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Essay by Shara Kronmal •

My Mother in Havana by Rebe Huntman is a memoir about journeys and the lessons learned along the way. In the memoir, the journeys are threefold in nature: physical, a literal journey from Ohio to Cuba; psychological, a quest for a connection with the narrator’s lost mother and for healing from the grief of losing her mother at a young age; and spiritual, the search for faith in Afro-Cuban religious traditions. The memoir is reminiscent of other creative nonfiction travel stories including Wild by Cheryl Strayed and Eat, Pray, Love by Elizabeth Gilbert, which bring to mind the (admittedly controversial) Hero’s Journey of Joseph Campbell, only in feminist and feminine terms. 

In the author’s interview accompanying this essay, Huntman speaks of her creative life as being “like a trail of breadcrumbs or threads, pulling me—quite insistently at times—toward a future not yet visible to me.” In My Mother in Havana, Huntman follows one of those threads to Cuba in search of her mother who died of cancer when the writer was nineteen and unprepared for her loss. The memoir begins some thirty years after that loss with Huntman still grieving, still “looking for a way back to my mother.” Once in Cuba, the writer reaches out to a Cuban Spiritist named Madelaine who may be able to help her speak to her mother from beyond the grave. 

But My Mother in Havana is about more than a search for contact with a dead mother. It is also a search for spiritual mothers important to Cuban culture, the river goddess Ochún and Our Lady of Charity, an incarnation of the Catholic Madonna. Ochún, Huntman writes, “could be found at the banks of her river, dyeing and weaving the cloth of our lives, plaiting our destinies through our hair. The threads she wove at the beginning of the world are what hold our stories in place, her steps that form the rivers of our days.” Initially, the narrator of My Mother in Havana finds it difficult to reconcile the river goddess and the Virgin Mary, a duality that is accepted by many Cubans who revere both. As an American, Huntman writes: “The ability to embrace more than one truth at once in order to make room for a layering of identity was something we had little practice in.”

In the course of her search for mother and Mother, Huntman signs up for dance lessons with Daniel, a Santería priest, and travels to the town of El Cobre to witness the annual pilgrimage to the statue of Our Lady. Along the way, Huntman shares fascinating insights into Cuban dance, culture, and religion interspersed with flashbacks to her childhood and her family. 

Is My Mother in Havana a Hero’s Journey, the literary structure proposed by Joseph Campbell in the mid-twentieth century? Campbell’s Hero’s Journey is based on the structure of mythic tales such as The Odyssey and purports to represent a “universal” form of storytelling summarized by a twelve-step progression that can be further condensed into “Departure,” “Initiation,” and “Return.” George Lucas used Campbell’s structures while plotting Star Wars. While it is beyond the scope of this essay to examine the flaws in Campbell’s claims about the universality of the Hero’s Journey, it’s worth noting that feminist writers have expanded upon it to create versions of a “Heroine’s Journey” separate from masculine stereotypes. Even so, My Mother in Havana showcases some of the narrative strengths of a Hero’s/Heroine’s Journey structure and how it works in a memoir (whether the structure was applied consciously or happened organically). 

After a brief prologue, Huntman launches her memoir with backstory and then in the third chapter the narrator leaves for Cuba (Departure). Later in the memoir, her dance lessons with Daniel turn into an initiation into the religion of Santería (Initiation). And when she returns home, she carries with her a new spiritual foundation, which she shares with her partner, and a fresh sense of connectedness to her maternal lineage and to a great spiritual Mother (Return). If one were to tease out the full twelve steps of the Hero’s Journey, it is easy to find some of the intermediate stages (Meeting the Mentor, The Ordeal) as the author learns and struggles along the way. 

Even though the narrative structure of the Hero’s Journey provides a possible scaffold on which to hang the details of this memoir, it inevitably fails to convey the true depths of a journey that is not an adventure of a warrior-male protagonist. Maria Tatar, author of The Heroine with 1,001 Faces, spoke in an interview about her search for the distinctive qualities of a heroine: “curiosity, empathy, a desire for justice or fairness.” Other feminine/feminist variants of the Hero’s Journey highlight goals such as self-knowledge, learning to accept support, and integrating masculine and feminine aspects of the self. Perhaps the greatest flaw of theories that search for commonality among narrative literature is that, while storytelling may be an innately human activity, the structure of story itself is as varied as cultural and individual differences can make it. 

There’s a journey in My Mother in Havana but is there a hero in the sense Campbell would have it, a warrior Odysseus who sails across an ocean to return home? No. This memoir is neither a Greek epic nor a contemporary science fiction movie. This is the journey of a woman coping with loss and with family tragedy and dysfunction, who struggles to become the woman she wants to be, mother and daughter, one of a line of women and their stories. A true heroine, she is on a journey to reinvent herself. As Huntman writes early on in My Mother in Havana: “There was something both exhilarating and terrifying about each reinvention. To tether oneself to a story, gather oneself in the props that made up an identity, knowing that when one tired of that skin all one had to do was shed it for the next.”

Huntman’s journey is that of a woman struggling with the ordinary challenges of life—loss, spiritual confusion, a search for answers to difficult questions. Ultimately, she learns from Madeleine that “the path to the mother begins and ends in the same place—that point that is constant and ever-changing. Omnipresent. Too vast for us to comprehend.” 

 

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Shara Kronmal: Rebe, you are a poet, dancer, and writer. How did these parts of your life work together to create this memoir?

Rebe Huntman: I love this question! As a dancer and a poet, I am drawn to the physicality of language—the way it moves, like the body in dance. The way it captures the way the world so often comes to us as more than one thing. My creative life has unfolded, like a trail of breadcrumbs or threads, pulling me—quite insistently at times—toward a future not yet visible to me: the inexplicable tug to learn Spanish as a child, the early loss of my mother, the seeds for my becoming a Latin dancer and choreographer that she planted just as I was losing her. It’s only years later that I can look at those threads and see the tapestry being woven from them: the way losing my mother at such a young age pushed me to make something from that loss. Or how my career as a Latin dancer led me to Cuba, where I found a way to not only make sense of my grief but to heal from it. Or the ways that writing my story invites the reader to shine new light on their own search for meaning and wholeness.

 

SK: I’m curious about your prologue. In it, you introduce one of the most salient moments of your memoir, visiting a Spiritist to speak to your deceased mother, but leave the reader wondering what happened and only return to share the ending of the encounter around page 200. How did you decide to structure it that way?

RH: My goal was to write about Cuba in such a way that my reader would feel like they were right there, riding on my shoulders as I opened each door along that pilgrimage: the drumbeats and dances that invoke the gods, and the animal sacrifices that feed them; ancestral altars and séances that bridge the living and the dead. Pilgrimages—ten thousand strong—that honor and celebrate the spiritual mother who watches over each and every one of us. Before I could take my reader to any of those places, I needed to establish the stakes that set all that into motion: that I had lost my mother. That, thirty years later, I missed her so much that I traveled to Cuba—a place neither she nor I are native to—hoping to find her among their gods and saints and their larger spiritual view of the Mother. Opening with the scene in which I meet with a Cuban Spiritist who is said to communicate with the dead allowed me to set the table, so to speak, for the reader. To invite them to see the candles flickering before statues of African and Catholic saints. Feel the tremble in the air as I ask the question that has brought me to Cuba. That, at age forty-nine, I miss my mother. Can this Spiritist who I’ve traveled fourteen hundred miles to meet help me find my way back to her?

 

SK: I admire your courage in writing about finding a belief system that might seem alien, even superstitious, to some readers. In your memoir, you ask yourself, “Would the people at home who knew and loved me before I left…think me charming or crazy?” It seems to me that one of the great challenges of writing memoir is being so publicly vulnerable. My Mother in Havana has just been released but I imagine some people have already read drafts or advance copies. Have you had any cause to regret your openness? 

RH: Advice I offer writing students is to write every first draft without worrying about who will read it. To put it all on the page. You can always scale back, which I did in a couple of places to protect the vulnerability of the people I was writing about. But as for my own openness? My Mother in Havana is a book about magic and miracle. About leaning into intuition and trusting that if we allow ourselves to be messy and vulnerable we will lean into our greatest strength. I hope my readers will feel that invitation. We are living in messy times, and we are grappling with big questions. And the first step to dealing with those big, messy questions is to go to those places where we ourselves feel fragile and uncertain. Those places where our questions outpace our answers. And where we find ourselves reaching toward one another for wholeness and connection. 

 

SK: Are you still following the traditions you learned in Cuba and is this a solitary practice or have you found a community?

RH: There is a story I share in the book about a seventeenth-century enslaved girl named Apolonia. Grief-stricken from the loss of her mother, the girl climbs the hill where her mother used to work. She hopes, against all logic, to find her mother waiting at the top. But when she reaches the summit, she finds only bare rock. It is then that the divine mother, Our Lady of Charity, appears before the girl, sweeping her up in her great arms. And when the girl climbs back down the mountain, she does so no longer filled with the grief of losing her biological mother but with the joy of having found her spiritual root.

It took me seven years to write My Mother in Havana, and in that time I returned multiple times to Cuba—continuing down the path of Santería initiations. Reading everything I could about Spiritism and Santería. Visiting with the Spiritist named Madelaine. Following the hills that once led Apolonia to her spiritual mother so often that the priests and nuns who are charged with caring for Our Lady’s sanctuary took me under their wing. And in 2018, Rick and I married on the farm outside El Cobre where I stayed during my first pilgrimage, with Our Lady’s sanctuary in plain view through the trees of their property.

All of which is to say that I am not the same person who traveled to Cuba in search of her mother. I have learned to view the world through the eyes of magic and miracle. I have learned to talk—unapologetically—with the spirits, setting out an ancestral altar where I communicate regularly not only with my mother but also with all the ancestors. Most miraculous of all, I have travelled down my own metaphorical hill, illuminated by the understanding that we are not alone but held by a wondrous force—dare we call her Mother—who is capacious enough to transcend life and death. 

 

SK: You’ve written some wonderfully lyrical flash prose (some published here in CRAFT) and poetry. How has writing a book-length memoir felt different?

RH: I love the way the lyric form allows us to explore not just the narrative direction but the very “is-ness” of life. To trace the seemingly digressive threads of our lives to find the multiple ways they circle back to one another. The trick in writing lyric flash or poetry is to find your way quickly in and out of those threads. Writing a lyric memoir is different because it allows much more time and room to inhabit and explore, and the initial drafts can look very much, in my experience, like a big mess. The first drafts of My Mother in Havana resembled a cross between a Pinterest board and a forensic murder board. I wrote themes and images on index cards and Post-it notes. Arranged and rearranged them across pinboards and floors. 

With each revision, I found myself making choices, saying yes to images I believed were central to the architecture of the writing, and no to those that led the reader away from that center. And this is how it often feels when I’m writing, like I’ve embarked on something more akin to raising a barn than writing a book.

There is something intuitive and dare I say magical about the process. You must trust that all those carefully placed note cards and Post-its are leading somewhere. Because, at the end of the day, the beauty of writing a lyric piece is the element of surprise. Whether it’s a poem or a book-length memoir, both the writer and the reader enter the writing not knowing how these seemingly competing threads will resolve themselves. And then, if you’re lucky, somehow, magically, both inexplicably and inevitably, they do.

 

SK: You’ve written a lot about your mother and mothers in general. You lost your mother while you were in college and My Mother in Havana is in part about mourning that loss. Has writing your memoir changed your experience of that loss and if so, how? Is writing memoir cathartic or therapeutic? And if so, did you ever feel that it could have interfered with the literary qualities of the writing?

RH: I tried unsuccessfully for decades to write about my mother. I lacked the distance necessary to make something from my grief. I had no story of redemption or healing because I hadn’t discovered it yet. The pilgrimage to Cuba, and then the writing of the book that holds that story, gave me permission to sit with my grief over an extended period of time. To test the threads that led to and from that grief and see where they led. 

The result is a love letter—to the nineteen-year-old version of myself who lost her mother. And to the fifty-year-old version who, after spending decades trying to move past that grief, found herself missing her mother more than ever. My Mother in Havana is a love letter to Cuba—an island that reached out—inexplicably! insistently!—to mother me. It’s a love letter to anyone who longs to connect with their own lost beloved. It’s for anyone who is curious about what lies beyond the five senses—who yearns to claim a more mythic life, a larger version of the self just waiting for you to fill its contours. It’s a love letter to anyone who’s ready for a guide to show you the way: a wide-lapped mother both as real as the woman sitting next to you on the bus, and as mysterious and vast as the deepest river of your being. A feminine path to the divine that has been largely buried in today’s rush toward materialism and consumption. A soft voice in your ear reassuring you that everything is going to be all right.

 

SK: You lost a journal in Cuba. It’s a moment that really sticks with me. Do you still keep journals and what do they mean to you currently?

RH: I do still keep journals and I put everything in them! Freewrites and grocery lists; doodles and quotes and pressed flowers. I highlight notes and ideas I want to remember for future projects, but mostly it’s the act of keeping a journal, more than any practical use for them, that keeps me going. The pages are an invitation to write whatever strikes me as important in the moment without censorship or judgment. I’m in love with this act of mark-making—of opening a page and penning the date at the top, each symbol, each letter a declaration that I am here. Which is what writing is all about, and certainly what writing a memoir is about. The ability to say to our reader: Look! Here is something worth looking at. In the case of My Mother in Havana, I am saying: Look! I need you to see this mother who lived and died—as all our mothers do—both an ordinary and an extraordinary life. 

 

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SHARA KRONMAL’s essays have appeared in PLEASE SEE ME and in the Journal of the American Medical Association. Her literary translations can be found in Hunger Mountain Review and MAYDAY, and she has written reviews for Necessary Fiction, Chicago Review of Books, and elsewhere. She is the associate editor for longform creative nonfiction at CRAFT and is a retired physician. She lives in Chicago. Find her on Instagram @skron11.

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REBE HUNTMAN is the author of My Mother in Havana: A Memoir of Magic & Miracle (February 2025, Monkfish Books), a memoir that traces her search to connect with her mother—thirty years after her death—among the gods and saints of Cuba. A former professional Latin and Afro-Cuban dancer and choreographer, for over a decade Rebe directed Chicago’s award-winning Danza Viva Center for World Dance, Art & Music and its resident dance company, One World Dance Theater. She collaborates with native artists in Cuba and South America, and has been featured in LATINA Magazine, Chicago Magazine, and the Chicago Tribune, and on Fox and ABC. Rebe’s essays, stories, and poems appear or are forthcoming in such places as The Southern Review, The Missouri Review, Parabola, Ninth Letter, The Cincinnati Review, and the PINCH, and have earned her an Ohio Individual Excellence Award as well as fellowships from the Macondo Writers Workshop, Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, Ragdale, PLAYA Residency, Hambidge Center, and Brush Creek Foundation for the Arts. She holds an MFA in creative nonfiction from The Ohio State University and lives in San Miguel de Allende, Mexico, and Delaware, Ohio. Both e’s in her name are long. Find her on Instagram @rebehuntman.