Yes—exactly as Lisandro Pérez indicates at the outset. The registry of his grandparents appears in the 1959 edition of Registro social de La Habana: Fonts y Acosta, Oscar–Nancy Boullosa de, accompanied with the listing of children Nancy, María Luisa, Carlos Ernesto, and two sons-in-law, Lisandro Pérez Rodríguez and Eduardo Rodríguez, and two grandsons, Lisandro and Víctor Pérez y Fonts. To paraphrase Oscar Wilde: like all good storytellers, Lisandro Pérez starts the saga of G Street at the end and then goes on to the beginning to chronicle “the very dissimilar paths” that the Fonts-Pérez family “had taken to become gente conocida” (p. 4). Yes—1959, very much the end . . .
Lisandro Pérez has assembled an expansive family history spanning multiple generations with origins in early nineteenth-century Spain. The story of the Fonts-Pérez family is recounted with affection and tenderness, at points with admiration and approval. But familial...