Máximo is the main character in the first and title story, “In Cuba I Was a German Shepherd.” He also appears in “The Party,” the second-to-last story in the collection, which is set before the events of “In Cuba I Was a German Shepherd.”

Máximo is described as “a small man” with a “grandiose name” that “inspired much amusement all his life” (12). His friends believe he enjoyed making people laugh, and in the title story, he tells four jokes, all in some way addressing Cuban exiles’ feelings and beliefs about the economic situation in their native country and the toll leaving took on their identity and self-respect. The jokes start off whimsical but feature depressing punch lines that express the exiles’ lack of hope for the future.

Before the revolution, Máximo had been a professor in Havana. He left in 1961, two years after the Cuban revolution and the year of the Bay of Pigs invasion by Brigade 2506, a C.I.A.-sponsored group of Cuban exiles. The invaders hoped to inspire Cubans to overthrow Castro. Instead, they were quickly and decisively defeated, and the 36-year-old Máximo joined the Cuban exodus that followed, fully expecting to return within a few years.

Unable to use his University of Havana credentials and too old to compete with younger men for jobs cutting sugarcane, he and his wife started a business providing lunch to laborers.