CUBA FOR NON CUBANS

Miami Dade is a peculiar county; a chunk of America where things look foreign and yet we all claim our American rights; perhaps due to its vicinity to Latin America there's a little of everything; the Venezuelans escaping the tragedy of a rare brand of socialism, the Argentines, who took advantage of their short lived visa waiver program prior to "el corralito", the Haitians, the Colombians and of course us: the Cubans. After fifty and odd years of alleged animosity between the two governments (ten different US administrations and the endless/boring Castro dictatorship) average Americans are all of a sudden  exposed to a barrage of information from the former foe and they inevitably look to us for definitions, for the real history and for our explanation as to how on earth a handful of bearded youths managed not only to seize power and defy the mightiest nation on earth, but also to safely age in the process and create a hostage nation just 90 miles south of uncle Sam's turf. 

Our answers somewhat vary and go from a downpour of emotional "truths" to blaming "the Americans" for the disastrous experiment the Castro brothers and their thuggish  followers have put our people through. Rarely an objective analysis is heard and with that proverbial short fuse and impatience we quickly retort to mother tongue and reward the usual Anglo Saxon skepticism with the whiplashing "comemierda" not to mention the unfounded accusations of collaboration with the communist regime. It's either with us or against us; we fail to realize how unreal our stories sound and how difficult it is to believe that millions of people escape a nightmare island only to sheepishly return as soon as they secure a legal status in the US. In the normal world you don't go back to hell. And our US born fellow Americans are right, only that Cuba is not part of the world, let alone the normal world. 

If only we chose the right words; the accurate metaphors and the appropriate epithets chances are they'd understand. But most of us haven't closed the chapter; we carry the burden of our past experiences; those even we at times cannot begin to grasp in their entirety, like an old piece of luggage we stubbornly keep holding; perhaps we should just drop the bags; rid ourselves of the psychological weight of it all and only then, maybe, we could begin to make some sense out of so much waste; fear, hatred and deceit. Joe and Jane can't for the life of them surmise what it is to be a Cuban because we haven't realized who we are and how to relieve ourselves of our former beings. There is no redemption here and no amount of heated rhetoric will help us exorcise the demons. It is probably necessary that we learn to talk Cuba in two different levels: the Cuba we talk about among Cuban Americans and the cleaned up, brushed up, impeccably enunciated and easy to digest horror story for the benefit of those who haven't ever worked in the cane fields for free, or pretended to hate their own family or reneged from their religion. Otherwise, we will always wear our speech hanging loose like grandpa's cardigan in a family dinner and will never be able to dig out that toy soldier we once hurriedly hid in a crevice somewhere in the yard hoping we would only be away for a few weeks.