Isla By Virgil Rodriguez Summary

As a Cuban American immigrant, Virgil Suárez, author of the passionately descriptive poem Isla, undoubtedly felt the sting of immigrating to America as a child. Born in 1962, in Havana, Cuba, Suárez immigrated to the United States in 1974 during the latter portion of the second wave of Cuban immigrants to America (PBS.org, 2005 & Poets.org, n.d.). Therefore, even as a child Suárez would have felt the tension of a disgruntled Cuban American community, desirous of returning home to claim what had been stolen from them by the Communist regime and the dissatisfaction of various American citizens overtly furious about the growing number of Cubans migrating to the United States (PBS.org, 2005). Subsequently, many Cuban immigrants felt alienated and unwanted in their old and new country. Thus, setting the stage for Suárez, sixteen years later to poignantly capture the feelings of Cuban

Suárez’ moving depiction of a young boy’s empathy for and identification with the movie monster, Godzilla. The narrator recalls how by the age of twelve he knew what it felt like to be “unwanted, exiled” and to “move from one country to another where nobody wants you” (Suárez, 2000/2012, pg. 679-680). This vivid image conjures feelings of isolation, loneliness, inadequacy, and being an outcast that most readers find intimately relatable. Second, the narrator described how he understood the heartache of rejection that echoed in Godzilla’s pained and tortured bellows as a fearful community rejected the powerful, fictitious outsider. Third, the mother’s recognition of “that monster, that island” assigned a secondary meaning to the monster, as she referred to Fidel Castro, the