Cubano de Facto
I remember that last day in Cuba. My family and I walked down the streets of Havana on our way to the port where we would board a fishing boat, our destination, exile. Hundreds of my fellow country men yelled at us from behind lines of soldiers, clad in green. “Gusanos, escorias”, (worms, scum) they shouted at us in a repetitious chant. I couldn’t understand what we had done but it was clear to me that we were not welcomed. We were packed in ships our destination, freedom. Most of us were good hard working people seeking a second chance at attaining the American dream, that long gone Cubans had attained after the first exodus of the 50’s.
A week ago, I read a story by Damarys Ocaña in the New York Times. I identified with the descriptions of her newly arrived experience with other Cuban-Americans who were not stigmatized as “Marielitos”; the term given to the newly arrived flock of Cubans who were very different from the mass wave of professional upper-class Cubans that established themselves in the U.S. after Fidel came to power. I was laughed at, taunted, and the butt of many banana boat jokes. Once again, I found myself an outcast by my own people. I learned the difference between my family, who struggled to get ahead in the slums of North West Miami, and the established Cubans who had a twenty-plus year head start at accumulating wealth and mastering the adopted language. My identity was torn and laid on the fringes of parallel dichotomies. One fueled by a political ideological standing and the other by a misguided sense of American-ness, in a country that for the most part is still being built by immigrants.
Like Damarys, “I quickly learned to speak English like a native [and] pushed myself to out-write my American born classmates.” It was my way of moving up and away from my self appointed sense of double minority-ness. The working class struggle was a very prominent aspect of my family's life and limitation would always be an invisible elephant lurking in our midst. The class difference was always there along side our neo-gusano status. Despite all of my family’s hard work, we never seemed to get ahead and gain the financial safety net that others had. It would be another 24 years before my family was able to buy our first home and feel a little safer about our future.
Years later, I sought to better understand my roots and a struggle, which I refused to simplify to the simple constructs of a Cold War. I wanted to understand the historical social political contingencies that shaped my peoples lives in that far away place. I needed questions answered and not refuted by, “Fidel is a son-of-a-bitch and that’s the end of it.” After all, “free housing, free medical care, free education, etc. etc,” didn’t seem like such a bad deal, considering the hardships we were undergoing to achieve the dream. I buried my self in books searching for answers which perhaps only experience could clarify. I wanted to understand what it meant to be Cuban and reclaim a culture that I did not know in its entirety. I wanted to better understand the Cuban mindset pre-colonial up to present. I read Jose Marti, Maximo Gomez, Maceo, Weber, and even Fidel, Marx, Engles, and Lenin. I even understood the ideals and possible fruits of a Marxist utopia and why some (very very very few) Cubans identify Fidel, like Marti, a hero of the people. It was a biased opinion, of course, that was easy to play with, especially from a privileged capital oasis. With time, more books came as well as my “Barsero” (rafter) and other just arrived via-here-and-there cousins. They were the new sub-culture of Cubans. They didn’t see me as a “Marilito” but as the Americanized relative that escaped. As they shared their stories I understood what that long ago voyage on the Straits of Florida left behind. In each other we saw a shadow of our would-be alternate reality had things played out differently. The nationalist historical texts and communist manifestos slowly but surly seemed to make less and less sense when speaking of Cuba in context. The more I heard, the more clarity I gained from these first hand accounts of family members, who’ve only known “la lucha”, the struggle, and the contradictions of the reality that is Cuba.
Contradiction seems to be at the core of the Cuban experience. It is “an outlaw culture” as writer Ben Corbett coined because in order to survive in the system, they have to illegally work around it. Despite the fact that the regimen has made some progressions on the island in comparison to other Third World nations, Fidel’s centralized government hides behind pretenses that would make Marx do cartwheels in his grave. Cuba is still the banana republic infrastructure that’s been passed from one super power to another and now the iron fist of tourism. My people wait with open hands the mercy of “la Caridad”, Charity. They rush to build more and more hotel rooms, they will never be allowed to use, import goods that only tourist or fortunates with abroad-money-sending relatives can afford, women find empowerment in prostitution, firing squad deaths continue to rise, and the only solution is an embargo that keeps my people hungry and an old satiated beard festered.
The island is stagnant, an explosive think tank, lost in “doublethink,” and “newspeak”, waiting to fire its canons and tell the world “look at us, look beyond Buena Vista.” They are hungry for information of the outside world, not whitewashed with propaganda, and await awakening from their long sleep. Waiting, like its population, “esperando en cola”, waiting in line, for happenstance to provide just a little more.
I’m still waiting, thousands of miles away, “en cola”, for the day I get to step foot again in my native land, my ticket towards the completion of my battle with identity. My need to know the island, whose shadow I’ve lived under in this close but yet so far away Diaspora, is relentless. I know that I won’t be returning as a Cuban but as a privileged "yanqui" once again a foreigner among my people in a strange new place that I am to call home.
How will it change me?