UNIVERSITY OF THE PEOPLE The Education Revolution
UoPeople
Alexandre Pinheiro
Question 21
Not yet answered Marked out of 1.00
Passage 1: Read the following passage from the 2001 book, In Cuba I Was a German Shepherd by Ana Menendez, and published by Grove Press:
1. Maximo was one of the first to leave L Street, boarding a plane for Miami on the eve of the first of January 1961, exactly two years after Batista had done the same. For reasons he told himself he could no longer remember, he said good-bye to no one. He was thirty-six years old then, already balding, with a wife and two young daughters whose names he tended to confuse. He left behind the row house of long shiny windows, the piano, the mahogany furniture, and the pension he thought he'd return to in two years' time. Three if things were as serious as they said. 2. In Miami, Maximo tried driving a taxi, but the streets were a web of foreign names and winding curves that could one day lead to glitter and another to the hollow end of a pistol.
His Spanish and his University of Havana credentials meant nothing here. And he was too
old to cut sugarcane with the younger men who began arriving in the spring of 1961. But the men gave Maximo an idea, and after teary nights of promises, he convinced his wife--
she of stately homes and multiple cooks--to make lunch to sell to those sugar men who
worked side by side, Maximo and Rosa. And at the end of every day, their hands stained orange from the lard and the cheap meat, their knuckles red and tender where the hot water and the knife blade had worked their business, Maximo and Rosa would sit down to whatever remained of the day's cooking and they would chew slowly, the day unraveling. their hunger ebbing away with the light. 3. They worked together for years like that, and when the Cubans began disappearing from the bus line, Maximo and Rosa moved their lunch packets indoors and opened their little restaurant right on Eighth Street. There, a generation of former professors served black beans and rice to the nostalgic. When Raul showed up in Miami one summer looking for work, Maximo added one more waiter's spot for his old acquaintance from L Street. Each night, after the customers had gone, Maximo and Rosa and Raul and Havana's old lawyers and bankers and dreamers would sit around the biggest table and eat and talk and
sometimes, late in the night after several glasses of wine, someone would start the stories that began with "In Cuba I remember." They were stories of old lovers, beautiful and round-hipped. Of skies that stretched on clear and blue to the Cuban hills. Of green Iandscapes that clung to the red clay of Guines, roots dug in like fingernails in a good-bye. In Cuba, the stories always began, life was good and pure. But something