Jubana! (16 page)

In class we began with the basics—sense memory, action, beat, business, character, improvisation, objective, obstacle—and eventually I got my first real part, that of Helen Keller in
The Miracle Worker,
a play that allows mostly white people in it. The role was beyond perfect for me, as in it I could remove the glasses and use my acute myopia to my advantage. Plus there's a scene or two where Helen gets to
act out
—another term I'd picked up back at St. Elizabeths—by physically attacking Annie, her teacher. This was one of my fave moments because being loud and theatrical is so utterly Cuban.

Armed with my newly acquired theatrical skills, I would soon realize my covert agenda to get black parents. Back on the parents' laps at the birthday party, I pressed on.
Action, beat, business, character, improvisation, objective, obstacle.

“Well, I'm like a Negro because I come from a lonely island, too,” I continued. “Only it didn't used to be lonely but now it is lonely and so are we, lonely like homesick, because of Fidel Castro, Hitler's cruel demon spawn. And Cubans, now we're in
el exílio.
Like our own poor little island right inside the richest ocean, that's the United States. All because of that wicked spawn. I'm gonna stick needles and pins into him. Long sharp ones for when he's dead. And then we're gonna get our house back and our country back and my air-conditioning with the painted baby bears on my dresser and then we'll be very happy again and I know we'll go swimming in the sea every day with the
caracoles.
Seashells. You can come, too. I'll show you it. We can even have a little siesta after lunch.”

I'd catch my breath for a beat and dive back in.

“So then recently, on my seventh birthday, December 10, I saw and my mommy showed me how Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., he got the Nobel Peace Prize, you know? It was on a Thursday, I'll never forget it because that was my birthday! Dr.
Rey
—that
means king—he said that peace costs more than diamonds or silver or gold. Well, my mommy just drives me crazy! That's not peace! So anyway I was wondering about if you could think about adopting me maybe. Just until the evil
asesino
croaks and then it's time to go back home.”

My audience of two would crack up and hug me and kiss me and tell me all sorts of nice things about myself. That was the good part. But then they always added that my parents loved me and I belonged with them. Now, another Jubana might have felt defeated at that point and given up. But another Jubana might not have anticipated this. I didn't fall off the
turrón
truck yesterday! I could out-manipulate. I'd learned that at the scrawny neck of my
gringa
school principal and even more so by playing Helen Keller, a master manipulator if there ever was one (until she got the tuf luv and the gift of self-expression). So. I was not prepared to give up that easily. The resistant black parents, in other words, had forced me to resort to playing the race card.

“Excuse me, but are you saying that you can't adopt me because…I'm…
white?
Is this, like, a racial thing? Because I know I could belong here. I couldn't be in
A Raisin in the Sun,
Alfie Brown said so, because it's a black folks' play. I have to be a white blind girl whose family doesn't understand her. It takes an outsider to.
The Miracle Worker.
”

Then for my finale, I'd launch into my MLK–Langston Hughes combo patois platter.

“I
told
you, I have a dream today. ‘What happens to a dream deferred? Does it dry up like a raisin in the sun? Maybe it just sags like a heavy load. Or does it
explode?
'”

By the time Mami arrived to pick me up, my potentially adoptive black parents regarded her exactly the way I wanted them to: monster child molester.

My dream of adoptive black parents never did come true, par
ents I imagined would give me infinite love, affection, understanding, warmth, protection, support, limits, and time, not to mention coconut cake and lemonade. Yes, it's true that I ultimately failed to get black parents. But I feel I came close, and the effort was in itself rewarding.

That's something, I think.

 

Some dreams do not die, especially when they involve Valerie.

When I had filled up my diary, I called Valerie like she said to, and the next thing I knew I had an Hermès typewriter, all green, with a hard dark green lizard cover with a brass snap on it. The typewriter wasn't just beautiful; it was a real workhorse made for pounding. I'd begun teaching myself how to type. Since I'm right-handed and my strongest finger is my right index finger, I used it exclusively. I was gradually working my way up to big speed. If all you did was listen, you'd swear it sounded as though I was using all ten fingers. Valerie had also given me two ribbon refills—with double black and red ink bands—and a bottle of Liquid Paper, a whole box of white typing paper, a stack of file folders with labels, and a pack of brightly colored indelible Magic Markers. I was apprehending a crucial North American lesson: You can't just dream dreams. You need the tools. This is why there's Home Depot. Staples, too. But they didn't have those back then. As Mami always told me,
“Allí tú.”

Joor on joor own.

S
earching for new parents as a Cuban refugee child is a bitch. I am not jooneek. You know it, you saw it, as I did that lazy Sunday in mid-April of 2000. The fiancé, who was my then-boyfriend, and I, both journalists, were eating bagels with cream cheese and drinking
café con leche
as we read the
New York Times.
Normally we'd be listening to American jazz or a Cachao
son
—a lively, sinuous, romantic, rhythmic style of Cuban music—with the TV turned off. But this was not a normal day or a normal spring. Elián González, an adorable six-year-old Cuban refugee, was obsessing me and, so it seemed, the rest of the world. By now his story has entered into Myth Land, but at the time, it was a compelling myth-in-the-making, a heartbreaking political and emotional saga, and a daily breaking news event with no clear-cut outcome that could ever satisfy everybody except, ultimately and as usual, El Caballo, Fidel Castro, Hitler's demon spawn.

To quickly recap the facts: Elián, whose parents were divorced, lived with his mother and stepfather in Cárdenas, a port
city two hours east of Havana on Cuba's northern coast. On November 22, 1999, the three Cubans joined ten others in a sixteen-foot motorboat heading for the United States. The next day, the vessel capsized, drowning ten of its passengers, including Elián's mother and stepfather. After clinging to an inner tube by himself for some seventy-two hours in the Gulf Stream in the Straits of Florida, Elián was rescued near Fort Lauderdale on Thanksgiving Day by two American fishermen, who delivered him to some distant relatives living in Little Havana, a conservative working-class Miami neighborhood of Cuban exiles. (The two other shipwreck survivors, both adults not related to Elián, separately got ashore, but nobody cared about them.) Elián enjoyed a tearful, joyful union with his extended family, who intended to keep him.

Then the proverbial
mierda
hit the fan.

Castro and Elián's father, Juan Miguel González, demanded Elián be returned. Predictably, the Miami relatives refused. Juan Miguel, a member of Castro's Communist Party, arrived in Miami to reclaim his son and return him to Cuba. Cuban Miami exploded in a collective frenzy, turning an innocent child into a political pawn in an international custodial tug-of-war, a Christ-like symbol of the miraculous and the preordained, and a poster child for all Cubans.

“Is there any more coffee, Geeg?” asked the preengagement boyfriend, Paul.

I was too engrossed in the TV news show to hear him. Talking heads were butting heads over Elián.

“Geeg?” Paul repeated.

“What?”

“Is there more coffee?”

“Here,” I told him. “You can finish mine. Sweetie, I really want to watch this.”

Paul understood, and not just because he's a journalist. My
gringo
boyfriend of one year, looking mighty cute in his Romeo y Julieta–brand cigar T-shirt (I'd bought it for him many months before in a Little Havana
tabaquería,
cigar factory, I wrote about for the
Washington Post
), had by now gotten a deep immersion in all things Cuban, thanks to me and my family. Although my parents and I didn't remain in Miami Land after leaving Cuba, there were always summertime trips to Miami, the Other Homeland, to visit friends and relatives and overeat at Versailles, my favorite Little Havana restaurant. Those vacations became increasingly less fun for me as time went by, however. The eternal, crushing heat. The political tunnel vision and dogma. The vanity and materialism and concern with appearances, with
¿el qué dirán?,
the what will they say? The nonstop Castro-bashing mania over the airwaves, in restaurants, at people's houses. The clannish, provincial hysterics. All those things would have been my norm had my parents settled there instead of in our nation's capital. And yet, sometimes I've been sorry they didn't. After all, there's strength in numbers, a sense of belonging and acceptance and solidarity.

In Miami, Cubans know who they are. They never have to feel ashamed to be it. That's one of the things I love most about going there, that instant unspoken understanding that
nosotros somos Cubanos.
When you're such a minority all the time, it's wonderful to be a part of a majority for a change. On the other hand, most Jubanos are Democrats, which puts us in the minority among overwhelmingly Catholic Republican Cubanos. Considering that all Cuban Americans are the tiniest Hispanic group in the United States—an underwhelming 3.7 percent, or about the same number as Jewish Americans—Jubanos are
really
in the minority. (According to the 2002 Census, most U.S. Hispanics are Mexican, 66.9 percent; then Central and South American, 14.3 percent; Puerto Rican, 8.6 percent; Cuban, 3.7 percent; and the rest make
up 6.5 percent.) Don't even get me started about the blank, polite, Thorazine smiles on Jewish American faces when you tell them you're a
Cuban
Jew. Pass the halvah and pass the pork. At any rate, when I'm sitting in Versailles, the weirdos are the Americans who can't pronounce
plátanos maduros.

So although I obviously feel very Cuban most of the time, especially in contrast to my New Yorker fiancé and his North American family and most of the rest of the native English speakers in my northeastern life, I will nevertheless never feel as fanatically or defiantly Cuban, or as Cuban to the exclusion of all other things, as do my friends and family who left Cuba in the early sixties, moved to Miami, and haven't budged since. Still, when a crisis arises in the community—and the fate of little Elián was certainly considered
primo
crisis material—we tend to circle the wagons.

Since Paul had polished off the remnants of my
café con leche
and I needed more caffeination to couple with my freshly lit Parliament for my Elián fixation, I unscrewed a fresh bottle of TaB. Yes, bottle. TaB is available in most metro areas, but usually only in cans. Canned TaB tastes metallic. In a pinch, I can settle, but for some bizarre reason, only TaB in the fabulous twenty-ounce plastic screw-top bottles works for me. Sometimes I have to drive more than two hundred miles one way just to get my hot pink cases of those TaBs. You should see them piled up in my trunk and backseat. Think of my shock absorbers! And then having to haul them all out and bring them upstairs into my apartment and find a nonobtrusive spot for forty cases of TaB. And then people come over and see the wall o' TaBs, and I have to pretend to laugh it off and say something like, “I know. It's an ironic statement. Neo-Warholesque, if you will.” All because I have an addiction. Paul said he knew I was Really in Love with him the first time I willingly shared my TaB. Well, what can I tell you? A girl goes
puerco
wild when she's in love. Wild and blind. Just as my fellow Cubano Americanos on TV were acting over Elián, a boy whom the majority didn't personally know but with whom they were madly in love, madly to the point of blindness.

Watching the live footage of my fellow exiles in furious full-throttle right-wing mode on TV, threatening to sue attorney general Janet Reno and the U.S. government, and weeks later erupting onto the streets of Miami when Elián was finally returned to Cuba with his father, I was truly torn between cringing (Americana: God, these freaks are so embarrassing!) and empathizing (Cubana: We may be short but we're fierce. You go, kids!).

So. Which camp would I side with, which one should I side with? But then I thought of a lesson I learned from Dr. Marvin L. Adland, my retired psychoanalyst-expander, and an exceptional student of the human condition. It was one of the hardest lessons to get locked into place inside me. Namely, you
don't
have to raise your voice or use bad words to be effective and get your point across—which is, of course, the ultimate anti-Cuban attitude. As a matter of fact, acting “Cuban” in that way in certain milieus of this society actually weakens people's perceptions of you and makes them think you're just…a typical, trivial, crazy, hot-blooded Spic.

Maybe we exiles drink too much espresso and we're wired from the caffeine. Maybe we live in chronic sugar seizure mode from our ultra-rich sweets like
flan de coco
or
pastel de tres leches
or
turrón.
Maybe we just have too much downtime. (Indeed, ask any Cuban old enough to have lived in pre-Castro Cuba about life in pre-Castro Cuba and you'll be incredibly sorry you ever brought it up. Ask about post-Castro Cuba and you'll be even sorrier.) I think what we really need isn't less caffeine and sugar and free time; it's better public relations. Because if the Miami crowd's goal was to make mainstream America feel sympathy for the
cause and understand that Castro's repressive, anachronistic regime was behind all of this from day one—dey totally blew eet, as my testy Mama Jubana would say.

A few days earlier my mother and I had been on the phone, both of us watching the same CNN show in which “famous” Cuban Americans had formed a human chain that they called a prayer circle in front of the Little Havana house where Elián was. There was a well-known actor, a talk-show hostess, a singer, a musician, a mayor, and, to my personal astonishment, a newspaper colleague whom I knew fairly well. I could perfectly understand the celebs getting out there—all publicity is good publicity, after all—but a
journalist?

“If I were her editor I'd fire her Cuban ass on the spot,” I heard myself tell Mami. I was surprised to hear myself pop that out just like that. “She's entitled to her opinion—in print. But she's injecting herself into the news. That's not journalism. That's—”

“De newspaper might talk to her but dey won' fire her,” Mami said. “Chee has a consteetuahncee. De paper knows dat. Der would be an uproar. Dey have to take eet. Chee knows exactly how far chee can poosh her agenda.”

Back on the Sam and Cokie show on TV, George Will was saying, without a trace of irony, that a Communist cannot be a good parent.

“There's a howler,” Paul said.

Was
it a howler statement? Or was this situation a Cuban exile version of “it's a black thing, you wouldn't understand”?

“Jesus Christ,” Paul continued, “Will's such an anal-retentive Tory.”

“You think so?” I said, lighting a new Parliament and sipping my TaB.

“You know what the Justice Department should do? Reno should get a court order that the loony uncle [Lázaro González, at
whose home Elián resided while in the United States] cough up the kid. And if he refuses, they should lock him up for contempt.”

“You would LOCK HIM UP?”

“Absolutely. ‘Communists can't be good parents.' Christ.”

“Maybe they can't,” I ventured.

“Fidel is a hypocritical thug. But the Elián crowd, those people down there are loud, bombastic, right-wing, hard-liner ass-holes who are trying to use their political clout and campaign cash to put themselves above the law.”

Paul picked up my bottle of TaB and took a long swallow. Now not only was he insulting my people but he had the audacity to drink my TaB right afterward, without so much as waiting for me to offer him some. This is my LIFE, dammit. Don't you get that I saw myself in little Elián? It's the story of so many Cubans.

Me cago en este cabrón jodedero!
Shit! I was thinking very bad things about Paul, all because he insulted My People and took My TaB. Could I continue to voluntarily sleep with a man who drinks My TaB
and
has an anti–Cuban exile attitude? I mean, it's one thing for ME to criticize them, it's quite another for outsiders to.

“I know what you want me to say, dear,” I said, trying my best to not repeatedly stab my
gringo
beloved with the now empty—EMPTY!—TaB bottle. “Like in those multiple-choice quizzes in
Cosmo,
when you know what the ‘right' answer is and you choose it just so you'll get a better score and not have to face the fact that your attitude's all wrong and you're all fucked up?”

“What does
that
mean?”

Where would I even begin? How to explain to an American, a non-Cuban, the passions behind this, the frustrations and hurt feelings of more than four pent-up decades…?
Ay, Cuba.
See, this is why I always wear waterproof mascara. You just never know when life will make you cry. What really drives me crazy is how tears uncurl your lashes—but not evenly. Half will be up and
half will be down, and all that effort you put into curling them all perfectly with your Shu Uemura eyelash curler in the morning just gets shot to shit. Hate that.

“Elián's mother
died
to get him here,” I said, blinking and feeling my eyes brim. “What do you not understand? She wanted him HERE. You know how many other Cuban parents have made similar sacrifices? Hello, there's a REASON for this. I realize no six-year-old gets to call the shots, but…”

Coño.
Elián was affecting me way more than I'd expected. I'd just mentally cursed out the man I loved. At least I'd kept my volume in check. That's a real accomplishment for a Cuban. Here's the thing that clouded my judgment and got me so riled up: Seeing that terminally cute (which is how Paul describes
me,
actually) Elián swinging on the swings in his Little Havana yard, playing with his five bazillion Toys “R” Us toys, drinking his little
mamey
nectar, and enjoying all the fruits of
Los Estados Unidos,
I was very moved. I identified with him. My parents didn't want me to live in Cuba under Castro, either. They also took risks to get me from there to here when I was a tiny child. So to see all of Elián's mom's effort and risk and even death come to nothing for her son except a U-turn ticket back to Cuba after having lived it up here was just sadder than any words. Who knows what might have become of me had my parents been living apart, as Elián's were back in Cuba, and my mother had drowned trying to get me to America and my father had come here to reclaim me and return me to Castro's Cuba? I'd never have met Paul, that's for sure, or experienced the life-altering thrill that only fashion magazines and TaB in the bottle can bring.