Cuba | You Are Here

I have the full lips of a good Cuban woman, wide hips that twitch at the sound of a Latin beat. I am red hot passionate, with an eyes-flashing, arms-waving temper. The sea is the only place I feel blood-rushing peace.

Yes, Cuba is inside me, whether I like it or not.

We flew through the skies one late July night. Surrounded by lightning and carried by turbulence, our entire California family landed in Miami well past bedtime. It was a journey of cultural homecoming for some in our group, and a first exposure for the rest of us. There in our two-star motel with its questionable swimming pool and a not-great view of the beach, I first understood just how wide are the borders of Cuban familia. We welcomed a parade of relatives, long ago friends, and friends of friends–categories that might as well cease to exist at the table a Cuban abuelita. Familia is familia. Everyone’s in.

Two weeks of all-day swimsuits and every morning breakfasts at IHOP are a blur in my memory now. I was only nine-years-old and not sure what to make of this place so different than my white-bred, dry-heat California hometown.

One half of a morning stands out in importance and recollection, however. After travelling to Key West, we found ourselves staring into the leaves of the southernmost tree. When a black cat darted from behind a bush, my cousin joked, “There goes the southernmost cat.” Just ahead of us stood a chain-linked fence, with the wide waters of the Atlantic splashing on the rocks below.

Attached near the top of the fence, a sign reads: 90 Miles to Cuba

This is what we came to see, and so we stood silent for a moment. My dad slung his arm around his sister’s shoulders and she smiled through her tears. Thirty-ish years back and ninety miles south–that’s how far away their minds traveled in those few minutes. As children and with no notice, they left their island home with their parents, abandoning memories, dear friends, all the treasures of their childhood.

While the grown-ups reminisced in choked-up Espanol, my cousins and I, along with my little brother and sister, ran wild in a game of tag, hopping on and off large rocks that topped the cliff we were gathered on. Laughing and running, we blinked our eyes at the Florida sun with our feet pounding the ground of freedom that has always spread beneath us.

When I was sure no one was looking, I strained my eyes out over the forever expanse of water, searching for a piece of driftwood or the black ridges of a tire, signs of a refugee almost to shore. These were the stories I’d grown up with, stories of desperation and hope. Sometimes they made it. Sometimes they were picked up by the Coast Guard. Sometimes they sank.

Standing at the edge of our country, I felt like I was at the edge of something else, but as I was only a little girl, I couldn’t put my finger on what it was exactly. I was overwhelmed. The gratitude I was supposed to feel, the imaginings of a childhood built with the brick and mortar of communism, language barriers so steep I feared I’d never break them apart, the constant volume and prattle of all these people who shared my blood, or at least a piece of my history, it was just too much.

Frankly, these Cubans of mine were too much.

We shared a gene pool, but we didn’t fit together easily. So when my dad walked out the door a few years after our Florida trip, filing for divorce and affirming all the discord I’d sensed, I erased them, mi familia, and Cuba itself from my very identity. 90 miles was too far to go.

But roots pull and roots dig.

All grown up now, I see it all with gentler eyes. As a wife and mother, I look at my babies and my husband and I see the dark eyes of my Abuelita. I wonder at the cost of her sacrifices, I wonder what it does to a woman to leave the way she did, to gather her children and pray that a far away land will be the answer she’s hoping for. I think of my dad’s childhood memories, and then I dream of sugar cane fields and a baseball soaring high above them, the exultant cries of a passel of Cuban boys.

I wince when I think of guns, suitcases, desperation and my dad as a skinny boy with enormous ears standing with his big sister decked in a white dress, helpless. I lose my breath when I think of my freedom-loving Papi in a cell all those times, his dream of a free Cuba still breathing, but losing color.

My heart edges close to what it all means, and sometimes that’s as far as it can go. But every now and then I stand in that place long enough to see the big picture–the mistakes, the desperate shots in the dark, the guts and the fear, the stubborn hope.

I know now that the edge I felt all those years ago was the edge of loss and anger, language barriers and picking sides. It was the sharp shatter of family, connection. It was me, trying to keep hearts safe and the coming realization that I can’t.

As I turn my gentler eyes on this this cast of characters in a complicated and sometimes devastating tale of a fully Cuban, fully American family, it is so clear that we all have scars of place and relationship. These Cubans of mine, and me. And if they are mine, and they indisputably are, then I am theirs and their Cuba lives inside me too. 90 miles is closer than I ever could have imagined.

Maybe in learning to make peace with a memory, I’ve learned to love a place and a people that I can’t escape. And the truth is, I don’t want to escape it or them anymore. What I want is to step beyond that chain link fence, to slice through the self-imposed invisible line between here and there. I want my heart to cross the Atlantic and finally say, “Estoy aqui y te amo.”

I’m here and I love you.

* * * * *

Bio: Sarah Torna Roberts is a writer who lives in California with her husband and four sons. She blogs at www.sarahtornaroberts.com where she digs around her in her memories, records her present, and is constantly holding her faith up to the light. She snacks at 2 AM with great regularity, is highly suspicious of anyone who doesn’t love baseball (Go Giants!), and would happily live in a tent by the sea.

90 Miles.jpg is a photo by Kay Gaensler, available for public use.

After nearly 24 hours, we finally landed in Havana. It was May of 1998, the summer after I’d completed my sophomore year in college, when I accompanied my mother back to her homeland, an island she hadn’t seen since 1971 when she boarded a plane as part of the Freedom Flight program. Our multi-stop journey — Los Angeles to Houston to Cancun to Havana — was made with each of us wearing several layers of clothing, all of which we would leave behind. That’s what you did when you visited family in Cuba.

Exhausted, we stood before an inspector who began to pick apart our luggage, item by item, all of which Mom had carefully selected and weighed, because the rule was if you were over the weight allotment, they would require some kind of remittance. Knowing this, Mom slipped our inspector a twenty dollar bill, and just like that, we were allowed to move forward.

Just on the other side of the makeshift cordoned off area for those waiting, was our family—the real people whose names and faces I’d only known through photographs and stories that occasionally worked themselves from my mother’s memory. After a round of hearty hugs, Mom and I were ushered into a relic of a car and off to her cousin’s apartment. With the windows down (the AC had long since stopped working), we drove through the damp Caribbean air under a silken evening sky. I found it hard to believe we were actually here; we were in Cuba, finally. It wasn’t a mythical land about which was sung to me through lyrics from my mother’s albums. This place was in fact real. I let my head lean against the doorframe and listened to the salty waves crashing against the stone walls along the famous stretch of Malecon that held up this crumbling city.

We spent two weeks in Cuba, visiting with family and taking in as much as we could. I got to see the elementary school Mom attended, and the apartment where she had lived with her own mother. Everywhere we went we were treated like royalty—brought to tables bowing under the weight of feasts prepared. Someone had gotten wind that I loved mangoes, so at every stop there was always plenty of fresh mango, the flesh of the bright orange fruit so sweet that it could have only ripened under an island sun. We walked through abandoned sugar factories, gnawing on the raw cane. There were trips to swimming pools, and dinner dances at rooftop bars. Music and laughter was never far from our ears and lips, and someone was always telling me a story of when my mother was a little girl. This woman I had only ever known as my mother, a figure I often worked hard to steer against as a teenager, took on a new light. She had a history that was all her own, one apart from mine. For the first time I saw her as an individual.

My favorite memory rests with the particular leg of the trip that took us to Camaguey, the town from which Mom came. We were sitting in the backyard of someone’s house, most of the women busying themselves with putting the meal together, while the men were planted in a circle, passing around the two bottles of rum we had purchased with our American dollars at the local store. There was the sound of glass clinking as someone poured himself another swig, callused farm-worked hands rubbing scruffy cheeks, and laughter. There was so much laughter. At some point someone arrived with an accordion, and the group broke into a spontaneous rendition of Guantanamera. I know the lyrics because I grew up with them, Mom singing the song at parties, or turning up the stereo if the track came through the speakers. I knew Guantanamera, and I felt part of these people, this island, this place. I sang with them, our arms interlocking with one another, feet tapping in rhythm, the accordion scissoring its soulful notes through the heavy afternoon air.

The toothy smiles, the plumes of dust kicked up by our dancing heels in the backyard of our cousin’s house, the smell of stewing goat meat on the open fire in a makeshift shack of a kitchen. That scene has been stitched into my history and I often wonder what will happen to our connection with Cuba when my mother is gone. She is the last true link to the island, and all the history that lies with those people, the ones with whom we danced and sang.

My own daughter, Lucille, was born in October of 2013. Weeks into her new life, my rawness into Motherhood, I discovered that if I wore her strapped to my chest and played music, her screams would calm as she became lulled by the rhythm of my dancing body. Often, the music I played was Cuban. I recently posted a picture of my daughter wearing a woven fedora. The caption read, Ella no nacio en Cuba, pero la isla vive en su corazon. Translation: She wasn’t born in Cuba, but the island lives in her heart. It’s in her smile — the one I gave her —the food I make, the music we listen to, and the intangible way my mother has taught me to live life. And now this breathes in Lucy, stitched in the fabric of her flesh, in all the ways that can be seen and unseen.

We are always there.

* * * * *

“Mi Tierra” was written by Ilene Marshall. Ilene resides in Pittsburgh, PA, with her husband and daughter. When she’s not documenting her life through photography, she attempts to capture some of it in writing. She has been a teacher for 11 years, but finds that often times, the biggest lessons aren’t found in books. Ilene blogs at “These Marmalade Skies,” and her photography can be seen at Ilene Marshall Photography.

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