False memories, false foods: Eating, cooking, remembering in tastes like Cuba by Eduardo Machado

Abstract

Pascual Soler explores the transition from the nation to the postnation through memories of food in the autobiography of the arrival of Cuban playwright Eduardo Machado in the USA in 1961, and his experience of exile. The chapter draws on Donald E. Pease’s theory of the (post)national narrative and looks at Paul Ricoeur’s classification of the three types of uses and abuses of memory: blocked, manipulated and obligated. It argues that the memories that ensure the continuity of (post)national subjectivities are largely of food, and draws attention to the ways in which food shapes and creates different memories. It concludes with references to other autobiographies, adding to the scholarship on food, memory, nation and the narration of the Cuban American self.