Cubans, period
Years ago, when I left Cuba for the first time, I was in a train leaving from the city of Berlin heading north. A Berlin already reunified but preserving fragments of the ugly scar, that wall that had divided a nation. In the compartment of that train, while thinking about my father and grandfather – both engineers – who would have given anything to ride on this marvel of cars and a locomotive, I struck up a conversation with the young man sitting directly across from me.
After the first exchange
of greetings, of mistreating the German language with “Guten Tag” and
clarifying that “Ich spreche ein bisschen Deutsch,” the man immediately
asked me where I came from. So I replied with “Ich komme aus Kuba.”
As always happens after
the phrase saying you come from the largest of the Antilles, the
interlocutor tries to show how much he knows about our country. “Ah….
Cuba, yes, Varadero, rum, salsa music.” I even ran into a couple of
cases where the only reference they seemed to have for our nation was
the album “BuenaVista Social Club,” which in those years was rising in
popularity on the charts.
But that young man on the
Berlin train surprised me. Unlike others, he didn’t answer me with a
tourist or music stereotype, he went much further. His question was,
“You’re from Cuba? From the Cuba of Fidel or from the Cuba of Miami?”
My face turned red, I
forgot all of the little German I knew, and I answered him in my best
Central Havana Spanish. “Chico, I’m from the Cuba of José Martí.” That
ended our brief conversation. But for the rest of the trip, and the rest
of my life, that conversation stayed in my mind. I’ve asked myself many
times what led that Berliner and so many other people in the world to
see Cubans inside and outside the Island as two separate worlds, two
irreconcilable worlds.
The answer to that
question also runs through part of the work of my blog, Generation Y.
How was it that they divided our nation? How was it that a government, a
party, a man in power, claimed the right to decide who should claim our
nationality and who should not?
The answers to these
questions you know much better than I. You who have lived the pain of
exile. You who, more often than not, left with only what you were
wearing. You who said goodbye to families, many of whom you never saw
again. You who have tried to preserve Cuba, one Cuba, indivisible,
complete, in your minds and in your hearts.
But I’m still wondering,
what happened? How did it happen that being defined as Cuban came to be
something only granted based on ideology? Believe me, when you are born
and raised with only one version of history, a mutilated and convenient
version of history, you cannot answer that question.
Luckily, it’s possible to
wake up from the indoctrination. It’s enough that one question every
day, like corrosive acid, gets inside our heads. It’s enough to not
settle for what they told us. Indoctrination is incompatible with doubt,
brainwashing ends at the exact point when our brain starts to question
the phrases it has heard. The process of awakening is slow, like an
estrangement, as if suddenly the seams of reality begin to show.
That’s how everything
started in my case. I was a run-of-the-mill Little Pioneer, you all know
about that. Every day at my elementary school morning assembly I
repeated that slogan, “Pioneers for Communism, we will be like Che.”
Innumerable times I ran to a shelter with a gas mask under my arm, while
my teachers assured me we were about to be attacked. I believed it. A
child always believes what adults say.
But there were some things
that didn’t fit. Every process of looking for the truth has its
trigger, a single moment when a piece doesn’t fit, when something is not
logical. And this absence of logic was outside of school, in my
neighborhood and in my home. I couldn’t understand why, if those who
left in the Mariel Boatlift were “enemies of the State,” my friends were
so happy when one of those exiled relatives sent them food or clothing.
Why were those neighbors,
who had been seen off by an act of repudiation in the Cayo Hueso
tenement where I was born, the ones who supported the elderly mother who
had been left behind? The elderly mother who gave a part of those
packages to the same people who had thrown eggs and insults at her
children. I didn’t understand it. And from this incomprehension, as
painful as every birth, was born the person I am today.
So when that Berliner who
had never been to Cuba tried to divide my nation, I jumped like a cat
and stood up to him. And because of that, here I am today standing
before you trying to make sure that no one, ever again, can divide us
between one type of Cuban or another. We are going to need you
for a future Cuba and we need you for the Cuba of the present. Without
you our country would be incomplete, as if someone had amputated its
limbs. We cannot allow them to continue to divide us.
Just as we are fighting
to live in a country where the rights of free expression, free
association, and so many others that have taken from us are permitted; we have to do
everything – the possible and the impossible – so that you can recover
the rights they have also taken from you. There is no you and us… there
is only “us.” We will not allow them to continue separating us.
I am here because I don’t believe the
history they told me. With so many other Cubans who grew up under a
single official “truth,” I have woken up. We need to rebuild our
nation. We can’t do it alone. Those present here – as you know well –
have helped so many families on the Island put food on the table for
their children. You have made your way in societies where you had to
start from nothing. You have carried Cuba with you and you have cared
for her. Help us to unify her, to tear down this wall that, unlike the
one in Berlin, is not made of concrete or bricks, but of lies, silence,
bad intentions.
In this Cuba so many of
us dream of there will be no need to clarify what kind of Cuban we are.
We will be just plain Cubans. Cubans, period. Cubans.
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