Listen to my story in my own voice.
A Baby Passport
Sixty years ago today, my mother and I left Cuba with the hope of reuniting with my father. Well. My mother would be reuniting with my father. I would be meeting him for the first time. It would be some months before that hope and yearning would be realized.
My parents were married young, in the early days of the communist Castro regime. Nationalization of businesses, both foreign and domestic, resulted in both my grandfathers losing their ability to provide for their families. An uncle was imprisoned for attempting to escape the country. Religious persecution was rampant. Hunger was rampant; the ration booklets given to each family, on paper, was insufficient. In reality, it was not worth the paper and ink expended to produce it because there was no food, no supplies. Sixty years ago the situation was dire. Today the Cuban people, crushed by a communism, are hungrier than ever. Nothing has changed in a lifetime. On the contrary, it has devolved further into despairing want.
My parents made the decision to leave, and as evidenced in my passport, it was a multi-year mission of disappointment and hope. They were married in the late spring of 1962, and shortly thereafter, my father was granted both entry to the US, and exit from Cuba. He came ahead of my mother to get a job and find a home, and in the interim, the Cuban Missile Crisis shut down the possibility for my mother, pregnant with me, to follow him to the US.
My passport is a record of every attempt to find any country in the world that would take us. There were opportunities, but the communist regime, in its totalitarian goal of separating families and fomenting despair, denied every visa. Finally, after years of pleading, prayers, and very likely, bribes, my maternal grandfather secured an exit visa for us. My passport is covered in entry visas from Spain, my grandparents’ homeland, but no exit was ever given for us to be received by family, Instead, we were left to the mercy of a former business associate of my grandfather, who received us in Mexico.
I have a devotion to Our Lady of Guadalupe, one that was never encouraged in my home, where Our Lady of Charity, patroness of Cuba, was prominant. But it was in the shadow of Our Lady of Guadalupe that my mother and I were kept safe in Mexico City while awaiting our reunion in the US. I came to this understanding as an adult, and hope to one day return to that little harbor of safety where we waited in limbo to give my thanks.
I can only imagine the spectrum of fears and anxiety my family felt. It is a story of intrigue, hope, despair, hope again, surrender, and trust.
Today I reflect on the sacrifices made for me. Sacrifices that came at great costs across generations, shifting, changing while creating and re-creating a family story that that spans two continents and three countries. It is a story of exile that is both uniquely personal and tragically a common thread that all too often is the human condition. And yet, I am grateful for it all.
I have often felt that I straddled two countries and two cultures, belonging fully to neither, but where time heals some wounds and scars over others, there is something to be said about constancy and presence. The United States has been my home for 60 years. It is a mere technicality that my citizenship was granted to me as a young adult rather than at birth. What’s a few years across six decades? And yet…I remain neither here nor there, and perhaps that is the last wound, the last vestige of what it means to be in exile.
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,