CUBAN TRANSITIONS

Recently, I went to the East Coast Chican@ Students Forum at Brown University. It was overall a rather inspiring event, and so when it came to write to start writing my first blog post, I naturally began thinking about what I talked about during that conference. One of the topics that was raised was Gloria Anzaldúa’s “La Frontera/The Borderlands” and it’s impact on Chican@ literature; this in turn got me thinking about the border between Cuba and the US.

The Border between Cuba and the US is quite different than that of Mexico and the US. Instead of the long, harsh land border that exists between the latter two, Cuba and Mexico have the free flowing and mixing ocean, the “unconscious, the imagination, the imaginal world”; the free flowing, natural, and organic ocean, which represents non-rational and hierarchical knowledge is what separates Cuba and the US, not the harsh rational and Euclidean lines which separate Mexico and the US (Anzaldúa, 108). Nevertheless, the former two have restricted each other much more than the latter two in terms of travel and interaction. This is turn makes the borderlands bewteen Cuba and the US a much more violent place than that of the borderlands of the Southwest. As we saw in the movie Balseros, during the period where people migrated to the US in large numbers, there were many people who died on their way to the US, drowned in a storm or dead of heat and starvation in what ought to have been a quick 90-mile trip to Miami (although I do not wish to gloss over the fact that many Mexicans and Central Americans die in the desert or get shot by Border Patrol on their way here). For those Cubans who did make it to the US these days, they had to be careful to be found on US soil, lest they get sent to a camp like the one in Guantánamo in Balseros, which made their lives circumscribed by what the US military allowed them to do in the refugee camp. While remittances are allowed to Cuba, even monetary transactions are very restricted, with travel and spending money in Cuba being illegal in America. Likewise, in Cuba, those who leave are considered traitors of the revolution and are not necessarily welcome back. Thus, overall, crossing the borderlands (or rather water) of US and Cuba is a very traumatic process.

Many people die on their way to the US, drowning in a storm or dying of heat of starvation

This traumatic process set up along the Cuba-US border I imagine must influence what both Anzaldúa and Mignolo call border thinking, the “double consciousness” which comes from “multi-languaging” and thus creates as Anzaldúa sees it “a change in the way we perceive reality, the we way see ourselves, and the ways we behave;” that is to say that the much less porous border affects the ways in which people who do cross it end up creating a new consciousness and culture based having two lives, one on either side of the border (Gilyard). Part of this comes out of the fact that some migrants form one of the largest pressure groups which is maintaining the blockade of Cuba; one of the legacies of immigrants to Miami from the early 60s is a population wholly dedicated to eradicating Castro’s Cuba, and usually dedicated returning to some form of the Cuba of the 50s. Having Castro as anathema to their conception of Cuba means that this part of the Cuban-American community is entirely unwilling to engage with Cuba in its current form at all. They refuse to think about Cuba beyond memories, or perhaps reclaimation. The border for them is not only a spatial border but a temporal one as well which lies in 1959. While this is something of conjecture, I would have to guess that because this group of Cuban-Americans are so tied to the old order of Cuba, and that their only thought about “home” becomes one reversing or demolishing the revolution, such a group of immigrants won’t engage in the sorts of thinking about the border which allows them to have a new, blended identity. They are either concerned with going back to Cuba entirely, or have given up on the island and now want to reside wholly in the US.

For the generation of migrants we saw in Balseros, however, the border between Cuba and the US might be a different marker. While, some, such as the family which come over, seem to feel that life in America supersedes and/or erases their old life in Cuba, others definitely feel, as the movie puts it, “shipwrecked between two worlds.” As the people in the movie move not just within Cuba but also within the United States, their conception of what “home” becomes changes in ways which could possibly affect ways in which they think about the borders separating the various places in which they have lived. The movie itself also created a sort of link back to Cuba that many other migrants would not have, through the video interviews which reached the Balseros’ families back in Cuba. While the movie itself does not explore what sorts of new consciousness can be formed from living throughout the US after making the trip from Cuba, it is clear that the experience of these migrants is not only different from those of the first generation of migrants which came to Cuba, but also different in way in which those migrants can reflect critically on what the border means to them and how they can create a new kind of culture based on their living in between spaces.

The theme of the Conference at Brown was “Neo Chicanismo.” As more and more migrants from Latin America come into the US, it is important to revamp the old political and ethnic markings which we have for new socioeconomic contexts, especially as anther “new” form of thought, neoliberalism, encroaches ever further upon our lives. The old generation of Cuban immigrants, whose migration was born not in revolution but counterrevolution and who think of Cuba as a place where they cannot go until it resembles the 50s once again, are unlikely to take much of a part in the construction of Neo Chicanismo, if at all. But I do have hope for new generations of Cuban-Americans, who are beginning to look at Cuba not in a Cold War context, but as a homeland held away from them by a new iron curtain, one held up by the US as much as Cuba itself. Upon realizing the death of their cubanidad, and should the lack the desire to fully integrate into Anglo society, to keep their culture, then I have faith they will begin to think of the space in between the two cultures, their veritable borderlands, as a place with which to start a new way of looking at things and become part of this discussion about Neo Chicanismo.

Sources:

Anzaldúa, Gloria, and Keating, Ana Louise. The Gloria Anzaldúa Reader. (2009). Duke University Press.

Gilyard, Keith. “Gloria Anzaldua Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza”. http://thoughtjam.wordpress.com/2009/01/02/gloria-anzaldua-borderlandsla-frontera-the-new-mestiza/

Balseros. 2002. Bausan Films.