Being Cuban

For some time questions and bewilderment about my “Cubanness” has hovered around my work and me. From what I gather, it seems to some people that my influences, my behavior and public choices, and the way I go about presenting my work do not easily conform to notions of being Cuban, or even Latin American.

Today I will contribute my opinion to this minor debate.

I have often thought that Tolstoy’s first line in Anna Karenina, “Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way,” is not only a fine remark on the specificity of misery but also a warning against the tendency to trust generalizations.

Undoubtedly, ethnicity and nationality contribute to self-definition, but are they as relevant in day-to-day living as our individual experiences of class, family, exile, disease and books, and our happenstance of epoch, encounters and genetics? Furthermore, if we are heirs to values and assumptions that influence the manner in which experiences are lived and perceived, how do the experiences, in turn, influence those values and assumptions? And in the arts, where does heritage begin and end? For instance, in the question of Joseph Conrad’s “Russianness,” where is Poland, orphanhood, lost nobility, the sea, sickness, exile and language? Is Conrad’s Russianness something more than an aroma perfuming the man and his writing? And what in T.S. Eliot is American? Is Pablo Picasso’s work Spanish? Is Jorge Luis Borges a traitor for preferring English and German?

I won’t attempt to answer any of these questions. Instead I offer them as disclaimers to what follows.

For me, being Cuban is about the tone of my childhood and subsequent exile and, less importantly, some values and fears that colored the way I was raised.

My childhood is a childhood of images I still don’t understand and hence, to be Cuban, for me, is to not have been in Cuba long enough to understand them: poorly lit rooms decorated with furniture that couldn’t be bought anymore and therefore couldn’t be used; standing in dilapidated yards on bright hot days; watching adults mourn our impending departure; talks of “El Norte;” talks of Fidel; surreal juxpositions of old toy soldiers and caged birds and billboards of the revolution; suffocating asthma attacks on a sweaty bed; leaving on an “Iberia” plane knowing we will never go back. To be Cuban is also to have lived in Spain as a foreigner; to have endured the jokes; to have learned to speak with a Castilian accent; to have gone to Mass only to look at the girls; to have been poor in Madrid in winter; to have sought country in my family, compatriots in my brothers and fistfights in school.

To be Cuban is also the Cuban writers who I read as a kid: Guillermo Cabrera Infante, Nicolás Guillén, José Martí, Reinaldo Arenas and Alejo Carpentier; it was the Spanish translations of Kafka and Tolstoy and my mother’s choice of reading to me a story about the sinking of the Andrea Doria at nighttime.

I did most of my reading in Puerto Rico, however, where being Cuban meant being an outsider but also a fellow “Caribeño.” “Caribeño,” in the 1970s (and probably still), was being part of the sea, Colonialism, humor, food and a collective sense of inferiority. It was also reading Kant in Junior High School hoping we were smart enough (we weren’t) to understand it, but free of the idea that the German philosopher wasn’t speaking for us.

To be Cuban, for me, means more letters than country, more a way of looking at things than memories. It also means nothing really "is," everything is becoming, including self-definition; every idea can be my own and every failing possible. To be Cuban, for me, is to be thrown into the recognition, as Kristeva has suggested, that the foreigner is within us and that, consequently, what some people don’t understand about me and my work—German and Scandinavian influences, American literary references, Physics, concerns with time, Jewish parallels—is nothing but an attempt to makes sense of that foreigner.