A Midwest Woman’s Quest For Her Mother’s Spirit In Havana At Books & Books

Rebe Huntman’s debut memoir “My Mother In Havana: A Memoir of Magic & Miracle” is about one woman’s quest to find her mother among the gods and saints in Cuba. Poet Richard Blanco joins Huntman for a conversation about her book at Books & Books, Coral Gables on Thursday, March 20. (Photo courtesy of Page One Media)

Rebe Huntman’s writing has been described as having a physicality of language that moves like the body in dance.  It’s no wonder. From 1998 to 2009, she directed Chicago’s Danza Viva Center for World Dance, Art and Music and its resident dance company, One World Dance.

Huntman, who calls herself a “multi-passionate artist,” comes to Books & Books in Coral Gables on Thursday, March 20 in a conversation with Richard Blanco, the first-ever Poet Laureate of Miami-Dade County, to discuss Huntman’s debut memoir, “My Mother in Havana: A Memoir of Magic & Miracle.”

Born in Litchfield, Ill., and raised in St. Louis and Chicago, Huntman, who now lives in Ohio, says, while she is not Cuban nor is her mother Cuban, the title of the book refers to her search for her mother in Havana.

“I lost my mother when I was 19 and I did not find any strategies in my home country for dealing with that loss,” says Huntman, who adds that the “American way” is to “keep moving, make something of yourself, make your mother proud, but don’t look back. Don’t be sad.”

Rebe Huntman, the author of “My Mother in Havana: A Memoir of Magic & Miracle” will be at Books & Books in Coral Gables on Thursday, March 20. (Photo by Kate Sweeney, courtesy of Page One Media)

She says she was “very good, a little too good” at following those instructions . . . moving forward, making something of herself. Then 30 years later, she confides, all of that moving forward caught up with her.

“As I was about to turn 50, I found myself missing my mother so profoundly. A lot of it had to do with being a woman and trying to negotiate my own identity as a grown woman.”

As a dancer and choreographer who had spent time in Cuba, with Spanish as her second language, and where she had collaborated with choreographers in Havana, she said she thought of the Afro Cuban spiritual traditions and the beliefs and practices of Santería.

“Thirty years later, I have come to Cuba in search of her and that has led me to the house of Madelaine,” writes Huntman in her book. Madelaine, she explains is an espiritista cruzado, someone who calls on both African and Catholic gods to “help him cross the threshold and speak with the dead.”

The way Huntman writes her book does have the rhythm of poetry – that physicality of language culled from the depths of a dancer.

“When I was working as a choreographer and a dancer in Chicago, I’d wake up at 2 a.m. with an idea and I would not be able to fall back to sleep,” she confides. “I lived above my dance studio, and I would go downstairs and sit with a pen and scraps of paper. I would practice the dance on myself, but there was also a lot about arranging other dancers across the floor. And that feels very similar to organizing a book.”

Through her experience as a dancer and having danced the dances in Havana “that call and summon the Orishas, the spirits,” she felt there were answers for her on the island if she would just go searching for them. But Huntman didn’t go on a quest to  Cuba just once.  She returned again and again.

“I returned repeatedly over a number of years to continue my investigations and to continue building relationships with the characters in the book.”

In the conversation with Blanco, they’ll be talking about religion, pilgrimage and healing, and of course, the author’s quest to find her mother among the gods and saints in Cuba.

Richard Blanco, the first-ever poet laureate of Miami-Dade County, will be in conversation with author Rebe Huntman  on Thursday, March 20 at Books & Books in Coral Gables. (Photo by Matt Stagliano, courtesy of Page One Media)

She first saw Blanco speaking  at a literary festival  in San Miguel de Allende, Mexico, where Huntman lives half of the year.

“As an educator, as a human being, as a poet, he’s a luminescent person and so he made a big impression on me,” she recalls.

And then, she says she had the privilege of working with Blanco at the Macondo Writers Workshop in San Antonio, Texas, in the summer of 2024. “I was a participant in his photographic poem workshop. We bonded over a shared interest in Cuban history, poetry, and language. And he was very generous to provide a blurb for the book ‘My Mother in Havana.’ I am so looking forward to being in conversation with him.”

Huntman says there is a constant preoccupation throughout the book that is not overt, but is ever present.

“As I enter into, and am invited into, all kinds of ceremonial spaces, I’m very aware of my position as being invited – as being a person who was raised differently and to be respectful of that boundary. And I wanted to get things right. I’m also very upfront in the book that I am not Cuban – that there are people who know these religions first-hand.  I’m not speaking for them. This is the story of one Midwestern girl who could not find the answer she was looking for at home and is so grateful that she found them. Cuba really reached out inexplicably and insistently to mother me just beautifully and changed my life.”

WHAT: Books & Books Presents: An Evening With Rebe Huntman and Richard Blanco

WHERE: Books & Books, 265 Aragon Ave., Coral Gables

WHEN: 7 to 8 p.m., Thursday, March 20 with an audience question and answer and book signing.

COST: Free

INFORMATION: (305) 448-9599 and registration here.

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