The "Historic" Exiles

People who use the term dislike Cubans, would like to render them mute. They use it to immure our fathers and mothers in stone, freeze them into position, so that they are no more relevant than the Elgin Marbles. The term implies that the exile, the angst is over and that it has no relevance today. How easily they dismiss the pain and loss. Yes, perhaps the historic exiles and their offspring are a tad intransigent, perhaps we could be more flexible in the face of newer realities, more understanding of newer waves of Cubans. But maybe those who so facilely decry them should walk in their moccasins for a bit.

Historic exiles arrived in the United States when there were very few Hispanics. There were no Spanish language forms. In fact, no one spoke Spanish. One friend of my father's was lost in the NYC subway system for a day. Finally, he spotted an Oriental. "Chinito, Chinito!" He was sure the Chinito would speak Spanish. "What?" the poor Oriental asked.

Another of the friends called she was lost. "Where are you? Look up that the corner," her husband instructed her. "What does it say?"
"It says ohnah waiy," she answered. These are cute anecdotes but they mask what was a harsh reality.

They went to work in factories and restaurants because they were the only ones who would hire them. One very prominent Park Avenue physician my parents knew literally washed dishes for years while trying to get his American license. They did what they had to. Men in those days wore suits, and you bought them at a second hand store since that was what you could afford. Very few had a car. If you had one, it was a clunker, like the one my father had that dropped the gas tank on some street. Macys was a store you had never seen the inside of. You did your shopping at Woolworths and Korvettes. If you were really strapped you had to buy at John's Bargain Stores, where they just threw cheesy merchandise haphazardly in bins.

If someone died, you would make a collection from the handful of Cubans you knew. No one actually had the money to bury the deceased. In coming, you gave up the possibility of ever seeing your family again, unless you were fortunate enough to have them come later. It was only much, much later when Fidel needed money that the possibility of family visits arose. My father left Cuba in his twenties. It would be decades before he laid eyes on the father who had single-handedly raised him. His brothers, he never saw again.

And the shame. I wish I could convey the corrosive nature of the discrimination we faced. From the time that I could walk through the front door to go out and play for fifteen minutes (my father worked in a factory overnight and needed his sleep), I was taught that I must be perfect. Any failing on my part, any misbehaviour or disrespect, would immediately result in my being labeled a "Spic." The reputation of whole peoples rested on my fragile, four year old shoulders. If my mother spoke Spanish to me in a store, it would result in looks of disdain nowadays reserved for smokers.

Our three room apartment in a working class neighborhood in Brooklyn, where I slept on the couch, had been rented to us in error. They had mistaken my fair-skinned father for an Italian. No one wanted to rent to Hispanics, even in Miami, which was a sleepy, decaying town, the glory days of tourism having left. In the summer, it was basically closed down, except the little hotels with two ghostly retirees rocking on the front porch. I know, I was there in '65. And there was nothing as gray, as dead, as depressing as Union City, perhaps that's why the first Cubans were allowed to settle there.

The worst was having to go to government agencies. Since I was the only one who spoke "good" English, and they were all afraid of the American world, I was the interpreter for the extended network of Cubans my parents knew. Immigration, department of motor vehicles, the phone company, and, worst of all the unemployment office, where the contempt was barely disguised, were the venues to which my seven year old tush was dragged. I am still traumatized.

They were truly strangers in a strange land who learned very quickly they were here on sufferance but did not truly belong. In short, they got the kind of welcome here that others had gotten in the past. But they never forgot they were Cuban. In their isolated homes, Spanish was spoken. The children were taught the mother tongue. There was the outside world where they insisted the children assimilate and excel and the inside circle of family. In this safe, insular world, they passed down their love of Cuba and their hatred of its oppression.

So I would propose to those who want to silence those very children that if the world we grew up in as second class citizens could not beat the Cubiche out of us, now that we are adults, no one else will. Yes, I am an American and proud of it. But to deny my Cuban heritage or bury it would be to turn my back on my father and all those "historic" exiles" whose faces I can still see: El Cabezon (my father); Andres; Tio Mario; Miguelito, el Polaco; Oscar who had a perfectly round hole between his front teeth that fascinated me as a child, Nena, Jacobo, Camilo, the grandparents, all of whom lie under gray skies in the unfamiliar cold soils of the North. They paid their dues. So by all means, you may differ with them and their progeny, but please treat them with respect. They earned it.