BOOK REVIEW / MEMOIRS : The Arrogant and Bitter Story of a Cuban Immigrant : NEXT YEAR IN CUBA: A Cubano’s Coming-of-Age in America by Gustavo Perez-Firmat; Anchor $22.95, 275 pages

The best thing--the most honest thing--about Gustavo Perez-Firmat’s “Next Year in Cuba” is that he’s finally surrendered to his favorite subject: himself. Instead of his earlier, somewhat pretentious efforts to compose serious poetry and criticism, Perez-Firmat, a professor at Duke University, finally gives us the book he’s wanted to write all along: the story of his life, especially of the long lingering effect of his immigration to the United States from Cuba as a boy in the early 1960s.

Those looking for a story about overcoming adversity and finding happiness, however, will be disappointed, for Perez-Firmat’s is a bitter tale--not because he doesn’t make it, but because, as he tells us repeatedly, his life was supposed to be so much better. As a Cuban Richie Rich, he should never have had to struggle so much.

Those looking for a personal tale of revelation will find “Next Year in Cuba” doesn’t quite fit that bill either. Although there are sections in which Perez-Firmat comes poignantly close to being vulnerable--about his brother’s drug and police troubles, about the breakup of his first marriage because of the affair that led to his second, about the tragic time warp in which his father lives--these sections sometimes end up being facile and manipulative.

All in all, “Next Year in Cuba” is Perez-Firmat’s eloquent, yet terribly flawed plea for acceptance. The audience for this book is American, not Cuban or Latino. Perez-Firmat may not want to be American, but he sure wants to be liked by Americans. In the process, he’ll do whatever it takes to separate himself from the rest of the Latino pack--and that includes sensationalizing his cubanidad if necessary, and dismissing the possibilities of a U.S. Latino-inclusive identity.

“Next Year in Cuba” details life among the first wave of refugees in the early 1960s after Fidel Castro’s revolution. This was a particularly privileged population--mostly aristocrats, professionals and business people. Perez-Firmat’s father had one of the biggest wholesale warehouses on the island and understood that his enterprise was a likely candidate for “nationalization” under the new socialist government.

Like many others, Perez-Firmat’s father chose to come to the United States with the firm belief that Castro wouldn’t last. Perez-Firmat describes the kind of suspended animation in which his father and other early refugees lived. They withstood their poverty and alienation because of their sense that this was not their life, merely a temporary interruption--their real lives lay back in Cuba, with their businesses and maids, their big cars and palatial homes.

Tending to generalize wildly, Perez-Firmat writes as though his story were every Cuban’s story. We get the impression, for example, that there were no poor or middle-class Cubans. At one point, he describes how his mother lost $50,000 (in 1960!) without so much as batting an eye.

His friends had no problems relating to their American schoolmates in Miami: “Since we were as smart, as Catholic, as good-looking, and often as athletic as the Americans, there didn’t seem to be any reason for condescension or disdain.” But he seems to have no clue that perhaps others weren’t so fortunate. Moreover, he seems oblivious to the causes of the segregation between Cubans and Americans, preferring to think that some mysterious force, rather than carefully crafted notions of class and race, kept the two groups separate. “It was just how we liked it,” he writes.

“Next Year in Cuba” is also a deliberately, if curious, macho story. In a later chapter in which he discusses his teaching style, Perez-Firmat attempts to persuade his students that macho isn’t so bad after all, that it’s less about power and submission than about chivalry and responsibility. But his argument might have been more convincing had he omitted his sexual fantasies about his students from the same chapter.

He qualifies these desires by adding: “Whatever my private fantasies, there’s little chance that I’ll end up in bed with any of my classroom paramours.” But he misses the obvious: Because he’s a married man, there should be not little but zero chance of that. It doesn’t seem to occur to him that any possibility, however remote, might be unwelcome and uncomfortable for his students, most of whom appear to be women.

But that’s not surprising. Although Perez-Firmat likes to think of himself as a kind of sensitive macho, he’s pretty much run-of-the-mill. In fact, in “Next Year in Cuba,” most of the women are pretty dismissible. The exception is his second wife, Mary Anne, perhaps not coincidentally the only American woman in his life, and as such instantly set apart from the others by that fact alone.

Perez-Firmat’s world is so amazingly male that in the end, he says, “Gustavo [his father], my brothers and I--we could have been a family together, if only we had given ourselves a chance.” In this sentence, he forgives his older brother, an unrepentant Castro supporter whom he wants to strangle in other chapters, and his younger brother, a thief, but leaves out his sister, who’s pretty nondescript through most of the book, and his mother, who is, of course, sainted.

For all this, Perez-Firmat is still hard to dismiss. Between all the arrogance and illogical assertions, there are vital insights and a real and lively sense of humor. Moreover, there are precious few Latinos, and even fewer Cuban Americans, writing cultural criticism in a U.S. context (Coco Fusco is the only other Cuban American who comes to mind, but her book, “English is Broken Here,” is as inaccessible as it is smart). Thus, Perez-Firmat becomes important almost by default.