My Native Land is Memory: Stories of a Cuban Childhood is Oliva Espín's memoir of childhood and adolescence in Cuba during the 1940s and 1950s, when family life, political instability, and a young girl's search for identity unfolded against a country approaching revolutionary transformation.

Espín writes from the double perspective of the child who lived those years and the feminist psychologist, immigrant, scholar, and teacher who later learned how memory changes when carried across languages and borders. The result is both intimate life writing and cultural history: a Cuba of everyday routines, losses, desires, family relationships, and political upheaval recovered through scenes that took Espín roughly a decade to assemble and revise.

In a 2021 Aztec Paper interview after the memoir won a San Diego Book Award, Espín explained that she wrote memories as they surfaced, only later arranging them chronologically. She hoped the book would give readers a small slice of everyday pre-revolutionary Cuba while showing how one person's story can illuminate lives very different from her own.