A howl to the heavens: Art in the life of first- and second-generation Cuban Americans

In a review of Phillip Roth's prolific contribution to American literature, the critic Claudia Roth Pierpont observes about the central character in Roth's most notorious book that Alexander Portnoy's onanistic hold to the flesh is "literally, in rebellion against the life that is being forced upon him⋯ a fiercely comic shtick that is also a howl to the heavens" (Pierpont 2006, 82). The same may be said about much of art, including the art of Cuban Americans in the United States.