Family Sentence: The Search for My Cuban-Revolutionary, Prison-Yard, Mythic-Hero, Deadbeat Dad

Jeanine Cornillot was just two years old when her father, a former Cuban revolutionary turned anti-Castro militant, was sentenced to thirty years in a Miami prison for political bombings. His absence left a single mother to raise four children and those children to conjure a father-hero out of little more than occasional letters and prison-yard visits.

The narrative shifts between Little Havana, where Cornillot spends her summers with her Spanish-speaking grandparents and cousins, and Philadelphia, where her unconventional Irish-American clan skirts poverty and conceals the family secret.

As Cornillot pieces together her own identity, a wryly funny and unsentimental narrator emerges. Whether going to prison to meet her father for the first time at age six and hoping she looks Cuban enough, imagining herself a girl-revolutionary leading protest marches, quitting Spanish class after one day, or writing to demand that her father end his forty-four-day hunger strike, young Jeanine maintains a hopeful pragmatism that belies her age.

Eventually, a child's mythology is replaced with an adult's reality in a final reckoning with her father, remarkable for the unsparing honesty on both sides.

Family Sentence: The Search for My Cuban-Revolutionary, Prison-Yard, Mythic-Hero, Deadbeat Dad
Beacon Press, Fall 2009

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• Cuba
• Memoir
• Family
• Father
• Prison
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