Review by Susan Blumberg-Kason
Rebe Huntman has enjoyed a long career in dance, directing Danza Viva Center for World Dance, Art & Music out of Chicago, along with its residency dance company One World Dance Theater. Through her work in dance, she has traveled throughout Latin America, including Cuba. She is also an accomplished poet and essayist, and now she has a new book, My Mother in Havana: A Memoir in Magic & Miracle, a lyrical and beautiful story that explores death thirty years after her mother passes away.
Huntman hopes to show that it’s never too late to mourn a loved one and that there is not one certain way to find solace. After suffering from cancer for a few years, her mother passed away when Huntman was nineteen and in college. It takes decades for Huntman to realize that she never had a chance to properly mourn her mother’s death. Her book tells of her literal and figurative journey to properly mourn her mother as well as the loss of other relatives, and her background as a poet is evident in her lyrical and beautiful prose.
In the world I came from, we didn’t speak of making contact with our ancestors. The dead were dead. We wrote their names on family trees for school projects, displayed their portraits in the hallway that connected my parents’ bedroom to mine. There the family hung framed like a sepia-tones map—German immigrants who’d traveled oceans, then rivers across the Atlantic and up the Mississippi River, from New Orleans, toward the Midwestern lands where they made their lives as farmers and teamsters, teachers and railroad car operators.
Huntman travels to Cuba in 2004 to study dance and returns nine years later to Havana and El Cobre on the southeast part of the country to connect with customs around morning in Catholicism and the African-Caribbean religion of Santería. Huntman’s parents had traveled to Cuba in 1951, when it was a popular tourist destination for Americans before the 1959 revolution. In many ways it hasn’t changed much since then as many of the cars on the streets of Havana are from the 1950s. Havana is a just as much a character in her book as are she, her mother, and her Cuban friends.
There is something else to the city. Something lush and electric. You feel it drifting on a wave of music. There again on an unexpected breeze. Perhaps you catch a glimpse of something out of the corner of your eye—the remains of a sacrifice tossed into the street. A candle burning in a window. A mirage that shimmers in the sun. If you reach your hand in any direction, you might feel the gods impregnating what you’d thought of as empty air, the hunter Ogún at their lead, carving through negative space this machete as the oricha spin their way to Earth.
Huntman’s book is not only a testament to her desire to properly mourn her mother, but it also serves as a reminder that mourning is always easier when those left behind are not left to grieve alone.
How might I have reacted if I hadn’t been a child—seventeen, eighteen, nineteen years old and scared of death—but rather someone whose courage to face what was happening might have offered some comfort. Someone who might have dared pierce the shroud of politeness we’d hung over my mother’s dying, pushed fearlessly toward those places in both of us that felt fragile, vulnerable, undeniably human, and reached for my mother’s hand. Confronted head-on the terror of death—that mysterious void from which we come and to which we return—and asked her, asked both of us: Are you scared?
My Mother in Havana: A Memoir of Magic & Miracle by Rebe Huntman
Monkfish Book Publishing Company, 2025, $24.99
9781958972557
Susan Blumberg-Kason is the author of a memoir and two biographies. She co-edited an anthology set in Hong Kong and is a regular contributor to Asian Review of Books, World Literature Today, Cha: An Asian Literary Journal, and Los Angeles Review of Books.