My Mother in Havana

A Memoir of Magic & Miracle

Rebe Huntman

Paperback
978-1-958972-55-7
US $24.99 Bookshop Barnes & Noble
eBook available
February 2025

A daughter’s search for her deceased mother brings her face to face with the gods, ghosts, and saints of Cuba. 

“My Mother in Havana lifts the veil between the living and the dead and makes believers of us all. This story of a mother's absence and a daughter's need is written with a lyricism that filled my heart with beauty while also making it ache for loved ones lost. This is a stunning debut.” —Lee Martin, author of the Pulitzer Prize Finalist, The Bright Forever

“I closed this book believing more than ever that the people we love, including the people we’ve been, never really leave us.” —Maggie Smith, New York Times bestselling author of You Could Make This Place Beautiful

Writing with a physicality of language that moves like the body in dance, Rebe Huntman, a poet, choreographer, and dancer, embarks on a pilgrimage into the mysteries of the gods and saints of Cuba and their larger spiritual view of the Mother. Huntman offers a window into the extraordinary world of Afro-Cuban gods and ghosts and the dances and rituals that call them forth. As she explores the memory of her own mother, interlacing it with her search for the sacred feminine, Huntman leads us into a world of séance and sacrifice, pilgrimage and sacred dance, which resurrect her mother and bring Huntman face to face with a larger version of herself.

Rebe Huntman is a memoirist, essayist, dancer, teacher and poet. For over a decade she was head of the award-winning Danza Viva Center for World Dance, Art & Music and its dance company, One World Dance Theater. Rebe collaborates with native artists in Cuba and South America, has been featured in Latina Magazine, Chicago Magazine, and the Chicago Tribune and on Fox and ABC News. The recipient of an Ohio Individual Excellence award, Rebe has received support for this book from the Ohio State University, Virginia Center for Creative Arts, Ragdale Foundation, Playa, Hambidge Center, and Brush Creek Foundation. She lives in Delaware, Ohio and San Miguel de Allende, Mexico.

“My Mother in Havana, lifts the veil between the living and the dead and makes believers of us all. This story of a mother's absence and a daughter's need is written with a lyricism that filled my heart with beauty while also making it ache for loved ones lost. This is a stunning debut.” —Lee Martin, author of Pulitzer Prize Finalist The Bright Forever

“In Huntman’s soul-stirring memoir, the author invites us to experience moments unbound from our accepted divisions of physical and spiritual worlds. With a pilgrim’s devotion, and a grieving daughter’s heart, Huntman takes us with her to places where, if we open ourselves fully, ‘one could simply lift one’s palm and brush the heavens.’” —Brenda Miller, A Braided Heart: Essays on Writing and Form

“A captivating debut for anyone who longs to connect with their own lost beloved, My Mother in Havana invites us to understand ourselves not as solitary beings making our way alone in the world, but as part of a greater web of ancestors who watch over us and are always a breath away. A reminder, in an increasingly polarized world, of the interconnectedness of all life, material and spiritual. With language that is as energetic, transfixing, and sensuous as the batá drums that keep the rhythms of the spirits, Huntman’s cadences conjure the divine spark that unites and animates us all.” —Richard Blanco, Presidential Inaugural Poet, author of The Prince of Los Cocuyos: A Miami Childhood

“Journeying to Cuba, the ever generous island with a huge spiritual heart, Rebe Huntman receives the gift of healing offered by Ochún, the goddess of love, reconciling with the mother that she lost too soon. A profound quest that reveals the beauty and possibility of bridges to Cuba.” —Ruth Behar, author of Across So Many Seas and Letters from Cuba

“More than a memoir, My Mother in Havana is a window to the spirituality of Cuba; Huntman’s deep research and engagement with the rituals, specialists, and devotees of Afro-Cuban religion reflects her in-depth knowledge of these practices as both an observer and a participant.” —Grete Viddal, PhD, Department of African and African-American Studies and Anthropology, Harvard University; Tulane University Stone Center for Latin American Studies Fellow

“Rebe Huntman’s My Mother in Havana does what all good memoirs should: travails a life with wisdom and insight, born of intimacy and vulnerability. Like the Trinity, My Mother in Havana is three things in one: an engaging travel narrative, a moving grief excavation, and an awe-inducing spiritual journey. Unlike the Trinity, Huntman’s memoir defies the container of a single religious tradition. Huntman embraces multiple spiritual paths with humility and respect, seeking not just a mother beyond the grave, but a holy maternal energy long suppressed by mainstream traditions. My Mother in Havana is deeply feminist and fascinating—a profound depiction of one woman’s spiritual quest for wholeness and healing.” —Heather Lanier, author of the memoir Raising a Rare Girl

“My Mother in Havana is full of ceremony and ritual, movement and music, miracle and myth. This evocative memoir takes us along on the writer’s quest ‘to call the ancestors and listen for their answer.’ On this remarkable journey, the veil between the spirit world and this world, between past and present, between who we were and who we are—‘the thin scrim that separates this moment from what’s to come’—nearly dissolves before our eyes. I closed this book believing more than ever that the people we love, including the people we’ve been, never really leave us.” —Maggie Smith, New York Times bestselling author of You Could Make This Place Beautiful

“Rebe Huntman knows we are the stories we tell ourselves, and at the age of forty-nine, she flies to Cuba find the story she needs to tell, a shape she wants to live inside. Huntman’s invitation in My Mother in Havana is so loving and generous, folding time and geography, loss and love, the corporeal and the spiritual, until we are all caught up in the swirl and breath and blood of the dance. In language pulsing with rhythm and ritual, Huntman leaves room for us to imagine what we might be looking for in our own lives, how we might need to mother and be mothered as we open to the messy wholeness of our own stories. What a gift.” —Jill Christman, author of If This Were Fiction: A Love Story in Essays

“My Mother in Havana belongs on every bookshelf—right between Loving Pedro Infante by Denise Chavez and Suttree by Cormac McCarthy, with wrinkles on the cover from holding it and spending a quiet time reading it again and again.” —Edward Vidaurre, author of By Throat, By Miracle: New & Selected Poems

“My Mother in Havana chronicles Rebe Huntman’s journey to find maternal sources of healing, belonging, and becoming in Cuba. Moving from one end of the island to the other, the orichas, the Virgin Mary, and the dead guide her towards self-discovery and a powerful spiritual awakening rooted in intergenerational memories.” —Solimar Otero, Director of Latino Studies & Professor of Folklore and Gender Studies, Indiana University, Bloomington

“Spiritually rich and unabashedly passionate, this memoir is a feast for the soul...Huntman’s deep love and respect for Cuba, and the Afro-Cuban traditions that permeate the culture, are abundantly clear in the writing.” —Kirkus Reviews