Lea Aschkenas shows slides and talks about Es Cuba: Life and Love on an Illegal Island.
"Es Cuba" is a poignant and passionate travel memoir about falling in love with a country and one of its compatriots. Aschkenas never strays from her acute awareness that there is no way to separate her foreignness from the complex mix of emotions - devotion and rejection, enrapture and apprehension - that she develops toward the country - Book Passage
Bio
Lea Aschkenas
In her travels, Lea Aschkenas has interviewed an exiled Black Panther in Cuba, dined at the house of a police chief who had previously arrested her for fraternizing with locals in Morocco, and gotten lost in a maze of water buffalo trails in the jungles of northern Viet Nam.
Lea currently lives in the San Francisco Bay Area where she works at a public library and teaches with the California Poets in the Schools Program. She has written about travel, literature, and life at large for the Washington Post, San Francisco Chronicle, Los Angeles Times, and Salon.com. She is also published in the books, The Best Women’s Travel Writing 2006, Travelers’ Tales Central America, Travelers’ Tales Cuba, The Unsavvy Traveler, Two in the Wild, and Beside the Sleeping Maiden: Poets of Marin.