Gwendolyn Cowgill, a local author, is pictured outside the San Benito News office Wednesday afternoon, when she discussed her new book. (Staff photo by Francisco E. Jimenez)
By FRANCISCO E. JIMENEZ
Staff Writer
reporter@sbnewspaper.com
Gwendolyn Cowgill can tell a story, but it was the stories she heard as a child that inspired her recent work.
“When we were children, we always heard of her story,” said Gwendolyn Cowgill of San Benito about her grandmother, Elfie Irene, whom her recently published book, And Then There Was Cuba, is based. “We’d heard of her going to Cuba, but we’d never heard why. We just knew that she spent a lot of years in Cuba.”
She had written a teenager’s view of her time there, and she called it, Those Island Years. “We had all read that,” she said. “We would read it over and over, it just sounded so exciting.”
The story begins with Cowgill’s grandmother, Elfie, overhearing her parents discuss moving to Cuba. The year is 1899, and the idea of manifest destiny is still fresh in the minds of many Americans in the form of free land in Cuba for growing citrus and sugar.
“I just wanted to tell her story,” Cowgill said. “Why did they leave the Midwest? How did that make her feel, as a 12-year-old, for her parents to say, ‘Come on, we’re going?’ It must have been a shock for her to leave one kind of life and go to a completely different kind of life. I just wanted to do it from her point of view.”
Cowgill said that the book required an extensive amount of research, including her own family’s history; the short story written by her grandmother about traveling to Cuba, as well as searching the internet for any information regarding the pioneering of Cuba.
She was able to find a poster which may have influenced her great-grandfather to relocate his family to Cuba.
“He must have just had an adventurous spirit,” Cowgill said. “We don’t have any of his writings, so I just try to think like he would think. I don’t have anything written down from him. I’m just speculating that he read this poster, it looked too good to turn down, and he just uprooted his family and went to Cuba.”
The poster that Cowgill is referring to was advertising the development of Cuba by the Cuba Land and Steamship Company. A photo of the poster is featured in the book.
Cowgill, who taught for 16 years in Beaufort, South Carolina, moved to San Benito in early 2011 to help take care of her father and her step-mother. Previously, Cowgill said that she used to visit annually, at least twice a year. She currently has a number of other books which the public can expect to see published in the near future through Sarah Book Publishing.
Read this story in the Jan. 23 edition of the San Benito News, or subscribe to our E-Edition by clicking here.
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