Tag: Cuba

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Review: The Red Umbrella

I have a huge stack of books to read on my nightstand, but a recent conversation with one of my nieces prompted me to reread Christina Diaz Gonzalez’s touching story of love and sacrifice, The Red Umbrella. Set in the early 1960’s after the Cuban communist revolution, it follows the journey of teenaged Lucia and her little brother as they flee the oppression and dangers of a cruel regime through Operation Pedro Pan.

Terrified by the imminent danger to their physical well-being, and distraught by the brain-washing and emotional abuse inflicted on the nation’s youth, thousands of Cuban parents sent their children to the United States to protect them from the unknown horrors of totalitarianism. In conjunction with the Catholic Church and hundreds of individuals and families who came together to foster these children, Operation Pedro Pan processed and welcomed over 14,000 unaccompanied children to the U.S. from 1960-1962.

Next year marks the 60th anniversary of the beginning of this exodus. It’s stunning to recognize how many decades have passed, and how fresh this pain still is. I imagine some of these children, now in their 70’s and older, have children, grandchildren, and even great-grandchildren. This is their story — all of them, as many of us carry the stories of our families in our hearts, never to be forgotten.

Gonzalez shares a fictional story that weaves important historical elements into the plot, gives a new generation insight into a tragic situation in Cuba, and provides families an opportunity to expound on the truths shared in the narrative. I first read this book almost a decade ago, and it still holds strong today.

You can read more about Christina Diaz Gonzalez and her books for middle grades and young adults here.

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another story from my childhood

I tell another story in this except from Confessions of a Middle-Aged Cubanita. I share how my friends and I grew up bicultural — and we didn’t even know that was a thing. We just knew it as our lives. Typical Catholic: living the both/and experience to the fullest!

I can’t really say my parents worked hard to protect us from anything. On the contrary, the worked hard to provide for us and give us opportunities for success in our new home. For some of my peers, it was very hard times. Maybe it was very hard times for my parents, too. If we were poor, I never knew it. I knew “no” for sure, but I never knew hunger or cold.

I knew love. And that’s the important thing.

Imagine my schizophrenic childhood. When everyone else was flocking to Union City (don’t you love New Jersey?) and Miami, my father chose the Deep South in the middle of the Civil Rights Movement. A classic move, if I dare say so.

In retrospect, I admire his decision on my many levels. He had a job – who could argue that practical point? Economically, it made sense: you go where you can get work. He traded his linen shirts for a wash and wear waiter’s uniform. Was I scarred? Not really, but to this day I admit that I am a sucker for a man in a tux, reeking heavily of Brut aftershave and Mennen deodorant. Hey, we all have our demons.

Culturally, it really wasn’t that bad. We lived in a neighborhood where we were surrounded by Cubans in the same dire straits – mainly, people working hard to eke out a living in a new country, and doing this, I reflect, under the pall of desperate and heart-wrenching exile. How did they do it? Only now can I begin to fathom the depth of their despair, their fear of the unknown, their pain at their loss. I owe my parents and that whole generation a heart-felt thanks for their sacrifice.

One of the amazing things to come out of that experience I can attribute to my parents and vecinos in that little neighborhood we called Pastorita. I never developed a sense of being different because I never thought that I was different. Almost everyone spoke Spanish, so I thought that was the norm. By the time I started school, I was speaking English fluently, thanks in part to my next door neighbor, an americanita named Elizabeth, and our little black and white TV, which brought me the joys of Saturday morning cartoons and afternoon westerns. This period in my life was important because I learned to be American. Consider this, I spoke Spanish at home (not Spanglish – that came later), ate comida criolla, and played with other cubanitos in Pastorita, the pastoral symbolism of the name lost on us (years later I learned that the adults named it after projects in Cuba, how’s that for self-deprecating humor?)

Imagine if you will, Leave It to Beaver with subtitles. “Oye tu” became a universal call to arms. At home I was free to be “me.” Nobody had labeled me yet, so I played and fussed and got into trouble and was loved in about equal parts as everybody else that I knew. And everybody else was just like me: cubanitos.

At school I was still “me.” I spoke English – with a drawl! I ate the school lunch. Consequently, I acquired a taste for black-eyed peas in addition to frijoles negros; mashed potatoes with gravy and that other side dish, congri; corn on the cob and platanitos maduros. I learned everything and accepted it all because nobody had suggested otherwise to me. In short, I was well on my way to becoming bi-cultural, only we did not have a name for it. We called it our lives.

By the time I was old enough to observe differences in culture, it was too late, luckily, for the negative affects of this knowledge to have a hold on me. I was a creature of both worlds. Cuban and American. Me. It was a beautiful time, and lasted several years before I was plagued with self-doubt and ambivalence about my identity. I had been labeled by both sides and realized I belonged to neither. I was too American for the older generation, too Cuban for my American friends. I found some solace with other cubanitos my age, but we lacked the sophistication and maturity to recognize that we were friends merely due to our circumstances. We fit nowhere else.

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my story as an immigrant

My story as an immigrant is all over the internet if you know where to look. Some years ago I self-published a small book of essays, Confessions of a Middle-Aged Cubanita, that I compiled for my children about growing up bilingual and bicultural after emigrating to the U.S. from Cuba in 1966. The book is intended for a very small niche, Cuban-Americans with similar experiences to mine: coming to the U.S. as small children and navigating the cultural seas of being first generation Americans. Most of my memories are funny — and a few poignant, maybe even universal for all immigrants. It struck a chord with a few people, precisely because the need to hold onto traditions and what-is-known is like the lifesaver thrown to a drowning victim. We clutch it wildly, desperately, hoping that it will keep us from drowning in a sea of despair and hopelessness, misunderstanding and loneliness. It is a bittersweet blessing. A privilege. A miracle. A hardship. A salvation. An opportunity. A responsibility.

My friend Maria Scaperlanda, who blogs at Day By Day with María, is collecting these stories with the hashtags #MyMigrationStory and #NationalMigrationWeek. I don’t know what she’s going to do with it. There are millions of stories out there. I fear she will end up overwhelmed with hundreds of stories.

I tell part of my story in My Badass Book of Saints. It’s all over this blog. It’s all over my previous blog, and the one I had before that. Of course, my story is a part of me. It’s who I am. The chapters about exile and being a refugee, leaving Cuba for the only country in the world that would take my mother and me, and then waiting months to enter the U.S. to be united with my father reside comfortably next to the chapters about my first kiss, graduating from college, getting married, having babies. It’s who I am. But somehow, those first chapters are a heavy weight — with threads that run through other chapters, and cast, almost imperceptibly, a pall of sadness over the scenes. Their presence, out of the way and unobtrusive, is still there, a silent reminder that things might have been different.

On a good day, that reality is met with gratitude. It can, on some days, be met with bitterness. But it’s my story, and I’m comfortable with it, like I’m comfortable in my own skin. It is part of my identity, although not all of it. The strongest part of my identity is my faith.

I’ll share snippets of my story this week — you don’t want to read pages and pages all at once, do you? Here’s a part from Confessions:

This memoir, like many others, took a relatively brief
time to write, but a lifetime to compile. The cubanitas my age
are facing challenges at both ends of the family spectrum. We
are facing aging parents and aging children – the threat of
nursing homes and empty nests.

Our generation faced a multitude of “firsts” in our
youth. We were the first to fully venture into American
culture. Sure, we were raised bilingually and bi-culturally, but
unlike our brothers and sisters, cousins, or aunts and uncles
just 10 years older than us, we were the first to be fully
immersed in the new culture. Most of us were the first
generation born in the United States, or we came so young,
like me, that we might as well have been born here.

This is meaningful in simple and complex ways. We
speak English with no accent, having been educated
exclusively here. Whether at school, the playground, or
watching TV, the dominant language in those interactions was
English. Yet, we speak Spanish with no accent because we had
our parents and grandparents who insisted that we maintain
the language. The extended network of Spanish-speaking
friends further reinforced the language.

Even though we have often wished that our own
children would sustain our level of proficiency in Spanish, it is
often a losing battle. In the end, it is English that wins. We
were the first to fight that battle and grumble “ay mami” when
too many demands were made upon us, and in rebellion traded
our guayaberas for Izod Lacoste shirts. Even then we were
aware of icons (perhaps that’s why we gravitate towards other
icons today).

The irony, of course, is that years later we have
embraced the language – the guayaberas – the icons of a
culture that we learned from our parents and grandparents in
the bas-relief of exile. Now that we are the ones aging and
trying to hold on to the things that have become dear to us do
we embrace the past. In fact, it is really not at all surprising to
discover that our cultural identity is built on nostalgia – a
distortion tempered with love. Love of country. Love of
culture. Love of family.

Our identity is as unique as the myriad stories told by
our parents and grandparents over thimble-sized shots of café.
However, our unique circumstances, when pooled, result in a
new hybrid culture – a little bit of the past, a little bit of the
future. In the present, we are what we are: cubanitos.

 

 

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