Diasporic Generations: Memory, Politics, and Nation among Cubans in Spain 9780857452467

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D iasporic G enerations

New Directions in Anthropology General Editor: Jacqueline Waldren, Institute of Social Anthropology, University of Oxford Volume 1  Coping with Tourists: European Reactions to Mass Tourism Edited by Jeremy Boissevain Volume 2  A Sentimental Economy: Commodity and Community in Rural Ireland Carles Salazar Volume 3  Insiders and Outsiders: Paradise and Reality in Mallorca Jacqueline Waldren Volume 4  The Hegemonic Male: Masculinity in a Portuguese Town Miguel Vale de Almeida Volume 5  Communities of Faith: Sectarianism, Identity, and Social Change on a Danish Island Andrew S. Buckser Volume 6  After Socialism: Land Reform and Rural Social Change in Eastern Europe Edited by Ray Abrahams Volume 7  Immigrants and Bureaucrats: Ethiopians in an Israeli Absorption Center Esther Hertzog Volume 8  A Venetian Island: Environment, History and Change in Burano Lidia Sciama Volume 9  Recalling the Belgian Congo: Conversations and Introspection Marie-Bénédicte Dembour Volume 10  Mastering Soldiers: Conflict, Emotions, and the Enemy in an Israeli Military Unit Eyal Ben-Ari Volume 11  The Great Immigration: Russian Jews in Israel Dina Siegel Volume 12  Morals of Legitimacy: Between Agency and System Edited by Italo Pardo Volume 13  Academic Anthropology and the Museum: Back to the Future Edited by Mary Bouquet Volume 14  Simulated Dreams: Israeli Youth and Virtual Zionism Haim Hazan Volume 15  Defiance and Compliance: Negotiating Gender in Low-Income Cairo Heba Aziz Morsi El-Kholy Volume 16  Troubles with Turtles: Cultural Understandings of the Environment on a Greek Island Dimitrios Theodossopoulos Volume 17  Rebordering the Mediterranean: Boundaries and Citizenship in Southern Europe Liliana Suarez-Navaz

Volume 18  The Bounded Field: Localism and Local Identity in an Italian Alpine Valley Jaro Stacul Volume 19  Foundations of National Identity: From Catalonia to Europe Josep Llobera Volume 20  Bodies of Evidence: Burial, Memory and the Recovery of Missing Persons in Cyprus Paul Sant Cassia Volume 21  Who Owns the Past? The Politics of Time in a ‘Model’ Bulgarian Village Deema Kaneff Volume 22  An Earth-Colored Sea: “Race,” Culture and the Politics of Identity in the Postcolonial Portuguese-Speaking World Miguel Vale De Almeida Volume 23  Science, Magic and Religion: The Ritual Process of Museum Magic Edited by Mary Bouquet and Nuno Porto Volume 24  Crossing European Boundaries: Beyond Conventional Geographical Categories Edited by Jaro Stacul, Christina Moutsou and Helen Kopnina Volume 25  Documenting Transnational Migration: Jordanian Men Working and Studying in Europe, Asia and North America Richard Antoum Volume 26  Le Malaise Créole: Ethnic Identity in Mauritius Rosabelle Boswell Volume 27  Nursing Stories: Life and Death in a German Hospice Nicholas Eschenbruch Volume 28  Inclusionary Rhetoric/Exclusionary Practices: Left-wing Politics and Migrants in Italy Davide Però Volume 29  The Nomads of Mykonos: Performing Liminalities in a ‘Queer’ Space Pola Bousiou Volume 30  Transnational Families, Migration and Gender: Moroccan and Filipino Women in Bologna and Barcelona Elisabetta Zontini Volume 31  Envisioning Eden: Mobilizing Imaginaries in Tourism and Beyond Noel B. Salazar Volume 32  Tourism, Magic and Modernity: Cultivating the Human Garden David Picard Volume 33  Diasporic Generations: Memory, Politics and Nation among Cubans in Spain Mette Louise Berg

D iasporic G enerations

n Memory, Politics and Nation among Cubans in Spain

Mette Louise Berg

Berghahn Books New York • Oxford

First published in 2011 by Berghahn Books www.berghahnbooks.com ©2011 Mette Louise Berg All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purposes of criticism and review, no part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system now known or to be invented, without written permission of the publisher. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Berg, Mette Louise, 1969  Diasporic generations : memory, politics and nation among Cubans in Spain / Mette Louise Berg.        p. cm. --  (New directions in anthropology ; v. 33)   Includes bibliographical references and index.   ISBN 978-0-85745-245-0 (hbk. : acid-free paper) -- ISBN 978-0-85745-246-7 (ebook)  1.  Cubans--Spain--Politics and government. 2.  Cubans--Migrations. 3.  Cubans--Spain-Social conditions. 4.  Immigrants--Spain--Social conditions. 5.  Cubans--Spain--Ethnic identity. 6.  Transnationalism. 7.  Collective memory--Spain. 8.  Cuba--Relations--Spain. 9.  Spain--Relations--Cuba. 10.  Spain--Ethnic relations.  I. Title.   DP53.C83B47 2012   305.868’7291046--dc23 2011024614 British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Printed in the United States on acid-free paper. ISBN: 978-0-85745-245-0 (hardback) ISBN: 978-0-85745-246-7 (ebook)

To Oskar and Astrid

C ontents

n Acknowledgements

ix

Introduction

The Changing Contours of a Contested Island 1 Diasporas and Belonging 3 Diasporic Generations 6 Defining Home and Homeland 9 The Formation of a Cuban Diaspora in Spain 12 Postcolonial Migration and Metropolitan Romance 16 Encounters in Cadiz 19 Outline of the Book 22

Chapter 1

Cuba, Ethnography and the Politics of Fieldwork Writing Cuba and Its Diaspora A Multi-Sited Field Ethnography, Diasporas and Context Doing Research in a Politicized Field

Chapter 2

Diasporic Generations 39 Conceptualizing Generation 39 Cuba’s Contested Past 47 Decolonization, Independence and Spanish Migration to Cuba 48 From Republic to Revolution 53 Creating Revolutionary Subjects 56 The Creation of a Cuban Diaspora Post-1959 58 Emigration From Cuba 1959­–1980s 59 Cuba’s Economic Crisis of the 1990s and the Balseros 63 Migration to Spain ‘Via Russia’ 65 Conclusion 66

27 27 30 33 35

Contents

Chapter 3 The Exiles 69 Leaving Revolutionary Cuba for Franco’s Spain 70 Geographies of Loss 77 Exilic Time-spaces and Longing for Cuba 79 Isabel and the Politicization of Everyday Life 83 Fractured Families: Marianito 86 Ricardo: Conflicts between New and Old Cuba 87 Sergio: A Right-wing Dictatorship Is Not the Same as a Left-wing Dictatorship 92 Chapter 4

The Children of the Revolution Contradictions of Belonging and Not Belonging Cuba’s Hombre Nuevo The Lenin School Encuentro de la Cultura Cubana On Labelling and Name Calling Becoming and Feeling Like a Traidor: Iván and Maida Counter-discourses of Cosmopolitanism Conclusion

97 98 102 104 106 110 111 116 121

Chapter 5

The Migrants 127 Love, Marriage and Migration 129 Adríán: Commodifying Cubanness 132 Lucy: ‘In Spain I Have More Freedom’ 135 César and the Elusive Abundance of El Capitalismo 137 Oscar: ‘I Had to Start from Zero’ 143 A New Politics of Memory and Homeland 145 Mirta and the Ambiguities of Distance 148 Conclusion 152

Chapter 6 Gender, Diaspora and the Body Time-spaces, Memory and Forgetting The ‘Pain of Cuba’: Emotional Landscapes of Belonging The Homeland and Diasporic Alienation The ‘Fluids of Destiny’: Beyond Trench Thinking Gender Life Stages and Life Crises Identity Discourses

155 155 159 163 167 168 171 174

Conclusion The Memory of Politics and the Politics of Memory

179

Glossary

187

References

189

Index

203

A cknowledgements

n During the research and writing of this book, I was helped by many people in different ways. It is to the people who shared their stories and memories with me that I am most deeply and expressly grateful. They are too numerous to list here and some of them would prefer anonymity, but I hope that they will be able to recognize themselves in my writing. However, I wish in particular to thank Marina García and her late father don Faustino who opened their home and shared their stories with me. I am deeply grateful to Marina for her invaluable support of my research from the first time I met her. Loly Castell and Asdai Díaz became friends and companions who shared their home and their thoughts with me; their families also welcomed me into their homes in Havana. I am also indebted to Victor Batista, Beatriz Bernal, Clara Caballero, Rigoberto Carceller, Jesús Carrasco, the late María Comellas, Maida Donate, Mabel Fajardo and her family, Manolo Fernández, Orlando Fondevila, Leopoldo Fornés, Marta Frayde, David Lago, Felipe Lázaro, Alfredo Llorente, Annabelle Rodríguez, Rafael Rojas and Pío Serrano for their friendship, support and for stimulating conversations. I hope they find that their faith and trust in me has not been badly placed even if they may not agree with all of what I say in this book. In Madrid, I thank Alicia Campos and Ubaldo Martínez Veiga for their support. When I needed it, Alicia and then Ninna Nyberg Sørensen generously offered me a place to stay. Nora Avés and Diego Lorente generously shared contacts and knowledge about Cuban immigration and Spanish legislation. In Barcelona, Verena Stolcke shared contacts and ideas, and Josep Maria Fradera answered queries about Spanish colonial history. Isabel Holgado Fernández provided lively discussion and generous hospitality. María Helena Bedoya Muriel and Ágata Sol both helped with contacts and their knowledge about Cuban immigration. The book started life as my doctoral thesis at the University of Oxford. Here, Roger Goodman and Steve Vertovec gave me critical and always supportive and engaging feedback. I also remain grateful to Karen Fog Olwig for her support, and for suggesting I should go to Oxford in the first place. For comments on drafts and conference papers, stimulating discussion and sharing ideas in Oxford and elsewhere, I thank Brian Keith Axel, Dominic Blaettler, Alberto Corsín Ji-

ix

Acknowledgements

ménez, Ariana Hernandez-Reguant, Nigel Rapport and Huon Wardle. Susan Eva Eckstein and Jorge Duany gave constructive, critical feedback on the manuscript which helped improve the argument immensely. I am very grateful to them both, and to Jackie Waldren for believing in the book. Sahana Ghosh and Katharine Marsh did excellent editorial work on the manuscript, and Petter Brandberg did the cover illustration. Thank you to all of them. My research was made possible by the now defunct Danish Research Academy, which supported three years of doctoral studies at Oxford. After the Academy grant expired, the hardship fund of St. Antony’s College assisted with a loan. A Royal Anthropological Institute Sutasoma Award 2003 helped in the very last stretch of writing. Much later, the Joint Initiative for the Study of Latin America and the Caribbean (JISLAC) supported fieldwork costs in Madrid in 2009, which helped bring my material up-to-date in important ways. I remain grateful to them all for their support. Finally, thank you to my husband Richard Barltrop for his support throughout thinking, writing and rewriting. Of course, any failings remain mine alone. Mette Louise Berg Oxford, March 2011

x

Introduction T he C hanging C ontours a C ontested I sl and

of

n Yanet lives in Spain, but was born and grew up in Havana, Cuba. Yanet left Cuba in 1999, soon after she married her Spanish husband whose business involves building projects in Cuba. Many émigré Cubans are not allowed to return to the island, but since Yanet left Cuba through marriage to a Spanish citizen she has been allowed to travel in and out. Her husband’s comfortable economic situation meant that she could dedicate herself to painting and she has been able to travel between Havana and Madrid frequently. When she arrived in her new home in Getafe, a modern suburb south of Madrid on the vast Castilian plateau, 650 metres above sea level and several hundred kilometres from the nearest coastline, Yanet missed the sea. Having grown up by the coast in the Havana neighbourhood of Miramar, she had been used to walks along the seafront since childhood: ‘To arrive here and not being able to see the sea, you feel a bit asphyxiated. The sea gives you a sensation of freedom, of plenitude’. Meanwhile, during her first winter in Getafe, the cold weather and the naked trees made it difficult for her to relate to her new environment: ‘[It was] so arid, so dry, so ochre, so bleak and void of greens’. In the following spring and summer she made sure to teach herself the names of trees and when I met her she proudly stated that ‘[now] I can tell a birch from a white poplar, and a black poplar from a hazelnut tree’. To come to terms with the absence of the sea, Yanet told herself it was like she had moved to Luyanó or Diez de Octubre, two inland neighbourhoods in Havana. When I visited her in Getafe in the spring of 2002, her house was full of plants and her own paintings. She said that she had brought plants back from Havana to her house in Getafe and taken plants from Spain back to her house in Havana. As she explained: ‘I learnt that [here] there was no green and no sea, but that there are beautiful things and that it is more interesting to enjoy what there is in Cuba and what there is here instead of being here and feel nostalgia for what’s there and when you’re there to feel nostalgia for what’s here’. Perhaps Yanet’s

1

Diasporic Generations

adaptability was related to the way in which she identified her homeland. Cuba, she said, was not her homeland, but, she continued: ‘My country [país] isn’t Havana either, for I haven’t lived in all of Havana. My country is my mother’s house, my street; that is my country’. Yanet’s experiences of displacement were strikingly different from those of her compatriot, the then 61-year-old widow Norma. As Norma recalled: ‘It was hard, because the roots … It’s the same, but it’s not the same. Nothing is the same’. Thus she explained to me over a soft drink in her apartment in central Madrid in August 2001. Norma was a devotee of the Virgin of Charity (Virgen de la Caridad), Cuba’s patron saint. She had draped a Cuban flag on the wall in her study, and in the hallway was a framed picture of a Cuban flame tree. Norma married in 1959, the year of the Cuban Revolution. Her husband wanted to leave Cuba soon afterwards, but Norma was an only child and did not want to leave her parents behind. Eventually, her husband left the island in 1969, and Norma followed him with her ageing parents a year later. The family settled in Madrid where their son, Pedro, was born in 1976. Although Norma said that she had become used to Spain, she still felt that a vital link had been cut: ‘For me the worst thing about living in exile is the uprooting [desarraigo] … While life takes its normal course, exile is like a cut. It’s like being cut down the middle both in the sense of your life and in your soul’.1 It would at first seem that Norma and Yanet embodied two contrasting modes of living in diaspora, one characterized by roots, the other by routes. Upon closer examination, however, the picture becomes more complex, and roots and routes entangle. In telling me her life story, it transpired that Norma’s paternal grandfather emigrated from Asturias in Spain to Cuba in the late nineteenth century. He later returned to Spain, but arranged for all of his sons to emigrate so that they would not have to do military service (Spain was engaged in war in Morocco from 1909 to 1927). Norma’s father migrated in 1914 at the age of fourteen and met his wife-to-be in Havana; she was also Asturian. Norma was born in 1940 in Old Havana, the colonial core of Cuba’s capital. Like many other Spanish families in Havana, Norma’s family cultivated their Spanishness. They hired coethnics to work in her father’s small grocery shop (bodega) and remained members of the Centro Asturiano, an association for migrants from Asturias. Like Norma and her family, many other Spanish immigrants in Cuba identified and maintained links with their homeland, yet they also felt that they belonged in Cuba, where many of them experienced considerable upward social mobility. Consider the excerpt below from an interview with the widowed don Orlando.2 He was then 100 years old and lived in Madrid. Don Orlando was born in Asturias, and migrated to Cuba as a child. In Havana, he became a medical doctor but his surgery was confiscated after the revolution. As he said: ‘Everyone prospered in the shades of those marvellous trees we have left behind [in Cuba]. Of course this emigration [from Spain to Cuba] left profound roots in the island. We married, 2

Introduction

we had families … we were not … a race [raza] that didn’t belong’. Here Orlando identified himself as belonging to a community of Spanish migrants and a ‘race’, that of the Spanish, which ‘left profound roots’ in Cuba. Like Norma, he located a sense of belonging in the soil. ‘We contributed with our sweat and blood to the progress of the country’, as he continued. Don Orlando also implicitly contrasted himself and other Spanish migrants with black Cubans and black Caribbean immigrants, whose position within the Cuban nation has been debated and contested since the nineteenth century (Knight 1989: 169). Throughout his time in Cuba, don Orlando (who died (in Madrid) in 2003) identified strongly with Asturias but after returning to Spain in 1970 he also identified himself as a Cuban exile. Paradoxically then, both Norma’s and don Orlando’s senses of belonging were constructed through absence: they only became Cuban when they left the island and returned to their erstwhile ancestral homeland. Unlike Yanet, Norma had not been back to Cuba since she had left, which was incidentally just around the time Yanet was born. Norma said that she would love to go back to visit – ‘the idea is present, latent always’ – and she hoped her son would be able to go as well. It was anxiety about the possible material expectations of the few remaining kin and friends, combined with the bureaucracy entailed in returning as an émigré, which had held her back. Besides, as she said: ‘It seems to me that Fidel [Castro] doesn’t have long to go and that everything will change [afterwards]’.

Diasporas and Belonging In an evocative essay, Jorge Duany (2000a) has identified a recurrent use of soilbased and arboreal language as a common thread in writing on Cubanness by Cuban intellectuals throughout the twentieth century. This telluric imagery has consistently been accompanied by the idea that Cuban émigrés are no longer part of the nation (ibid.:17–18). Duany focuses on primarily male intellectuals and writers, but as Yanet’s, Norma’s and don Orlando’s testimonies show, tree symbolism is shared by ordinary men and women too. Yet they challenge the exclusion of émigrés through their claims of belonging to Cuba from afar. From a different angle, Laura Rival has argued for the universal importance of tree symbolism across human cultures: ‘trees provide some of the most visible and potent symbols of social process and collective identity’ (Rival 1998: 1). Certainly, botanical and arboreal metaphors and the imagery of roots and soil abound in discourses of belonging; the term ‘diaspora’ itself refers to the sowing or scattering of seeds. As Paul Gilroy has noted, this is a mixed blessing, which: ‘demands that we attempt to weigh the significance of the scattering process against the supposed uniformity of that which has been scattered. It posits important tensions between here and there, then and now, between seed in the 3

Diasporic Generations

bag, the packet or the pocket and seed in the ground, the fruit or the body’ (Gilroy 1994: 208–9). Norma drew on an idiom of soil that fixes identity to place, whereas Yanet prized apart the culture–people–place equation. For Norma roots did not travel well; for Yanet by contrast roots were also routes. She thought nothing of uprooting plants and had successfully transplanted several.3 While for Norma ‘nothing is the same’ in the new country, for Yanet the Madrid suburb of Getafe was no stranger than an unknown Havana neighbourhood. Geographical distance or national borders mattered little compared to the alienation she felt at Getafe’s distance from the sea. The two women’s stories raise a number of questions: Why did Norma and Yanet experience home and belonging in such different ways? What identitywork do discourses of roots and routes do for them? Answering these questions entails inquiring into how diasporic Cubans remember their homeland and to what degree being Cuban matters to them. It also entails asking about the significance of living in Spain, the former colonial power. Finally, how and to what extent are memories of home and homeland nationalized, and what kind of nation do diasporic Cubans imagine? That both Norma and Yanet drew on a shared symbolic language to describe experiences which were radically different from one another is illustrative both of what is shared, and of the fractures that characterize Cuban diasporic experiences. ‘Cuba’ or ‘homeland’ are different things to different people: they are at one and the same time an object of nationalist aspiration, a landscape of emotion, a nostalgic memory and an embodied disposition. Karen Fog Olwig has noted that it has ‘become common to conceptualize immigrants in terms of communities of co-ethnics, identified by a common place of origin, rather than as new members of the migration destination’s society’ (Olwig 2009: 520). For some diaspora scholars, an ethnic community or a shared ‘ethnocommunal consciousness’ as well as a clearly defined ‘homeland’ are the sine qua non of diaspora (e.g. Safran 1991). Yet the concept of community all too often essentializes and reifies migrant groups, eclipsing internal division and stratification as well as cross-group dynamics (see, e.g., Baumann 1996; Rapport and Dawson 1998; Amit and Rapport 2002). Cubans in Spain do not form an ethnic community in any meaningful sense of the term. Apart from internal fragmentation, among my informants there were a number who, from an outsider’s view, would appear to be Spanish return-migrants, and others who held Spanish citizenship obtained through ancestry but who identified themselves as Cuban.4 Diaspora is also in some cases constructed through an active disavowal and rejection of community and homeland. Take Rafael, a journalist in his thirties who left Cuba in 1998, and who now lives in Madrid. Rafael told me that he found it difficult to meet with Cubans who had recently arrived as they were so ‘full of Cuba’, and it made him claustrophobic to hear them tell the same stories again and again of the hunt for dollars, the electricity cuts, the food rations that never arrive, and other similar stories about the precariousness of living in contempo4

Introduction

rary Cuba. Rafael also felt profoundly alienated when he saw pictures of Havana on television. His memories of Havana simply did not match what he saw on the screen. In this context, both ‘community’ and ‘homeland’ were fraught ideas. In the case of migrants from the Caribbean, the notion of community is especially tenuous because of the region’s history of colonialism, mobility and the early emergence of modernity and cultural complexity (Mintz 1996). Among Cubans, diversity of trajectory, legal status, and subject position translated into a fragmented social context in which alternative understandings of what it means to be Cuban compete not only with the official Cuban discourse but also among each other as well as with prevailing discourses of Cuba and stereotypes of Cubans in the Spanish public sphere. Olwig’s suggestion, that ‘rather than assuming the existence of well-established and clearly defined Caribbean communities comprising an important context of life for Caribbean migrants, ethnographic research should be directed towards exploring how migrants from the Caribbean, through statements and practices, create and sustain different forms of relatedness … that may generate a sense of community’ (Olwig 2009: 521), is therefore apposite. Understanding diaspora as a historical formation in process (Werbner 2000: 5), always evolving and in contest with hegemonic understandings of belonging, allows us to make sense of Cubans’ contrasting narratives without imposing an artificial homogeneity upon them. More generally, Pnina Werbner (2000) and others have noted that diasporic groups are often characterized by social heterogeneity and internal antagonism, especially in the case of migration induced by conflict or political upheaval in the homeland (see, e.g., Talai 1989; Malkki 1995; Ballinger 2003). Diaspora discourses often contain within them both territorializing, essentialist urges and celebrations of movement and hybridity. However, as Werbner asserts, ‘the challenge remains … to disclose how the tension between these two tendencies is played out’ (Werbner 2000: 6). We cannot assume a priori that discourses or practices of hybridity are necessarily liberating, nor that claims for a national culture are always reactionary: ‘The politics of hybridity is conjunctural and cannot be deduced from theoretical principles. In most situations, what matters politically is who deploys nationality or transnationality, authenticity or hybridity, against whom, with what relative power and ability to sustain hegemony’ (Clifford 1997: 10). Trying to answer the question of what identity-work discourses of roots and/or routes do for Norma and Yanet therefore offers an opportunity to consider how diasporic subjectivities are produced and for examining the social conditions for the production of claims to homeland, origin and belonging. This in turn entails critically examining the concept and practices of diaspora not just for our informants as research interlocutors but also for anthropology as a discipline. Rather than adhering to the idea of diaspora as a community of people dispersed from an original homeland and the inevitable, problematic assumptions of uniformity between them, I depart from an understanding of diaspora which 5

Diasporic Generations

accommodates a number of different migratory processes each with their own historical context (see also Falzon 2003). I concur with Ruth Behar’s plea for an inclusive definition of diaspora: By choosing diaspora I opt for undecidability, a refusal to submit to the tyranny of categories: Cubans outside Cuba are perhaps immigrants, perhaps exiles, perhaps both, perhaps neither, and Cubans inside Cuba are in certain ways perhaps more exiled in their insile than the so-called exiles themselves. Diaspora embraces all these possibilities and others, including earlier periods of displacement in Cuban history. (Behar 1996: 144–45, original emphasis)5

This approach situates the contemporary Cuban diaspora in a longer history of displacement and mobility. Furthermore, it insists on the relational nature of diaspora by emphasizing the connections between Cubans on the island and outside it. While diasporic subjects can never go back or return to the homeland they left behind in a literal sense, diasporas are often characterized by a continual re-turn, ‘a repeated turning to the concept and/or the reality of the homeland and other diasporan kin through memory, written and visual texts, travel, gifts and assistance, et cetera’ (Tölölyan 1996: 14–15). Diasporas, in short, are characterized by particular relationships not just with a place, or places, but also with time. This book focuses on an everyday poetics and the way in which it relates to the cultural politics of diaspora. Cubans often invoke their homeland through embodied memories – for example, recalling the smell of the sea and the sound of waves. Yet such embodied memories, like narratives, need to be situated within specific political and cultural economies, historical moments and geographic locations. In other words, there is a need for a ‘worlding’ (Said 1984) or social grounding of diasporas. This book accordingly traces the changing configuration of the Cuban diaspora in Spain from the 1960s to the early 2000s and brings to light the lived experience and everyday narratives of ordinary people. This is not however a community study of Cubans in Spain, for Cubans do not form a single ethnic or national community. Rather, their subject positions reflect memories and experiences embedded in particular moments of recent Cuban and Spanish history. Age, class, gender, race and the specific circumstances in which they left Cuba and arrived in Spain also mediate their experiences and trajectories. Some Cubans have formed communities with other Cubans, but to speak of a ‘Cuban community in Spain’ would be misleading.

Diasporic Generations The far-reaching and complex transformations of Cuba since 1959, from capitalism, through revolution and transformation toward socialism, to what we may now call late socialism (Hernández-Reguant 2004) and incorporation into the 6

Introduction

global, neoliberal market, mean that Cubans have left from very different contexts. These differences are compounded by the fact that many have not been back since they left. Adding to this complexity, Spain has in the same period changed from being an isolated, fascist dictatorship to a prosperous democratic state and a NATO and EU member. Those middle-class Cubans who arrived in Spain in the 1960s found themselves in what for them was a poorer and less developed country still characterized by emigration; their memories of pre-revolutionary Havana are of abundance and consumption. For them, the revolution and the comprehensive social and economic reforms that came after it constitute a turning point. Those who have left Cuba since the 1990s remember a latesocialist country marked by shortages, rationing, electricity cuts and urban decay; they have in turn arrived in an affluent, consumer-oriented society marked by growing immigration. For these Cubans, the economic crisis of the 1990s known as the Special Period constitutes their narrative turning point. Quite apart from changes in both Cuba and Spain, many Cubans now living in Spain have spent prolonged periods in the US, Mexico, Puerto Rico and the former Soviet bloc countries. Some have arrived in Spain through several other countries and many plan or have planned to move on from Spain later. In short, their experiences both of home(land) and of living in diaspora are shot through with multi-layered differences. Percy Hintzen argues that, ‘the unifying theme of any particular diasporic imagination is the collective memory of homeland. However, there is no single corpus of memory, and no single imaginary homeland … An individual can have many claims to homeland and many diasporic imaginaries to call upon’ (Hintzen 2004: 296–97). This is certainly born out in the case of Cubans in Spain. Yet it still leaves unexplained why diasporic people remember and imagine their homeland in different or even contrasting ways. Like Susan Eckstein, who did research among Cubans in the US (Eckstein 2009), I found that for Cubans in Spain such differences can be linked to migration trajectory, especially the period and circumstances of leaving Cuba. Additionally, Cubans arriving in Spain in different periods have had distinctive experiences of integration and accommodation. The Cubans arriving in Spain in the 1960s, like Norma and don Orlando, tended to have a sense of Spanishness, which in Cuba conferred racialized privilege. At the same time, because of their exposure to North American modernity and development in Cuba, they felt superior vis-à-vis the mother country. They were lucky enough to arrive in Spain with skills that were in short supply at the time and they were thus able to find work relatively easily. The Cubans arriving in the 1970s after Spain’s transition to democracy were structurally in a fundamentally different position. Spain was then no longer ‘backward’ and under-developed relative to Cuba. Many found that they could identify relatively easily with the socialist government of Felipe González with which they shared democratic socialist ideals and a critical stance towards the US. Finally, for the Cubans who have been arriving from the 1990s 7

Diasporic Generations

onwards, conditions have changed yet again. From being a country of emigration, Spain is now receiving labour migrants from the global South, of which Cubans make up only a small fraction. Spanish migration laws discriminate against foreign nationals in the labour market by restricting entry and by prescribing the sectors in which immigrants are allowed to work, such as hospitality, construction and care work. In this book I argue that, seen through a lens of trajectories, three historically grounded diasporic generations of Cubans emerge, each with a distinct way of remembering and relating to their homeland, and with different material conditions both for leaving and visiting Cuba, and for staying in Spain. I call these generations the Exiles, the Children of the Revolution and the Migrants respectively. Inevitably there is a degree of overlap and criss-crossing between different trajectories and subject positions, so the term diasporic generation is a heuristic device; it does not denote empirically existing communities of Cubans who define themselves by these terms. Nonetheless, a historically grounded generational approach is helpful for mapping the different ways in which Cubans remember and narrate home, homeland and belonging, and for appreciating how these are moulded by context. Rather than focusing on essential and dehistoricized transcendental ‘types’ of migrants, a generational approach investigates the emergence of subjects that are culturally and historically specific (see also Axel 2004). All Cubans, including those who hold Spanish passports, are subject to state powers in granting and withholding access to residence, job opportunities and to return visits. Those Cubans who arrived before Spanish immigration laws were enacted needed no work permits, whereas recent migrants do. The Cuban state did not allow those who left in the first decades after the revolution to return even for short family visits, whereas this is now possible in some cases depending on the circumstances of leaving. The case of Cuban migration after 1959 is, therefore, also an instructive case of the continued importance of states in channelling and directing migration. In the lives of some diasporic Cubans, the experience of exile was dominant. It is well illustrated in an essay by Felipe Lázaro, a poet and publisher, who also became a good friend. Felipe left Cuba with his family when he was twelve years old. When I met him he had lived in Madrid since the late 1960s. In a perceptive autobiographical essay titled ‘We are all Cubans’ (Todos somos cubanos), Felipe describes how his personal history is similar to that of thousands of other Cubans. ‘The astonished generation’ (la generación del asombro) he calls his own generation, in which he includes all of those Cubans who were children at the time of the revolution and therefore had no direct part in it, yet whose lives were profoundly and radically transformed by it (Lázaro 1999: 78–79). As Felipe explains in the essay, his childhood was marked by three ‘essential moments’, namely his mother’s death, the ‘triumph of the Cuban Revolution’ and the ‘unexpected path of exile’ chosen by his father in 1960 (ibid.: 77). It is indicative of the tremendous 8

Introduction

impact on Felipe’s life (and by extension the lives of many others) that he should rank the revolution and exile next to his mother’s death, though this is not in any way unusual. Indeed, Thomas Tweed has noted that among Cuban devotees of the Virgin of Charity in Miami, exile is the dominant life experience (Tweed 1997). Similarly, Rafael Rojas has noted that Gustavo Pérez-Firmat, a writer who grew up in exile, ‘makes the Castroite revolution the foundational event in his Cuban-American imaginary’ (Rojas 2001b: 63). Yet for others, diaspora was just one aspect of their life among so many others. This book teases out those moments when it does matter for my subjects that they are Cuban, and examines why and how.

Defining Home and Homeland Norma’s transformation from second-generation Spanish immigrant in Cuba to Cuban exile in Spain and Yanet’s non-national identification of home(land) show that ‘home’ and ‘away’ are neither stable nor neatly separate categories. Furthermore, what it means subjectively to live away from ‘home’, however defined, is not the same for them. The question of why Norma identified herself as a Cuban exile is central to this book. After all, her parents originated in Spain, and, when I met her, she had lived more time in Spain than in Cuba. Spain is where her son was born and her husband had died. Yet for Norma, life in Spain did not feel like a return to her roots. Rather, it remained an emotionally harrowing deracination that left her feeling cut in half. This needs explanation in the same way that Yanet’s embrace of an identity politics that celebrates movement needs examination and explanation. As Jacqueline Nassy Brown has argued, we need to examine ‘how historicallypositioned subjects identify both the relevant events in transnational community formation and the geographies implicated in that process’ (Brown 1998: 293). Being from Cuba does not necessarily produce a diasporic subjectivity; nor can we assume that living away from the island means the same to different subjects. It is not my aim here to argue that Norma’s claim on Cubanness is anything less than authentic, in the sense of deeply felt.6 Questioning the relative Cubanness of diasporic Cubans has been an established strategy of the revolutionary government in its quest to monopolize nation and belonging. Equally, exiled Cubans have often seen those who left the island later than themselves as less Cuban, their national essence somehow diluted and contaminated through their exposure to life in revolutionary Cuba. Emphatically, I do not wish to add my voice to either of these essentialist and totalizing ideologies. Rather, I wish to open a space which makes it possible to enquire how, when and why diasporic subjectivities emerge. For Pablito, a dance teacher from Havana who defined himself as a mulato, racialized discourses of exclusion in both Cuba and Spain rendered him feeling 9

Diasporic Generations

utterly homeless and shattered his diasporic identification with Spain nurtured in Cuba. Pablito visited Spain in the mid 1990s, facilitated by one of the Spanish Societies in Havana (of which more below). The purpose of the visit was to enable him to study regional dances in Spain, which he taught in Cuba. Pablito had always identified strongly with Spanish heritage and culture and considered Spain his ‘motherland’ (madre patria). However, his trip to Spain became an unsettling experience and made him feel more Cuban than ever: When I came to Spain I was very shocked, because it was not at all as I had thought it would be. I saw it very Americanized, in the way of dressing, the food, et cetera. Young people will rather have a Coca-Cola with their cheese than a glass of wine. I’m not like that, I like a glass of wine served with my meal; someone who knows about these things will tell me which wine goes with what kind of food. I had imagined Spain as it was in the 1940s and 1950s, and I was shocked when I saw Spain of the 1990s. Before I went to Spain I always thought of myself as very Spanish, more Spanish than Cuban. But when I was there in Spain I realized that I’m really Cuban. It was a very special experience for me.

The dance troupes Pablito studied with in Spain asked him to teach them Cuban dances, such as casino and cha-cha-cha.7 In Cuba, Pablito would have recoiled from the idea of teaching exactly these dances because he associated them with blackness. In Spain, he was expected to be an expert because he was Cuban, and he accepted the request with mixed feelings. Not only was Pablito racialized in Spain, he was also confronted with a social reality which tore apart his ideas of home and belonging, grounding him in Cuba where he had never felt he belonged in the past. While his journey to Spain had been a significant event in his life, it had consequently been fraught with rather more ambiguities and pain than he had anticipated. As a result, Pablito decided not to stay in Spain as he himself and all his friends had expected he would, and instead returned to Havana. The ‘homecoming’ had turned into an alienating experience, compelling him to question the feelings of belonging and identity that he had painstakingly constructed in Cuba to protect himself from discrimination there. The Cubanizing effect of the journey had also thrown into relief ambiguities and doubts about his life in Cuba, where he often felt that he was restricted in pursuing his dreams because of social, economic and political constraints. As he said to me in Havana: I don’t feel I’m part of anything, I can be neither a Catholic nor a Communist. I want to be better, but I can’t see a path. I find myself in this dilemma … I have felt like going away from it all many times. I hope that some day in the end something beautiful will be waiting for me … What is most hurtful is that I will have to leave Cuba to do what I want to do. But I want to do the things here.

10

Introduction

Pablito’s experiences underline the contingent and racialized aspects of feeling at home and belonging, and challenge any facile understanding of diaspora construction. Narratives such as these compel us to consider closely the historical underpinnings of diasporic formations. Yanet’s, Pablito’s, don Orlando’s and Norma’s stories raise questions about the oneness of the diaspora and about conceptualizing diasporas without essentializing them. Pablito, don Orlando and Norma all identified with Spain when they lived in Cuba and only came to identify as Cubans once they arrived in Spain, yet their experiences were very different from one another. In Cuba, don Orlando’s and Norma’s sense of Spanishness stemmed from their racialized privilege, whereas Pablito’s identification with Spain was a way of protecting himself from racialized discrimination. Yet none of them were able to feel at home when they arrived in their erstwhile motherland, where gendered and racialized discourses of exclusion located them differently in social hierarchies. In critiquing the exclusive focus on homeland in some approaches to diaspora, Hintzen (2004) argues for an understanding in which diasporic identity is embedded in racialized geographies of exclusionary nationhood, thus foregrounding diasporic location. In his work on West Indians in the San Francisco Bay area, he shows that this diaspora is the result of racially based experiences of exclusion in the United States. Yet an exclusive focus on race and experiences in the host country would not capture the diversity of diasporic groups such as the Cubans. Pre-migration experiences matter (see also Eckstein 2002; 2009), especially in the case of diasporas created through political upheaval in the homeland. The ethnography presented in this book insists on the multiplicity of historically situated experiences and on the importance of grounding diasporic subjects historically. Cubans in Spain systematically identified themselves through their relationship to Cuba even when some of them – like Norma and don Orlando – could have identified as Spanish. Others aligned themselves with hybrid or cosmopolitan discourses (see Chapter 4), yet were drawing on cultural tools and idioms that were distinctly Cuban. This may sound like the old argument of Cuban exceptionality,8 but it is rather an acknowledgment of the diversity of ethnographically observed practices and discourses. Different diasporic groups at different points in time draw on and define themselves relative to the idea and experience of ‘homeland’, and as anthropologists we need to take this into account. This approach still resonates with those who argue that it is unhelpful to premise diaspora exclusively on the idea of one original displacement from a homeland (see, e.g., Brown 1998; Constable 1999; Axel 2002, 2004). Furthermore, when one ‘initial moment of dispersion’ is taken as the starting point of analysis (Brown 1998: 293), fluid processes of identification are effectively fixed. The stories presented here in different ways illustrate the problems raised by such an approach. They also raise broader questions: What purposes do ideas of ‘home’ and ‘away’ serve for different people? What is the relation between disjuncture and continuity for diasporic peoples? How and why do differently positioned subjects construct, ap11

Diasporic Generations

propriate or reject discourses of home and belonging? What factors are important in aligning subjects with competing discourses of nation and homeland?

The Formation of a Cuban Diaspora in Spain The Cuban presence in Spain has a long history going back to the colonial era. Already in the nineteenth century, various Cuban Catholic associations were operating in Madrid, one of which was still active in the 1990s (Carceller Ibarra n.d.). Perhaps the most famous Cuban émigré is José Martí (1853–1895), the nationalist independence leader who spent many years in exile in Spain. Although Cubans were the first immigrants to arrive in Spain in large numbers in the twentieth century and have at times been among the largest groups of immigrants in the country, little research has been dedicated to understanding their experiences.9 In order to understand the contemporary Cuban diaspora in Spain, some background on Cuban emigration in the post-revolutionary period is necessary. Since the revolution, approximately one-tenth of the Cuban population of eleven million today have left the island in successive waves, most dramatically in the early years after the revolution (García 2007). Since 2000, however, emigration has stabilized at around 30,000 annually, of whom 20,000 go to the US (EIU 2008: 17). Toward the end of the first decade of the twenty-first century, approximately 1.6 million Cubans or people of Cuban descent lived in the US (Pew Hispanic Center 2009), accounting for an estimated 89 per cent of the Cuban diaspora globally (Eckstein 2009: 11). Spain has the second-largest population of Cubans outside Cuba, and in 2009, 56,734 Cuba-born persons were registered with local Spanish authorities as living in Spain. Of these, 31,058 were women. Cubans were concentrated in particular in Madrid, Barcelona and the Canary Islands.10 The trend in emigration from the island is towards a diversification of destination countries (Martín Fernández 2006), and apart from in the US and Spain, there are significant numbers of Cubans in Mexico (Aja Díaz 2000), Puerto Rico (Duany 2000b; Martínez-San Miguel 2007) and Venezuela (Ackerman 2007), with smaller groups in most Western European countries, such as Switzerland (Wimmer 1998) and France (Navarrete 2007). What then can be gained from studying Cubans in Spain? How, apart from in size, is the diaspora in Spain different from that in the US? To answer the second question first, Cubans in the Miami area are a wellresearched group, and account for two-thirds of the Cuban population in the US (Pew Hispanic Center 2009). They constitute what Alejandro Portes and Robert Bach have called an ethnic enclave (1985: 203) and have a more diverse history of waves or generations of arrivals than Cubans in Spain. They have been one of the most economically successful new immigrant groups (Eckstein 2009: 69), aided 12

Introduction

by generous US government assistance not available to other immigrant groups (García 2007: 83; Eckstein 2009: 80–83). Politically, they have been very effective in influencing US policy towards the island (Eckstein 2009). As early as the 1960s, the US-based Cuban community was praised as a ‘model minority’ in popular media, and a myth of universal Cuban immigrant success was created. As María Cristina García shows, many Cuban émigrés internalized the myth and have continued to identify with it and promote it. However, the epithet glosses over considerable internal diversity and the persistence of poverty among some Cubans in the US, including a large racialized pay gap (García 2007: 83). Apart from these differences, the myth of Cubans as a model minority in economic terms obscures the fact that Cuban exile groups have been linked with corruption, violence, obstruction of rights to travel to Cuba and attempts to limit freedom of expression (Eckstein 2009: 58). By contrast, Cubans in Spain are much less visible and influential politically than Cubans in the US. Compared with over 500,000 Moroccans, 370,000 Ecuadorians, nearly 300,000 Columbians, 269,000 Britons and over 159,000 Germans in Spain, Cubans are but a small minority. In Madrid, Cubans have never dominated the city politically or economically, and today there is no ‘Little Havana’ anywhere in Spain, for the Cubans live geographically dispersed and carry their own private Cuba or Havana with them. The answer to why this is so should be sought not merely in numbers – although clearly they matter – but also in structural differences between the US and Spain. The two countries have very different histories as receiving countries for Cubans and other migrants. Another important difference lies in the history of Cuban–Spanish relations from the colonial period onwards, which also accounts for the shared language. An answer to the first question, what can be gained from studying Cubans in Spain, would need to address at least three dimensions. Firstly, the historical connections between Spain and Cuba go back centuries, and the history of mobility between the two countries is an integral part of the history of the Iberian Atlantic. Secondly, the story of the Cuban diaspora in Spain is part of the still evolving history of Spain’s transition from a country of emigration to one of immigration. Thirdly, examining the Cuban diaspora outside of Miami and the US, adds much needed nuance to the understanding of the relations between socialist Cuba and its diaspora. Like other southern European countries, Spain was a country of emigration during most of the twentieth century (King, Fielding and Black 1997). Only since the mid 1970s has it become an immigration destination. The country had no asylum or immigration legislation until 1984 when the first law covering asylum and refuge was enacted, followed by the ‘Immigration Law’ (Ley de Extranjería) of 1985 (Arango 2000: 265). Prior to this, there were no restrictions on citizens of Latin America settling in the country. Immigrant numbers in the early 1980s remained low, but it is difficult to gain an accurate picture (Apap 13

Diasporic Generations

1997: 142–43). Quantifying migration is never an easy task (see, e.g., Maluquer de Motes 1994), and in the case of immigration to Spain the endeavour is hampered by inaccurate and often incomplete official statistics, especially before 1996 (Apap 1997: 142­–43; Arango 2000). Matters are further complicated by the high incidence of undocumented migration, continuing deficiencies in official statistics (Arango 2000), and, in the case of Cuban immigration, the fact that many Cubans hold Spanish passports. Some have acquired these after arriving in Spain, but others arrived as Spanish citizens, yet consider themselves Cuban. Spanishborn, self-identifying Cubans – such as those like don Orlando who emigrated from Spain to Cuba and then later returned to Spain – cannot reliably be identified in Spanish statistics. Yet in the context of this book, it is self-identification that matters rather than citizenship or place of birth. From the 1980s onwards, growing numbers of immigrants and political exiles from Latin America, and increasingly from Africa, Asia and Eastern Europe, have joined returning Spanish émigrés and political exiles. Immigrant numbers in the country have risen rapidly since then; the legal foreign-born population quadrupled in the decade from 1995 to 2004 (Arango and Jachimowicz 2005). Factors contributing to this change have been an increase in prosperity following the transition to democracy in the mid 1970s, and membership of the European Common Market and the European Union from 1986. Residence permits are a common problem for recently arrived immigrants, and because work and residence permits are closely linked, many migrants move frequently between legality and illegality (Arango 2000: 261). Repeated government-decreed amnesties for undocumented immigrants who could prove they were working (in 1986, 1991, 1996, 2000/1 and 2005) have caused significant fluctuations in the immigrant statistics (Arango and Jachimowicz 2005). In 2009, Spain’s immigrant population numbered approximately 5.6 million, constituting about 12 per cent of the overall population. Immigrants to Spain are in the majority women and have in many cases either created or been pushed into existing or emerging ethnic and gender niches in the labour market – for example, Ecuadorian women working as domestics and Ecuadorian men working as construction workers, Chinese migrants opening corner shops, and so on (King and Zontini 2000). In Madrid the migrant presence is palpable in the cityscape. Some 16 per cent of the population of Spain’s capital is now made up of immigrants, with Latin American immigrants alone accounting for 10 per cent of the overall population (Ayuntamiento de Madrid 2007). The formation of a Cuban diaspora in Spain in the second half of the twentieth century needs to be seen in the light of the mass migration in the early twentieth century from Spain to Cuba. The long and close historical connections between Spain and Cuba, which include 400 years of colonial history, have implications for belonging and citizenship, and for the ways in which Cubans relate to the Spanish state and society and to Spaniards in face-to-face encounters. 14

Introduction

Many Cubans in Spain are but the latest embodiment of back-and-forth mobility within families that goes back over a century. They have arrived in Spain in multiple ways. Those who left in the first two decades after the Cuban Revolution were motivated by their political convictions and religious faith, as well as the economic restructuring taking place in the island, while others leaving later were impelled primarily by pragmatic concerns fuelled by the economic crisis on the island. Cubans who have left the island permanently, whether as émigrés in the first decade after the revolution or as defectors during trips abroad, are not allowed to return to live on the island (Aja Díaz 2000: 3) unless they hold a special permit (see below). Furthermore, it is a criminal offence (previously a political offence) to leave Cuban national territory without a permit. If a citizen leaves the country and fails to return within eleven months, a quarantine of between three and five years is normally imposed and property and belongings are confiscated. After the quarantine Cubans may apply for a permit to visit the island. Since the 1990s, the enforcement of the quarantine has been relaxed so that it is not always automatically imposed on persons who leave the country legally (ibid.: 11). Still, Cubans who left Cuba at different points in time have unequal access to return visits to the island and as a rule they can only enter on Cuban passports even if they have obtained nationality elsewhere; and even then, they need a visa. Cubans who left the island prior to 1970 are exempt from this rule, and have been allowed to return to visit with passports of their adopted country of nationality.11 However, Cuban-born Spanish citizens are not entitled to aid from the Spanish diplomatic service on their behalf while they are in Cuba. Cubans who are married to non-Cuban nationals may apply for a ‘Permit to Reside in the Exterior’ (Permiso de Residencia en el Exterior), also known as a PRE. PRE holders are allowed to reside abroad, to visit the island when they wish, and to return to live in Cuba.12 Up to 1996, some 10,000 people had obtained PREs (ibid.: 11), and numbers continue to grow (Martín Fernández 2006). Like the Cuban-Americans (Castro 2000: 303), Cubans in Spain are not representative of the island population: they tend to come from Havana, and the majority are ‘white’ and middle-class. This reflects firstly that those who most benefited from the revolution (non-whites and the working class) have not wanted to leave or been able to marshal the resources, including transnational kinship and other connections necessary to leave. Secondly, the historical connections between the two countries have made it easier for Cubans of Spanish descent to settle in Spain. However, the most recent migrants are more diverse in their class profile and region of origin in Cuba. Relatively more are also nonwhites. Cubans continue to occupy a special place in the Spanish imaginary, embedded in the historical links between the two countries, to which I now turn.

15

Diasporic Generations

Postcolonial Migration and Metropolitan Romance After losing most of its overseas colonies in the first half of the nineteenth century, Spain wielded little influence in Latin America throughout the nineteenth and early to mid twentieth century. From the 1990s onwards, however, it increasingly sought economic and political footholds in the region (Domínguez 2000: 20, 46–47; Haines 2000). The end of the Cold War and the reopening of Cuba to foreign investment, combined with the continuing US embargo, created new opportunities for Spain and for Spanish investors to increase their economic and political presence in the island (Domínguez 2000: 20). As a result, Spain is now one of Cuba’s main trading partners and is among the five top countries of origin for tourists in Cuba.13 Intellectual and artistic exchanges have also grown in number, as have programmes for Cuban students to study at Spanish educational institutions (de la Campa 2000: 11). The wave of Cuba-mania, which swept Western countries after the fall of the Berlin Wall and the end of the Cold War, was closely linked in Spain to the strengthening of relations between the two countries and their shared history of colonialism and migration. The colonial parallels were clear not least in the language used to describe the rush of Spanish investments in Latin America in the late 1990s, sometimes referred to as a reconquista or ‘reconquest’ (Domínguez 2000: 47).14 Meanwhile, the commodification of Afro-Cuban culture for tourist consumption in Cuba, driven by the global popularity of Cuban music and dance, contributed to an intensification of racialized images of Cuba in Spain and in Western Europe more generally. Inside Cuba, tourism prompted a revival of interest in Spanish heritage. As the Cuban state became increasingly incapable of sustaining its monopoly over definitions of Cubanness, the otherwise nearly defunct Spanish Societies (Sociedades Españolas), founded by Spanish migrants to Cuban in the early twentieth century, found new space for manoeuvring. The Spanish Societies organize art exhibitions, language courses, poetry readings and other cultural events, and some of them distribute medicine to their members free of charge. They also offer their members the opportunity to travel to Spain at considerably reduced rates. The devolution of power from central government to the autonomous regional governments in Spain meant that the regionally defined Spanish Societies in Cuba – such as the Asturian Centre, the Galician Centre and so on – increasingly became beneficiaries of economic aid from ‘their’ regions. They also started to receive visits from regional Spanish politicians who have sometimes been received in Cuba with the protocol otherwise reserved for heads of state.15 There has thus been a confluence of interests on both sides of the Atlantic: Spain has economic interests in nurturing ties with its former colony, and Spain’s autonomous regional governments can use relations to Spanish Societies in Cuba as a platform for airing political ambitions. Meanwhile in Cuba, reclaiming re16

Introduction

gionally defined Spanish roots and Spanish culture has given access both to economic and material resources and to symbolic capital (Berg 2005). In Spain, images of Cuba tend to be tinged with nostalgia, whether colonialist or revolutionary-romanticist. Cuba’s role as the richest overseas colony, and the recipient of more than 1.5 million Spanish migrants between the mid nineteenth century and 1936, when the Spanish Civil War broke out (Busquets 1997: 8), has ensured it continues to hold a special place in the Spanish imaginary. Media representations of Cuba in Spain and tourist advertising frequently feature darkskinned Cuban women as part of ‘the dark enchantment of Cuba’ in the words of the Spanish journalist Mauricio Vicent.16 This trope is directly related to the colonial period and slavery, the Cuban mulata being the product of sexual relations between Spanish men and African women (Martinez-Alier 1974; Kutzinski 1993). The effect of such racialized discourses is felt by all Cubans in Spain, but in different ways depending on skin colour. Maida, a Cuban architect living in Madrid since 1996, who defined herself as a mulata, was eloquent on the issue: My personal experience is comical … Men will direct themselves to me in one way when they don’t know that I’m Cuban, but automatically when they find out I’m Cuban, even during the same conversation [they will change] … There’s a kind of perception that the boundaries of what is acceptable are wider. Of course for me my physical appearance doesn’t help, because I represent the paradigm of the typical cubana [female Cuban], the jinetera17 in the Malecón [Havana’s seaside promenade].

By contrast, Spaniards often assumed Maida’s friend Elena – who was fair-skinned and red-haired – to be from the Canary Islands, where the accent is similar to that of Cuba.18 The extent of mass-emigration from Spain to Cuba in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries means that many Spanish families today have relatives in Cuba and vice versa. Effectively, the two countries are linked in a dense network of kinship ties, tinged in Spain by nostalgic memories of Cuba as a land of opportunity (Hennessy 1993: 34). George Lambie has observed that ‘[n]o two nations could have been further apart ideologically than Franco’s Spain and Castro’s Cuba’ (Lambie 1993: 238). Nonetheless, Lambie suggests that Castro and Franco, both of Galician origin, ‘apparently shared an empathy which transcended politics’ (ibid.: 253). Such links extend to the present day. Fidel and Raúl Castro descend from Spanish migrants to Cuba, while in Spain several highprofile politicians have close, personal links to the island. They include José María Aznar, Spain’s right-wing prime minister from 1996 to 2004, whose father and grandfather were Cuban-Spanish. Likewise, Manuel Fraga, the formidable president of the region of Galicia between 1990 and 2005, and a former government minister both under Franco and in the transition government, is a personal friend of Fidel Castro. As a child, Fraga lived in Cuba (Falcón 2002: 110–18).

17

Diasporic Generations

While the Spanish right-wing continues to nurture colonial nostalgia for Cuba, the Spanish left wing saw in Cuba the revolution the fascists had snatched from them in Spain (Díaz 2009: 32). That this revolution took place in a former Spanish colony, which was also a tropical Caribbean island only made it more appealing. Indicative of this appeal, the late Julio Busquets, a sociologist and a member of the Spanish Parliament for the Socialist Party during the 1970s and 1980s, introduced a scholarly journal issue dedicated to the study of contemporary Cuba by explaining how he had become ‘captivated’ by Cuba (Busquets 1997: 7). This, he writes, ‘is nothing exceptional but is common among many Spanish citizens’ (ibid.: 7). He then explains that Cuba is ‘special’ and that when talk is about Cuba, neurons give place to hormones, passion comes out in full bloom … Many times I have asked friends and colleagues why this happens. Young people usually give political answers. They tend to see this passion as a result of the particular political system there [in Cuba]. Without downplaying the importance of this factor, I think there is another factor deeply embedded in history and sentiments. (ibid.: 7)

Paradoxical as it may seem, in late twentieth- and early twenty-first-century Spain, right-wing imperialist nostalgia (Rosaldo 1993) for the ‘pearl of the Antilles’ (perla de las Antillas), as Cuba was known in Spain during the colonial period, converged with leftist revolutionary nostalgia and solidarity and support for the Cuban Revolution in a racialized sexual fantasy of conquest. Maida found the expectations created by this colonial imaginary offensive: I have girl friends who have travelled to Cuba … They ask me: ‘What should I do to get laid by a Cuban?’ … It’s like they were talking about an animal … They don’t think that I have a father in Cuba, that I have a brother, that I have a little nephew who’s a couple of months old … When these girls asked I had the impression that they were going to the zoo and it annoyed me, it upset me a little.

She summed up the way racialized and sexualized images intersect with Cuba’s reinsertion into capitalist markets: ‘We’re in fashion, my dear, we’re in the market’. Within the Cuban diaspora, race has proven a fraught issue. The Havana that the Exiles grew up in and remember consisted of white, middle-class suburbs, exclusive private schools, and the almost by definition white-only Spanish Societies. Meanwhile, Cubans born after the revolution have grown up in a society where people of all skin colours mix more freely than before 1959, although racism and structural inequality continue to constitute serious problems in Cuba today (Fernandez 1996a; Safa 1998; Berg 2004a). Notwithstanding changes in the demographic composition of Cuba’s population after the revolution, and in the normalization of inter-racial socialization in socialist Cuba, the Exile generation simply remember their Cuba as white. The degree to which this is the

18

Introduction

result of ‘social forgetting’ (Fernandez 1996a) of the colour composition of prerevolutionary Cuba, or whether it is because many Exiles were simply raised to live in a white world, is difficult to establish retrospectively.19 The question of ‘race’ has been explosive throughout the twentieth century in Cuba (Helg 1995; de la Fuente 2001; Fernandez 2010). In a historic speech in 1959, Castro declared the battle against racial discrimination to be central to the revolutionary struggle, and suggested that white and black Cubans should be able to dance together in social clubs. The notion of such intimate inter-racial relations created strong opposition among the white middle class (Fernandez 2010: 54–55; see also de la Fuente 2001: 264). More than four decades later, ‘blackness’ and ‘the blacks’ have, for the Exiles, come to embody the changes in Cuba which led them into exile in the first place and which they have so staunchly opposed ever since. When one elderly Exile man of an elite, pre-revolutionary landholding family said to me in Madrid – again more than forty years after Castro’s speech – that going back to Cuba to live would entail ‘dancing with the blacks’, he was referring not only to ‘race’ but also to the revolutionary transformation of the Cuban economy, class system and its politics. Let me now recount some events during and surrounding a conference on diasporic Cuban culture which illustrate both the importance of the Spanish context for understanding the dynamics of memory among Cubans in Spain, as well as the tension and mutual incomprehension among them.

Encounters in Cadiz During a conference in November 2001, a group of about 100 Cubans and some non-Cuban scholars and interested locals met to discuss ‘exile Cuban culture’ in Cadiz in south-west Spain. Throughout the conference, differences within and between participants were played out in a particularly articulate way, as was the close link between Spanish domestic politics and stances on Cuba. The conference was held in Cadiz partly because of its striking visual similarity with Havana,20 and partly because of its historical connection to Latin America as the seat of the liberal Courts of Cadiz in 1812, which envisioned a commonwealth of nations including Latin America and Spain. As a Madrid-based Exile Cuban speaker said on being in Cadiz: ‘It is not that I feel like at home; I feel at home’. In an interview I conducted with him later, it transpired that his personal trajectory was of cosmopolitan mobility through academia in the US, Puerto Rico and Spain. Over the next few days, however, it became clear that the ‘feeling-at-home’ was fraught with pain and fragility, and that the mutual intelligibility of experiences was somewhat strained. The hosting of the conference in Cadiz caused controversy locally, and an alternative act of ‘solidarity with Cuba’ was organized. There was also a demonstration against the conference, and in local newspapers 19

Diasporic Generations

members of the Spanish left-wing party Izquierda Unida discredited the conference for being one-sided. Their counter-event was meant to offer a different view of Cuba, as they expressed it, one ‘distanced from the obsessions and phobias of the anti-Castroites in Miami and the Spanish right wing’.21 A majority of the conference participants were Cubans from Miami, but some Cubans living in Spain and Europe also participated. Most of the participants from Miami had left Cuba in the first decade after the revolution. Among the Cubans based in Europe, however, were a number of younger people who were born after the revolution and who had left the island in the 1990s. They therefore only had vicarious knowledge of pre-revolutionary Cuba, which in turn was the only Cuba that the older generation knew. The absence of any recent Cuban immigrants to Spain spoke of the restricted resources of this group – the conference lasted several days and delegates paid for their own accommodation and meals – as well as of their limited interest in engaging with overtly political discourses and participating in politicized meetings. The conference started with the laying of a wreath in front of a bust of José Martí, the polysemous hero of Cuban independence (see Chapter 2). The bust of Martí sits on Cadiz’s waterfront almost as if looking towards Cuba. The little group of conference participants who gathered in front of the bust decided spontaneously to sing the Cuban national anthem, which has remained the same since independence. One participant in the conference was Pablo, a young man in his early thirties. Pablo lived in Stockholm with his Russian wife and their two children, with whom he spoke only Russian. Pablo told me that an elderly Cuban woman living in Miami, who was also a participant in the conference, had asked him where he went to university. Pablo studied in the Soviet Union, as many Cubans of his generation did until 1989. Upon hearing this, the woman asked him what he ‘had done’ to be sent off to the Soviet Union. A seemingly innocuous question about where someone studied was in this context laden with political significance and implicit accusation; the woman was implying that Pablo was politically and morally compromised through his studies in a socialist country. Pablo replied that he ‘had not done anything’ in particular, and then added that when he left Cuba for Moscow he was a communist and a convinced supporter of the revolution: ‘My generation only knew Cuba as it was after the revolution, we had nothing to compare with. Your generation knew Cuba before the revolution and could compare, but my generation didn’t. It was your generation who put Castro in power’, Pablo expounded to the woman, implying that her generation was to blame for the current situation on the island. The woman then asked if his parents had not been able to give him a different perspective on politics. ‘No,’ Pablo answered, and continued: ‘I was sent to a boarding school when I was five years old and only saw my parents at the weekend. I didn’t really know my parents’. The short conversation ended with the woman embracing Pablo, and on a conciliatory note claiming ‘We are all Cubans’. That this gesture should be necessary aptly illus20

Introduction

trates not only the divisive nature of recent Cuban history but also the strength of exclusive ideas of national belonging. One evening, as Pablo and I walked along the waterfront of Cadiz, which so resembles the Malecón in Havana, he burst into tears. The sea salt in the air reminded him of Havana and his father, who he had not seen for ten years. His father had been denied an exit permit and Pablo did not want to return to Cuba. He did not think he would be allowed entry anyway as he was involved with a political group working for change in Cuba. On one of the following days, Pablo and I had lunch together on a terrace in the old quarter of Cadiz. We both agreed that we might as well have been in Old Havana, the colonial core of the Cuban capital, such was the semblance. Pablo told me that he went to Spain as often as possible and that he was hoping to retire there, as it would feel more like home than Stockholm ever would: ‘Spain is not Cuba, but it is next best for a Cuban’, he explained. As we strolled down a narrow cobbled street after lunch we came upon a gift shop called El Habanero, meaning ‘a resident of Havana’. Pablo walked in and asked the owner if she was Cuban. She was not, but her grandfather lived in Santiago in the east of Cuba and she was ‘dying to go,’ as she said. Pablo chatted amicably with her about Cuba for a little while before we left again. As elsewhere in Spain, the multiple links to Cuba are present in Cadiz too, in a shop owned by a granddaughter of a migrant to Cuba and in the passions that a small conference generated in the local press. Local activists from Spain’s then ruling centre-right Partido Popular who attended the conference asked for support to counter arguments by left-wing activists who were ‘pro-Cuba’, reflecting how Spanish political opinions about Cuba are as much a reflection of Cold War stances and domestic Spanish politics as about the situation on the island. The rhetoric employed by the detractors of the conference, and their mapping of a conference dedicated to diasporic Cuban culture onto domestic Spanish politics, suggests how the issue of Cuba in Spain often is a litmus test for political allegiances that reach much further than agreeing or disagreeing with the politics of the current Cuban government.22 At the conference, only one Cuban from the island, the Havana-based poet Ibrahim, participated. He was viewed with suspicion by some for his lack of explicit denunciations of the regime. In a later conversation with me, it transpired that his father had been executed shortly after the revolution as a supporter of the Batista regime, which was overthrown by the revolution. Ibrahim had stayed in Cuba for family reasons, but he had never supported the revolutionary government. Since the 1990s he had been allowed to travel abroad frequently, but he avoided making any political statements lest he should jeopardize his opportunities for travelling. In the tense environment of entrenched political debate, such in-betweenness and ambiguity made Ibrahim seem untrustworthy. Meanwhile, some diasporic Cubans knew of the conference but did not want to go: ‘They are just going to say the same things as always’, as a Barcelona-based writer said 21

Diasporic Generations

to me when I asked him if he was going. He also criticized the absence of any Cubans from the island in the programme. I suspect the laying of the wreath and the singing of the national anthem would indeed have been ‘the same things as always’ to him. The mutual recriminations between conference participants, and between them and local gaditanos, inhabitants of Cadiz, illustrate the deeply politicized nature of the Cuban diaspora. What most struck me during the conference, however, was the fragility of claims to Cuba and Cubanness and the disjuncture between claims to Cuba and the conference location, namely Spain. We should really have been in Havana, but we were not. Pablo’s tears, his insistence on Cadiz’s resemblance to Havana, and his hopes of retiring in Spain underlined the same fragility, of a life lived as second best. The familiar smell of the sea brought back memories and a fleeting sensation of being there, but was simultaneously a painful reminder of distance in time and space. Even more striking was the absence of Cubans from the island or of recent migrants, whose experiences and voices were therefore not heard.

Outline of the Book Chapter 1 is an account of the ethnographic fieldwork upon which this book is based. It addresses a central debate concerning diaspora, namely that of context, and argues that defining the context for the Cuban diaspora is very complex indeed. It also addresses the challenges of conducting fieldwork in a highly politicized field. Chapter 2 introduces the generational framework on which the argument of the book is based. It then moves on to outline the history of migration between Cuba and Spain. Although all Cubans share a geographical origin, the dramatic economic, social and political changes in Cuba over the past fifty years mean that diasporic Cubans remember their homeland in ways that are often mutually unrecognizable. Each diasporic generation remembers Cuba in different ways and each generation bases their claims to belonging in an imaginary homeland. In effect, there is not one Cuba but many. Three subsequent ethnographic chapters are therefore dedicated to each of the three diasporic generations: the Exiles, the Children of the Revolution and the Migrants. Chapter 3 about the Exiles, portrays a generation characterized by a tenacious looking back to Havana of the 1950s. In effect, the Exiles are symbolically reclaiming a lifestyle that was turned upside down by the revolution. The ensuing politicization of everyday life and the economic, social and political transformations alienated them, and most of them left Cuba in family groups. While their background as descendants of Spanish migrants to Cuba eased their entry into Franco’s Spain, returning to Spain was neither triumphant nor sweet. While they 22

Introduction

still lived in Cuba, they thought of Spain as their homeland, but when they settled there they transferred their feelings of belonging to Cuba. The Exiles in effect became Cuban when they left the island. The chapter follows the story of Isabel and her family. The revolution rent Isabel’s family asunder as she went into exile with her son but left her husband behind. The chapter also introduces two of Isabel’s friends, Sergio and Marianito, who both went through forced-labour camps before leaving Cuba, and who both left close relatives behind. The following chapter is dedicated to the Children of the Revolution. The Cubans of this generation were educated to become the ‘New Man’ (Hombre Nuevo) of the revolution. They experienced upward social mobility facilitated by the extension of free education; many went on to study at universities in socialist countries. Yet the isolation of Cuba following the breakdown of the socialist bloc in the late 1980s, and individual experiences of repression and deprivation, disenchanted them. When they left Cuba, the government labelled them ‘traitors’ (traidores). In diaspora, they shun the nationalism of both the government and the Exiles. This chapter shows how their lived experiences of cosmopolitanism, through which they distance themselves from exclusive nationalisms, is paradoxically enabled and facilitated by the Cuban government’s educational policies. The chapter follows Maida, an architect who studied in the Soviet Union and who, despite her decision to leave the island, feels that perhaps she really is a ‘traitor’, as the government and even her close family think. The chapter also introduces Alexis, a conceptual artist who defies closed territorial understandings of Cubanness with his idea of a ‘transglobal’ sense of identity. Chapter 5 is about the Migrants. This generation of Cubans have left the island in search of material improvement of their lives and hope to be able to return. They see themselves as immigrants impelled by the economic crisis of the so-called Special Period in Cuba in the 1990s. They have made their way to Spain in various ways, some through marriage. Most have close kin in Cuba and are committed to remitting earnings to them. Some have become ‘professional Cubans’ in Spain, making a living out of their Cubanness by working as dancers, for example. They find solace in groups of friends often consisting of Cubans who have also arrived since the 1990s. The growing disjuncture between the promises of socialism in Cuba and everyday experiences of scarcity have led these Migrants to claim minimal homelands, namely affective networks of kin and friends, and avoiding any claim to a territorial nation. The chapter introduces Mirta, who works for an NGO collecting medicine to send to Cuba. It also follows César, who trained as an actor in Cuba but finds it hard to escape racial pigeonholing in the increasingly nationalist Catalonia. He is struggling to remit money to his mother in Cuba and assuring her he is doing fine in the capitalist world. Following these three ethnographic chapters, chapter 6 examines the disjunctures and continuities in discourses of home and belonging among Cubans in diaspora. The nationalism of the Exiles is in many ways a mirror image of that of the Cuban 23

Diasporic Generations

government, whereas the Children of the Revolution envision a more fluidly defined nation, and the Migrants in turn are attached to the most minimal nation, namely that of kin and friends, not a territory. The chapter compares and contrasts the narratives and commemorative practices of the three diasporic generations, focusing on changes over time and on the bodily idioms of diasporic experience. In the Conclusion, I argue that the Cuban diaspora in Spain is an especially instructive example of the complex relationship between exclusive nationalisms and the diasporas they produce. Cubans in Spain embody different histories of connections and ruptures between homeland and diaspora from their US-based co-nationals. Yet the highly politicized and antagonistic relationship between Cuba and the US, and between the island and its diaspora, has eclipsed the internal diversity and multiplicity of experiences. Cold War rhetoric and territorial imaginaries have marginalized non-territorial modes of imagining home and belonging. The dominant political discourse has also caused a focus on disjuncture between Cuba and its diaspora. This book instead reveals continuities within ruptures between the two. The two most recent diasporic generations in effect embody the limits of nationalism and are to some extent living out post-national lives, although constrained by exclusionary national orders both in Cuba and in Spain. Conceiving diasporas in terms of migration trajectories and generations helps us to appreciate both diasporic diversity and similarity, and wrestles diaspora and migration studies out of the excessive focus on spatial displacement towards a more processual and temporal understanding, thus opening up new analytic perspectives.

Notes   1. ‘Uprooting’ captures both the vagueness about the agent in the action or process, and the roots invocation of the original Spanish, but beyond uprooting a plant, desarraigar also means ‘to extinguish completely a passion, custom or vice; to separate a person from the place or environment in which they grew up, or to cut their affective ties with that place; and to expel, especially an invader or enemy’ (Real Academia Española. 2011. Diccionario de la lengua española – Vigésima segunda edición. Retrieved 24 January 2011 from: http://buscon.rae.es/draeI/ SrvltConsulta?TIPO_BUS=3&LEMA=cultura).   2. Don (feminine: doña) is a title of respect used especially for older people.   3. On idioms of roots and routes, see, e.g., Hall (1995, 1999) and Clifford (1997).  4. This merely highlights the ambiguities in the concept of ‘return migration’; see Markowitz and Stefansson (2004) and Tsuda (2009).   5. Given the expansion of the uses of the term ‘diaspora’, some writers have feared that it is in danger of losing its meaning altogether. See Kirschenblatt-Gimblett (1994), Tölölyan (1996), Clifford (1997), Vertovec (1997) and Brubaker (2005).

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  6. It is worth noting the tension between the constructionist bent of anthropology and the essentializing identity projects of many of our informants. As reactions to the work of Richard Handler and other scholars of nationalist movements have shown, research subjects are likely to feel upset and betrayed by the anthropologist arguing for the constructed nature of their ideas (see Handler 1993).  7. Casino is the generic term for the dance more commonly referred to outside Cuba as salsa.   8. For critique of this exceptionality, see Fernández (2004).   9. The same is equally true for other groups of political exiles in Spain, such as Argentineans and Chileans. Where Cubans are included in literature on immigration to Spain, politics and romance tend to prevail over analysis. As an example, in a book consisting of portraits of twenty-four immigrants of diverse origins and nationalities by the Spanish journalist Rafael Torres (1995), one Cuban immigrant has been included. She is described as ‘the explosive daughter of a fiery mulata and a left-wing lawyer’, a ‘beautiful mulata’ with a ‘fabulous body’ (ibid.: 221, 226, 223). Reading Torres’s book is instructive for learning about the racialization of immigrants, but tells us little about the migrants’ own experiences. Of more interest are Romano (1989), which provides testimonies by a number of diasporic Cubans living in Spain, and Martín Fernández and Romano (1994), which offers some description and analysis of Cuban migration to Spain after 1959. 10. Unless otherwise indicated, all statistics on immigration to Spain derive from Inebase, the online database of the Instituto Nacional de Estadística (Spanish National Institute of Statistics). Inebase is a publicly accessible database which allows users to generate statistics by choosing among different variables within broad categories, such as demography and population, society, economy, and so on. For migration, variables include nationality, sex, province of residence, and marital status, with varying timespans. There appears to be a moving wall so that some information becomes unavailable after a certain period (though this is not clearly indicated on the site itself ), and over the years not all information has been available for all years. I have used Inebase over a number of years to generate statistics on Cubans in Spain, hence some of the data is no longer available. See http://www.ine.es/inebmenu/indice.htm. 11. See the website of Cuba’s Ministry of Foreign Relations: Ministerio de Relaciones Exteriores. 2008. ‘Nación y Emigración’. Retrieved 12 August 2009 from: http://www. nacionyemigracion.com/InfConsular/TramitesConsulares_TramitesMigratorios.html. 12. Ministerio de Relaciones Exteriores. 2008. ‘Nación y Emigración’. Retrieved 12 August 2009 from: http://www.nacionyemigracion.com/InfConsular/TramitesConsulares_PermisoResidencia.html. 13. See EIU (2008) on trade. For tourism, see ‘Cuba Tourism Grows Despite World Crisis’, Juventudrebelde.co.cu. Retrieved 20 October 2009 from: http://www.juventudrebelde.co.cu/economic/2009-04-20/cuba-tourism-grows-despite-world-crisis. 14. For a parallel in the 1960s, see Lambie (1993). 15. Although the autonomous regions in Spain are not allowed to pursue their own foreign policy, Juan José Ibarretxe of the Basque National Party, and also the then lehendakari, or president of the Basque autonomous region of Spain, visited Cuba in April 2002 and met with Fidel Castro. Ibarretxe was treated as a head of state during

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his visit and stated that Cuba and the Basque country were ‘two countries that respect each other’ (El País, 8 April 2002, p.18; 12 April 2002, p.15). Ibarretxe further stated that relations between Vitoria (seat of the Basque Parliament) and Havana were ‘very good’ and that they were not meant to ‘intimidate Spain’. The visit created ‘concern’ among Spanish diplomats in Havana (El País, 12 April 2002, p.15). Similarly, the then president of Spain’s Galician autonomous region, Manuel Fraga, of the then ruling Spanish Partido Popular, claimed in 1998 that Cuba was given ‘priority’ in the ‘exterior actions’ of the Galician government (ABC, 2 November 1998). 16. Mauricio Vicent. 2000. ‘El oscuro encanto de Cuba’, El País, 30 July, p.5. 17. Jinetera, literally ‘horseback rider’, is a racialized term used especially about darkskinned Cuban women seeking sexual relations with tourist men. See Berg (2004b). 18. I return to racialized imaginaries in Chapter 5. 19. The Cuban population on the island today is more dark-skinned than before the revolution. This development is explained by two factors: firstly, the mass exodus in the early years after the revolution consisted mainly of white Cubans; secondly, AfroCubans benefited especially from the redistribution of wealth and the institution of universal health care, which in turn affected fertility and mortality rates (de la Fuente 1995: 139–40). The nature of race relations before and after the revolution has been the subject of extensive debate (see, e.g., de la Fuente 1995; Fernandez 1996a). See Fernandez (2010: 58–66) for an unusually insightful account by a white Cuban woman about the way in which she had been raised seemingly without racial prejudice, but also to live in ‘a white world’. She only realized how racialized her social world was, when she met and fell in love with a black man and had to face family opposition to their union. 20. The makers of the 2002 James Bond film Die Another Day clearly also spotted the similarity, and they used Cadiz to film the Havana scenes. 21. See Diario de Cádiz, 6 November 2001, p.48. 22. See also the introduction to Holgado Fernández (2002), in which she describes the furious reaction by parts of the Spanish media to her discussion of the shortcomings of the revolution.

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Chapter 1

C uba , E thnography and the P olitics of F ieldwork

n The material presented in this book is based on multi-sited ethnographic fieldwork carried out primarily in Madrid between May 2001 and September 2002, with two follow-up visits in December 2002 and July 2009 respectively. During the main period of fieldwork I also went to Barcelona and Cadiz in Spain, Havana, Cuba and Miami, Florida. I chose Madrid as my base because more Cubans lived there than anywhere else in Spain according to the figures available at the time. My research in Spain was informed by fieldwork I conducted in Havana in 1998 on processes of marginalization in Old Havana, the colonial core of the Cuban capital (Berg 2004a, 2004b, 2005). During the course of this earlier fieldwork in Havana, I had been struck by the ways in which migration aspirations, Spanish family links, racialized identities, and narratives of nation and belonging were intertwined. I decided that I wanted to explore these links from the viewpoint of Cubans living in Spain.

Writing Cuba and Its Diaspora A major challenge in writing about twentieth century Cuba is the tendency of historiography and memories to be partisan and polarized. Politics influences memories and scholarship, and vice versa. The fact that so many US-based Cuba scholars are themselves Cuban or Cuban-American has been important (see Behar 1995, 1996). As Damian J. Fernández observes, scholarship on Cuba has been ‘in a tight embrace with politics, romance, and disaffection’ (Fernández 2004: 164) where the US–Cuba divide set the tone. On the one hand, this neatly illustrates the partial nature of all representations, while on the other it presents the researcher with complex challenges. Thus, depending on political views, some describe twentiethcentury Cuban society before the revolution as the ‘pseudo-republic’ and stress the economic, social and racial inequalities of the period, which they contrast with

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post-1959 Cuban society.1 Others instead emphasize the relatively high standard of living and level of development at the time, especially in Havana. These contrasting understandings in turn rely on different readings of indicators of wealth and inequality, and there is a tendency to sacrifice the complexities and paradoxes of an unevenly developed society in favour of partisan accounts. Paradoxical though it may seem, these opposing views have several common traits. They are both equally informed by nationalist paradigms and frequently invoke the same events and historical characters to legitimize their positions. Both are also equally committed to ‘an absolute disqualification of each other’s subsequent experience’ (de la Campa 2000: 14). Khachig Tölölyan has observed of the Armenian diaspora that the two sides to the debate ‘passionately share the conflicts that divide them’ (quoted in Werbner 2000: 16); this is equally true in the case of Cuba and its diaspora. The background to this polarized discourse should be sought in ‘the polarizing nature of the Cuban revolutionary process itself ’ (Castro 1997: 93). Until the late 1990s, much of the literature on Cuba and its diaspora contrasted being inside or outside Cuba, using space as a shorthand for differences. As the Cubanist Marifeli Pérez-Stable, herself a Cuban-American, pointed out in the early 1990s, the field of Cuban studies could then be characterized as a ‘trench’ (trinchera) in which battles were fought over how to interpret the past one hundred years of Cuban history (Pérez-Stable 1991: 240). In the case of Cuban migration to the US, a phenomenon highly inflected by the Cold War context, a politicized narrative of emigration remained dominant, reinforced by representations of the Cuban diaspora as a monolithic anti-communist group. According to this narrative, Cuban migration to the US is an exceptional case, explained by the Cuban Revolution and the hostile Cuba–US relationship, regardless of the fact that Cuban migration to the US had already been increasing significantly prior to the revolution (Pérez-Stable 1999: 34). Seen in a wider context, fraught Cuban–US relations after the revolution overshadowed studies of contemporary Cuba that were not fuelled by a cold war agenda, and in some cases made research impossible. Ethnographic studies suffered especially after American anthropologists Oscar and Ruth Lewis were expelled from Cuba in the late 1960s and accused by Fidel Castro of being CIA agents (Lewis, Lewis and Rigdon 1977: xxiii). Apart from the work of Fernando Ortiz (1881–1969), socio-cultural anthropology has had little hold inside Cuba (Hernández-Reguant 2005: 294), and it was not until the 1980s that Western anthropologists came back to Cuba for research (Daniel 1995; Rosendahl 1997). Yet in 1991, the Swedish anthropologist Mona Rosendahl found that her otherwise open-ended research permit was not renewed and she had to leave (Rosendahl 1997: 24–25). The US scholar Nadine T. Fernandez carried out fieldwork in Havana in the early 1990s. Her original proposal to carry out research on race relations among young people in a school setting proved unviable, but she 28

Cuba, Ethnography and the Politics of Fieldwork

was able to do long-term ethnographic work on interracial relations in Havana, an otherwise sensitive topic for the government. Fernandez describes a cautious welcome from the University of Havana, and ‘very constructive feedback from Cuban academics’ (Fernandez 2010: 14–15). Since the late 1990s, more ethnographic research has been permitted or quietly tolerated in Cuba, and young anthropologists began to go to Cuba to do research that went beyond the cold war binaries.2 In this decade as well, pioneering anthologies began to question the entrenched positions of Cubanology, featuring works from both of the ‘two shores’ of the island (Vázquez Díaz 1994b), or intending to ‘build bridges’ between them (Behar 1995). Notwithstanding the considerable individual merits of these publications, they almost inevitably downplayed differences both within the diaspora and its diverse locations, and within the island itself, as well as similarities that cross the island–diaspora divide. In a post-Cold War field of Cuban studies, the spatially defined inside/outside dichotomy can now be seen as the ideological construct that it always was. The global restructuring of relationships and Cuba’s opening up to outside investors since the mid 1990s has meant a commoditization of the revolution to a global market. It has exposed Cubans both on the island and in the diaspora to images and discourses about each other and themselves on a previously unimaginable scale. Likewise, with more Cubans being able to travel in and out of the island, the ‘two shores’ are bleeding into one another. Against this background, recent scholarship has begun to challenge the paradigm of Cuban exceptionalism and to explore the island’s history and its migratory flows in the light of developments within the wider region (Pérez-Stable 1999; Fernández and Cámara Betancourt 2000; Fernández 2004, 2005; Hernández-Reguant 2005; Hoffmann and Whitehead 2007). The prevailing view of the Cuban diaspora as overwhelmingly white, middleclass and anti-communist has been challenged by studies showing the class, ethnic, religious and other diversity within it. New work on Cuban migrants in south Florida and beyond, such as the present book, is contributing to a more historically embedded and geographically representative understanding of contemporary Cuba and its diaspora.3 Thus, the validity of the ‘trench’ metaphor for Cuban studies is being eroded in favour of a more complex picture in which ordinary diasporic Cubans’ ideas of nation and belonging and their subjective experiences of displacement are beginning to come into focus. This book contributes to a new wave of studies of contemporary Cuba, in which borders are being redrawn and Cuba’s ‘alternative geographies’ are explored (Hernández-Reguant 2005, 2009b).

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A Multi-sited Field Like many anthropologists of my generation, I set out to do fieldwork with a research imaginary inspired by George Marcus’s work on multi-sited ethnography (Marcus 1995, 1998). The multi-sited imaginary has enabled anthropologists to expand their horizons in novel ways, not merely by adding perspectives and sites but by reconfiguring space and expanding what is ethnographically in the picture (Marcus 1998: 85). Yet as Matei Candea has noted, it suffers from ‘its lack of attention to processes of bounding, selection, and choice – processes which any ethnographer has to undergo to reduce the initial indeterminacy of field experience into a meaningful account’ (Candea 2007: 169). In the context of a study of a diasporic and mobile group of people, where and how can one reasonably draw lines of inclusion? Not only does the ethnographer have to deal with their informants’ mobility across borders and boundaries, but also with changes over time in both home and host societies, as well as within the life course of individuals and the diaspora itself. In multi-sited fieldwork, moreover, the ‘function of translation from one cultural idiom or language to another’ becomes even more important than in a single-site study, for it is the practice of translation that ‘connects the several sites that the research explores along unexpected and even dissonant fractures of social location’ (Marcus 1998: 84). The issue of cultural and linguistic translation deserves much more space than I can dedicate to it here. I was fluent in Spanish from the beginning of my fieldwork and all interaction and interviews with my research subjects were in Spanish, but translating between two languages neither of which is my native language has been a challenge. During the early months of fieldwork I all too often felt inadequately prepared for the complex field of diasporic politics where subtle linguistic markers, which I was unfamiliar with, often indicated particular political positions. Additionally, many of my Cuban interlocutors were highly articulate and reflexive about their own language and use of words. So as to preserve some flavour of the richness of their Cuban Spanish, and because some expressions have no simple equivalent in English, I retain some expressions in their original Spanish throughout. Classic ethnographies often start with an account of the ethnographer arriving in the field. Malinowski’s evocative passage – ‘[i]magine yourself suddenly set down surrounded by all your gear, alone on a tropical beach close to a native village, while the launch or dinghy which has brought you sails away out of sight. Since you take up your abode in the compound of some neighbouring white man, trader or missionary, you have nothing to do, but to start at once on your ethnographic work’ (Malinowski 1961: 4) – conjures up a sense of ‘the field’ already there waiting for the ethnographer to start work. By contrast, my first days of fieldwork did not produce any encounters with Cubans but were spent wandering Madrid, taking in the visible immigrant presence: 30

Cuba, Ethnography and the Politics of Fieldwork

The South American, African and Chinese faces; the immigrant travel bureaux; the telephone booths from which you can call long distance cheaply; the remittance agencies. The staff in many bars and cafes are Latin American. There are lots of Cuban restaurants and bars, some cashing in on the current fad for all things Cubans, others catering – perhaps – to Cubans living here? In the airport and on the metro into town: adverts for Havana Club Rum [produced in Cuba] … They are all over Madrid, as are adverts for Cuban music. In the bookshops: lots of novels about Cuba or by Cubans. This is at the same time as a disagreement is breaking out between the EU and the US over trade with Cuba. The new Bush administration apparently wants a harder line towards Cuba.4

As Vered Amit comments, the ethnographic field does not ‘simply exist, awaiting discovery … [i]t has to be laboriously constructed’ (Amit 2000: 6), and so it proved for me on a daily basis. There was no native village, no rituals, no cockfights, no elders to approach. Indeed, there appeared to be no discernible ‘community’ of Cubans in the form of ethnic organizations, residential clustering or places to meet, and little appetite for it among Cubans. Cubans lived dispersed across the city and I quickly realized that they were further separated by migration trajectories, length of stay in Spain, legal status with regard to their homeland and host state, class origin and politics. In short, my initial predicament was like Liisa Malkki’s: ‘the setting did not readily produce informants. Embarrassingly, it provided no context to participate in or to observe’ (Malkki 1995: 49). Some of the Cuban bars and restaurants in Madrid were owned and staffed by Cubans, others were Spanish-owned. It was rumoured that some of them were even owned by the Cuban government. But they were not generally sites for the production of diasporic identities. On the contrary, many of my informants were eager to stress that they did not like to frequent these bars, except if they were taking Spanish friends on a kind of tourist trip to Havana without leaving Madrid. Less educated Cubans would sometimes meet in Cuban bars, whereas intellectuals were more likely to distance themselves from such overtly ethnicized conceptions of Cubanness. Some Cubans were mutually antagonistic and hostile to one another, and research often felt like a balancing act between different groups of people who knew little about each other but who nonetheless had strong opinions and passionate beliefs about those of their compatriots who they saw as ‘other’. Against this background – and the fact that most of my informants lived in small apartments – it was unfeasible to live with a family so I moved into my own apartment in central Madrid. In this context, fieldwork took an unexpectedly literal meaning for me as I travelled in and out of ‘the field’ every day, continuously constructing it anew. Much as many of my informants would only think of their being Cuban as significant in some situations, on an ordinary day I slipped in and out of different positions as an ethnographer as I moved around the city and engaged in different kinds of activities and relations with my informants. This constant 31

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movement, which I think of as both physical and cognitive, helped make it clear to me that my informants too, like anyone else in a complex, urban society, were involved in a ‘complexity of contexts’ (Olwig 2009: 534). I was aware that some of my informants knew or wanted to know what I knew, albeit from different subject positions. I was also keenly conscious of being within a landscape and of the need for renegotiating my identity over and over again as the landscape of research changed across sites (see also Marcus 1998: 97). After some time in Madrid, I made two trips to Barcelona to interview Cubans and to gain a sense of the degree to which there were any significant differences between the two cities for the Cubans living there. As it turned out the most obvious difference was the growing importance of Catalan nationalism. Labour market integration has become more difficult in Barcelona due to the increasing emphasis on Catalan language skills as a prerequisite even for menial jobs. On the other hand, Cubans in Barcelona often stressed that they preferred Barcelona to Madrid because of its proximity to the sea, which made them feel more at home. I later went to Havana to talk to friends and relatives of my informants in Spain. Some of the time in Havana I accompanied Mirta, an informant from Madrid introduced in Chapter 5, on her visits to friends and family. During this stay I lived in a flat in central Havana, lent to me by one of those lucky few Cubans who lived in Spain with a permit from Cuba which allowed him to travel back and forth, money permitting, and to maintain his abode in Havana. Moving through different social and geographic spaces variously enhanced or diminished my standing and credibility with different groups of Cubans. The trip to Miami turned out to be important in gaining contacts and establishing rapport with the Exile generation of Cubans in particular, and became important mostly in terms of what the trip meant to my informants more than in terms of the ethnographic data it actually produced. My subsequent trip to Havana in turn aroused suspicions as to what the ‘real’ motives for my investigation were: ‘You are going in the wrong direction’, an Exile politico said to me shortly before my departure for Havana. Yet his wife and many others asked me to carry medicine and money to their relatives on the island. Some of the Children of the Revolution were anxious that I might reveal compromising information about their political views to their pro-government relatives. As for the Migrants, most asked me to carry letters, medicine and money and expressed regret that they could not go themselves. Returning to Madrid and telling my informants news of their families was both awkward and instructive, an issue I return to in Chapters 3 to 5. One of the ironies of the current economic and political situation is of course that being able to move freely between Spain, the US and Cuba is a privilege that most Cubans do not have.

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Ethnography, Diasporas and Context For social anthropology, there has always been an emphasis on context in interpretation: ‘Phenomena are illuminated by appeal to their surroundings; but these surroundings themselves are selected and interpreted in different ways. These differences are relevant to what is seen as problematic and to what counts as explanation’ (Dilley 1999b: ix–x). Etymologically, context derives from the Latin verb texere, ‘to weave’. The related verb contexere means ‘to weave together’, ‘to interweave’ or ‘to join together’. What is implied is ‘a generalized set of connections thought in some way or other to be construed as relevant to the object or event under discussion’ (Dilley 1999a: 4). But connections necessarily also imply their opposite, so that ‘while some things are connected via context to the object under study, others are by implication unconnected or disconnected’ (ibid.: 4–5). During both research and writing up, I have been grappling with the question of connections and disconnections. Quite apart from the difficulties entailed in striking the right balance between different places (Cuba and Spain obviously, but also the US and the Soviet Union), the historical context has also been difficult to establish: Is it that of Cuba or of Spain? Immediately the fact that much historical research is nationally defined, with the nation conceived as a kind of container, becomes problematic. The family stories of many Cubans I knew in Spain involved multi-generational mobility across the Atlantic which made the task of defining the appropriate context complex indeed. In this case, context is perhaps most helpfully understood as a series of relations, sites and intersections, including links not only with Cuba, but also with the former Eastern bloc, Miami, Mexico, pre-revolutionary Havana, Francoist Spain, the Spanish Civil War and other times and places remembered and invoked by my informants – in short, a number of sites and relations distributed in time and space, variously expanding and contracting. This is then a field configured by forces of history and political economy as well as by the imagination. As I explain below, I was faced with hostility and mistrust by some Cubans and was therefore not able to carry out much participant observation in the first few months. Instead, I carried out unstructured, open-ended interviews. Whenever possible, I would only start recording when meeting an informant a second or subsequent time. Because of the nature of ethnographic fieldwork where boundaries between an informal, open-ended interview and a focused conversation are often blurred, it is not always possible to say exactly how many interviews one has conducted. That said, I recorded interviews with sixty-five interlocutors, most of them between one and three hours in length, but some longer. Other interviews were more informal, with notes jotted down as it went along. I knew and talked with many, many more Cubans, through participant observation at social gatherings, birthday parties and so on, as in any ethnographic fieldwork. 33

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Over time I came to know a great number of Cubans in Madrid and saw many of them regularly. Of the recorded interviews, twenty-five were with members of the Exile generation, and the rest spread evenly between the other two generations. The imbalance is because many Children of the Revolution and Migrants did not feel comfortable being tape recorded, so instead I made notes during the conversation when appropriate, or else at some later time. For the Exile generation especially I often interviewed several members of the same household or family either together or separately. For the other two diasporic generations, this was less feasible as most of them did not have family with them in Spain, except a partner or spouse. Instead I sought to see their relatives during my visit to Havana. I did a number of life-story interviews consisting of two or more sessions with some informants. This was a familiar format for my research subjects and most of them enjoyed the opportunity to narrate and reminisce. I paid a research assistant to transcribe the interviews for me and if possible presented the interviewees with printed transcripts, which many appreciated. This additionally created a good opportunity for talking about issues raised in the interview and gave me a chance to ask further questions. My research assistant was herself Cuban and became an important informant as well as a good friend. I came to understand much more through conversations with her than I would otherwise have done. However, in order to protect her anonymity and privacy as well as that of all my other informants I have chosen to present all of them under pseudonyms except where I refer to their published writing, or when they talked to me as the spokesperson of an organization. Some personal details have also been changed. E. Valentine Daniel has warned against drawing conclusions on the importance of nation and nationalism in the lives of refugees and exiles, based on fieldwork among exactly those self-selected informants who are most heavily implicated in national projects themselves (Daniel 1998: 311). The danger is that those émigrés who are not involved in long-distance nationalism simply become invisible to the researcher’s gaze. Mindful of Daniel’s warning, I quickly became aware that only a minority of Cubans, primarily men, were involved in émigré political organizations, while relatively more women were involved in voluntary charitable work. Yet the majority of Cubans were not involved with any organizations at all. Conducting long-term, open-ended ethnographic fieldwork mitigated against meeting only the politically active diaspora Cubans. I adopted a multiple snowballing approach, pursuing as many different lines of contact as possible, including those made through trades unions, Cuban organizations, academic contacts, immigration lawyers, NGOs, Cubans met at Cuban events, visiting Cuban bars and restaurants, and chance encounters.

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Doing Research in a Politicized Field Given the politicized nature of the Cuban diaspora and a pervasive sense of mistrust, it took time to make contact and establish rapport with Cubans. This mistrust manifested itself in mutual accusations of government infiltration and of a lack of ‘morality’. Some Exiles, for example, saw the more recently arrived Cubans as potential government infiltrators or docile communist puppets without moral principles, while others saw the Exiles as extremists. Among those who had been persecuted in Cuba, there was mistrust towards those who travel back and forth to Cuba for not ‘breaking with the regime’ (romper con el régimen) and accusations that they were ‘a velvet exile’ (un exilio de terciopelo). Some informants made it clear that they found ‘the paranoia’ (la paranoia) which led to these accusations excessive. But ‘the paranoia’ was irrevocably part of the context, and was also illustrative of the dynamics of boundary marking and exclusion which was such a recurrent feature in diasporic memory politics. There was no single community of Cubans into which I could be accepted and, perhaps more importantly, my informants never ceased to mistrust me and my motives, just as they mistrusted one another. People tested and challenged me on my political allegiances and the ulterior motives of my research. It was consequently not always easy to establish a rapport and I was repeatedly reminded by my informants that I was an outsider; that my probing into their lives was circumscribed by them; and that they were not always willing to play the part of ‘informant’ to my ‘ethnographer’. I was also often aware that they were watching and observing me as much as I was observing them. Doing research in this context was sometimes straining, and I would often feel an edge of mistrust arising from the feeling of taking part in something vaguely illicit (see also Michalowski 1997). When a Spanish cleric who was himself expelled from Cuba in the early 1960s asked his congregation of elderly Exile Cubans to pray that my research might turn out well, I was touched and hoped it meant that my presence had been accepted. Yet, as I found during my research, the rapport I had with my informants strengthened and weakened several times over. The progression from complete outsider to acceptance or ‘adoption’ within a family often described in classic monographs relies on the assumption of a homogeneous community into which one can be accepted. In my case, such a community did not exist. A few times I was turned down for interviews or meetings, once explicitly because the person in question feared that I was, in his words, ‘an agent of the Cuban government’. The trope of the anthropologist suspected of being a spy or a government agent is familiar to many anthropologists (see, e.g., Herzfeld 1991; Malkki 1995; Dresch 2000; Ballinger 2003). In my case, certain factors concerning my own position were a help to my research, while others were a hindrance. My age and gender made me relatively unthreatening. Many saw talking to me as a chance to tell their story and have their version of events set down for posterity 35

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by inclusion in a scholarly study. Being the citizen of one country (Denmark), living in another (Britain), and doing research in a third country (Spain) about people displaced from a fourth (Cuba) established me as a transnational and mobile individual, something many of my informants identified with. Gradually I gained the rapport of a number of individuals whose support opened doors for me. Emphasizing certain aspects of my background and suppressing others depending on context eased access. Thus, when talking to Exiles, I would usually only tell of my previous fieldwork in Cuba if directly asked. In other contexts, I used my knowledge of Cuban idioms to reciprocate the ironic use of official expressions. ‘Venceremos’ (We shall win), I would respond to Beatriz, an architect who married a Spaniard and migrated in 1988, when she giggled ‘Patria o Muerte’ (Fatherland or death) to me on the telephone to end a conversation. Some informants seemed to have different versions of their life stories, depending on context, and this initially worried me. A particularly poignant example was Humberto, a middle-aged man. He arrived in Spain from Cuba in the late 1990s after being threatened with prison for his political activities. I had met him on several occasions before I interviewed him in the premises of the Fundación Hispano-Cubana, a Cuban–Spanish political organization with close links to the then ruling centre-right party in Spain. During the interview, Humberto presented himself as one of many Cubans who had been swept up by the revolution, unable to resist it because of ‘a feeling of absolute impotence’. Incidentally, I later discovered that Humberto had been a provincial head of the young Communist Party until the late 1960s, which seemed inconsistent with his account to me. Another example was that of Mario, a former civil servant, introduced at length in Chapter 2, who in contrast to Humberto was keen to explain and contextualize the socialist convictions of his youth in the light of rebellion against his bourgeois upbringing and the general mood among young middle-class Cubans in the late 1950s and early 1960s. However, I also overheard Mario describe himself as someone who had been a ‘shitty communist’ (comunista de mierda) to an Exile Cuban, thereby downplaying the sincerity of his earlier convictions. For some time such complex and contradictory self-representations vexed me. Yet I was myself busily engaged in context-sensitive self-representation whenever I met new informants, shifting the emphasis in order to establish some resonance with my interlocutor. In retrospect, I understand my anxiety as the result of a process of seduction, where polarized and antagonistic, politicized discourse took its hold on me so that I too started to judge my informants in the way they judged each other. In the end, what matters is the ability to contextualize narratives both historically and within the specific circumstances in which they are told. Timothy Jenkins puts it succinctly: ‘the anthropologist must give up the ideal of objective knowledge in the sense of an understanding that everybody might share’ (Jenkins 1994: 36

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443). This issue is especially urgent and also particularly difficult to honour when informants tenaciously propound mutually exclusive truth claims. Eventually, I became enmeshed in social life, ‘where there is no objective truth, but simply potentially exclusive versions of the truth’ (ibid.: 443), and accordingly I had to juggle different versions of ‘the truth about Cuba’. In literature on fieldwork it is often implicitly assumed that the anthropologist must build a relation with their informants that ensures an ‘ethnography of empathy’ (Ballinger 2003: 7) built on the complex idea of ‘rapport’ (Marcus 1998: 106). Such a relation was complicated in my research by mistrust and the politicization of the field of research. Pamela Ballinger’s frank account of her multi-sited fieldwork among Istrian exile groups and among those who stayed behind when others left resonated deeply with my experience. Like her, I too felt conflicted throughout my fieldwork, and uncomfortable about my ‘duplicitous activities’ (Ballinger 2003: 6); that is, of mixing now with this individual or group, now with another. James Clifford has urged us to think of fieldwork in terms of encounters and shifting relationships between dwelling and travelling (Clifford 1997: 67). In my case, the idea of encounters was mediated by ‘disencounters’ (from the Spanish desencuentro, a failed or disappointing encounter) between Cubans as well as between ethnographer and informants. An encounter towards the end of my fieldwork encapsulates this ambiguity: I go to the Centro Cubano [an Exile organization] to thank them for their help and support during my fieldwork. I know that not everyone in the Centro agreed to my presence at some events, but others let me in and welcomed me. I run into Esther, a frail elderly woman who manages the Centro’s reception of new Cuban immigrants. She tells me that somebody asked her just the other day if I was from the CIA and that she said she did not know. Esther does not wait for my reaction, but starts talking about what will happen the day Fidel Castro dies. She says I must hurry to come to the Centro as soon as I learn about this much longed-for piece of news.5

I feel I was right in thinking that Esther did not expect an answer from me. During my fieldwork I saw and heard several diasporic Cubans accuse other Cubans of being agents or spies. Her implicit accusation could therefore paradoxically mean that I had become accepted as an actor like any other in this politicized field. On the other hand, it might also have been Esther’s way of saying that, although she trusted me not to be an agent or spy, she still entertained the idea that the Centro’s activities potentially were important enough to merit CIA surveillance. In a politicized field where groups and individuals variously inhabit positions of relative marginality and centrality of power (see Ballinger 2003: 7), the ethnographic ideal of empathy and rapport is difficult to honour. I have therefore found Marcus’s use of complicity helpful in thinking through the complexities of relations and encounters in the field. As Marcus emphasizes, complicity is often entangled with rapport, but it also has a darker meaning, that of ‘partnership in 37

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an evil action’. His interest, however, is in complicity as the ‘state of being complex or involved’ (Marcus 1998: 107). He connects complicity to the multi-sited imaginary of both ethnographer and their informants: ‘an awareness of existential doubleness … having a sense of being here where major transformations are under way that are tied to things happening simultaneously elsewhere, but not having a certainty or authoritative representation of what those connections are’ (ibid.:118, original emphasis). As an ethnographer I knew that my fieldwork sites were ‘integrally and intimately tied to sites of possible fieldwork elsewhere’ (ibid.: 117). As for my informants, they were all aware of a ‘here’ and a ‘there’, whether that other place was Cuba, Miami or somewhere else. Complicity captures the shared realization for ethnographer and research subjects alike that ‘one is somehow tied into what is happening elsewhere’ (ibid.: 119). Many of my informants were engaged in cultural and political work through which they sought to vindicate and reclaim diasporic modes of Cubanness. Complicity was a way of creating ‘a shared and cooperative space of research’ (Ortner 2010: 226) with those of my informants who were academics or writers, and who in their professional lives engaged with questions of home, belonging, identity and nation. They became colleagues as much as informants. Some of my informants were well-versed in diaspora and exile literature, and globalized diaspora discourses informed their narratives. On several occasions, I overheard discussions among Cubans in Madrid about whether they were a diaspora or an exile community and what the implications of applying one or the other of those terms would be (see, e.g., Méndez Rodenas 2000). Since, as Roger Goodman has argued, ‘[a]nthropology is, among many other things, the study of reflexive debates within other societies’ (Goodman 2000: 161), ‘the field’ of fieldwork inevitably merged with ‘the field’ of writing. This book is consequently a contribution to an already existing transnational community of written and spoken discourse (see also Handler 1993: 73–74).

Notes 1. In revolutionary Cuba it has therefore been perceived as problematic to suggest publicly that social problems which plagued pre-revolutionary Cuba, such as racism or prostitution, still exist (de la Fuente 1995; Fernandez 1996a; Berg 2004a). 2. For a discussion of this, see Hernández-Reguant (2005: 278). 3. For a sample of studies, see, e.g., Behar (1995), M. Torres (1995b, 1998), de la Campa (2000), Mahler and Hansing (2005), Quiroga (2005), Behar and Chávez Mayol (2007), O’Reilly Herrera (2007), Behar and Suárez (2008), Eckstein (2009) and Prieto (2009). 4. Fieldnotes, 19 May 2001. 5. Fieldnotes, 13 September 2002. Esther did not survive to see Castro die; she died herself of old age in Madrid in May 2008.

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Chapter 2 D iasporic G enerations

n Why do diasporic Cubans remember and imagine their homeland in different and sometimes irreconcilable ways? Cubans themselves were often adamant that they had ‘nothing to do’ with other Cubans who arrived in Spain in different periods to themselves or for different reasons. Reasons for leaving Cuba varied from the particular circumstances of an individual’s life and their political views, to constraints on social and economic mobility, or specific events such as repressive or interventionist measures, or the economic crisis of the 1990s. A few of my informants were persecuted and chose to leave rather than face prison sentences or continued harassment; some were motivated by a desire to see the world; and many additionally sought better material conditions for their lives. Amidst this complexity, there was inevitably also a degree of mutual ignorance about the lives and experiences of others. Notwithstanding the diversity of migratory experiences and motivations, many of my informants were of middle-class origin with secondary or even tertiary education. Yet social class held different meanings to them depending on whether they grew up before or after the revolution, and on whether or not they had lived through transition to socialism in the 1960s, or the economic crisis in the 1990s and the subsequent re-emergence of stark economic inequalities (see also Eckstein 2009: 230). Being middle class in Cuba today simply means something entirely different to what it meant in the 1950s. Class in itself is therefore not very helpful for making sense of diasporic diversity. A historically grounded generational approach however is helpful.

Conceptualizing Generation Generation and generational differences have been used widely in studies of migration to account for differences in ways of relating to the homeland and different degrees of integration into the host society between migrants and their off-spring

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(see, e.g., Portes and Zhou 1993; Rumbaut 1997; Portes and Rumbaut 2001; Rumbaut and Portes 2001; Rumbaut and Rumbaut 2005). The approach was pioneered in a US context and has been influential in scholarly debate and beyond (for critical discussion, see Eckstein and Barberia 2002; Levitt and Waters 2002). This approach emphasizes the importance of biological age at the time of migration for future prospects of integration. The focus on biological age however tends towards disembedding migrants from historical context both in their homeland and in their host society in favour of socialization and individual psychology. Despite Rubén Rumbaut’s critique of deterministic understandings of ‘assimilation’ (Rumbaut 1997), the teleology of this approach – whereby the first generation holds onto foreignness, the second generation is conflicted, the third generation assimilates – is problematic and assumes a homogeneous society into which immigrants can assimilate. As scholars of transnationalism have shown, many migrants lead lives that transgress borders, building social fields that span country of origin and country of settlement (Glick Schiller, Basch and Blanc-Szanton 1992b). In a transnational field, clear-cut definitions of generations become problematic or even futile, for the generational approach relies on the assumption of a singular migration event rather than ongoing mobility and multiple moves across generations. Thus, as Eckstein perceptively argues, ‘[i]t is time to deconstruct the concept of generation and reconceptualize it’ (Eckstein 2002: 213). In my material, biological age at the time of migration appeared relatively insignificant. Rather, it was historically situated trajectories, which gave rise to different modes of remembering and relating to home and away. I therefore decided to focus on individual stories of migration, especially of when and how my interlocutors left Cuba and arrived in Spain. Through these individual stories, a larger story about diaspora formation, belonging and nation as inflected especially by class, race, gender and sexuality started to emerge. Seen through this lens, three diasporic generations emerged from the ethnographic material. These diasporic generations were intimately linked to gendered, racialized and class-based experiences of the Cuban Revolution and the transition to socialism, and to experiences of life in Spain. Diasporic generations thus emerge through historically embedded experiences of leaving Cuba and of arriving in Spain rather than through age at the time of migration. In temporal terms, the generations overlap, but the first generation, the Exiles, can be identified as those Cubans who left the island between the early 1960s (although a few left Cuba even earlier) and about 1980. They were overwhelmingly white, middle-class residents of Havana, now middle-aged to elderly. Most say they left Cuba because the revolutionary government made their lives ‘impossible’, by which they meant the nationalization of businesses and the confiscation of land and property. They were Catholic, often strongly anti-communist, and most arrived in Franco’s Spain in the first fifteen years after the revolution, some 40

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after considerable delays in Cuba. They saw themselves as political Exiles as opposed to economic migrants. However, their relatively homogeneous class status in pre-revolutionary Cuba also revealed an economic underpinning to their exodus (see also Eckstein 2009: 18). Many of the Exiles were technically returnee migrants or descendants of Spanish émigrés to Cuba who had established small businesses in Havana. At the time of my fieldwork, few of them had immediate family members left in Cuba, but they had close relatives in Spain, the US or elsewhere. Members of this generation tended to have a strong sense of community with other Cubans who arrived in the same period as themselves. The Children of the Revolution have arrived in Spain in the 1990s, i.e. after Franco’s death and Spain’s ensuing transition to democracy in the mid 1970s. They grew up in revolutionary Cuba in families that were supportive of the government. They and their families experienced upward social mobility caused by the opening of education to new sectors of society and from Cuba’s incorporation into the socialist bloc. Many studied at universities in Berlin, Moscow and Prague and have a background as members of the Young Communists or the Communist Party. They were often suspicious of imputed communities and many of them claimed not to socialize with other Cubans at all. They left Cuba because of a combination of factors, including political dissatisfaction and career frustrations caused by Cuba’s economic collapse and political isolation in the 1990s. In between these two first generations came a number of disenchanted revolutionaries, who were close to the Exiles in age but politically and socially closer to the Children of the Revolution. Finally, the Migrants were those Cubans who emigrated during Cuba’s economic crisis initiated by the collapse of the Soviet bloc. They defined themselves as economic migrants and emphasized that they had not been involved in politics in Cuba. Most of them aspired to go back to visit as soon as it was economically possible for them to do so. In comparison with the previous two generations, this generation was more diverse in class and racial background, and relatively more came from the provinces. Many of them had never been outside Cuba before migrating to Spain and had no or few relatives abroad who could support them either before or after they left Cuba. Some of them left children or partners behind in the hope that they would be able to sponsor their migration to Spain in the future. Within each generation there was a degree of diversity in terms of age, class, race, and trajectories, and in how people interpreted their experiences. Race overlapped with class: most of the Exiles and Children of the Revolution were white and middle class, whereas the Migrants were more often non-white and working class. Race and class thus mapped onto diasporic generation to some degree, but were not isomorphic with it. In the context of discussing children of immigrant Cuban parents in Miami, Lisandro Pérez also argues for the importance of the moment of leaving the island 41

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when comparing different groups of Cubans. Pérez uses the term ‘vintages’ about Cubans who have arrived at different moments (Pérez 2001: 97). Silvia Pedraza also endorses this term in a similar discussion, but distinguishes between ‘waves’, defined by time of leaving the homeland, and ‘vintages’, defined by attitudes (Pedraza 1996: 264). Diasporic generation is however meant to capture something more than merely the moment of leaving Cuba or attitudes toward the island; it refers also to arriving in Spain and to the changing context in the host society. The generational framework can helpfully be understood in the spirit of what Rodney Needham called ‘polythetic classification’ (Needham 1975). A polythetically defined category has no definitive attributes, and no traits hold central significance (ibid.: 350). Taking a polythetic approach, attributes are not mutually exclusive and there will always be borderline cases (ibid.: 354). In this case, belonging to a diasporic generation is defined by common or shared experiences, but there is no checklist of attributes shared by everyone within a generation. Generation was first conceptualized sociologically by Karl Mannheim (1997, first published in German in 1928). Using the example of political struggles within the male elite in nineteenth-century Germany, Mannheim argued that common experiences during youth in certain circumstances can create a commonality of outlook between individuals who share social location (ibid.: 291), but class and other differences within a generation will mean that individuals interpret events in different ways. Mannheim emphasized that the ‘problem of generations’ would be especially pertinent in periods of rapid social change and ruptures with the past and might result in a situation where one generation does not recognize the experiences of those who come after it. Cubans within the same generation certainly did not all interpret events in the same way – gendered, racialized and class-based differences stood out – but they were likely to refer to the same events or historical processes as important. For the Exile generation, the revolution was the event they continually referred back to; for the Migrants it was Cuba’s so-called Special Period and the economic crisis of the 1990s. It was from these differing historical orientations that much intergenerational incomprehension arose. As a man who left Cuba in 1980 said to me: ‘The Cuba I knew and left behind is completely different to the Cuba that those who arrived in the nineties told me about. But when I talked about the Cuba I knew to the people who left in the sixties, they didn’t recognize it’. Mannheim emphasized that any generation is likely to contain different units who share their orientation toward each other within it, even if only to fight one another (ibid.: 306–7). Thus political antagonists in a given epoch are likely to share a quest ‘to master the same destiny and solve the same social and intellectual problems that go with it’ (ibid.: 314). This observation is especially apt for the Exile generation, whose nationalism constitutes a mirror image to the nationalism of the government. Both were formed through the upheavals of 1950s and 1960s Cuba and the subsequent redrawing of citizenship, nation and belonging. 42

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Some common themes across the generations did emerge, namely a sense of truncated personal agency and loss. But the nature of these losses is very diverse. Some lost fortunes and properties, others time spent waiting or in prisons and labour camps. Some felt bereaved of a future in their country, others never had the chance to say goodbye to a mother or a father. In a comparable context, namely that of contemporary Vietnam, Ashley Carruthers has described what he calls a ‘fractured transnational sociocultural intelligibility’ between overseas and domestic Vietnamese (Carruthers 2002: 428). For Cubans this fracture manifests itself between the diasporic generations even more than between diasporic and island Cubans. The events that emerged as particularly significant for inter-generational incomprehension among the Cuban diaspora were: the transition from a consumer-oriented capitalist society to a socialist planned economy characterized by shortages; the closing-off of Cuba from Western popular culture and the island’s incorporation into the socialist world; the economic crisis in the 1990s and the subsequent severe decline in standards of living and social mobility for an entire generation; and the reopening of the country to tourism and the dollarization of large sectors of the economy. The communication ban between Cubans on and off the island, the restructuring of the educational system, and the practice of sending children to boarding schools from an early age have also contributed to creating a gap between different generations of Cubans, and between those living on and off the island. The boarding schools meant that parents spent little time with their children. Intergenerational transmission of values and social norms was thereby interrupted and parental control and authority curtailed. Pablo, who grew up in Havana in the 1970s, told me that he never really knew his parents since he spent more time at his boarding school than at home, and his parents were busy anyway with political meetings, marches and voluntary work. Pablo also said to me that his parents and others of their generation would never understand what he called the promiscuity (promiscuidad) of the boarding schools. The spectre of sexual relations between pupils, and between pupils and their teachers, in boarding schools and during school stays in the countryside was an abiding issue for parents, especially of adolescent girls, in the late 1990s when I conducted fieldwork in Havana. Yet Pablo’s promiscuity referred also to social and racial intermingling, which prior to the revolution had been subject to parental control (see also Fernandez 2010: 68). It was striking within the diaspora how parental memories of Cuba were transmitted inter-generationally, and were reproduced by those who left Cuba as children and adolescents. Since family migration to Spain was almost exclusively a phenomenon of the first two decades after the revolution, I observed this most clearly among the Exiles.1 In interviews with Cubans who had left the island as children with their parents in the 1960s or 1970s, I found a strong adherence to parental, i.e. Exile positions. For example, Jorge, the grandson of don Orlando 43

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(see Introduction and Chapter 3), shared his mother’s and grandfather’s antiCastro view although he did travel to Cuba, which they would not. Likewise, Mariana, who left Cuba in 1960 at the age of one, was involved with an Exile group working for human rights in Cuba. Apart from her, all other members of the group were in their sixties or older. Since she was from an important old family in pre-revolutionary Cuba, her name carried a certain weight in Exile circles. Mariana had no memories of Cuba of her own, but had been brought up in an environment infused with talk and reminiscences about Cuba. She had also spent many summer holidays as a child among Cuban Exile kin in Miami. None of her siblings had ever been interested in Exile politics, but for Mariana her Cubanness was an intrinsic and important part of her identity. She always made sure to tell people that she was Cuban, lest they would think she was Spanish because of her flawless accent. In research conducted among Cubans in the US, Eckstein reports very similar findings about the transmission of memories, and has developed a comparable generational framework (Eckstein 2009). In contrast to the generational framework developed by Portes, Rumbaut and others, both Eckstein’s and my own findings suggest that contextual factors are more important than biological age at the time of migration, thus suggesting the need for a historical grounding of generations. In the Cuban case, Rojas has argued, referring to constitutional changes, that ‘[i]n the course of one century, Cuba has gone through at least four deaths and resurrections as a nation: one in 1902 as a liberal republic, one in 1940 as a democratic republic, one in 1961 as a Marxist-Leninist regime and that of 1992 as a national-communist regime’ (Rojas 2001b: 65). In the past fifty years alone, changes have been ‘colossal’ (Krull and Kobayashi 2009: 166), and Cubans of different generations and classes have experienced and interpreted changes in ways that are often irreconcilable. In tandem with economic, social and political changes, narratives about the past have also changed, in turn reflecting changing perceptions of nation and belonging. The result of these repeated ruptures with the past has been an ‘intimate alienation’ so that ‘Cubans of yesterday have become foreigners for the Cubans of today’ (Rojas 2001b: 65). This is even more strongly reflected in the diaspora, where one person’s memories may have little bearing upon the memories of others who left in different periods. Such differences have been further compounded by the fact that many have not been back since they left. As Norma put it: ‘The person who left … stopped the clock there [in Cuba] in that moment, and he still thinks that when he goes back it will be the same. But it is not the same’. The idea of a clock that has come to a stop as a metaphor of diasporic experience has been explored by Svetlana Boym, who found that a popular object in homes of Soviet exiles in the US was exactly an old clock that no longer worked, arrested forever at the moment of departure from the homeland (Boym

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1998: 517). Although I never saw any broken clocks in diasporic Cuban homes, metaphorically the effect was the same. Returning to Mannheim, shared generation does not necessarily imply an actually existing social group: ‘it is possible in general to draw a distinction between generations as mere collective facts on the one hand, and concrete social groups on the other … The generation is not a concrete group in the sense of a community’ (Mannheim 1997: 288, original emphasis). Rather, Mannheim emphasized commonality of outlook grounded in shared experiences. Likewise, diasporic generation does not denote actual social groups but rather similarity of subject position with regard to the homeland. In some contexts diasporic generations asserted themselves as ‘partial communities’ – that is, groups with fuzzy boundaries in time and space, ‘a loosely structured and multi-faceted community, grounded in social relations of varying personal significance, historical depth, and geographic dimension’ (Olwig 2009: 522). Indeed, most social and friendship groups of Cubans were composed of people who shared a migration trajectory. Here it is helpful to turn to the work of Carmelo Lisón Tolosana who explored the significance of generations ethnographically. His monograph Belmonte de los Caballeros: A Sociological Study of a Spanish Town (Lisón Tolosana 1966) is an analysis of social change and perceptions of history among ordinary people in Belmonte, a small town in Aragon, Spain. Lisón Tolosana focused on how individuals, who have lived through the same historical events in the same period in their lives, share a certain outlook on life: ‘A generation in the sociological sense comprises an age-group of men and women who share a common mode of existence or concept of life, who assess the significance of what happens to them at a given moment in terms of a common fund of conventions and aspirations … “Generation” thus has little to do with biological generation’ (ibid.: 180–81). In the tumultuous climate of early twentieth-century Spain, different historical experiences in youth created distinct generational outlooks. Lisón-Tolosana’s older generation had in their youth been divided into opposing political blocs of Left and Right, which led to the Spanish Civil War (1936–1939). The middle generation reacted against the fratricidal war with political apathy, but benefited from their wider knowledge of Spanish society gained as soldiers in the war. Lastly, the youngest generation consisted of youth who grew up in an era of peace and growing prosperity. They reacted against the family-centred world of their parents and sought greater independence and freedom. Each successive generation was thus disposed differently towards politics and nationhood. Neither Mannheim nor Lisón Tolosana wrote about diasporas and both emphasized the importance of experiences during youth for the formation of generational outlooks. Like Eckstein, I argue that the imperative of youth can be overridden by transformative events, such as revolutions, economic crises or experiences of migration, which may lead people to rethink their past (Eckstein 2002; 2009: 43). The changes in Cuban society from capitalism, through revolutionary 45

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socialism to late socialism, have been profound and dramatic to the extent that memories and experiences of Cubans who left in different periods are so different that they might as well have come from different countries altogether. Underscoring these differences, Cubans who have arrived in Spain at different points in time have also arrived in different circumstances and into a changing society. Against this background, it is unhelpful to think of the diaspora in terms of a single homeland and a single host society. The turning points around which the narratives of each generation are structured are different; each generation has its own Mannheimian ‘drama’. Furthermore, one person’s traumatic expropriation is another’s step towards a more just society. One Migrant man in his thirties said to me that he was educated ‘thanks to the revolution’ (gracias a la revolución), whereas many Exiles feel their lives were ruined by it: ‘then came the dictatorship of that man who confiscated everything … This is where the catastrophe started and I lost everything’, said don Orlando. As Lisón Tolosana puts it: ‘Each new situation is seen and experienced from a different angle by the contemporaneous generations and a single event holds very different significance for each one of them’ (Lisón Tolosana 1966: 200). The politics and memories of each diasporic generation was framed by the discourses of nation and belonging of both the Cuban and Spanish states and their respective societies, but took different forms. The Exiles rejected the revolutionary government and adhered to their own counter-nationalism, which mirrored the revolutionary discourse. Their position was close to the traditional Exile standpoint of Miami Cubans. To the bewilderment and disapproval of this first generation of Exiles, the two more recent diasporic generations not only rejected their nationalism as well as that of the government, but thought of themselves partially or wholly in post-national, de-territorialized terms. However, the national order of things still had implications for them and continued to restrict them in important and tangible ways. The Children of the Revolution adhered to a national project, but did so through subverting and ironically criticizing both revolutionary and Exile nationalism. Many of them embraced cosmopolitanism and postmodern discourses of hybridity. The Migrants, however, heralded an altogether new politics of memory; one in which Cuba was remembered as poverty and deprivation, but homeland was understood as affective networks of kin, friends, the street or neighbourhood, but not the nation or patria (fatherland). These differences made communication between generations fraught and difficult. All of the three diasporic generations remembered and reclaimed Cuba and Cubanness through manifold and diverse social practices. But it was not the same Cuba. An account of the changes in Cuba and the circumstances of migration is therefore necessary.

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Cuba’s Contested Past The fiftieth anniversary of the Cuban Revolution in 2009 gave rise to commemorations both on the island and in the diaspora, varying from the defiantly celebratory to denunciations of ‘fifty years of dictatorship’. Such varying interpretations were hardly a surprise to anyone, yet it is not merely the revolution that constitutes a deeply contested event in twentieth-century Cuban history. For example, the year 2002 marked the centenary of Cuban independence, which was only achieved after several wars against the colonial power and then four years of US rule between 1898 and 1902. The occasion was celebrated widely among diasporic Cubans in Madrid, Miami and elsewhere, and prompted a reappraisal of Cuba’s short-lived republic (1902–1958). In Cuba, however, 2002 was known as the ‘year of the hero-prisoners of the empire’ (año de los héroes prisioneros del imperio) after five Cuban citizens who were serving prison sentences in the US for espionage.2 No centenary celebrations took place. By contrast, 26 July was a national holiday as usual, but this date was not celebrated among diasporic groups.3 Some years earlier, in 1998, Spain, the former colonial power, commemorated a different centenary, that of the loss of Cuba, its most precious colony. The centenary was marked by a spate of conferences and publications on the significance of the loss, with titles such as ‘Cuba, the Pearl of the Antilles’ and ‘More Was Lost in Cuba: Spain, 1898 and the Fin de Siècle Crisis’.4 The reasons for this outpouring of imperial nostalgia a hundred years after the fact can be found in the special place Cuba continues to hold in the Spanish imaginary. The simultaneous loss of Puerto Rico and the Philippines seemed insignificant in light of the loss of Cuba, ‘the ever faithful isle’ (la siempre fiel isla) as it was affectionately called. The events of 1898 became known as ‘the disaster’ (el desastre), and led to a severe questioning of ideas of Spanishness and nation which still resonates today (Thomas 2001: 236). A generation of writers became known as ‘the generation of ’98’ (Naranjo Orovio and Serrano 1999). In contrast to the nostalgia in Spain in 1998, the centenary of passing from one colonial master, Spain, to another, the US, prompted no commemoration in Cuba. Rather, in official letters and on the front page of Granma, the official newspaper of the Cuban Communist Party, 1998 was called ‘the 40th anniversary year of the decisive battles of the war of liberation’ (año aniversario 40 de las batallas decisivas de la guerra de liberación). The ‘war of liberation’ here refers to the struggle against the dictator Fulgencio Batista (in power from 1952 to 1958), not the independence wars against the Spanish. Such differences between diasporic Cuban, island Cuban and Spanish commemorations of past events are illustrative of just how contested and incompatible understandings of Cuba’s past are. Memories and representations of what ‘Cuba was like’, especially in the 1950s and 1960s, remain key to debates over how to interpret the Cuban Revolution and the transition to socialism with the year 1959 47

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as ‘the great divide’ (Pérez-Stable 1999). For example, Cubans of the Exile generation are keen to portray pre-revolutionary Cuba as modern and prosperous. Those supporting the revolutionary government, on the other hand, emphasize economic inequalities and Cuba’s dependency on the US. For the Exiles, the 1960s by contrast are marked by repression and upheaval, whereas those who supported the revolution remember the decade as a time of optimism and effervescence. All too often, such polarizations produce essentialized accounts conforming to a formulaic narrative structure. The approach taken here is neither to pass judgment nor to assess the relative merits of one interpretation over the other but rather to contextualize the accounts and to understand them as positioned statements.

Decolonization, Independence and Spanish Migration to Cuba Cuba was colonized by the Spanish in 1511. In the nineteenth century, Cuba was firmly established as a sugar plantation economy connected to the world sugar market. Plantations were owned by the Spanish and Creole plantocracy, but mainly worked by African slaves. Slavery was abolished in Cuba in 1886 – considerably later than in other Caribbean islands.5 The beginning of the process of abolition can be dated to 1868, when the rebellion that later became known as the Ten Years War was started (Scott 1985: 26–28). This was, in effect, Cuba’s first war of independence, but it took another war before the Spanish withdrew. The war of independence was fought from 1895 to 1898 under a banner of a free and independent Cuba for all regardless of race (Chomsky 1998: 1). The leaders of the independence wars and their legacy have variously been called upon by later nationalist leaders to legitimate and embellish disparate political projects, none more so than the journalist, poet and writer José Martí, who was born in Havana in 1853 and died in battle for a free Cuba in 1895. Martí was the son of Spanish immigrants to Cuba and became politically aware at an early age. When he was eighteen he was sent into exile in Spain by the colonial authorities, and he was to spend most of his adult life outside Cuba. A prolonged stay in New York made him a staunch critic of the US (Thomas 2001: 167–71). From the 1930s onwards in particular, Martí’s legacy has been glorified and he has become a symbol of the nation, his premature death making him a martyr to the cause of Cuban independence. Nationalists of opposing ideologies have sought to tie their own political projects to the moral legitimacy derived from association with José Martí, and almost all rebellions and coups d’état in Cuba between 1902 and 1959 have claimed a ‘Martían’ heritage for themselves (Rojas 2001a: 57). As one informant said to me, if you are criticized for being anti-Martían, you are also implicitly seen as anti-patriotic. In the words of Oscar R. Martí:

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José Martí is the ideal political hero: an eloquent and charismatic revolutionary for the left, a soldier of freedom for the right, the apostle for all. He is also a moral hero, the embodiment of civic virtues, personal integrity, and patriotic fortitude in the face of adversity … Bolstering this heroic image is his status as a literary giant: a master of Spanish prose and poetry who authored plays, poems, novels, art criticism, essays, and translations; the editor of newspapers, of political and economic journals, and of a children’s magazine. (Martí 1998: 317, original emphasis)

Martí has in short become a polysemous symbol for Cuban nationalists: a protosocialist for the government, a conservative nationalist for Exile groups and an early postmodern thinker for Cuban-American academics, spurring popular adulation, hagiographies and competing editions of his complete works (see also Belnap and Fernández 1998; Ponte 2001). A line from one of his poems was even appropriated by the Spanish Falangists for their hymn ‘Cara al sol’ (‘Face to the sun’). Statues and busts of him are ubiquitous in Cuba, and diasporic Cubans of the most disparate political convictions all claim his legacy. In the view of the British historian Hugh Thomas, he was a ‘perplexing and often contradictory figure’ whose ‘precise views of the future of Cuba were always romantic, never clear’ (Thomas 2001: 180). In 1898, the US entered the conflict in Cuba by declaring was against Spain. When the Spanish withdrew, governance of Cuba was ceded to the US (Knight 1989: 170). The US intervention became the starting point for the economic, political, and cultural domination that was to mark Cuba in the first half of the twentieth century. Already some time before the occupation, however, Cuba had become commercially dependent on the US (Pérez-Stable 1999: 15). Washington only withdrew its troops from Cuba following the imposition of the Platt Amendment (1901–1934) that allowed the US ‘to monopolize the Cuban economy, to intervene in domestic political affairs, and to approve international treaties’ (Knight 1989: 171). The US army intervened in Cuba twice again in the early twentieth century (Masud-Piloto 1996: 13–14), and Cuban politics throughout the republican period (1902–1958) was marked by the threat of US intervention (Knight 1989: 172). Although deeply regretted in Spain, Cuban independence did not mean a severing of ties between the two countries and, unlike what happened in other former colonies, Spanish citizens were not expelled following independence in 1902 (Pérez-Stable 1999: 17). The period between the late nineteenth and the early twentieth century was marked by mass migration from Spain to the whole of Latin America. Between 1902 and the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War in 1936, some 800,000 Spaniards migrated in search of a better life in Cuba (Maluquer de Motes 1992). As a result, in 1910, nearly a quarter of the Cuban population as whole had been born in Spain (Thomas 2001: 297), and in 1931 a quarter of Havana’s residents were immigrants (Naranjo Orovio 1994: 131).

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Havana then comprised one of the largest Spanish cities as defined by the number of Spanish citizens residing in it (Maluquer de Motes 1994: 140). Migration from Spain peaked in 1920 when almost 100,000 Spanish citizens entered Cuba in one year (Iglesias García 1988: 290). Emigration from Spain was fuelled by growing pressures on land and a rising population, particularly in rural areas such as Galicia and Asturias in northern Spain. In Cuba, Spanish immigrants found work as day labourers, or in small-scale businesses and shops and the service sector. In Cuba in 1910, ‘[o]ut of 50,000 big or small merchants, almost half were Spaniards; out of 32,000 describing themselves as salesmen, over 20,000 were Spaniards; Spaniards owned a quarter of the sugar mills and had considerable investments in tobacco. The groceries found at crossroads in the country usually belonged to Spaniards’ (Thomas 2001: 297). Some of the migration was of the golondrina, or ‘swallow’ type; that is, seasonal wage work, particularly from the Canary Islands (Nugent 1992: 104). Most migrants were young men from rural backgrounds with limited formal education. They came to Cuba in the hope of new economic opportunities created by favourable sugar prices on the world market (Naranjo Orovio 1994: 123), and most experienced significant upward social mobility (Naranjo Orovio 1984, 1994; Iglesias García 1988). Many expected to return to Spain when they had made enough money (Thomas 2001: 298). In the early twentieth century, Cuba was unique in receiving both black West Indian immigrants and white Europeans on a large scale (de la Fuente 1996: 363), but the playing field was never even. Immigration from Spain was encouraged to ‘whiten’ the nation (Helg 1995; Chomsky 2000) and Spanish immigrants were given opportunities that were denied black immigrants from Jamaica and Haiti, or Cuban blacks (Chomsky 1998: 20). The economic depression of the 1930s led the Cuban Parliament to pass stricter immigration legislation, which led to large-scale expulsions of black West Indians but offers of naturalization for Spanish migrants (Naranjo Orovio 1984: 513). When the Spanish Civil War broke out, emigration was interrupted, and from the 1940s onwards most Spanish emigration was directed towards other Latin American countries (ibid.: 513). In Havana, the Spanish immigrants founded a number of Sociedades Españolas, or Spanish Societies, which functioned as cultural and social meeting places, and as organizations that defended the rights of immigrants (ibid.: 508). They were organized according to the regions whence the immigrants originated, the Centro Gallego (Galician Centre) and the Centro Asturiano (Asturian Centre) being the two largest numerically and the most well-established economically (ibid.: 519). The premises of many of the Spanish Societies were purpose built, with bars, meeting rooms, ballrooms and libraries, and were located in central Havana. In the 1920s they played a significant role in Cuban social life (Moore 1997: 38). The four largest Spanish Societies were simultaneously also the four largest private entities in Cuba and had between them more than 200,000 mem50

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bers. Each one of them had an annual financial turnover greater than that of the province of Havana; health care, education and the printed press in Havana were all primarily in their hands (Maluquer de Motes 1994: 140–41). The strong presence of Spanish citizens in the early to mid twentieth century had repercussions in Cuban society and politics. In an attempt to invoke the former glory of the lost empire, Spain’s right-wing Falangist party, for example, considered the support of Spaniards abroad an important part of its political mission. The political struggles in Spain, which eventually led to the outbreak of the Civil War, were thus mirrored in Havana where supporters of the Falangists and Republicans respectively fought for control of the Spanish Societies and their considerable economic assets (Naranjo Orovio 1988: 95). The leadership of the largest Spanish Societies supported the Falangists as did some elements of the Cuban media and the Catholic Church (ibid.). Yet the republican side also had supporters in Cuba, and during the Spanish Civil War Cuba contributed more republican volunteers per head of population than any other foreign country (Hennessy 2000: 245), while the Cuban embassy in Madrid also offered shelter to Spanish republican refugees (Naranjo Orovio 1988). After the end of the war, however, most republican exiles went to Mexico and Venezuela rather than Cuba, partly due to laws restricting access to the labour market for non-nationals in Cuba (ibid.). In 1941, when the Cuban government was carefully shaping its policies in accordance with US interests, the Spanish consul was expelled because of his open support of the Cuban Falangist party (ibid.). Although they were never completely disrupted, diplomatic relations between the two countries were not fully restored until 1952 following the coup d’état of Fulgencio Batista. In the intervening period, the Franco government attempted to maintain contact with Spaniards in Cuba through the Spanish Societies (ibid.). Meanwhile, Spanish exiles in Cuba published an anti-fascist political magazine and continued to commemorate the republic even after Franco’s death, the restoration of the monarchy and the transition to democracy in Spain. The revolutionary Cuban government later honoured many of these exiles for their support (ibid.). By contrast, it considered the Spanish Societies counter-revolutionary, racist and bourgeois, and the premises of both the Centro Asturiano and the Centro Gallego were seized by the state to become the Museum of Fine Arts and National Theatre respectively. Most Spanish Societies remained functioning, but with very limited means and no new immigrants to replenish their ranks. Many elderly diasporic Cubans in Spain today originally migrated from Spain to Cuba early in the twentieth century. The following vignettes of the family stories of three such Cubans in Spain are illustrative of the movements back and forth between Cuba and Spain in the early to mid twentieth century and the ways in which politics impacted on migratory routes and outcomes. Don Orlando, the child migrant (see Introduction), left Asturias in northern Spain around 1915, when he was about fourteen years old, and travelled to Cuba 51

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alone. It was the first time he had left the immediate surroundings of his native village. Orlando was the youngest of ten siblings, four of whom emigrated to Argentina and two, including Orlando to Cuba. His father’s death a couple of years earlier had impoverished the family, and Orlando had no chance of further education. Additionally, his mother worried that he might be drafted for the war in Morocco (1909–1927). His mother chose to send him to Cuba because there he could stay with his sister, who was married and lived in Havana. Before returning to Spain to settle in 1970 with his wife, daughter and grandson, he had been back on holiday to Spain three times prior to the revolution. Throughout his years in Cuba, he was a member of a hometown association as well as the Centro Asturiano and contributed to collections for funds for a new church bell and a new school building for his village. In other families, movement back and forth between Cuba and Spain goes back several generations, as in the cases of Mario and Caridad. When I met him, Mario had retired from work, dedicating himself to writing his family history and to active membership in various Cuban Exile groups, mostly of a cultural nature. Mario agreed to tell me the story of his family over the course of several meetings, most of them in his home in Madrid. Mario’s paternal grandparents married in Valencia in 1890. After the birth of a son, Mario’s grandfather was drafted into the army and sent to fight in Cuba against the rebels in 1895. In Cuba he caught malaria and then yellow fever, and became disenchanted with the colonial project. He therefore deserted the army and settled in Mexico. Later, Mario’s grandmother travelled to Mexico in a vain attempt to find her husband and eventually settled in Veracruz on Mexico’s Caribbean coast with her son. As a young man, Mario’s father worked as an accountant for Shell in Veracruz. Meanwhile, Mario’s maternal grandparents were struggling in Madrid. Of their fourteen children, only four survived beyond infancy; Mario’s mother was the youngest. Searching for a better future, the family left Madrid for Buenos Aires in Argentina, then moved on to Montevideo in Uruguay, where they set up a restaurant. They subsequently lost the restaurant and decided to return to Spain, which they then left again, bound for Cuba, in 1907. Back in Cuba, Mario’s grandfather became the accountant on a sugar plantation. In the 1920s, Mario’s mother, then a young woman, returned to Spain where she met a man from Catalonia, who she later married in Cuba. The newly-weds moved to New York, but Mario’s mother was unhappy and did not get on with her husband, so she left him and returned to Cuba with her young daughter, Mario’s half-sister. Back in Cuba, she petitioned for divorce and later met Mario’s father, who had then been transferred to work for Shell in Havana. With the outbreak of the international economic crisis in 1929, Mario’s father lost his job. In 1933, Mario’s parents therefore decided to return to Spain where the new republic seemed more promising than the dictatorship in Cuba. They spent a couple of years in Madrid, where Mario’s brother was born. Mario’s father set up a small cosmetics factory in 52

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Valencia, but in 1936 the Civil War broke out. With luck they managed to escape the fighting in a boat of refugees and made it back to Cuba, and in 1938 Mario was born in Havana. His parents enrolled him in a private Catholic school, where he learnt English and French, which later ensured him translation work. Mario went on to become a supporter of the revolution and studied history and philosophy in Prague. It was here that he met and married a Czech woman. After a number of years in Czechoslovakia, studying and working as a translator, Mario and his wife were called back to Cuba in 1967 but later returned to Prague. They moved to Madrid in 1970. Both Mario and his wife became civil servants and their two children were born in Madrid. When I met her Caridad was a pensioner and, having never married, she lived on her own in a flat in Madrid. She was born of Spanish parents in Cuba in 1929. Her father was the proprietor of a small shop (bodega) in which he employed other Spanish immigrants. Around the age of seven, Caridad fell ill and her mother decided to take her to Galicia in Spain, where her family lived, to convalesce. The outbreak of the Civil War put an end to exits from Spain and meant that Caridad and her mother were forced to stay with the family in Galicia while they waited for a chance to return to Cuba. Then the outbreak of the Second World War meant that travel across the Atlantic was restricted and Caridad did not return to Cuba until she was fourteen years old. Back in Havana, Caridad studied to become a secretary. In 1966 she left Cuba for Spain. With such a background of movement between the two countries, many Cubans who left the island in the early 1960s did not consider their return to Spain a permanent move, but expected to return to Cuba or else move on to the US.

From Republic to Revolution As Pérez-Stable has argued, the nature of Cuban society before 1959 has been a neglected theme in literature on Cuba (Pérez-Stable 1999: 5), its complexities overshadowed by politics. The Cuban republic (1902–1958) was characterized by large imbalances between urban and rural Cuba in terms of literacy, school enrolment levels, housing, health care provision and overall standards of living (Pérez-Stable 1999: 27). In effect, the inequalities were not so much between urban and rural areas as between Havana and the rest of the country (de la Campa 2000: 57). In the 1950s, one in five Cubans and one in three urban dwellers lived in Havana. Havana was far larger than any other city and had a considerably higher standard of living than the rest of Cuba (Scarpaci, Segre and Coyula 2002: 79). Yet Cuba also ranked among the top five Latin American countries on a wide range of socioeconomic indicators, including literacy, per capita income, infant mortality, and life expectancy (Pérez-Stable 1999: 5; Eckstein 2003: 18).

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Historians have emphasized that Cuba’s independence was uniquely precarious. The island gained independence long after mainland Latin American nations and only after the intervention of US troops and a very bloody war of independence. Indeed, as Aviva Chomsky has observed: ‘Political and economic realities in the early twentieth century seemed to recreate those of the colonial period’ (Chomsky 1998: 4). Sovereignty was compromised by the extent of American political control and the country’s economic dependence on the US sugar market. Democratic governance was interrupted and hindered by revolution (in 1933), social and political upheavals, fraudulent elections, corruption and US intervention throughout the republican period. In 1940 a progressive constitution was installed envisioning social democracy (Thomas 2001: 448–49), but in 1952 a military coup suspended it. The 26 July Movement would later call for its reinstatement, but after Castro seized power his pledge to reinstate the constitution was not fulfilled. Instead, a new socialist constitution was put in place in 1976, revised in 1992 (de la Cuesta 2001) and again in 2002. Some Exile political groups are still calling for a return to the 1940 constitution. When the rebel army, led by Fidel Castro, triumphed on 1 January 1959, it had a programme of national revival, social equality and land reform. Castro had effectively fashioned the rebels as the successors to the heroes of the independence wars, such as José Martí (Pérez-Stable 1999: 4). Castro’s was not initially a socialist movement. He took over a country that was the world’s largest producer and exporter of sugar. It was also ‘one of the most mono-product export and trade-dependent economies in Latin America’ with most new investment going into the sugar industry (Eckstein 2003: 18). In 1960 relations between the new Cuban government and the US soured irreversibly when Castro nationalized US-owned oil refineries in response to their refusal to refine Soviet oil. The US government thereafter instituted a trade embargo against Cuba, which at the time of writing was still being upheld. The embargo in turn led Cuba to move further towards the Soviet Union (Pérez 2003: 241–43). In April 1961, Castro proclaimed the socialist character of the Cuban Revolution. The following day, Cuban Exiles supported by the US attempted to invade at Playa Girón (Bay of Pigs) (Pérez-Stable 1999: 3). In contrast to the antagonistic relationship with the US, in the revolutionary government’s relations with Spain, the former colonial power, then under the rule of Franco, it seems that pragmatism and economic interest outweighed ideological differences. Even when Cuba expelled Spanish clerics from the island and diplomatic relations broke down, Spain did not support the US-imposed embargo. Spain received considerable US aid at the time and was under pressure to comply with its embargo, but ultimately it managed to maintain an independent policy towards Cuba. Lambie argues this was possible because of the strategic importance to the US of its naval bases in Spain, giving the Spanish government leverage in negotiations with the US (Lambie 1993: 238–54). Both right-wing 54

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US politicians and Cuban Exile groups in the US strongly resisted and criticized the links between Spain and Cuba, and one CIA-trained Exile group attacked a Spanish vessel en route to Cuba, killing three Spanish sailors. The attack caused a serious uproar in Spain, and Franco exceptionally allowed anti-American demonstrations (ibid.: 261). In the face of pressure, the Spanish government claimed a ‘special relationship’ with Cuba based on the history of colonialism. Manuel Fraga, then Minister of Information and Tourism, stated in 1964 that while Spain ‘was unequivocal in its opposition to communism one had to remember that Spain’s ties with Latin America, including Cuba, were complex and deeply rooted, and were composed of elements which transcended politics’ (ibid.: 258). One further motivating factor for Franco in maintaining ties with Cuba may have been satisfaction at seeing the Cubans turn against the US and thus partly avenging the Spanish defeat of 1898 (Hennessy 2000: 246). Manuel de Paz-Sánchez argues that Spain ultimately was interested in maintaining its commercial interests in Cuba, which increased in significance after the revolution due to the gap left by the US embargo (de Paz-Sánchez 1997: 17). Certainly, by 1964, Spain had become Cuba’s most important trading partner in Western Europe (Lambie 1993: 240), while Cuba was an important trading partner for Spain, on a par with economically more powerful countries in Latin America (ibid.: 241). Yet although trade statistics appear to show an expanding commercial relationship between Spain and Cuba, in reality the relationship put Franco’s government at a trading disadvantage (ibid.: 234). In its first decade in power, the new Cuban government started a literacy campaign and instituted universal and free schooling and health care, as well as a system of social security. Employment for all, agrarian reform and an increase in the minimum wage were among other economic, institutional and political reforms that won Castro wide support among hitherto disenfranchised Cubans. Shortly after the revolution Castro delivered two speeches in which he expressed hopes for racial integration in Cuban society. However, after these two speeches a ‘policy of silence’ was instituted on race matters, and race effectively became a taboo topic (Fernandez 1996b; de la Fuente 2001). The government subsequently banned political organization along the lines of racial identity, but did not introduce any affirmative action policies (Moore 1997: 225). It did, however, invest in Afro-Cuban culture to promote what it saw as less politically compromised cultural forms, compared with bourgeois, Spanish-derived culture. The increasing radicalization of the new government alienated parts of the middle class and most of the upper class. This is how don Orlando, by then a laboratory doctor, remembered the nationalization of his medical clinic and his own subsequent departure from Cuba: When I left, I lost everything I had. They confiscated the money I had in the bank … This brings back memories that are very sad. My wife died here [Madrid] and I

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went through a lot. I found [Spain] very cold. It is very hard to establish yourself in this country. There is no solidarity at all … Cuba was a beautiful country, but they spoiled it because they made the different classes fight each other, and those who had nothing won, while those who had money lost and were persecuted. They harassed and intervened and made it impossible, because such are revolutions … That is why you see me here [in Madrid].

Many other diasporic Cubans of the Exile generation were affected to some degree by the confiscation of businesses, and they felt society had turned against them and what they believed in. Indicative of the degree to which 1959 became ‘the great divide’, Pío Serrano, a poet based in Madrid since 1974, on the other hand, remembered the early revolutionary years with fondness. In conversation he would talk of the excitement and ‘effervescence’ of the period. In an article entitled ‘Havana was a feast’, he reminisced: The time of fragmented hope and egotism appeared far away. In the streets, the multitudes made friends, they were no longer anonymous masses, but marched in spontaneous demonstrations and parades, singing. Singing songs and hymns that were born of the struggle of the cities and had gone up to the mountains with the guerrilla fighters and which now appeared to be coming back down again from the rebel mountains … Carpenters and students, peasants and lawyers, writers and bricklayers, railway workers and bureaucrats paraded arm in arm … seven years of bloody dictatorship lay behind … In those initial days one had the impression that the revolution consisted of a finished body, unequivocal, without fissures. (Serrano 1995: 245)

Creating Revolutionary Subjects The revolutionary government not only transformed Cuban economy and politics, it also set out to create a new political subject, the Hombre Nuevo or ‘New Man’ (note the gendering), who was to be a socialist and a patriot. For Ernesto ‘Che’ Guevara, Fidel Castro’s close collaborator, forging the Hombre Nuevo was as important for constructing communism as the transformation of the material base of Cuban society (Guevara 1977: 7). The Hombre Nuevo was to sacrifice his personal life for the revolution; he would be cooperative, hardworking, morally pure and disinterested in personal gain; in short ‘unsullied’ by the ‘original sin of capitalism’ (ibid.: 14). In the nineteenth and early twentieth century the mulata was seen as the embodiment of the Cuban nation in the dominant white imaginary (Betancourt 2000). The militarist jargon of socialism and the quest for the New Man entailed a re-gendering of Cubanness.6 As Behar has commented, ‘the revolution called

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for an ultra-virile sense of national identity’, with severe punishment meted out to those men who deviated from the ideal (Behar 2000: 138); women, meanwhile, barely merited a mention in Guevara’s text on the Hombre Nuevo. Revolutionary Cubanness was to be a public stance, affirmed through participation in mass-meetings and marches, as Serrano recalls above. As the shaping of the New Man started, a certain social rigidity was instituted. Officially, socalled ‘social excesses’ and ‘deviations’ were no longer tolerated (Lewis, Lewis and Rigdon 1977: lxi). Rock music was banned as the expression of a bourgeois and decadent lifestyle, and homosexuals were purged from educational institutions. In 1965, the government set up the so-called Military Units to Aid Production (Unidades Militares de Ayuda a la Producción). Known as UMAP, these were forced-labour camps for those who were seen as non-conformist, including counter-revolutionaries, homosexuals and those openly practising religion (Lumsden 1996: 65). Inmates carried out hard physical labour in Cuba’s sugarcane fields. Castro closed the camps in 1967, after critique of them by the Cuban National Union of Writers and Artists (UNEAC), and denunciations and pressure from the European and Mexican left (Domínguez 1978: 358; Lumsden 1996: 65–71). Before then, many men wanting to leave revolutionary Cuba had gone through the camps, including many of those who arrived in Spain in the 1960s and 1970s. For many male Exile Cubans I knew in Madrid, bitter memories of their time in the camps formed a cornerstone of their utter rejection of revolutionary Cuba. The revolutionary government also made changes to place names and the ritual calendar of the nation as if to emphasize the rupture with the past and to map the new order onto the nation. Thus the first year of the revolution became the ‘Year of the Liberation’ (Año de la Liberación) (de Paz-Sánchez 1997: 153) and 26 July became a national holiday rather than 20 May, the anniversary of the republic. Provincial borders were redrawn and new provinces created. Perhaps the most striking example of this revolutionary re-ordering was the decree in 1969 that Christmas would be celebrated in July 1970 with the goal of mobilizing all Cubans to take part in the ambitious project of harvesting ten million tons of sugar in 1970, rather than celebrating Christmas. The ten million tons did not materialize and the project became an economic and political failure for Castro (Thomas 2001: 980). As for Christmas, it was not reintroduced until the late 1990s, coinciding with the Pope’s visit to Cuba. As Jonathan Boyarin has argued, nationalist movements and governments often seek to organize time and space in ways which serve to legitimize themselves and simultaneously attempt to dictate the contents of memory by delineating exclusive spatial and temporal boundaries (Boyarin 1994: 15–16). In revolutionary Cuba this has certainly been the case and the spatio-temporal order has been a key point of contestation between the government and the Cuban diaspora.

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The Creation of a Cuban Diaspora Post-1959 Accounts of Cuban emigration after the revolution reflect the politicization of the phenomenon and tend to place themselves within a continuum where one extreme is defined by those who see the phenomenon as a function of US immigration policy, which continues to give Cuban immigrants preferential treatment. The opposing view explains the large-scale exoduses in terms of political discontent, repression and economic failure on the island. Those inclined towards the former position discuss the phenomenon in terms of ‘emigration’ whereas those inclined towards the latter position tend to use the term ‘exile’. As with most accounts of twentieth-century Cuban society, the choice of terms and the weighting of causality are politicized, as is the intention of distinguishing between political refugees and economic migrants.7 Scholars of migration have long argued that political, economic, social, familial and other factors all influence migration trajectories, and once established, migration networks create their own dynamics (Massey et al. 1998; Castles and Miller 2003). ‘Refugee’ and ‘economic migrant’ are labels that are frequently harnessed to do ideological work with little regard for the understandings, needs and experiences of the people being labelled. An especially telling example is the different fates of Cuban and Haitian boatpeople who respectively arrived on US shores in the 1990s. Both groups were fleeing collapsing economies and repressive regimes, yet the Haitians were repatriated as purely economic migrants whereas the Cubans were accepted into the US as political refugees (MasudPiloto 1996: 111–27). People like Mario, Caridad, don Orlando and Isabel, and their families migrated variously because of colonial projects, war, poverty, political repression, instability, in search of opportunities, or because they believed they would feel more at home somewhere else. The multi-generational mobility across the Atlantic, up and down the American continent and within and beyond the cold war-defined East–West divide certainly complicates ideas of migration as a single, uni-directional movement between A and B, or of the Cuban diaspora as uniquely and solely a post-1959 story. Mario’s years in Prague and marriage to a Czech woman speak of the new transnational world in which Cuba became enmeshed after the revolution in 1959, suggesting that we need to look beyond the US–Cuba relationship to appreciate mobility in and out of Cuba in the second half of the twentieth century. Individuals within the families whose stories appear in this book could at different points in time be labelled variously as labour migrants, exiles, return migrants, undocumented migrants, refugees, or child migrants, but such labels do not necessarily tell us much about their subjective experiences and motivations and whether or not these stayed the same or changed over time. What the labels do tell us about, is the importance of the state in structuring, channelling and defining migration and its effects on the migrants 58

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themselves. As Mario commented, the notion that you need a passport, now so taken for granted, is actually a relatively recent phenomenon: In that epoch [early twentieth century] people didn’t have passports, you didn’t need citizenship or work permits; you just went and said “look, I’d like work” … It wasn’t like today when you need seventy-five permits from the authorities to do anything only to be told that the problem is that there are no jobs.

Notwithstanding the complexity of personal circumstances and motivations for leaving the island, Cubans in Spain themselves often differentiate between economic and political factors for leaving, reflecting the polarized discourse about nation and migration. Those who arrived in Spain up until and including the 1970s uniformly define themselves as political Exiles. Yet when asked to explain why they left, they refer to both political and economic factors. By contrast, those who have arrived later tend to say they left for a combination of personal, political and economic reasons, but are often reluctant to use the term ‘exile’ about themselves. The most recent arrivals from the 1990s onwards say they left Cuba because of the economic crisis, and some were keen to say they were not political exiles. What follows is a brief overview of migratory flows from Cuba since 1959 through to the early 2000s, focusing especially on migration to Spain.8

Emigration from Cuba 1959–1980s During the period from 1959 to 1962 over 200,000 Cubans left the island for the US (Masud-Piloto 1996: xxiv). According to official Cuban figures, in the first two years after the revolution alone, Cuba lost half of its doctors and teachers to the US (ibid.: 33–34), although these figures may not be entirely reliable. Upper middle- and upper-class whites made up the majority of this first wave of Exiles (Fagen, Brody and O’Leary 1968). This is how don Orlando remembered the early 1960s: The millionaires left … those who had yachts left in yachts, those who had sailboats took their boats and left. Those who had nothing couldn’t leave … I said to myself: why should I try to fight it, let’s wait and see how this is going to turn out. But it went from bad to worse and everyone was thinking that the Americans wouldn’t allow it.

When it became clear that the US was not going to intervene militarily in Cuba, the exodus of the upper echelons of Cuban society accelerated, effectively entailing the abdication of the very social forces that might have curbed Castro’s power (de la Campa 2000: 27). Rather than weakening the country, the exodus of the professional and managerial classes thus helped consolidate Castro’s power base 59

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inside Cuba (Masud-Piloto 1996: 52). It was in effect, as Jesús Díaz has called it, the ‘suicide of the Cuban bourgeoisie’ (Díaz 2001: 86). Their departure, combined with the new government’s investment in the public sector, opened unprecedented opportunities for social mobility for hitherto disenfranchised groups. Those who left Cuba were at first not allowed to return even to visit family (Masud-Piloto 1996). In tandem with the no-return policy, the Cuban government maintained a strict ban on communications between Cubans within and outside the island from the early 1960s until the late 1970s (Eckstein and Barberia 2002: 804), and made job promotions contingent on severing contacts with diasporic relatives (Eckstein 2009: 129). The US government for its part barred possibilities for travel after the embargo was put in place in 1961, and prohibited Americans from spending US dollars in Cuba (ibid.: 128). The Cuban government’s no-return policy was changed in the 1970s when first small and then larger numbers of chosen individuals were allowed back for visits. Today, most émigré Cubans can travel back to visit Cuba, although visas are still required, with Cubans in the US continuing to face restrictions from both Cuba and the US. Not all families have been able to re-establish contact and migration continues to be a fraught topic. Rafael, a journalist, had been trying to locate a paternal uncle in the US since 1998 when he himself left Cuba, but had given up when I interviewed him: Rafael: I don’t know them [his relatives in the US] because my father was a communist, or he is a communist and he broke all ties with him [the brother] in the 1970s. He never wrote to him again and we never knew anything about them. It’s a pity for they were only two brothers. They have no other siblings. MLB: So your uncle doesn’t know that you are here [in Madrid]? Rafael: No he doesn’t know. I have tried, I spent three months looking on the Internet and in telephone directories, everything, but those I found with the right surname were not related to me … My uncle tried to get him [Rafael’s father] out of the country several times, but he said ‘No, never’ … since it was prohibited to write and exchange letters … But he is probably dead now, as he was older than my father.

In Cuban government discourse, who qualifies as Cuban and who does not was until recently politically exclusive and territorially defined; government discourse accorded authenticity only to those Cubans who were living on the island (Torres 1998: 178–79). Since the 1960s, leaving the island has in official discourse been described as an act of treason towards the revolution. Cubans in Miami and in Cuba who were against Castro were often referred to as gusanos, ‘maggots’ or ‘worms’, thereby stripping them not only of their Cubanness but even of their humanity. When diaspora Cubans were first allowed to visit the island again, popular humour therefore dubbed them mariposas, ‘butterflies’, for their

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supposed transformation from despised ‘maggots’ to welcome hard-currencycarrying visitors from ‘the community abroad’ (M. Torres 1995b: 219). Communist cadres who leave the island are still designated as traidores, ‘traitors’, while the more value neutral quedada/o (‘stayee’), is mostly used for those who do not return after a journey abroad, but who abstain from making political statements against the government in public and who did not occupy a politically important post before deserting. Notwithstanding the recalcitrant rhetoric, the Cuban government has changed its discourse and policy over time to accommodate pressure from within and to attract hard currency from Cubans abroad, especially so after the economic crisis in the 1990s (Eckstein 2009: 135). The Cuban government’s antagonistic stance towards its diaspora has its mirror image among the Exiles in Miami. When the first diasporic Cubans returned to visit the island, they were ostracized and threatened with violence by hardliners (Azicri 1981/2). Some Exile groups vandalized and firebombed businesses of Cubans known to support dialogue with the Cuban government, and clandestine Exile groups even assassinated individuals known to support reconciliation (Eckstein 2009: 131). They saw any contact with Cubans on the island, even for family purposes, as treason, and lines of division often ran right through families (Behar 1995; M. Torres 1995a; Masud-Piloto 1996). When diplomatic relations and direct flights between Cuba and the US were severed in 1961, Cubans leaving the island for the US had to go through a third country. In this period, Spain gave visas to all Cubans who applied at the consulate and who could show they had relatives or friends in Spain (García-Montón García Baquero 1997: 276). Spain was in this period the only Western European nation to have a scheduled air service to Cuba (Lambie 1993: 256). Even though less than 10,000 Cubans had a Spanish residence permit during the 1960s (García-Montón García Baquero 1997: 278), Madrid hosted large numbers of Cubans en route to the US throughout the 1960s and 1970s. This is how José María, who arrived in Madrid in 1979 at the age of twelve, remembered the period: I would put up a little table in the street, like the Africans you see [in Madrid] today. I was the same in that period, but selling tobacco, chewing gum, things like that and it wasn’t easy at all. The police would be after you as well … They could take the merchandise away from you and if they got hold of your money they would take it as well so you had to fight for it.

The total number of Cubans believed to have arrived in Spain in the 1960s varies between 125,000 and 200,000, but at least 80,000 of them left for the US after some time. This group constituted approximately half of all immigrants and exiles in Spain at the time (Romano 1989: 17 n.1; Colectivo IOÉ 1993: 234–35). Some were technically returnee migrants; approximately 10,000 Cubans with Spanish passports arrived in Spain in the early 1960s (García-Montón García

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Baquero 1997: 283 n.15). Others were first- and second-generation descendants of Spanish emigrants. A number of NGOs, Church groups and other charities were involved in assisting the Cuban arrivals (Martín Fernández and Romano 1994: 52–53). In this period, most Cubans considered their stay in Spain temporary, and although they officially needed a permit to work the requirement was rarely enforced. Between 1960 and 1989 only 4,000 resident Cubans opted for Spanish nationality, although the number steadily increased year on year (García-Montón García Baquero 1997: 283). The small number probably reflects the fact that many Cubans in this period continued to harbour hopes of a return to the island or else of migrating to the US. Isabel García-Montón García Baquero argues that a contributing factor was that, as immigrants, Cubans had access to assistance from NGOs and charities, making it relatively unattractive to apply for nationality (ibid.: 283). In the late 1960s, growing Soviet influence turned Cuba’s revolution more austere. Beatriz, an architect who left Cuba in 1988 after marrying a Spanish citizen, remembered the 1970s and 1980s as decades of imposed uniformity and repressive demands for conformity in everything from thought to clothes. Mario, who was sent back to Cuba against his wishes in 1967, remembered the period as gloomy and ominous: When I returned to Cuba I saw a total change … I had left with the romantic revolution and I returned to the bureaucratic revolution, with repressive bureaucracy, oppression, Stalinist tendencies … and I started to be afraid. I tried to regain my old job, but they wouldn’t let me have it … Then the ‘Revolutionary Offensive’ came, during which they nationalized absolutely everything that was left of private businesses, small industries and shops. They even nationalized little food stalls and that kind of thing.

Mario had returned in the middle of the so-called ‘Push for Communism’. During this period, disenchanted revolutionaries started applying to leave the island. Most were sent to forced-labour camps before they were allowed to leave. The political changes in Spain in the 1970s which followed the death of Franco, culminating in the victory of the Socialist Party in the first democratic elections in 1977, made some resident Cubans nervous that Spain would turn socialist in the same way that Cuba had. Some therefore decided to leave for the US and the number of Cubans with residence permits in Spain fell from around 12,000 in 1974 to less than 7,000 in 1978 (García-Montón García Baquero 1997: 285). After the 1970s, the flow of Cubans to Spain slowed down due to increasing restrictions on migration from Cuba. In 1980, a new mass exodus from Cuba occurred, this time with a different demographic profile from the previous waves. This was the Mariel boat lift, named after the port west of Havana, whence ap-

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proximately 125,000 Cubans left the island bound for the US. Nearly half of the marielitos, as they became known, were young enough to have grown up in socialist Cuba (Bach, Bach, and Triplett 1981/2: 36). In Cuban government discourse they were called lumpen [-proletariat] and escoria, ‘dregs of society’. Ironically, the marielitos were not well received in the US either. US media branded them as ‘thugs’ and ‘anti-socials’ (Fernandez 1981/2; Borneman 1986). The marielitos diversified the existing Cuban community in Miami in terms of race and class composition and lifestyle. In de la Nuez’s words, the marielitos confronted the Miami Exiles with the reality of a country that was also black, pagan, homosexual, iconoclast and plebeian. They presented a terrible mirror image that the Cuban community in Miami had forgotten or tried to forget … Their insertion within the exile [community], which lived with half of its conscience in a pre-1959 Cuba was … difficult, for these shirtless people arrived to confirm to them that the Cuba they longed for was dead and buried. (de la Nuez 1998: 106–8)

About 500 Cubans from the Mariel boat lift were given asylum in Spain (GarcíaMontún García Baquero 1997: 281) and throughout the 1980s, the total number of Cubans in Spain remained relatively stable at approximately 12,000 (ibid.: 284). During this decade, the Spanish government introduced legislation which discriminated against non-nationals in the labour market and then increased its monitoring of employers’ compliance with the law. Since then it has become more attractive to hold Spanish nationality and it has become increasingly difficult for newly arrived immigrants to establish themselves in the Spanish labour market. For many Cubans in Spain, this situation echoed their parents’ or grandparents’ predicament in 1930s Cuba when legislation was passed to protect the Cuban work force (Maluquer de Motes 1994: 141). Most had a pragmatic approach to the nationality issue and expressed a preference for Spanish nationality for reasons of practicality.

Cuba’s Economic Crisis of the 1990s and the Balseros With the break-up of the Soviet Union and the socialist bloc, Cuba’s economy plummeted. Between 1989 and 1993 Cuba’s economy shrunk 35 to 50 per cent and living standards fell dramatically (Pérez-Stable 1999: 174). At the same time, the US stepped up its efforts to extend the collapse of the Eastern bloc to Cuba (Eckstein 2003: 93). In response, Fidel Castro declared the country to be in a ‘Special Period in Peacetime’ (Periodo Especial en Tiempos de Paz, hereafter Special Period) and introduced a number of austerity measures to rescue the crumbling economy. The

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government also initiated reforms that drew on features of capitalist economies (ibid.: 102–10). Since then, the economy has recovered considerably, not least thanks to the rise in tourism, which surpassed sugar as Cuba’s main hard currency earner in the 1990s (Morris 2007). The economic crisis had implications for social, economic and geographical mobility within Cuba, and new sectors of Cuban society started harbouring dreams of emigrating. The generation of Cubans who were born in the late 1970s and 1980s has been particularly affected. They grew up in a period of relative prosperity during which education and social mobility were within reach. As they reached adulthood, the crisis set in. Since then they have experienced downward social mobility, the opposite of what their parents’ generation experienced in their youth (Eckstein 2003: 125). The growing economic inequalities which emerged during this period became a source of anger and frustration among Cubans who had become used to a fairly egalitarian society. In 1993 and 1994 the crisis reached its peak. Even people living in flats in Havana began to keep pigs and chicken to ensure they had enough food, and some 40,000 Cubans lost their eyesight owing to an epidemic of optic neuritis caused by nutritional deficiencies (ibid.: 135). Meanwhile, the US hardened its embargo against Cuba (Castro 1997: 100). In 1994 a serious food shortage led to riots in Havana, the first since 1959. Tens of thousands of Cubans took to the sea bound for the US on fragile homemade rafts, balsas, and thus became known as balseros, of which unknown numbers perished at sea (Ackerman 1996a).9 Maida, the architect, had vivid memories of the period: In 1994 … the situation in the whole country was disastrous, economically speaking … The moment in which I said to myself ‘I want to leave’ was when I was standing on the beach in Guanabo [east of Havana] and I saw rafts and rafts of people leaving the country and the police were just standing there. Fidel [Castro] was saying that anyone who wanted to leave could leave. People were dying and nobody said anything. Absolutely nobody said anything at all.

A demographic profile of the balseros showed that they were mostly young adults raised entirely under the revolution and that many of them left immediate family behind. Compared to earlier waves of migrants, the balseros were also more racially mixed and represented a wider spectrum of class and regional origins (ibid.). Both Cuban and US scholars have found that balseros left because they saw it as the only way of achieving an improvement in their lives (Ackerman 1996b; Aja Díaz 2000). During this period, the number of Cubans in Spain appears to have fluctuated considerably, dropping from 5,000 in 1990, to only 2,500 in the following year, before jumping to 16,500 in 1999. While some fluctuation is to be expected as a result of Cubans moving from Spain to the US or elsewhere, the actual number

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of Cubans residing in Spain is likely to have been both higher and more stable than these numbers suggest. The fluctuations, for example, hide the fact that some Cubans opted for Spanish citizenship while others fell out of the statistics when they moved, and some may never have registered in the first place.

Migration to Spain ‘Via Russia’ Between the late 1990s and spring 2002, many Cubans migrated to Spain ‘via Russia’ (via Rusia). This way of emigrating was used by those who did not have cause to travel because of their jobs, and merits explanation. Since Russia did not require an entry-visa for Cubans, a market for invitations to Russia emerged in Cuba. According to Cubans in Madrid, these invitations were available in Havana at a price of US$100 per letter. The letters were sold by Russian citizens living in Cuba, and Cubans with relatives in Russia, both legacies of Cuba’s inclusion in the Soviet socialist bloc. With an invitation to go to Russia, Cubans would apply for an exit permit from the Cuban authorities at the price of roughly three times the average annual state salary (Eckstein 2009: 247 n.67). Once obtained, the would-be migrants would then buy a plane ticket to Russia entailing a stop-over in Madrid. These tickets were only available at market prices, again well beyond what would be affordable on an average state salary. On landing in Madrid the would-be migrants applied for political asylum in Spain. According to administrative practice, Cuban citizens were not repatriated when their applications were deemed unfounded. Instead, they were given ‘humanitarian leave’ to stay in the country for up to sixty days. Most Cubans who arrived in Spain ‘via Russia’ left immediate family behind. The high cost of this migration route made it impossible for families to pay for more than one member to emigrate and more than one member of the same family may not have been given exit permits anyway. Although Cubans were treated preferentially in that they were not repatriated, humanitarian leave did not entail residence and work permits. Cubans who entered Spain in this manner therefore had to find jobs on the same terms as other immigrants, but could hope for an amnesty (see Introduction) that would enable them to legalize their situation. However, the Spanish government closed this route down by imposing an obligatory transit visa on Cuban citizens from March 2002. The decision followed several incidents when plane loads of passengers from Havana sought asylum in Spain.10 As was intended, the measure considerably reduced the number of Cubans arriving in Spain, and for the first time since 1959 the Spanish government started repatriating Cuban citizens.11 The transit visa requirement has made it almost impossible for Cubans to reach Spain unless as part of a professional exchange or on an invitation from a Spanish institution, making it virtually impossible for non-professional Cubans to enter, with the exception of marriage migration.12 65

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The clamp-down on the Russian route appeared to augur a severe restriction on Cuban migration to Spain. In 2007, however, the Spanish government passed the ‘Law of Historical Memory’ (Ley de la Memoria Histórica), also known as the ‘Grandchildren’s Law’, which opened for new migratory flows.13 In recognition of the injustice inflicted upon those Spaniards who were forced into exile during the Spanish Civil War (1936–1939) and the ensuing dictatorship, grandchildren of Spanish exiles became eligible for Spanish citizenship even if their parents did not hold it.14 Hitherto, nationality had been accessible for children of Spanish citizens only. Initially, it was estimated that as many as 400,000 Cubans would be eligible for Spanish citizenship on the basis of the new law, but in July 2009 the Spanish consulate in Havana adjusted the estimate to 100,000. In February 2009, Norberto Díaz, a 38-year-old cardiologist from Havana, became the first Cuban to obtain a Spanish passport in accordance with the new law; his three siblings were also granted Spanish nationality. Díaz was planning to migrate to Spain immediately, and in a press interview with the Spanish news agency EFE he explained that he had always wanted to ‘return to my land [mi tierra]’.15 The law expires at the end of 2011, but before then may give rise to a new diasporic generation of Cubans in Spain, with the full privilege of Spanish citizenship. The implications of Spanish migration to Cuba in the early twentieth century for Cuban migration to Spain, are thus still unfolding.

Conclusion By looking at the Cuban diaspora in Spain within a context of the history of mobility between Spain and Cuba, historical continuities become more apparent than the disjunctures. The historical context of movement and interrelationships is important for understanding how the Cuban diaspora in Spain has developed, and continues to develop, and for appreciating how it is different from the USbased diaspora. Yet it is also clear that memories of the past constitute a particularly contested terrain linked to politicized positions. I have highlighted some of the contested terrain of the Cuban past in order to show the complex context in which diasporic memories are produced. Conflict over how to define the past manifests itself not just in different ritual calendars but also in the way that history is mapped onto territory, such as in the renaming of places and streets. The Cubans living in Spain today have left Cuba over a period of half a century. Given the dramatic changes in Cuban society over this time, their memories of their homeland vary greatly and sometimes are mutually incompatible. The variations in their memories are exacerbated by the politicization of representations of Cuba. I suggest that the best way to make sense of these contradictions and contestations is through the concept of diasporic generation. Accordingly, in the following three chapters, I portray each of the three diasporic generations in turn. 66

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Notes   1. In this respect Cuban migration to Spain may differ from that bound for the US.   2. In 1998, US authorities apprehended ten Cuban citizens accused of running a network of secret agents. Five declared themselves guilty as charged and received prison sentences of between four-and-a-half and seven years. The other five maintained their innocence but were found guilty, and are now serving life sentences. The Cuban government considers these five men political prisoners (Mauricio Vicent. 2002. ‘EE UU-Cuba: la guerra sigue’, El País, 30 June, p.4).   3. The date commemorates the unsuccessful attack on the Moncada Barracks in 1953 led by Fidel Castro. The attack signalled the beginning of the revolutionary struggle and Castro’s movement was thereafter named the 26 July Movement.   4. These are the titles in English of volumes edited by Spanish historians Consuelo Naranjo Orovio and Tomás Mallo Gutiérrez (1994) and Juan Pan-Montojo (1998).   5. Slavery was abolished in Haiti after the slave revolt of 1791–1804, and in the Dominican Republic in 1822. In the British Caribbean, the Abolition Act was passed in 1833; the French abolished slavery in 1848; the Netherlands in 1863 (Knight and Palmer 1989: 8). Scholars disagree over the reasons for the abolition of slavery in Cuba: see, e.g., the contributions in Moreno Fraginals, Pons and Engerman (1985).   6. The shift is subtly hinted at in the film Memorias del subdesarrollo/Memories of Underdevelopment (dir. Tomás Gutiérrez Alea, 1968).   7. Similarly, scholarship on Spanish migration to Cuba in the early twentieth century is also characterized by a degree of politicization. In addition to differences explained by ideologically driven understandings of Cuba’s past, methodological nationalism (Wimmer and Glick Schiller 2003) and different national traditions have resulted in scant cross-referencing between Cuban, Spanish and US historiography. In literature on Spanish migration to Cuba in the early twentieth century, Spanish historians tend to adopt the point of view of the migrants. They often focus on emigration from a particular region in Spain – such as the Canary Islands or Asturias – and emphasize the relative powerlessness of the immigrants and their reasons for migrating, such as poverty or the scarcity of land. In other words, they contextualize the migration primarily within a Spanish context (see, e.g., Naranjo Orovio 1984, 1994; Iglesias García 1988; Eiras Roel 1991; García-Abásolo 1992; Maluquer de Motes 1992, 1994; and Morales Padrón 1992). For a critical review of Spanish historiography on emigration to the Americas in the colonial period, see Mörner (1995). US historians on the other hand contextualize migration in the light of Cuban nation building and emphasize the interrelations between race and immigration policies, but show less sensitivity to the motivations of Spanish migrants and internal stratification among whites in Cuba (see, e.g. Helg 1990; Chomsky 2000).   8. For book-length accounts of Cuban migration to the US, see, e.g., Fagen, Brody and O’Leary (1968), Boswell and Curtis (1984), Portes and Bach (1985), Rieff (1994), García (1996), Masud-Piloto (1996), Tweed (1997), Eckstein (2009) and Prieto (2009).

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  9. For a description of the impact of the Special Period on everyday social life, see Fernandez (1996b). The film Balseros (dir. Carles Bosch and Josep María Domènech, 2002) contains footage from the street riots and interviews with balseros. 10. See the various reports in El País, 24 January 2002, p.22; 12 March 2002, p.22; 5 May 2002, p.16. 11. El País, 31 March 2002, p.22. 12. According to Inebase – the website of the Spain’s Instituto Nacional de Estadística – 1,834 marriages between Cuban and Spanish citizens were contracted in 1999. Thereafter Inebase ceased making data available by nationality of non-Spanish spouse, with the only data available being for the total number of registered marriages between Spanish and non-Spanish citizens. See http://www.ine.es/inebmenu/ indice.htm. 13. Ley 52/2007 de 26 de diciembre. 14. See the website of Spain’s Ministry of Justice: Ministerio de Justicia. 2007. ‘Concesión de la nacionalidad española a descendientes de españoles (Hasta el 27 de diciembre de 2011)’. Retrieved 30 July 2009 from: http://leymemoria.mjusticia.es/ paginas/es/descendientes.html. 15. ‘El primer cubano con pasaporte español por “ley de nietos” emigrará enseguida’. Público.es, 2 June 2009. Retrieved 16 October 2009 from: http://www.publico. es/agencias/efe/197995/primer/cubano/pasaporte/espanol/ley/nietos/emigrara/ enseguida?nr=1.

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Chapter 3 T he E xiles

n This was what we brought with us on our journey across oceans, beyond frontiers, through life: our little storehouse of anecdote and what-happened-next, our private once-upon-a-time. We were our stories. —Salman Rushdie, Fury

Many diasporic Cubans emphasized the individual and idiosyncratic aspects of their personal experiences of leaving the island. Yet as I undertook interviews, listened to stories and became part of conversations and social interaction, commonalities started to emerge. In the broadest sense these were in the form of an orientation towards Cuba, and more specifically in the culturally embedded forms of expressing belonging. Thus for all the Cubans I met during fieldwork, memories of home, homeland and migration were given form by spoken and written narratives, whether referring to ideas of the nation or ‘fatherland’ (patria), or simply the family home. De Certeau’s assertion that ‘what the map cuts up, the story cuts across’ (de Certeau 1984: 129) was thus borne out. Narratives serve not only to give meaning to the past but are also a means by which to draw boundaries between selves and others. They are imaginative constructs of origin and belonging, articulated within specific social and spatial geographies, ‘worldly’ texts ‘enmeshed in circumstance, time, place, and society’ (Said 1984: 35). Narratives situate the self, and help to give meaning to bewildering and painful experiences. As Michael Jackson argues: ‘To reconstitute events in a story is no longer to live those events in passivity, but to actively rework them, both in dialogue with others and within one’s own imagination’ (Jackson 2002: 15). Through storytelling, reality is made bearable (ibid.: 16). Thus it is effectively through storytelling that diaspora and diasporic subjects are constituted. As Stuart Hall argues, ‘[i]dentity is formed at the unstable point where the “unspeakable” stories of subjectivity meet the narratives of history, of a culture’ (Hall 1996: 115). In this and the following two chapters, I situate the stories my informants told me in their historical and cultural context. To respect the integrity of my informants as subjects, I have retained their stories as much as possible in their own words.

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Leaving Revolutionary Cuba for Franco’s Spain The Exiles left Cuba after the revolution and up to about 1980. By their own account, they left for political and religious reasons, though only a minority had been personally persecuted. Most of them additionally had strong material incentives for leaving Cuba, having lost their class-based privileges, including property and jobs. Many emigrated in family groups through various assisted emigration schemes in the 1960s and 1970s. They were from Havana’s middle to uppermiddle class, and overwhelmingly ‘white’. The Cuban upper class also left in this period but did not settle in Spain in significant numbers, although some passed through Spain on the way to the US. The Exiles count among their numbers some owners of big companies, such as a fast food chain and a telecommunications company, but they are exceptions, as confirmed by the fact that it was always the same few names that were mentioned (see also Martín Fernández and Romano 1994: 91). Many women among the Exiles had paid work outside the home – as secretaries or shop assistants, for example – whereas the men tended to be self-employed, professionals (especially accountants and lawyers) or office workers in Cuba. In contrast to the subsequent diasporic generations, for the Exiles the move to Spain meant a lowering of their standard of living compared to what they had been used to in Havana. The Exiles come from a fairly homogeneous background and many knew each other from Havana: they were educated in the same private Catholic schools, frequented the same social clubs and Spanish Societies, and lived in the same middle-class neighbourhoods. Most of them were unhappy with Fulgencio Batista’s dictatorship in the years before the revolution, but mostly they had not been actively involved in politics. Initially they supported Castro, but turned against him when the revolution radicalized and the government declared itself socialist. Thereafter they found themselves in a rapidly changing society with a new moral economy and new ideas of personhood and belonging, where their livelihoods, lifestyle and world-views were no longer tenable, and where politics entered the workplace and private sphere in ways they found unacceptable. Specifically, some made the decision to leave when their properties were confiscated and some when the companies they worked for were nationalized. The abolishing of public accountancy during the ‘revolutionary offensive’ as a preparation for a money-less society (Thomas 2001: 987–88) led many accountants to leave. Those who left in the early 1960s believed that they would return soon, as they expected a swift US-backed invasion of Cuba and an overturning of the revolutionary government. Many of the Exiles were returning Spanish migrants or first-generation descendants of Spanish migrants. They therefore had family or even property in Spain, and it was not uncommon for them to settle for a time in Asturias or Galicia

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before they moved to either Madrid or Barcelona, where there were more jobs. Yet even if they were in a sense returning ‘home’ they identified themselves as Cubans. Many found work with the same multinational companies for which they had worked in Cuba, such as Coca-Cola, Pfizer and others. In Madrid, they first settled in the neighbourhoods of El Carmen and Acacias, centred around two now-defunct soup kitchens that were specifically set up for Cuban immigrants. Few Cubans live in these areas today and they are not generally known as ‘Cuban’ neighbourhoods. It is indicative of the politics of the Exiles that they chose to leave Castro’s Cuba in favour of Franco’s Spain, yet for many the imperative was to leave Cuba regardless of where they ended up. Notwithstanding their outspoken stance on the lack of democracy in Cuba, most Exiles had little to say about the Franco government. Thus, standing outside the Museo de América, a museum founded and built during the Franco years on the outskirts of Madrid, with a view over a valley where important battles over Madrid took place during the Spanish Civil War, one middle-aged man of the Exile generation commented to me that ‘at least Franco saved Spain from communism’. We had walked out of the museum together after a lecture about the historical links between Spain and Cuba. Although some of the Exiles would disagree with the remark – and one younger man quickly intervened to say that I should not pay attention to it – it stands in contrast to the position of the Children of the Revolution, who often emphasized that they would not have settled in Spain prior to the transition to democracy. Yet apart from an often passionate anti-Castroism, many Exiles seemed to have little interest in politics. The Exiles did not experience the decision to leave Cuba as particularly difficult or exceptional; it was after all what most of their friends and family were planning. But the waiting period and the actual moment of leaving were both traumatic and dramatic experiences for many. After applying to leave the island, they often had to wait years for an exit permit, and in the meantime had their belongings, property and savings confiscated. Upon applying for permission to leave they would also lose their jobs, and men were forced to work in sugar fields attached to labour camps. They were allowed to take with them only one suitcase weighing a maximum of twenty kilogrammes; photographs taken outdoors could not be taken out of the country. This is how Sergio, who arrived in Madrid in 1971 after more than a decade of waiting, remembered his stay in one of the dreaded labour camps: I cut sugar cane for nineteen months … You’re treated like and considered a political prisoner in the process of rehabilitation. You can’t go to the village or city nearby, you live in a hostel close to the fields and you have to cut cane every day including Saturdays and Sunday mornings. They only gave you Sunday afternoons off so that you could wash your clothes, these disgusting clothes that you use to cut the cane all week … If you fulfilled … the quota that they set for you, they would give you five days off 71

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to visit your home every thirty days of work. I worked … until the government gave me the exit permit and I left.

Sergio was born in Havana in 1941 to a Spanish father and a Cuban mother. When I met him, he lived with his Spanish wife and two sons, born in 1980 and 1983. Sergio decided early on after the revolution that he wanted to leave Cuba, but first he had to wait until he was twenty-one to be able to apply in the first place. He was then working as a bank clerk. With the Cuban missile crisis and the prospect of war in 1962, all exit permits for young men of military age were frozen, and he had to wait until he was twenty-seven to apply again. When he finally received his exit permit, Sergio paid his ticket with money borrowed from friends who had already left Cuba.1 He left his frail elderly parents behind, not knowing if he would ever see them again. Upon arrival in Madrid, friends of his father’s took him in and helped him. Nineteen months later he managed to bring over his parents with money borrowed from the same friends, but not all families were reunited. In this period many Cuban families were rent asunder by geography and politics and many Exiles have family members spread across the US, Mexico, Venezuela and other countries, with only distant relatives remaining on the island. They therefore only know about recent developments in Cuba through the mass media and second-hand accounts. Others remain in contact (or have resumed it) with relatives in Cuba by letter and telephone. In some cases these relatives form part of the now emerging entrepreneurial class. The Exiles have close links to Cubans in Miami and many of them have lived in Miami for periods or visit frequently. For them, Miami is ‘the other neighbourhood’ (el otro barrio), as they called it, a known and familiar place in spite of its physical distance from Madrid. They tend to be in favour of the US-imposed trade embargo on Cuba and disagree with the Spanish government’s more dialogue-oriented approach. Many Exiles maintain contact with former classmates and teachers and receive newsletters from employee clubs of businesses that have otherwise not existed for the past fifty years or so. Most of these newsletters are produced in Miami and are distributed worldwide, carrying information about anniversaries, birthdays and social events. They also award certificates for ‘long and loyal service’ to employees, thus keeping alive the memory of their losses and maintaining group boundaries. In short, the Exiles had established a community of people who share class background and migration experience, but were mistrustful of anyone who left the island later than they did. The Exiles saw these other Cubans as generally untrustworthy opportunists. They preferred to socialize with people whom they knew from Cuba or who were introduced to them by someone they knew from Cuba. The moment of leaving Cuba especially served as a key boundary marker. Mario explained:

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There was a tendency, which was very marked in Miami and in Madrid as well … which consisted of the following: ‘I left in ’60. So you, who left in ’65, have collaborated with the spurious government of Fidel, the communist dictatorship’ … Personally, I left in ’69 and arrived here in 1970 and for some narrow minded people who had left in ’61, ’60 or in ’59, that indicated that I had collaborated with Castro’s regime, with communism, and that I had agreed [with the government] … I would even say ‘Yes, I was a revolutionary. I was like many people, almost everyone in fact, but I have not started to pretend [that I was not a revolutionary]’ … Those of us who have been in exile twenty or thirty years always look with some suspicion at those who have left since 1990 … What happens is that after some years of having to deal with them, I don’t have the same suspicion because I get used to them. There are even people who were linked to the regime until recently [whom I now get on with].

This process is in effect the articulation of a moral economy where deprivation, loss, nostalgia and suffering play shifting roles in diasporic subjects’ projections of themselves and in the production of memory and politics. In this economy, the moment of leaving constitutes the currency. What is at stake is the ‘purity of exile’ (Malkki 1995); that is, a morally infused Exile identity in which the criteria of when, why and how someone left Cuba combine to determine that person’s perceived moral standing in the eyes of others. The arrival of each new generation upsets the outlook and being-in-diaspora of those Cubans already living in Spain, and new boundary making processes ensue. As Mario explained, he had at first been looked at with some reserve by those who arrived earlier than himself, whereas he in turn had reservations about those who arrived after him. Some Exiles were also hostile to me and many were suspicious about the political motives behind my research. I was at one point confronted with the rumour that I was going to Cuba to ‘talk to the government’, which was tantamount to discrediting my research completely. I was often uncomfortable about my language when interviewing the Exiles because they were so sensitive to certain terms and expressions. I was confronted with informants who wanted a clear indication that I was ‘on their side’ as the basis of feeling comfortable in talking to me. On the other hand, some Exiles were eager to talk to me as they saw it as a chance to have their stories told. Although some of the Exiles had lived for up to forty years in Spain, they would often reminisce about their losses and their past in Cuba. Many had paintings reminding them of Cuba on the walls of their homes, e.g. depicting the Morro fortress in Havana or a Cuban flame tree. They also often kept tropical plants in pots and displayed Cuban flags in their homes. Many Exiles enjoyed Cuban music, but not the kind which became popular in the West in the 1990s. Rather, the Exiles liked to listen to Cuban music with a strong European influence, such as that of Lecuona.2 The narratives of the Exiles are similar in structure: they involve the invocation of a bourgeois, consumption-oriented lifestyle in middle-class neighbourhoods of pre-revolutionary Havana. Indeed, their memories of homeland are of Ha73

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vana, not Cuba. They would often use the same examples to convey the nature of their lives in the 1950s and the high standard of living they enjoyed when compared to Spain in the same period. Norma, the widowed housewife, said about her first impressions of Spain: ‘It was a lot more backward than Cuba was even after ten years of revolution, both with regard to material things – like finding a refrigerator – as with regard to mentality’. Recurrent tropes were that Cuba had colour TV before the revolution whereas in Spain it was only introduced in 1980; that Cuba had railways before Spain; that Cuba was richer than Spain in 1959; that the UN statistics for 1959 showed that Cuba was an affluent country, unlike its current position which is more like that of Bolivia, in this case a shorthand for under-development and abject poverty. Such Exile tropes of the affluence and modernity of Cuba in the 1950s place Cuba and Cubans in a different category from other more recent groups of racialized immigrants to Spain from the global south, such as Moroccans or Ecuadorians. Through narratives of progress and wealth, the Exiles attempt to reclaim the splendour of their past, which stood in contrast to their lives in Spain, particularly in the first years after they arrived. Though it was rarely articulated as such, the narratives of Exiles were strongly racialized. Put simply, for the Exiles, Cuba was a white nation with European and North American cultural influences, unlike the Afro-Cuban culture marketed globally today. The degree to which white, urban, middle-class Cubans were aware of or had consciously decided to ignore the stark inequality and abject poverty of the rural hinterlands of Cuba in the 1950s, or whether their narratives are exilic rewritings, is an interesting question. Some Exiles acknowledged political, economic and social problems in Cuba in the 1950s, but others clung to a narrative of a prosperous nation betrayed by the villainous Castro. Román de la Campa, a Cuban-American scholar, reflects on the question in his memoir: We often underestimated – and in some cases deliberately denied – conditions of underdevelopment in Cuba prior to 1959: the high levels of poverty and unemployment in many parts of the country, which at times reached 35 per cent; the absence of doctors and teachers in the vast countryside, where as many as 40 per cent of the people lived; the squalid conditions of Havana’s shantytowns, and, most importantly, Cuba’s illiteracy rates … To us, any account of historically dire conditions in Cuba amounted to communist propaganda. We could only imagine – or remember, from the context of our refugee status – a Cuba that was urban, middle-class, filled with trained professionals, and without any racial discrimination. (de la Campa 2000: 63–64)

As discussed in the Introduction, the seemingly intractable debate over what Cuba was ‘really like’ before the revolution can be attributed to the antagonistic and polarized public discourse which prevailed when the Exiles grew up in 1940s and 1950s Havana. It is the same political discourse which has produced the predominant Exile understanding of contemporary Cuban society, in which 74

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everything hinges upon Fidel Castro. As Lisandro Pérez argues, this understanding is deeply rooted in Cuban history and in a political culture of personalism: once the strongman has gone, everything will fall like a tower of cards overnight (Pérez 2008: 86). In this vision of change, Cuba will return to what it was before the revolution with virtually no traces left of the past fifty years. Not only have the Exiles been able maintain this vision successfully among themselves despite the continual arrival of new Cubans and the manifest changes on the island over the past fifty years, it has also become US policy (ibid.). Ironically, as Eckstein insightfully remarks, the Exiles do not attribute Cuba’s economic hardship to the US embargo, even though they all support it in the hope and belief that it will lead to the collapse of the current regime (Eckstein 2009: 165). Yet as it has become increasingly clear that the only place Castro will fall is into his grave, Exiles are focusing their speculations about change on the day Castro dies (Pérez 2008: 87), just like Esther at the Centro Cubano, as recounted in Chapter 1. This is how Caridad, introduced in Chapter 2, remembered life before and during the early years of the revolution: [T]here were many disastrous governments, terrible! … Dictatorships are always caused by the misfortunes of a country … Batista came to power, but there was a student movement and Fidel Castro was involved with it … My brothers were involved as well when they were students. Fidel Castro went to the Sierra Maestra [a mountain range in the east of Cuba] … It was not a civil war in Cuba, for I knew the Spanish Civil War, it lasted three years. In Cuba, I think [the fighting] was just about a year. They said it was a revolution … My brothers and I, who had all studied at the university, thought it was a nationalist movement, like Perón in Argentina, for everything was very dependent on the Americans. Everything was American. The currency was considered American and Cuban, we depended on the American economy … but we had a fantastic life, people could travel … Before Fidel [Castro] took power, my uncles travelled a lot to Europe, for example to Paris. In the summer, people from Cuba would go to Miami to buy clothes … The standard of living was good. But it seems in the countryside it was different, though I don’t know how.

Like Caridad, many others supported the rebels against Batista, being motivated by nationalism and a dislike of corruption. Caridad’s memory of life in Havana in the 1950s resonates with those of other diasporic Cubans of the Exile generation who remember a comfortable middle-class existence in a politically unstable country, as described by de la Campa. While the Exiles were supported when they began to settle in Spain by various NGOs, the Catholic Church and charities, their narratives convey a strong sense of individual victimization and a subsequent lonely rebuilding of their lives. It is striking that apart from immediate family who arrived with them in Spain, few other persons are present in their narratives. Many of them expressed bitter disappointment at their reception in Spain, both by their own families and by

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the Spanish state. The disappointment should be understood in the context of the welcoming reception Cubans received in the US (see Chapter 2),3 and the comfort and privilege they had become used to in Havana. It is also related to the Exiles’ experience of ordinary Spaniards’ lack of understanding for their plight. Many Exiles recounted stories of conflict with Spanish family members who the Exiles felt were unwelcoming and insensitive when they arrived in Spain. Finally, the Cuban Revolution was the world’s first televised revolution, led by a group of charismatic and photogenic young men. It had a deep resonance and exerted a powerful influence not just in Spain, but on a whole generation of European intellectuals as an ideal of a ‘happy revolution’, which was quite unlike the perceived dreariness of the East European socialist bloc (Arcocha 1994: 234; Díaz 2009).4 European left-wing intellectuals, including Sartre and many others, looked at Cuba as a symbol of hope: ‘Sartre, like so many others, discovers Cuba at the same time as the revolution, as if the country had been conceived the first of January 1959, after a long nightmare called Batista. He was not interested in the past; Cuba’s specific past does not interest him. Cuba is a model, the hope of a “humanist” revolution’ (Machover 1995: 24). Many diasporic Cubans lamented to me that they had to carry the burden of all the other hoped-for, but unaccomplished revolutions of Europe and Latin America in the 1960s. Thus Sergio complained of the lack of understanding for his situation by Spaniards. He was annoyed with prevailing images of Cuba and the Cuban Revolution in Spain, and had often felt misunderstood by Spaniards who supported the revolution in Cuba, particularly during his first years in Spain: ‘I don’t think that anyone who hasn’t lived there [in Cuba] would have the slightest idea of what really occurred and what is still occurring … The only thing people saw was that Fidel Castro was a señor who had “raised his voice against the North American colossus that was subjugating and exploiting all other nations”’. In Sergio’s opinion, the Spanish understanding of the Cuban Revolution was ‘a very folkloric story, which has nothing to do with reality at all’. As Rojas has written: Cuba, the only Communist country in the West, is an island situated 180 kilometres from the coast of the United States, the most powerful nation on the planet. The symbolic battle that these two unequal neighbours initiate in the Caribbean draws the sympathies of a large part of the world towards the little David. All the bitterness, stereotypes and prejudice that Goliath, the giant philistine, awakens in Asia, Africa, Latin America and Europe become involved in the global apparatus for the legitimation of Castro-ism. (Rojas 2001b: 59)

Since other Latin American exile groups in Spain in the 1960s and 1970s originated in left-wing resistance to right-wing dictatorships, there was not much common ground between them and the Cubans. Some Cubans of the Exile generation expressed bitterness at Argentineans and Chileans for rejecting them as 76

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‘true exiles’. However, their later rejection of other Cubans was based on their own similarly partial views.

Geographies of Loss In 1966, Cubans in Madrid founded the Centro Cubano de España (Cuban Centre of Spain), modelled on the Spanish Societies in Havana, to which many of the founder members of the Centro had belonged. According to one of the original founders, the Spanish authorities allowed the Centro to operate only on the condition that it did not engage in overtly political activities. In the first years of its existence the Centro was a hub of activity. It was staffed by numerous volunteers and received generous donations from affluent Cuban Exiles. However, the offspring of the original members of the Centro have been reluctant to join and the Centro has not been able or willing to attract members from subsequent generations of the diaspora. Many of the Exiles expressed regret at the decline in activity of the Centro and lamented that it had not, as they hoped it would, become like the grand Spanish Societies in Havana. The Centro is located in the exclusive Salamanca neighbourhood of Madrid, surrounded by designer boutiques and embassies. Situated on the first floor, part of the premises where the Centro is found are occupied by a relatively upmarket Cuban restaurant serving local customers. The walls of the dimly lit entrance hall are decorated with shields of the six provinces of pre-revolutionary Cuba and a portrait of José Martí.5 An enormous, dated map of Miami-Dade County and a signed photograph of Celia Cruz, the Cuban singer, who died in the US in 2003, illustrate the importance for the Exiles of this other diasporic location: ‘Those are the strong ones’, as Esperanza, an elderly woman, said to me about the Cubans in Miami. According to one of the founders of the Centro Cubano, the 1970s hit ‘Cuando salí de Cuba’ (‘When I left Cuba’), by the Argentinean Luís Aguilé, was premiered there. The lyrics of the song captured the feelings of many Exiles: ‘I can never die / My heart isn’t here / It is waiting for me there / It is waiting for me to return / When I left Cuba / I left my life, I left my love / When I left Cuba / I left behind my buried heart’.6 As well as being an international hit, the song also became the unofficial anthem of Cuban Exiles. As one musician of the Exile generation said to me, ‘all the Cubans always start to cry when we play that song’. During my fieldwork the Centro functioned as a social meeting point for the Exile generation. Groups of elderly men – often clad in guayaberas, the traditional Cuban shirt-jacket – met to play dominoes and discuss politics. Some members of the Centro would go several times a week to exchange news and discuss the latest newspaper articles about Cuba. Opinion pieces from Miamibased newspapers denouncing the Cuban government, were often circulated and

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discussed. For many, the experience of exile dominated their lives and defined not only political outlook but also friendship groups and religious practices. Three days a week the Centro received newly arrived Cubans seeking assistance. This was one of the few occasions at which (some of the) Exiles met Cubans from outside their own peer group. Those who arrived at the Centro were given a small amount of money, a metro ticket, orientation as to where they could go for help in the form of a list of addresses of NGOs and charities, an explanation of procedures for applying for a residence permit, and an offer of a couple of nights’ accommodation in a modest hostel. The Centro kept a record of all new immigrants arriving at their premises –including professional background, marital status, place of residence in Cuba, and so on – and in the year 2000 it received and gave advice to approximately 700 Cubans (Centro Cubano 2001). Being asked to submit information on a form could in itself be an anxiety-inducing experience, and some recently arrived Cubans told me they had provided faulty or incorrect information. They did not know where the information would end up, and ironically some suspected it might be passed on to Cuban authorities. Newly arrived Cubans who came to the Centro were also invited to visit the Ropero de la Caridad del Cobre, a charity named after the patron saint of Cuba and which dispenses second-hand clothes. The Ropero and the advisory service were run mostly by Exile women and were exclusively for Cubans. For the Exiles it was a point of honour to be able to provide these services to their compatriots while it simultaneously provided them with living proof of the failure of the Cuban government. It was also a way of establishing continuity with the immigrant ethos of the Spanish Societies. Both governing members of the Centro as well as diasporic Cubans of other organizations were convinced the Centro had been infiltrated by Cuban intelligence agents, just as US Exile organizations have been in the past. For members of the Centro this confirmed their own importance as meriting surveillance – which was a not unimportant aspect of daily life for some – while at the same time closed their ranks against more recently arrived Cubans who might be agents and thus not trustworthy. Given the tense relationship between the Cuban government and the diaspora it does not seem unlikely that Cuban intelligence services should have tried or indeed succeeded in infiltrating diasporic organizations. Yet the proof provided by members of the Centro may simply have been instances of cross-generational unintelligibility. In Cuba, it is rare for anyone to express political opinions that are not in line with official discourse to persons who are not close friends or relatives. But if newly arrived Cubans failed to expressly condemn the government, the Exiles might think they were ‘agents’, while they themselves were observing their usual circumspection. Some of them might simply not be interested in engaging with the Exiles’ explicit anti-government statements, which for the Exiles would be yet more proof that they were somewhat complicit with the government, if not in fact secret agents. 78

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Some of the members of the Centro were also involved with the Círculo Católico, a Catholic club which met once a month for prayers and discussion of the Bible. The Círculo was led by an elderly Spanish cleric who was himself expelled from Cuba after the revolution. Those involved with the Círculo were mostly middle aged to elderly, and most of them were women. A third group within for the Exile generation was the peña, a discussion group. This group of mostly middle-aged to elderly Exile Cubans met once a month in a café in central Madrid. An invited – usually Exile Cuban – speaker would talk about some aspect of Cuban history, society or culture, followed by a discussion. Many of the talks took the form of reminiscences of Cuba and the audience often interrupted to contribute their own memories of a specific poetry reading in a particular bookshop, a film screening, and so forth. In short, the peña conjured up an emotional landscape, but it only resonated with those who knew Havana in the 1950s, for whom the peña was an occasion for reliving and reimagining the Havana of their youth. For younger Cubans who grew up after the bookshops were closed, or had their names changed, or who were treated to Soviet rather than French cinema, it was difficult to participate. As one 80-year-old man said to me, the peña was ‘too nostalgic’ for younger people, so they did not like to come. Participation in the peña was anyway by invitation only, thus limiting the number of participants.

Exilic Time-spaces and Longing for Cuba Many Exiles still remembered the date, time and day of the week they arrived in Spain. The moment of leaving constituted a narrative turning point that provided the basis for the before-and-after event that most of their life stories were structured around. This is how 35-year-old José María recalled his departure from Havana: I left Cuba on October 1, 1979 … I was twelve years old. It still seems like yesterday, but time passes ever so quickly. I leave with my mother and my maternal grandmother, the Spanish one … This is a traumatic moment for me. You can’t imagine what it feels like when you get on a plane and separate yourself from your beloved and intimate family, who are saying goodbye to you. You are leaving and you don’t know when you will come back, if you are going to come back at all or if you will ever see these persons again. In spite of my young age, I realized the importance of the journey, because … I didn’t know if I would come back. Now I know I will go back, but I didn’t know it in that moment and it was very traumatic. In fact I still can’t stand airplanes or even airports; I don’t like them, they harbour very bad memories. I had to take other planes later because months after coming to Spain we went to the US and then we had to go back again because my mother became very ill … To come back to what I was saying

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to you, I can’t stand airports, because I still remember when this airplane takes off and I see the shore of Havana, this image is recorded in my memory as if it were yesterday.

After the arrival in Spain came the hard years of exile, often recounted with bitterness and regret, as in the words of Norma: When you left from there [Cuba] you knew you wouldn’t go back. There wasn’t that opportunity as there has been later. Right now I could go to Cuba as a tourist, but when I left in that moment one couldn’t go back … When I arrived here, it was like a curtain [falling] and of course you don’t realize until you’re outside and you want to see one or other person and you can’t. When we arrived here the second part comes; the bitterness.

Some of the Exiles seemed to be counting the days since they had left Cuba. I met Eugenia at a birthday party for another Exile Cuban. The following passage is drawn from my fieldnotes: [At the party] Eugenia tells me that on December 11th [2001] it will be thirty-two years since she left Cuba and adds with a sad smile that she has now lived more years in Spain than in Cuba. Eugenia arrived in Spain with her husband and their two small sons. Her husband did forced labour before they were allowed to leave Cuba and their youngest son did not recognize his father when he came back from the labour camp: ‘It broke his soul’, she says to me. Both of Eugenia’s now-adult sons have married Spanish women and feel ‘completely Spanish’, she adds. Eugenia herself has been back to visit Cuba once on her own in 1980, after the government opened up for visits by Exile Cubans for the first time. Since then her parents have died and she has not been back for more visits. Eugenia tells me she would not dare to go back again. She is older now and says she does not feel up to ‘throwing myself into a situation like that’ again. She has heard how ‘deteriorated everything is’ from friends who have gone. She prefers for her brother to come to Spain to visit. He has been a couple of times.7

Eugenia’s narrative, like those of most Exiles, was structured around the traumatic fracture of leaving the island; she had a strong sense of a ‘before’ and an ‘after’, combined with a sense of loss of a whole way of life. Although many Exiles have spent more years in Spain than in Cuba, as Eugenia had, it was as if their lives after leaving Cuba had never quite regained the same intensity of experience, so that their true and most authentic lives had been left behind on the island; the ‘cut down the middle’, as Norma put it. Exile, they feel, robbed them of what was rightfully theirs. For some it was property and money, but for José Maria it was education and youth: My adolescence passed, it was that simple, it just passed because I had to work and look after my mother. I even had to quit studying. I never made it to university. I had to quit studying long before … This is another thing that I cannot forgive Fidel

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Castro. This situation is related to having to leave the country because of him. I would have liked to have grown up in my country, to have developed in my own country, and I am sure that I could have been a professional today, but this man [Fidel Castro] has taken it away from me. A lot of people in my family are not communists and that is simply why he has taken it away from me.

José María was unemployed when I interviewed him and survived through odd jobs and unemployment benefit. He was single and lived alone in central Madrid. His small bedroom was decorated as a shrine to Cuba and the revolution; the walls were covered with posters of the protagonists of the revolution, except Fidel Castro. His bookshelves were full of Cuban authors and he seemed to spend much of his time reading about Cuban history. He had a melancholy air about him and a soft but insistent manner. Clearly for José María, his life course hinged upon leaving Cuba, and subsequent events were somewhat irrelevant. Sergio put it very simply: ‘I have seen the best and I have lost it’. Yet Sergio also hoped to go back to live in Cuba when he retired and the days of Castro have passed, almost as if the many intervening years were only a short interruption in his life. A sense of loss and suffering, of a life lived as second best, was crucial in the Exiles’ self-understanding and representation, and they were not always inclined to recognize the pain of others. Alfredo, a retired lawyer, had chosen a different way of coping with the loss of his homeland. As he told me on the telephone the first time I talked to him, he did not want to turn into a pillar of salt like the biblical Lot’s wife, and so he had thrown himself into a new career as a lawyer in Spain.8 Perhaps because of this overwhelming sense of loss, many Exiles harboured little sympathy for Cubans remaining on the island, who they saw as necessarily complicit with the government. This became particularly clear when I returned to Madrid from Havana and went to a meeting in the peña. I had taken medicines to relatives of several of those who came to the meeting and I expected that they would ask me about them. ‘Who did you see then?’ asked Esther, the woman who later told me about suspicions that I might be a CIA agent (see Chapter 1), as soon as I arrived. I explained to Esther that I had seen relatives of Cubans in Spain and talked to them. Esther asked if I had seen any dissidents. I had seen two. ‘Well, you only saw those Cuban families who aren’t suffering anything!’ she said scathingly to me, trivializing the economic hardship and daily struggle to procure food in Cuba endured by all ordinary Cubans regardless of political convictions. She then launched into an account of her own dramatic flight from Havana, after several months of hiding in a third-country embassy, some thirty years ago. Esther told me this story every single time I saw her, always with the same intensity, as if it had happened just the previous week. She was uninterested in my fresh impressions of Cuba but preferred to recount her own story of hiding and leaving, thus reinforcing her own sense of being a morally upright person. Like

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the Istrian Italian exiles discussed by Ballinger (2003: 181), Esther’s homeland no longer resides in the physical territory bearing its name but in the moral community of memory she conjures up through continual retellings of her story. Most of the Exiles have not been back to visit Cuba, but those who have often expressed mixed feelings about their trips, and some talked almost exclusively about the physical decay of the cityscape. Others kept tender memories of colours, smells and tastes. José, an elderly man who left Havana for Madrid in 1966 and later retired to Miami, where I met him, went back to visit Cuba in 1996. Although he said he had not expected the buildings to have deteriorated as much as they had, he was more eager to tell me about the fish a cousin had cooked for him: ‘In Consolación del Sur [a town in western Cuba] they gave me trout twice. It was lovely, lovely. The other day I talked to my cousin on the telephone and I said to her: “What a wonderful trout you cooked for me”, and she said: “Come back again and we’ll give you more”’. For José, the rich flavour of the fish and the generosity of his cousin in serving it to him were what he remembered rather than impressions of decay. But not all Exiles shared José’s attitude, and many explicitly did not want food stuff or any other objects from Cuba. When I asked if I should bring anything back for them from Cuba, most Exiles said emphatically that there was ‘nothing there’ that they could possibly want. Instead, for the Exiles Miami has in some ways become more authentically Cuban than Cuba itself. As de la Campa tells of his family’s annual holiday in Miami, ‘[t]he Miami ritual was a way to get close to Cuba, but in time it felt as if it was Cuba itself ’ (de la Campa 2000: 62). When Sergio told me about his trip to Miami some nine years previously, he started by bringing out two empty soft-drink cans. They were brands of soft drinks that were manufactured in Cuba prior to the revolution, and the owners of the factories set up new ones to produce the same drink in the same cans in Miami after the Cuban factories were nationalized. Sergio then produced various bottles of eau de Cologne, aftershave and a potion against hair loss. They were all brands he knew and used in Cuba that are now produced in Miami with the same labels and packaging as was used in Cuba in 1959, giving them an oddly anachronistic look. Sergio tenderly showed me an eau de Cologne called Violetas Rusas (‘Russian Violets’), which was used for children on Sunday family outings, and an aftershave in a blue glass bottle. He opened all the bottles to let me smell the scents and told me that he receives new bottles of aftershave regularly through friends in Miami. There was something touching about a sixty-year-old man still using the scents of his childhood and youth, and even keeping the cardboard packaging of the products. He kept saying to me: ‘See, this was produced in Cuba, in Cuban-owned factories before the revolution’, as if he wanted to make sure that I understood that Cuba had been a modern, industrialized, consumerist nation. In contrast to his tender recollections of Miami as a distilled and violet-scented Cuba, Sergio also showed me photographs of Havana taken by his US-based 82

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niece, who visited the island in 1994. They could have been taken in the Calzada del Cerro, a main artery in central Havana. Sergio said that he had only recognized the street because of a church in the background. ‘Look, the balconies are falling down. The roof has fallen in’, he said as he pointed out the poor state of the buildings. ‘This is a central street in Havana, it’s not like the Castellana, but it could be Salamanca or Goya, you know’, he continued, comparing the picture with streets in Madrid. He pointed out that there were no cars in the street. In another picture, also by his niece, he remarked on the uncollected rubbish in the streets. Sergio’s remembered Havana was clearly different from the one he saw in the photos, which he seemed to keep as proof of what he had lost, the decay and rubbish standing for the moral decay of revolutionary Cuba. Eckstein similarly describes how some of her Exile research subjects refused even to look at photos or videos brought back from visits to Cuba: ‘Visuals of Cuba under Castro were too much for them, for fear that they might destroy the beloved Cuba of their imagination’ (Eckstein 2009: 152). These Exiles, like Esther and Sergio, know that their Cuba does not exist any longer. As Sergio said: ‘[The] Cuba of my mind doesn’t exist any longer. I don’t want to go back. People who have gone have told me how hard it was, even people who are not normally sentimental. I don’t want to go through that experience’.

Isabel and the Politicization of Everyday Life Isabel was in her sixties and worked full time as a secretary for an oil company. She was the only daughter of don Orlando, introduced previously. During my fieldwork, Isabel lived with her father and a maid from Romania in a modest, modern flat on the northern edge of Madrid. Her only son, Jorge, and his Spanish wife, Pilar, lived close by; they were both engineers. Isabel had short hair, usually dyed a flaming red, and wore skirt suits in bright colours. She had an energetic air about her and a girlish giggle. She would rush home from work every day to have lunch with her father. Isabel also often looked after her young grandson, Jorgito, in the afternoons and weekends. While I was in Madrid, Jorge and Pilar also had a daughter. Isabel’s ex-husband and the father of Jorge, Jorge Sr, still lived in Havana in the house that don Orlando built for the family in the 1950s in La Víbora, a modern middle-class residential district of Havana. Jorge Sr shared the house with his new wife, Lucy, and their son and daughter-in-law; in addition, the house was home to Lucy’s son from a previous marriage, along with this son’s wife and their baby. From the first time I met her, Isabel seemed to understand the purpose of my research and what I was interested in. She became a key informant and introduced me to friends and relatives of hers in Madrid, Barcelona, Havana and Miami. I think she sometimes felt alone and overburdened with her caring re83

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sponsibilities so she enjoyed the afternoons spent reminiscing and looking at old photographs with me. She also felt she had been treated unfairly, and perhaps saw a possibility for vindication, or at least for putting the record straight, through my interest in her and her father’s lives. After emigrating as a young boy to Havana from Asturias in the early twentieth century, Orlando’s first job was as a cleaner in a hospital. Through luck, dedication and hard work he made it to the University of Havana to study medicine, but due to political upheavals in the 1930s, which led to the closure of the University of Havana for several years, Orlando was unable to finish his medical degree. Instead, he was licensed to practice as a ‘laboratory doctor’. Although Isabel often urged him to talk about later events in his life, don Orlando preferred to talk about the 1950s when he owned a medical clinic and was an active board member of the hometown association for immigrants to Cuba from his village in Asturias. He proudly showed me the framed diplomas he had received from the Spanish Societies in Havana acknowledging his work and support for them. The diplomas adorned his bedroom walls. Oil paintings of don Orlando’s village in Asturias decorated the living room. In 1959 Isabel was working for Coca-Cola in Havana. The company was soon nationalized and meetings and voluntary work started taking up lots of time. Isabel did not like the meetings, where reactions were monitored to see who did and who did not applaud speeches, and she detested the so-called voluntary work. She married in 1961 on the understanding that she and her husband would leave Cuba as soon as possible. After the wedding, Isabel and her husband lived with her parents in the family home. Jorge, their only child, was born in 1963. After their son was born, Jorge Sr ‘became a revolutionary’, as Isabel put it, and decided he did not want to leave the country. Marital tensions increased as Jorge Sr and his mother threatened to denounce Isabel and her parents as counter-revolutionaries, and his mother secretly taped Isabel’s mother criticizing the government. Isabel was very bitter about this phase of her life and the way she felt her husband had betrayed her. Since Jorge Sr would not permit Isabel to leave with their son, she had to decide between staying in Cuba or leaving her son behind, and so for seven years Isabel continued living with her estranged husband and her mother-in-law, who by now had also moved in.9 By 1970, according to Isabel, Jorge Sr had fallen in love with another woman, Lucy. However, when I met Lucy and Jorge Sr in Havana, Lucy explained to me that she had met Jorge only after Isabel had left the country. In any case, Jorge Sr agreed to let their son leave with Isabel. The two of them left as soon as possible with Isabel’s parents and maintained only a rudimentary contact with Jorge Sr thereafter. Isabel’s social life in Madrid was very different from what it had been in Cuba because of her straitened circumstances. However, since many of her childhood friends had also migrated to Spain, including Sergio and Marianito, who are introduced below, her group of friends remained relatively intact. Isabel’s knowledge 84

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of English provided her with an entry into the Spanish labour market. Yet the conservative social mores of Spain were hurtful. Isabel found herself stigmatized and gossiped about in her neighbourhood because she was a single mother, and she was told off by the Spanish side of her father’s family for leaving her husband.10 The return to Spain was not as don Orlando had anticipated, and disappointed with his economic situation he decided to move to New York with his wife. They hoped that he might find work there more easily than in Spain, where his age and overseas qualifications prevented him from practising. Not long after, Isabel and Jorge joined them. Isabel enjoyed her time in New York and later New Jersey. In contrast to her experiences in Spain, she felt she was respected professionally and experienced no stigma as a divorced mother. Isabel was following the same pattern as many other Cuban immigrant women in the US, who by 1970 constituted ‘the largest proportionate group of working women in the United States’ (García 2007: 82). Jorge however had problems in school, so the family decided to move back to Spain. Then, during the transition to democracy in Spain, they feared a socialist takeover and decided to move to the US again, this time to Miami. Once there Isabel changed her mind and they all returned once again to Madrid where they found a flat in a new housing development. Isabel’s mother died not long afterwards. In the 1990s, over twenty years after Isabel and Jorge left Havana, Jorge Sr turned up unannounced at Isabel’s home in Madrid. Jorge was then still unmarried and living with his mother and grandfather. In the intervening years, Jorge Sr had become a high-ranking government employee and was on a work-related trip to Madrid when he visited. According to Isabel, he turned up out of the blue, walked into their home and sat down in the front room. At first, nobody said a word, but after a couple of hours had passed Isabel offered him a meal. He sarcastically commented that he had never thought he would see her cooking. Back in Havana in the 1950s, a maid did that. Jorge Sr proceeded to tell don Orlando that the house in Havana was now in his name and that his son by Lucy would inherit the house. This particularly upset Isabel and don Orlando, as they believed the rightful heir would be Isabel, and like many other Exiles, they took the deeds of their house with them when they left. Regardless of the recriminations, since this first re-encounter, Jorge has been on a business trip to Cuba where he spent most of his time with his father and an uncle, who is now a bank executive. Isabel told me she knows Jorge often sends medicine to his father, and before I left for Havana Isabel e-mailed Jorge Sr and instructed him to welcome me into his house and to look after me. Although she felt bitter towards him, she gave me medicine to take to his son by Lucy. Months before I went, she said to me that I should hear his side of the story too: ‘Obviously, it’s going to be very different from what I have told you’, she added. On the day I went to see Jorge Sr in Havana, I spent the morning with Faustinito, a childhood friend of Isabel’s who still lived in the same house a couple of blocks 85

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away from Isabel’s former home. Isabel often expressed pity for Faustinito because he had ended up staying in Cuba although all of his friends had left: ‘He was so handsome when he was young and several admirers of his offered to pay his travel’, she said. Faustinito told me that he had been to Madrid some years previously on a trip organized by one of the Spanish Societies in Havana. Don Orlando had taken him to the Centro Cubano to play dominoes, but the anti-Castro talk at the Centro scared Faustinito. He told me that he had asked don Orlando to introduce him as a Cuban friend from Asturias and not to say that he was actually living in Cuba. In Havana, Faustinito walked me to Isabel’s old house. I recognized it immediately from photos Isabel had shown me in Madrid. It was neatly painted and well kept, unlike many buildings in Havana whose owners do not have access to hard currency or do not receive remittances. Jorge Sr and his wife Lucy were obviously doing relatively well in Cuba’s new dollarized economy. At the garden gate, Faustinito and Jorge Sr said guarded hellos to each other; on the way Faustinito had told me that he had not seen Jorge Sr since Isabel left Cuba thirty-two years beforehand. Jorge Sr seated me on the front porch of the house and offered me a mojito (Cuban rum cocktail). He accepted the medicine for his son. Later we moved into the house. Jorge Sr seemed to only barely tolerate my presence and talked little. He said his son and daughter-in-law were cooking for me. His wife, Lucy, was more cheerful and showed me round the house and garden. The front room seemed untouched since Isabel had lived there except for a few newer photographs on the mantelpiece and an oil painting of Che Guevara. Lucy and Jorge Sr’s son had previously worked as a waiter in a tourist restaurant, but was now unemployed. The meal he and his wife cooked for me was ‘Italian’ with most ingredients from the expensive dollar-only shops that are unaffordable to most Cubans. Rice and beans, the inexpensive staples of Cuban cooking, were conspicuously absent. I felt guilty consuming the expensive food, likely laid on as a display of purchasing power organized for my benefit. Maybe Jorge Sr wanted to show that while Isabel had to cook for herself in Madrid without the assistance of a maid, he could at least offer me, the visitor sent by her, a meal that demonstrated how well he was doing in dollarized but still socialist Cuba. After a couple of tense hours, Jorge Sr offered to drive me back to my lodgings. The story of don Orlando and Isabel shows the dramatic politicization of lives and how the revolution and subsequent social changes had implications even for intimate relationships such as that of Isabel and her husband. Surprisingly, given the mutual mistrust and recriminations, Isabel still maintained contact with her ex-husband and even asked me to take medicine for his son by Lucy. It was as if even after all the intervening years they were still eager to prove to each other that their respective political standpoints were superior to that of the other, and they still shared the same currency to do it with, namely consumption.

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Fractured Families: Marianito Marianito was a law student in Havana with one and a half years left of his degree when military service interrupted his studies. After serving he applied to leave the country and was therefore not allowed to finish his studies. Instead, he was sent to a labour camp where he spent the following three years. In 1970, after his stay at the labour camp, Marianito was finally allowed to leave the island. His father was dead by then but his mother was still alive. It was not possible for him to bring her to Spain and he was never to see her again; she died later in Cuba. Marianito also left his wife behind believing that she would later join him. However, her father’s actions interfered with their plans. When Marianito’s father-in-law realized that his personal savings would be seized by the government, he emptied his bank account and, in front of the local Committee for the Defence of the Revolution (Comité de Defensa de la Revolución, CDR), burnt a large amount of cash in US dollars.11 As a punishment, he was given house arrest for three years and his children, including Marianito’s wife, were barred from leaving the island. Even though Marianito’s wife subsequently ‘collaborated’ with the government by doing agricultural work, she was still turned down for an exit permit. Marianito and his wife later divorced, and he went on to marry a Spanish woman with whom he had four adult children, none of whom had been to Cuba when I met him. Of his extended family of ninety-seven persons, Marianito said that twenty had died in Cuba, another twenty still remained on the island, and the rest lived either in the US or Spain. Marianito was overwhelmed with emotion several times during our interview. He was circumspect in what he said and made sure not to mention any names or defining characteristics of himself or others. He only made vague reference to his profession, for example, and explained to me that it was mostly to protect his remaining family members in Cuba. I think Marianito took me for an agent of the Cuban authorities as he seemed to believe that the interview would end up at the consulate. He said he would like to go back to Cuba to see his former house and meet his few remaining friends, but five years prior to our interview his application for an entry permit had been rejected. Marianito enquired about the rejection at the time, but was told by an official at the Cuban consulate that ‘he would know best himself ’. Later he was told that he had been mistaken for someone else with the same name. Marianito’s narrative encapsulated several recurrent themes of the Exile generation. Ordinary, everyday life was disrupted by political events and his family was forcibly split by sheer distance and state intervention. The belief that he may have been of continuing interest to the Cuban intelligence services was also common to many of the Exiles.

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Ricardo: Conflicts between New and Old Cuba Ricardo told me his life story during a series of interviews in a café in central Madrid. While the afternoons went by and the place filled with office workers, Ricardo talked. It was obvious that it was difficult and painful for him to reminisce about his years in Cuba and after the first interview he looked scared and fragile. He reassured me that he wanted to go through with the interviews, although he seemed to fear the tape recorder. When I met Ricardo, he was single and lived with a lodger in a rented flat in a newly developed suburb. He was the only child of a mother who grew up in a poor family in rural Cuba and a father who had migrated to Cuba from a small village in Galicia in northern Spain as a young man. The father was only barely literate but had established himself in forestry, selling timber. Of Ricardo’s father’s siblings, four migrated to Cuba and three to Argentina. I was born in the year 1950 in a city called Camagüey, which is in the central eastern part of Cuba. My father was from Galicia and my mother was Cuban of second or third generation. Her ancestors were … from Cáceres [in Spain] … they were Sephardic Jews who migrated to the Canary Islands and from there to the Americas, many of them to Cuba.

Despite his parents’ humble backgrounds, Ricardo grew up in an economically comfortable environment: ‘I had a privileged childhood as a rich child … I went to one of the best religious [Catholic] schools … I grew up in what was evidently a petit-bourgeois family, but of humble extraction’. After the revolution, the family’s situation changed. Ricardo’s father lost most of his savings when a new currency was introduced, and he decided to invest everything he had left in land, despite persistent rumours of agrarian reform. He later lost his land too in the Second Agrarian Reform of 1963. After initial reluctance on his father’s part, Ricardo’s family tried to leave Cuba several times, but all attempts failed. Like Marianito, Ricardo lived in fear of Cuban government surveillance. In Cuba he had got into trouble a couple of times. The first was when he was no more than fifteen years old. With a group of friends, Ricardo was involved in a prank at school which consisted of turning the tables in their classroom upside down during a break. As Ricardo remembered it, he and his friends had not wanted to convey any political message with their act, but to their horror the school director immediately accused them of being counter-revolutionaries. Ricardo’s father only compounded his son’s misdemeanour when he offered to pay any damage caused by him, although according to Ricardo he had by then lost his savings and did not in fact have any money. Notwithstanding, to the school director, his father’s behaviour was a sign of a ‘bourgeois mentality’, which only aggravated the case against Ricardo. Years later Ricardo discovered through a friend and neighbour that he had been on the verge of being sent to one of the 88

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then newly created UMAP forced-labour camps on account of the incident. The friend’s mother, who at the time was a schools inspector, intervened in the case filed against him by the school director. Nevertheless, shortly afterwards, Ricardo was sent to one of the Escuelas al Campo (‘Rural Schools’), where he worked in agriculture for some weeks and agreed to join a Red Brigade (Brigada Roja), in order to ‘cleanse’ himself ideologically. Later, while Ricardo was doing his pre-university entrance exam in Havana, a member of the Federation of Young Communists asked Ricardo to join a CIA cell. Ricardo was terrified; the mere knowledge of a CIA cell was enough to land him in serious trouble, as it made him an accomplice to the other’s conspiracy. Ricardo therefore told his co-student that he was wrong in assuming that he, Ricardo, was against the government and that although he was not an active member of the Young Communists, he was still a revolutionary. After some time had passed, Ricardo felt convinced that the invitation was a trap, and he therefore decided to tell the head of school what had happened, to ensure that he could not later be accused of conspiracy. Since no action was taken against the other student, Ricardo felt confirmed in his suspicion. The incident, coupled with the military discipline at the school and the lack of food, made Ricardo decide to go back to his hometown to sit his exams. But a couple of months later he was summoned for an interview in the ominously named Department for Social Misfits (Departamento de Lacra Social). By then, Ricardo was in a sexual relationship with a man who had spent time in a UMAP camp. During the interview Ricardo was asked to cooperate with the Department by providing names of homosexuals among his friends and acquaintances.12 Ricardo told me that he had been evasive and claimed he did not know any homosexuals. As a teenager, Ricardo identified strongly with the North American hippie movement and its music, most of which was banned in Cuba: ‘In Cuba, we lived the hippie epoch to some extent, it made it to Cuba too. In the first instance [because] the US was very close to Cuba, and secondly because the spirit of the movement … was to be against the establishment … We were definitely also against the establishment, only it was a different kind of establishment’. Decades later in Spain, Ricardo found that most of his Spanish friends of his age were left wing and anti-American. Ricardo said to me that he would probably also have been left wing had he grown up in Spain under the Franco dictatorship, but since he happened to grow up in socialist Cuba his outlook had been shaped by different experiences and he had no confidence in any political system. Ricardo’s aspiration was to become a writer and he therefore applied to study literature at the University of Havana, but he was not admitted and matriculated instead in economics. Ricardo was never officially told why he had been turned down for literature, but a well-connected friend said it was due to his ‘anti-social attitude’. Ricardo himself thought it was because he was homosexual. During his studies he was suspended for two years because of ‘political apathy’ and was told 89

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that he would be obliged to ‘relate [himself ] with the working class in order to eliminate any vestiges of the past’. As Ricardo ironically noted, he did not understand why this happened to him, for he had outstanding marks in the obligatory course in ‘scientific Marxism’. At the time of the Mariel boatlift, Ricardo unsuccessfully applied to leave Cuba by declaring that he and his mother were Jehovah’s Witnesses: All over Cuba they created these offices called Oficinas de la Escoria [‘Offices of the dregs of society’]. You would have to go there … and present a letter from your local Committee for the Defence of the Revolution which stated that you were smoking marijuana, or gambling illicitly, or were a homosexual, or a counter-revolutionary, disaffected in some way, the possibilities were infinite. Of course there were the religions too.

At this time the authorities orchestrated violent campaigns of actos de repudio (‘acts of repudiation’) against Cubans wishing to leave. These actos were organized by colleagues or neighbours of those intending to leave and included public shaming, vandalism and violence towards the would-be migrant and their property. Ricardo said he still had nightmares about these actos: It was very strong all of that, the degradation that we all arrived at, both those of us who wanted to leave and all of those people who were manipulated or manipulated others out of fear, to participate in the actos de repudio. Sometimes these very same people would leave [Cuba] at a later date and they would be subjected to actos de repudio themselves. It was amazing, because these people were your neighbours or work mates … It really brought out the lowest in human beings and it was exploited … This period is etched in my memory. You didn’t know what could happen … To make matters worse, Fidel [Castro] … said that we were on the verge of being attacked by the US. I lived close to the airport and two sounds have been stored in my memory. They were two sounds that alternated. One was of the MIGs, the Soviet combat planes that would fly over the house and land at the airport and they made a horrible noise. Sometimes this sound was followed by the noise of a large group of people coming through the street and you knew they were going to give an acto de repudio. You wouldn’t know who they were doing it to nor where they would do it; maybe it would be for you. You would have to run to the front room … to protect the door as best you could. You would already have the windows covered with planks of wood, but you would have to drag the furniture away in case they would throw stones or sticks and try to avoid that they destroyed the house. You had to lock yourself up in the back of the house and wait for it to pass by, at least until you were sure that they were not going to stop in front of your house so that you knew that it wasn’t meant for you this time, it was for somebody else. I have never been able to forget this.

Thus while Ricardo left Cuba much later than most others of the Exile generation, he, like them, was formed and grew up in pre-revolutionary Cuba. His experiences during the Mariel boatlift alienated him even further from the revolution,

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and set him apart from the Children of the Revolution. While the marielitos who arrived in the US have formed their own generation with shared experiences, too few arrived in Spain to form a distinct group or generation.13 Finally, in 1982, after his father’s death, Ricardo and his 71-year-old mother left Cuba after several further unsuccessful attempts. The departure from Cuba became Ricardo’s moment of diasporic dispersion, overshadowing earlier experiences of displacement in his family history, including the migrations of his maternal ancestors or the moment his father left Spain in the early twentieth century. By mentioning these other possible moments of identification I do not suggest that subjects freely choose their identities. On the other hand, it is important to appreciate that any particular narrations of self are contextually constructed out of many possible ones. Ricardo remembered the moment of leaving Cuba vividly, recalling the dates without hesitation: ‘It was exactly 7 March, at about five in the afternoon in Cuba, and we arrived here on 8 March 1982, at seven in the morning in Barajas [Madrid’s airport]’. They obtained the exit permit through an invitation to visit a paternal uncle’s family in Spain. Ricardo was convinced they were given the permit because of the divine intervention of the Virgin of Charity, Cuba’s patron saint. Ricardo and his mother first stayed in the house of a friend in Madrid and then went to Galicia to meet Ricardo’s father’s family. When they turned up at the family home, it turned out that Ricardo’s friend, who had convinced the uncle to write the invitation, had intimated that they would only visit Spain for two weeks. The family reunion ended in bitter recriminations when the uncle realized that Ricardo and his mother were planning to stay and had no means of supporting themselves. Ricardo and his mother returned to Madrid after a month and a half in his father’s village, but subsequently lost contact with the family in Galicia. It was not until many years later that Ricardo re-established contact with his father’s family, and he never felt they understood him. In Madrid, Ricardo and his mother rented a room in a house shared with other Cubans, one of whom they knew from their hometown. Through another Cuban friend Ricardo found work in a Chinese restaurant two weeks later. At first he washed plates, but later he started waiting on customers. He was terrified of the job; his privileged upbringing had not prepared him for menial labour in a restaurant. When I met Ricardo he was living on a state pension, granted because he was HIV positive. He had published his own works of fiction and memoirs during his years in exile, and some of his poems have been published in anthologies. But Ricardo did not think of himself as an Exile, for, as he wrote to me in an e-mail: The word ‘patria’ produces a real panic in me and I have never felt nostalgia as such (another thing is to have memories, good and bad). I don’t feel attached to the concept of exile because I believe it carries with it the possibility of a return (theoretical,

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utopian, real or as a goal) and I am not going to return regardless of how much things will change.

For Norma, don Orlando and others the patria represented belonging, but Ricardo had always felt excluded from it. His self-conscious avoidance of identification with ‘exile’ suggests instead that the relationship between diaspora and homeland is one of continuity-in-rupture: ‘I didn’t leave Cuba to continue living in Cuba’ as he continued his message to me. Ricardo later explained to me that his alienation from nationalism stemmed from his experiences as a child in Cuba after 1959: of discrimination and harassment as a member of the petty bourgeoisie in provincial Cuba, and later because of his sexuality. Although Ricardo did not feel part of an Exile community and said he abhorred politics, his family’s experience of confusion and disorientation in the new political and moral system resonates with the experiences of many Exiles too. Ricardo’s recall of the exact date and time he left Cuba and arrived in Spain is also typical. Most of the Exiles would tell me the date unprompted, illustrating the feeling that their lives were divided in two: a before and an after leaving Cuba. But the moment of leaving is also important because it implicitly signals the reasons for leaving. Those who left earlier can more easily claim that they had no part in what happened afterwards, thus clearing themselves of any complicity with the government, which they will often implicitly or explicitly impute to those who left later. Ricardo’s sensitivity to how the historical context influenced and shaped his world-view differently from his Spanish contemporaries was unusual. Most of the Exiles were uninterested or unwilling to empathize with the different nature of the historic experiences of others and would, for example, reject attempts at drawing parallels between the Spanish and Cuban experiences of living under a dictatorship. Sergio, for example, was adamant that the Cuban experience was exceptional.

Sergio: A Right-wing Dictatorship Is Not the Same as a Left-wing Dictatorship Like Ricardo, Sergio found himself feeling out of place in a rapidly changing society with new norms that he did not agree with. When Sergio decided to leave Cuba, he also decided not to marry until he had left the island as he did not want any more ‘complications’. After arriving in Spain, he pledged to himself that he would not marry a compatriot. Rather, he wanted to put Cuba and his experiences behind him. Like other Cubans of the Exile generation, both in Spain and in Miami, where the ‘traditional exile ideology’ maintains that Cubans are different from other immigrant groups (Castro 1997: 93), Sergio distinguished sharply between Castro

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and other dictators, arguing for a Cuban exceptionalism. He also made a clear distinction between left-wing and right-wing dictatorships: A right-wing dictatorship is not the same as a left-wing dictatorship. In spite of there being a man at the top, who is the dictator until he dies or he is deposed, the system that the government uses to perpetuate its hold on power is not the same … Under a right-wing dictatorship meetings are prohibited and free expression is prohibited, etc., but from an economic point of view, if you work peacefully and you don’t get involved in politics, you will never have the slightest problem in a right-wing dictatorship. In a left-wing dictatorship, you will have problems, because politics enters the home. Politics leaves the sphere of politics and enters the economy, because of course the economy has to be state run and the management of a business has to be political more than economic, so politics enters the world of work too, eight hours a day … You reach a point where you become obsessed, constrained and harassed by this world of politics. If you agree with the ruling politics of the moment, it’s fine, but if you don’t it is the most horrifying thing you can possibly imagine.

Sergio found that Cubans in Spain do not organize much because ‘you never know what kind of opinions another person holds if you don’t know them beforehand’. He also said that Cubans have not made friends with other Cubans for the past forty years because they do not want ‘complications’. Sergio blamed it all on ‘that man’, Fidel Castro, whose name he would usually not even utter, like many other Exiles. ‘This is something that Fidel Castro has accomplished, this distrust towards other Cubans. It wasn’t like that before the revolution’. When I asked if he had any contact with more recently arrived Cubans, he said he was not interested: ‘With Cubans who are arriving now, nothing, no contact … I already told you, we Cubans don’t have anything to do with other Cubans unless we knew them before Fidel Castro or if it’s through a person who you trust completely’. Likewise, José María, introduced above, said he was not interested in socializing with more recently arrived Cubans: For me they are worthless, because they have no real aspirations in life, you know, they have no aspirations to study, or to do anything at all … The only thing they like is the clubbing scene, to pull girls, etc., and to try to improve their economic situation in that way. They have nothing to talk to me about and I have nothing to do with them, of course. They also have a damaging impact on the image of the Cuban exile [community].

Sergio and José María’s rejection of contact with more recently arrived Cubans was typical, particularly of the men of the Exile generation. Women tended to be less categorical, and of the volunteers in Exile organizations supporting recent arrivals from Cuba, women were a clear majority. Sergio made a sharp distinction between himself and others like him who had left for political reasons and those arriving now for economic reasons: ‘The Cubans who leave now don’t leave for reasons of freedom, patria, or anti-communism. They leave for the same reasons as a Moroc93

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can or a Senegalese migrant. Now Cuba is a Third World country’. Sergio insisted that he wanted to integrate in Spain and therefore did not socialize much with other Cubans: ‘I didn’t come here to cry’, as he said. Asked if he would like to go back, he said that maybe he would ‘when circumstances permit it’.

Conclusion The restructuring of society and the economy, the politicization of everyday life entailed in the new political system after the revolution, and the radicalization of politics alienated some sectors of Cuban society. When they decided to leave the island, their belongings and properties were confiscated and many men were sent to labour camps. Those Cubans who chose exile in Spain, or ended up living there, are a generation who found that only a few wanted to listen to their narratives and memories. In Spain, where popular opinion was often favourable towards Castro, they felt politically marginalized and misunderstood. The lost homeland has become a central feature of their self-representation. Their upward mobility and class-based privilege in Havana contrasted with their limited opportunities in Spain, and this is clearly important for understanding the emotional resonance of their memories of homeland. The relationship between, on the one hand, narratives of exile in which home and away are juxtaposed, and in which a single, traumatic moment of dislocation is continually recounted, and, on the other hand, the actual experiences of continued mobility across time and space for many Exiles, is complex. Where among don Orlando’s and Isabel’s multiple moves across oceans and over borders would it be reasonable to locate a moment of dispersion? Don Orlando and Isabel unhesitatingly defined themselves as Cuban Exiles and had kept the deeds to their house in Havana in the hope of reclaiming it in the future. For them there was no contradiction between their family history of mobility and multiple belonging and their self-presentation of a rooted existence destroyed by the revolution. As Keya Ganguly has remarked, for postcolonial migrants, recollections take on a special meaning because they represent ‘the only set of discursive understandings which can be appropriated and fixed; disambiguating the past permits people to make sense of uncertainties in the present’ (Ganguly 1992: 31, original emphasis). It is difficult to ascertain to what degree the exilic narratives of identity based on rupture that my informants presented to me were retrospectively constructed. There must have been a period of coming to terms with living in Spain when the possibility of return was still kept open, but, as Hall argues, closure is needed to create communities of identification (Hall 1996: 117). In retrospect, the Exiles repressed uncertainties in favour of a monolithic narrative in which a comfortable life in Havana was destroyed by the revolution. After

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leaving Cuba, don Orlando’s and Isabel’s lives had been characterized by experiences of marginality; their multiple moves across the Atlantic were sparked by a continuing anxiety and insecurity about the present and their place in the world. As if to protect their fragile subjectivities in the face of drastic change, they and other Exiles rendered their past unequivocal. Leaving Cuba became the moment against which the rest of their lives was measured and understood. This transformation of mobility into a story of a single lost homeland speaks volumes about the strength of exclusionary nationalism in this case. The Cold War context and the bipolarity of political discourse in Cuba in the 1960s is crucial for appreciating the Exiles’ narratives for, paradoxically, they are structurally similar to government discourse in which nation, territory and belonging are isomorphic. Both positions equally involve a determination to reject the validity of alternatives, and they even frequently invoke the same historical events to legitimize their positions, although most Exiles would deny any similarity. Ricardo was almost unique in his appreciation of this continuity. I was often struck by the tenacity of the Exile generation in recounting seemingly trivial episodes from their lives in Havana and their indifference to more recent first-hand accounts of everyday life in Cuba. Almost none of them asked me about my trip to Havana when I returned to Spain, even when I had met with their relatives. Perhaps a key to understanding this insistence on turning their back on the undeniable fact that Cuba had changed irrevocably was that they wanted to keep alive the memory of another Cuba. Their Cuba was the country they left behind, not the country that more recent Migrants or the odd anthropologist may want to tell them about. They knew their Cuba did not exist any longer, so I would not have been able to tell them about it; I had never even been to their Cuba. They had no interest in the new Cuba, which could only be a painful reminder of what they had lost. As Tweed has noted, the space of exile is odd, for exiles can never go home; the home they long for and imagine does not exist as a social reality (Tweed 1997: 87), and the Exiles knew it all too well. The provincial shields of pre-revolutionary Cuba in the entrance hall of the Centro Cubano conjure up a memory map for the Exiles of the Cuba they knew and left behind. By exhibiting maps and shields of now non-existing provinces, and commemorating republican Cuban holidays and Epiphany in the Centro, now abolished in Cuba, they keep alive the pre-revolutionary social and political ordering of time. Perhaps in these time-space practices lie the explanation why more recently arrived Cubans have not been attracted to the Centro: this particular spatio-temporal ordering does not coincide with theirs. For the Exiles, the past has become a foreign country indeed.

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Notes   1. Although all wages were paid in Cuban pesos, tickets to leave the country could only be purchased with hard currency, which it was illegal for Cubans to possess. The only way a Cuban could buy a ticket to leave was therefore to rely on somebody outside Cuba wiring the money to them at a government office, which would then issue a voucher to the person who had applied to leave. The voucher could only be used to purchase a ticket to leave.   2. Ernesto Lecuona (1895–1963), a pianist and composer. His exile in 1960 and death in 1963 has meant that his work is primarily known among the Exile generation.   3. In fact, Cuban immigrants have been treated preferentially compared with other migrant groups in both Spain and the US. See Fullerton (2004).   4. See Drinot (1997), Rojas (1998b) and Alberto (2002) for discussions of Che Guevara as a global icon.   5. The number and names of provinces and municipios were changed after the revolution, but many exiles adhere to the pre-revolutionary six provinces with 126 municipios, or town councils. In Miami, the association municipios de Cuba en el exilio (Cuban municipalities in exile) has created an afterlife for these now defunct administrative units (Boswell and Curtis 1984: 175–78).  6. Nunca podré morir / Mi corazón no lo tengo aquí / Allí me está esperando / Me está guardando que vuelva allí / Cuando salí de Cuba / Dejé mi vida, dejé mi amor / Cuando salí de Cuba / Dejé enterrado mi corazón.   7. Fieldnotes, 27 November 2001.   8. Behar uses the same biblical imagery in a discussion of her own longing to go back to Cuba, the homeland she left at the age of five (Behar 1996: 148).   9. For minors to be allowed to leave Cuba, both parents need to give their consent. 10. Both marriage and divorce rates increased in Cuba after the revolution. In 1958 the marriage rate was 4.5 per thousand and the divorce rate was 0.4 per thousand. In 1970 the figures went up to 10.7 and 2.9 respectively (DDDPC 1977). In 1994 there were 48.5 divorces for every one hundred marriages (Álvarez Suárez 1997: 105). 11. The CDRs were formed in 1961, initially to defend the revolution against attacks, and are neighbourhood-based groups that coordinate neighbourhood safety watches and community support work (Eckstein 2003: 22). 12. See Lumsden (1996) for a discussion of the repression and persecution of gay men in revolutionary Cuba. 13. Eckstein also notes similarities between marielitos and the Exile generation in her study (Eckstein 2009: 230).

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Chapter 4 T he C hildren of the R evolution

n Cubans who grew up in the 1960s and 1970s are often referred to as hijos de la revolución, Children of the Revolution. They have lived all of their lives under the revolutionary government, and were as a generation destined to become the socialist Hombre Nuevo, or New Man (Guevara 1977). However, disappointment and a sense of unfulfilled promises pushed many to desert the island or to become part of the insilio, or ‘insile’. ‘I gradually stopped being a child of Utopia and was converted instead into something like a brother of Atlantis’, muses the essayist Iván de la Nuez (1999: 126). Most of this group arrived in Spain from the early 1990s onwards. Some disillusioned intellectuals and writers who originally supported the revolution had started to leave Cuba and settle in Spain from as early as the mid 1970s. Because of their political trajectories, they had little in common with the Exiles, and were indeed viewed with suspicion by them. Later, when Children of the Revolution started arriving in Spain, the older intellectuals and writers connected with them rather than with the Exiles. The Children of the Revolution grew up in a world of actually existing socialist cosmopolitanism, which nonetheless was simultaneously infused with commitment to a national, territorially based political project: an independent, socialist Cuba.1 Some of these New Men and New Women now reject the patriotic socialism with which they were inculcated as children. Although they see themselves as loyal to the aims of social equality of the revolution, they find it stifling to live in Cuba: ‘Cuba has become very small’, as Maida, the architect, put it. This group of émigrés often left the island through professional contacts, deserting while abroad for professional reasons or failing to return after a period of study at universities abroad. Their motivations for leaving Cuba stem from a combination of truncated professional opportunities during the Special Period of the 1990s, problems of censorship and repression, disappointment with the policies of the government or direct opposition to its ideology, and personal or career frustrations.

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Contradictions of Belonging and Not Belonging While the Exiles were part of a transatlantic migration stream of the early and mid twentieth century, the Children of the Revolution grew up in a society increasingly orientated towards the socialist world, and many took advantage of the opportunity to travel and study in other socialist countries. Thus most of them are graduates from either the University of Havana or universities of the former socialist bloc. They arrived in Spain as individuals, rather than in family groups as the Exiles did. Many cannot go back to Cuba, or do not dare, lest they should be prevented from leaving again, for their former privileged status in Cuba as a generation destined to embody the ideals of the revolution continues to shape the way the Cuban state interacts with them. Like other nationalist regimes, the Cuban state has shown itself intolerant of those whose exclusive loyalties are in doubt. Consequently, it has labelled some of them as traidores, ‘traitors’.2 Historically, accusations of treachery towards national projects have been levelled at those perceived to be too cosmopolitan in outlook by nationalists, in the same way that communists and Jews have also been accused of treachery towards the nation at various points in time (Harvey 2000: 529). It is, however, deeply ironic and tragic that Children of the Revolution should find themselves thus expelled from the national body, given the role and position the government had envisioned for them.3 Yet they are also denied inclusion in the exile body by their compatriots who left Cuba in the 1960s and 1970s, and who see them as untrustworthy and tainted by communism. Having been thus excluded from the territorially based nationalism that exists both on the island and among Exiles, they forsake nationalism: ‘I was born in Cuba, but I don’t feel I am a Cuban … I feel I am fundamentally transnational. We can’t keep talking about Cuban culture from this narrow territorial mark’, said Alexis, a conceptual artist living in Barcelona, who is introduced fully below. Nevertheless, in Spain, in the eyes of the majority society, they are foremost identified with class-based and racialized stereotypes of Cubanness that are both othering and demeaning. In short, this diasporic generation is caught between multi-layered paradoxes of inclusion/exclusion, and belonging/not-belonging. In response, many of them embrace a cosmopolitan perspective. Characterized by Ulrich Beck as a perspective defined by a dialogic imagination, in which it is a matter of fate to ‘compare, reflect, criticize, understand’ and to combine ‘contradictory certainties’ (Beck 2002: 18), cosmopolitan subjects reject the logic of exclusive oppositions (ibid.: 19), such as Cuban/non-Cuban or pro-Castro/anti-Castro. Instead, a cosmopolitan perspective corresponds to the coexistence of ‘rival ways of life in the individual experience’ (ibid.: 18). For the Children of the Revolution, embracing cosmopolitanism is thus an attempt to break out of a national slot and to carve alternative spaces of identification. Such attempts often have considerable material consequences, such as being banned from travelling to Cuba, even for family visits. 98

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The Children of the Revolution do not as a whole have the same kind of close familial, political and friendship links to Miami Cubans as the Exiles do. Instead they are connected to friends in Cuba and elsewhere through shared experiences in schools and universities. Many were also members of the Federation of Young Communists until shortly before leaving the island. Whereas for the government and the Exiles, the boundaries of the homeland and the nation coincide with the island, for the Children of the Revolution, ‘home’ and nation are not isomorphic with it, but are mapped onto their transnational social networks. Unlike the Exiles, the Children of the Revolution have actively chosen to come to Spain or Europe and often state that they did not want to go to the US for political reasons. They sometimes draw distinctions between themselves and those Cubans who aspire to go to the US: ‘they are only interested in money’, they would say, or ‘I am not interested in American culture at all’. Unlike the Exiles’ silence on the politics of the Franco government, many of the Children of the Revolution say that for political reasons they would not have come to Spain during the Franco years. Another contrast with the previous generation of émigrés lies in practices of and access to consumption. Whereas the Exiles grew up in a consumer-oriented and Americanized society, the Children of the Revolution grew up with shortages of consumer goods but with plenty of state-sanctioned and sponsored ‘culture’, including cinema, theatre, music, books, and so forth. They are unimpressed with what Spain has to offer compared to the Cuba of their childhood in this respect, and they complained that Spanish TV programmes are ‘rubbish’ and ‘un-cultured’. As Maida put it: The Cuba I remember from my adolescence is a Cuba that is much more cultured than the Spain I know today … Spain is really not an educated country … Even within my profession [architecture], which is so elite here, so chic, it is very difficult to find people who read and who have a universe that goes beyond ‘the tremendous car I bought’ and ‘where I last went to ski’.

Some within this generation have adopted Spanish nationality, others have permanent residency status, but the most recently arrived are in the same position as thousands of other immigrants who are in Spain undocumented. They cannot lawfully work in Spain, but if they register with their local councils they are entitled to public health care and their children can enrol in schools. Those who are undocumented have to survive through menial jobs until they gain residency status and have their qualifications ‘re-validated’, a lengthy bureaucratic process. Although many of them have connections through friends who are able to help them find jobs in the first few months, most go through an initial period during which they subsist through casual and menial jobs, similar to those found by other migrant groups. Nevertheless, many Children of the Revolution have

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found jobs within their fields of specialization after some time, often through personal networks. However, unlike the Exiles, the Children of the Revolution have had the misfortune of arriving at a time of unemployment in Spain and after the introduction of laws discriminating against foreign nationals in the labour market. Maida found the uncertainty and the threat of downward social mobility hard to cope with: The first year was horrible, it was terrible … In the end I didn’t have to work in a bar like so many architect colleagues of mine; somehow or other I found a way to make a living doing other things, and in the end with a huge effort I found a job as an architect … For me the two first years were like a world collapsing … I went for a very long time without finding a stable job, without possibilities of legalizing my situation here. I was turned down for work and residence permits three times. For me the professional aspect was very important, and that is a very serious thing that happens when one migrates … It was absolutely demoralizing, the perspective that I would never be able to practise my profession. I had never imagined that when I was in Cuba, never.

Many others of this generation shared Maida’s dismay and disappointment at having to accept jobs that they were overqualified for at low wages. Yolanda, who was born in Havana in 1974 and worked as a magazine editor in Cuba, felt depressed and frustrated at having to work as a waitress and a domestic servant when she arrived in Madrid. She quit several jobs after only a couple of days or weeks because she felt demeaned: ‘I don’t want to work for such a small amount. If I have no other options, I’ll do it because I have to live, but not otherwise’. While many Exiles had similar experiences when they arrived, they narrated them differently, emphasizing that they had been able to support themselves promptly. This is how Sergio remembered his experiences when he arrived in Spain in 1971: I arrived here on 12 April and 7 June I began working for Puig Publishers as secretary to the director, so that was fairly quick. Before that I worked for two weeks, but I don’t consider that a stable job … [It was] as a salesperson selling to the public in English in a shop for tourists. I started in the shop on 24 May and I left on 7 June to begin my new job, which was better because it was more in line with my experience and what I wanted to do.

There are obvious difficulties in comparing memories that are over thirty years old with much more recent memories by a person who is still coping with changes and upheavals. Yet there was a subtle difference in emphasis between the Exiles, for whom the central issue was to leave Cuba behind at any cost, and the Children of the Revolution, for whom leaving Cuba was partly prompted by career frustrations. For Sergio, it did not matter that he had to work in a shop even though he considered himself to be over-qualified; it was a job after all. Yolanda and Maida by contrast found it demeaning to accept jobs below their qualifications.

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Iván de la Nuez, who was born in Havana in 1964 and who currently lives in Barcelona, describes the Children of the Revolution, in which group he includes himself, as a generation who have been the protagonists of the most radical rupture with tradition and family in Cuban history (de la Nuez 2001a: 10). Their parents are often members of the Communist Party, or at least sympathetic to the Party line, and do not understand their children’s decision to leave, let alone agree with it. At the same time, many families partly subsist on remittances from their children abroad. Often the younger generation feel incapable of explaining to their parents what they are doing in Spain and why they chose to leave the island. Some confess to feeling guilty about leaving and avoid telling their parents if they are involved in diaspora politics. This is the case even though they mostly agree with what they understand as the original ethos of the revolution and its ideal of social equality: ‘The revolution achieved interesting things, it succeeded in educating the whole population, it eradicated illiteracy, and made medicine free; it succeeded in reaching a high level with regard to education, nobody can deny this; and it nourished the Cuban ego’, said Carlos, an actor who has lived in Madrid since 1996. However, although the Children of the Revolution are dissatisfied with the current Cuban government, they do not romanticize the pre-revolutionary era in the way the Exiles do, nor do they hope for a return to pre-Castro Cuba. Instead, intellectuals and writers of this generation have attempted to redefine Cubanness as an inclusive notion not based on territoriality, as opposed to the notions of Cubanness propagated by the government and by some Exile groups. In general the Children of the Revolution have an ambiguous relation to the very idea of ‘community’. Some were reluctant to identify with anything or anyone Cuban, such as Alexis: I practically don’t hang out with Cubans here. I don’t see Cubans, I don’t work with Cubans. I’ve always believed that what I need of Cubanness I have myself. I wanted other stories, other realities. Sometimes when a group of Cubans get together, the only thing we do is talk about Cuba; there is this kind of desperate profusion and need to talk about what was.

In my experience however many Children of the Revolution socialized mostly with other Cubans who they knew from Cuba or from their studies abroad. At any gathering of Children of the Revolution – be it a wedding, a birthday party, a night out or a dinner party – ‘the issue’ came up sooner or later. Often the stories revolved around the hardships of the Special Period; at other times the stories were about the agricultural work they did in school or the futility of the courses in ‘scientific Marxism’ that they had all had to do at university regardless of what they were studying. In short, the Children of the Revolution partake in a sociality based on shared memories of Cuba and generation specific experiences, but they also reach out towards a cosmopolitanism that goes beyond Cubanness. 101

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While the experiences and narratives of the Exiles are characterized by their constant reference to the before-and-after period of the revolution and the subsequent transformation of society and the economy, Children of the Revolution relate to different time-space coordinates. They were born with the revolution as a fait accompli and harbour no nostalgia for a society they only know vicariously. Most were brought up to support the revolution but do not see it as an event that structures their life story. Their narratives instead hinge around a multiplicity of events, such as the political and economic crisis of the 1990s, career disappointments, and a sense of existential and moral malaise that set in after the fall of the socialist bloc. As a group, the Children of the Revolution find it difficult to connect with the Exiles. They have not been attracted to the Exiles’ political organizations and they rarely frequent events organized by them. The similarity between the Exiles’ outlook and the nationalism of the government are too obvious, and the Cuba the Exiles remember is too different to their own. Sergio’s remark, ‘I have seen the best and I have lost it’, did not resonate with them. In this chapter, I focus on two nodal points where contesting understandings of subjectivity and belonging meet and crystallize. One is in meetings between diasporic Children of the Revolution and Cuban consular officials. These are unequal encounters between citizens and representatives of the state. In such encounters, consular officials label and categorize Cubans living abroad. Defected members of the Communist Party or former employees in strategically important sectors are likely to be considered ‘traitors’. As such they are subject to punitive measures, the minimum being a five-year ban on return visits to the island. Much is therefore at stake in these meetings, but diasporic subjects have little leverage in influencing outcomes. The other nodal point is constituted by narratives and practices of cosmopolitanism in which diasporic Children of the Revolution reclaim agency for themselves.

Cuba’s Hombre Nuevo Education was seen as centrally important to bring about the Hombre Nuevo. The government therefore made primary education free and universal and created mixed-sex boarding schools. Illustrative of the modernist zeal of the revolution and the desire to break with the tradition of religious education, the boarding schools prioritized scientific and technical skills. Many were located in the countryside – where pupils would spend half the day studying, the other half doing agricultural work – and emphasized austerity, discipline and obedience (Smith and Padula 1996: 83). In Fidel Castro’s words, Cuban youth would in these schools be educated in ‘the strong and pure principles of communism, socialist patriotism and proletarian internationalism’.4 The new boarding schools were 102

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designed to minimize the influence of parents’ pre-revolutionary values on the children and to discourage ‘individualism’ (Smith and Padula 1996: 87, 146): the new Cubans were truly to be the children of the revolution. The restructuring of the educational system and society at large, the sometimes considerable physical distance that lay between pupils and their kin, and the bringing together of children from across the island, combined to produce a new political subject with a distinct generational outlook, who valued the patria and the revolution above the family. Mirta, who eventually left Cuba for Spain when she was twenty-one in 1993, told me how as an eight-year-old child she resisted her family’s plans to emigrate to the US in 1980: ‘My family … told me that there was a lot of ice cream. They tried to tempt me with material conditions, but … I had my friends and I said no. I said I wasn’t going to leave my patria, my palm trees, and my Martí’. When Cuba became an ally of the Soviet Union, its highest achieving youngsters were given the opportunity to study at universities in the socialist bloc, supported by government maintenance grants. Between 1961 and 1982 more than 56,000 Cubans studied in the Soviet Union alone. In the academic year 1984/85, 38 per cent of them were women (ibid.: 90). Thus, although the Hombre Nuevo was conceived as male, a New Woman emerged along the way. In 1989 when the Cuban government requested all its students in socialist countries to return to Cuba, many chose to defect, and some have since made their way to Spain.5 The breakdown of the socialist bloc meant that the possibilities for this generation were radically changed. Those who returned to Cuba found themselves living on a small, impoverished island where opportunities for social mobility were rapidly contracting. Having been part of the international socialist world, Cuba’s New Men and New Women found Cuba constraining. Maida voiced a sentiment shared by many of her generation: ‘I needed so badly to live somewhere else … I think it was also to do with being caught up in the maelstrom of my generation. Everyone wanted to leave and the ambience was getting ever more asphyxiating. My possibilities were suddenly very limited’. Maida’s description of existential disillusionment brought on by the economic and political crisis of the 1990s, combined with disappointing career prospects, were key motifs in the conversations I had with members of this generation. They grew up in a period of relative prosperity during which education and social mobility were within reach. As they reached adulthood, the crisis set in, leaving them with aspirations nurtured through education but without prospects for commensurate careers. The gradual opening of the island to global capitalism in the 1990s revitalized links with Spain, the former colonial power, and invitations and grants from Spanish institutions offered a new connection with the outside world. In the early 2000s a number of Cuba’s young intellectuals and artists accordingly settled in Spain, where they could not only benefit from a shared language but 103

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also avoid the political stigma associated with living in the US. In Spain they were confronted with a romance of Cuba in which imperialist nostalgia (Rosaldo 1993) mixed with capitalist expediency to produce representations of Cuba as the lost colony fixed in time, newly available again through sexual and economic conquest. Such expectations bespoke the history of colonialism, but were clearly incompatible with the ideal of the socialist Hombre Nuevo. However, the perspectives gained, and the networks and friendships forged in boarding schools and during studies abroad, were to prove crucial in the future trajectories of the Children of the Revolution.

The Lenin School Many young diasporic Cubans in Spain were educated at academically selective boarding schools, such as the Escuela Vocacional V.I. Lenin. The school, known simply as la Lenin, opened in 1972 and admits especially gifted children. La Lenin is located on the outskirts of Havana and is capable of taking 4,500 boarding students between the ages of eleven and eighteen. It specializes in science subjects. One strong expression of the lasting legacy of their educational socialization is that alumni of la Lenin have held several reunions outside the island since the 1990s, and that they run a website for alumni and current students of the school.6 The site flags up reunions, features photographs of the school buildings and uniform, has a large section of anecdotes and even a glossary of school slang, all of it supplied by former and current leninistas. The website introduces itself in the following way: The [web]site of the Lenin Vocational School was founded in October 1999 with the aim of contributing to the unity of alumni of this school … The site is nourished by the collective contributions of every one of us … [T]he physical place of residence is … not singular. We can think of the locale of this site as being located in the vault of memories inside us, in the nostalgia, the good moments we have lived, in friends and teachers. This space is gigantic and has enough room for all of us.7

In fact, there are no territorial references anywhere on the site except to Cuba. Donations to the site can be made in US dollars, but they go via a Germanlanguage payment intermediary service. Linked to the website is the charitable foundation Fundación Vento, established in New York in 2005 with the aim of organizing reunions for alumni of la Lenin and collecting funds in order to provide humanitarian and logistical aid to leninistas on or off the island in difficult circumstances.8 The board of the foundation comprises members living in the US, Germany and Spain.

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Visitors to the school’s website are encouraged to register and enter their own stories and anecdotes. The site also facilitates contact searches and has a ‘News from La Lenin’ section as well as an interactive chat room. Both in the visitors’ book, the chat room and the ‘stories’ section, contributors are a mix of current students and alumni living on and off the island. In some cases, current students ask advice from former students about how to cope with life at the school. One posting from 2009 with the title ‘Alumni Stories: Leninist without Experience’, is by a then current student telling of her difficulties settling in at the school, but then adding: ‘I must admit that I have felt really bad, but when I meet someone who already finished the School, all I hear is “What I wouldn’t do to be there again!!” … when I get home and logon to the school pages and read all these stories, I tell myself; “I can’t leave the School, I can’t be defeated!! … A big hug to all those who have written their stories, they have really seriously helped me’.9 Three weeks after the anonymous student submitted her story, an alumna resident in Spain submitted a reply encouraging the writer to stay at the school,10 and within some months, two further messages to the conversation had been submitted by alumni resident in Spain and the US respectively, whose pictures suggest they are recent graduates.11 The three alumni all empathized with the sentiments of the student, encouraged her to persevere, and emphasized how much they, in retrospect, enjoyed being at the school even if at the time they found it hard. The sense of the School as something so special that it moulds and shapes its students is echoed in a report on a reunion of alumni held in Miami in 2005. Zunilda Cantelar, herself an alumna, wrote: ‘It was truly an accomplishment to have reunited so many people, some of whom had travelled from abroad … recent graduates who like everyone else share this sense of identity which makes us feel special; and the recently arrived because it is always wonderful to see people that we haven’t otherwise seen since we graduated’.12 The site itself avoids any overt political statements, but a hyperlink connects the visitor to another section of the site with humorous entries on Cuban politics and current affairs: The reports of a political character that we have received, whether serious or of a satirical or parodic nature, have been posted in a section outside the school environment of la Lenin and its alumni as they do not fit with the rest of the site, which aspires to be a kind of history book of our school where we can accumulate the largest possible quantity of data.13

The name of this section, Grampa Digital, is a pun on Granma, the official daily newspaper of Cuba’s Communist Party (the literal meaning of grampa is ‘staple’), and the section’s layout is also modelled on that of Granma.14 Grampa Digital claims to be located in ‘Havana, Cuba’, although it is clear that this section of the website is maintained by Cubans outside the island. A news story announcing

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Castro’s death was posted which was obviously tongue in cheek: ‘The beloved comrade Fidel Castro died yesterday afternoon at a very old age’. A link to the ‘complete text’ was promised ‘shortly’.15 Later, the story was replaced with an equally fanciful one: ‘Fidel Castro Resuscitated’.16 Grampa Digital also contains the political document ‘La patria es de todos’ (‘The fatherland is for everyone’), written by four Cuban dissidents on the island who call for democratic reforms and respect for human rights in Cuba. The section includes a column written by the Madrid-based journalist Carlos Alberto Montaner, leader of the diasporic Cuban Liberal Party, and a member of the Exile generation. The website of la Lenin locates memories in a specific time-space and draws on a shared frame of reference, but its cyberspace sociality welcomes all regardless of place of residence. The avoidance of nationalist rhetoric is clearly not incidental, yet what is particularly striking about the site is the fondness alumni have for their old school, the way they identify with it whether they live in Cuba or elsewhere, and their enthusiasm for connecting with other leninistas, whether virtually or otherwise. Meanwhile, in Cuba, some parents who themselves were educated in the socialist system use their little hard currency to pay for private tutoring of their children to enable them to pass the test for the school.17 In short, la Lenin has become a locus for feelings of belonging that transcend the physical space of the school and the island of Cuba. It seems then that the New Men and New Women are heralding a new Cuba after all, one in which belonging is not based on national and territorial exclusivity.

Encuentro de la Cultura Cubana Some leninistas who live in Spain were involved in the production of the diasporic journal Encuentro de la cultura cubana (‘Encounter with Cuban culture’). Encuentro was founded in Madrid by the writer and film-maker Jesús Díaz (1941–2002), and from its inception in 1996 to its final issue in the autumn of 2009 was the premier Cuban cultural magazine of the diaspora. After Díaz’s death, editors included the poet and journalist Manuel Díaz Martínez (b.1936) and the essayist Antonio J. Ponte (b.1964), who was a contributor to Encuentro while he still lived in Cuba. However, Ponte’s works were barred from publication and he was prevented from holding any official position; he now lives in Madrid and is not allowed to return to the island. Díaz Martínez left Cuba in the early 1990s after a career as editor of various cultural magazines in Cuba and as a diplomat for the revolutionary government; he now lives in the Canary Islands. Encuentro was published with support from, among others, the Spanish Agency for International Cooperation, the European Commission, the US National Endowment for Democracy and the Ford Foundation. Unlike other diasporic journals, Encuentro was distributed relatively widely in Cuba, albeit 106

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clandestinely, with support from the Spanish Cultural Centre in Havana, a subsection of the Spanish Embassy (the Centre was closed by the Cuban government in 2003 because of its support of dissidents). Encuentro’s editorial board and contributors were a mix of island and diaspora-based writers. In its final issue, the editorial declares that, ‘From its birth, Encuentro has been a journal without a territory, destined for that virtual country which is the diaspora, and for the real country which shut its doors on it’ (Anonymous 2009: 3). Apart from the journal, the group of people behind Encuentro also started an online newspaper, Encuentro en la red, which still existed at the time of writing.18 The publication is edited by Pablo Díaz (son of Jesús, Encuentro’s founder), and aims at providing a democratic public space. Encuentro remained independent of party political interests, but became an increasingly strong critic of the Cuban government. Jesús Díaz was a prolific writer and film-maker and a leading revolutionary intellectual on the island. Early on he was interested in the relationship between Cubans on and off the island and produced two films about diaspora issues. His books have been translated into many languages and were published by major Spanish publishers. His first novel, Las Iniciales de la Tierra (Díaz 1986), was tacitly barred from publication by the Cuban cultural authorities for a number of years as it was considered ‘heretic’, though it is now considered a foundational text in contemporary Cuban narrative (Fornet 2006). His decision ‘to break’ (romper) publicly with the regime in the early 1990s was surprising to many, including close friends (ibid.). Díaz went on to become a leading diasporic intellectual, a harsh critic of the Cuban government, and a key person in connecting disenchanted former revolutionaries with the Children of the Revolution. Encuentro’s editorial line and its collaboration with Cubans on the island was consistently different from the trinchera, or ‘trench’ politics of the Exile generation. It was no coincidence that Encuentro was founded in Spain, where public debate and political opinion gives more conceptual space for a less entrenched and more nuanced position with regard to Cuba. It was also important for Encuentro’s legitimacy that it distanced itself from the traditional Miami Exile groups and their rejection of dialogue with Cubans inside the island. In the editorial of the first issue, Díaz argued: One of the most lamentable circumstances of the present national moment is the resort to divide the Cuban population into two groups who are usually presented as irreconcilable, namely those who live on the island and those who live in exile. Nonetheless, it is evident that Cuban culture is one single culture and that it has shown its vitality even in the most difficult circumstances. The magazine Encuentro de la cultura cubana will have as its foremost objective to constitute a space which is open to an analysis of the nation’s reality. In our pages,

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there will be space for contributions from Cubans who live in the island as well as from those who reside in other countries. (Díaz 1996: 3)

In the same issue, the poet Gastón Baquero, who left Cuba for Spain in 1959, also invoked an inclusive notion of national culture as nourished by ‘men and women, young and old, traditionalists and innovators, activists and those who are indifferent to politics or religion’ (Baquero 1996: 4). This line resonated with many of the Children of the Revolution, who contributed to Encuentro. The emphasis on the unity of Cuban culture and the orientation towards the future is markedly different from the Exiles’ orientation towards the past and their insistence on the irreconcilability of political views. Notwithstanding the emphasis on inclusion and the attempt to bridge the island–diaspora divide, Encuentro prioritized high culture over popular street culture and gave little space to marginalized sectors of Cuban society, including Afro-Cuban voices and women (see also Hernandez-Reguant 2009a: 79). According to contributors to Encuentro, Cuban-based writers were intimidated by the Cuban Union of Artists and Writers not to contribute to the journal. There were thus limits to inclusion on both sides (see also ibid.: 79). Because of his background as a leading revolutionary intellectual, and because of his surprising choice to ‘break’ with the revolution, Díaz was the target of vitriolic attacks from Cuban officials and intellectuals in the Cuban media. In a critical article about Encuentro en la red published in the Young Communists’ online magazine La Jiribilla,19 Manuel Henríquez Lagarde comments on Díaz’s turn against the revolution in a letter that makes up part of the ‘J.D. Files’, saying that ‘one couldn’t expect anything else from a deceiver and opportunist who has never hesitated in sacrificing principles and convictions’.20 This letter was part of an extensive dossier about Díaz on La Jiribilla’s website, the purpose of which was to discredit Díaz as untrustworthy, opportunistic, and treacherous.21 In another section of these files, the editors of La Jiribilla, who themselves remain unnamed, appealed to the Mexican writer and cultural critic Carlos Monsiváis to withdraw his public support for Díaz and Encuentro: Jesús Díaz lacks any moral authority to promote ‘dialogues’ or ‘encounters.’ His embarrassing political itinerary disqualifies his past and his present. He was a persecutor of homosexuals in the sixties … In the difficult ’70s, during the so-called ‘grey fiveyear period’ … he converted himself into an active film-maker-functionary dedicated to official travels and to fabricating, almost as the only one, ‘socialist realism.’ During the ’90s, in the most difficult moments for our country, he changed colours and ideology to become firstly – while financed by European social democrats – a moderate social democrat, and later a cultured mouthpiece [repetidor, lit. ‘repeater’] of Miami’s agenda, a renegade, a servant of his former enemies: the classical Jewish convert [converso] who would cut the throat of his former brothers of faith and race.22

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What is striking – apart from the odious and anti-Semitic tone – is the choice of terminology. Converso was originally used about Jewish converts to Christianity in Spain after the expulsion of Jews in the 1490s. While the original conversos were not always accepted as bone fide Christians by established followers of the faith, ironically some Exile Cubans also call former revolutionaries turned antiCastroites conversos, and many of the Exile generation were not convinced of Díaz’s ‘break’ with the government. Shortly after Jesús Díaz’s unexpected death in Madrid in May 2002, an article by Servando González, which purported to tell the ‘true story’ of Díaz, was circulated widely in the Cuban diaspora blogosphere and on mailing-lists. On his personal English-language webpage, González presents himself as a ‘historian, semiotician, writer, political satirist, intelligence analyst’.23 In the article, González indicates that he himself had gone into exile at an early stage, and thus implicitly claims moral superiority over Díaz. González’s article discredits Díaz as a moral person and claims to investigate a ‘hidden aspect’ of his life and his possible connections to the ‘Castroite intelligence services’.24 Curiously, the article cites passages from La Jiribilla’s aforementioned ‘J.D. Files’ to substantiate its claims. The author argues that ‘many aspects of the motives that, according to himself [i.e., Díaz] led him towards exile, are evidently suspect’. As an example, González finds that Díaz’s ‘conversion’ from supporter of the revolution to diaspora intellectual happened too quickly. This and other factors make González believe that Díaz was in fact a double agent for Cuban intelligence, and whose task it was to politically neutralize non-Castroite intellectuals. González thus interprets the creation of the ‘J.D. Files’ as evidence of Díaz’s supposed mission, which, again according to González, was to ‘penetrate true exile intellectuals and confuse them ideologically’. To support his thesis, González assures the reader that in the context of espionage and intelligence ‘things are rarely what they seem to be’. González was not the only person to suspect Díaz of complicity with the Cuban government. Thus, Ricardo, introduced in Chapter 3, was appalled when he saw me reading one of Díaz’s novels. As he approached the café table where I was waiting for him, Ricardo looked at the small green paperback with horror and disbelief. He was convinced its author was on the Cuban government’s pay roll: ‘How else could he afford such a nice flat in Orense Street?’ he asked rhetorically, hinting at the exclusive zone of Madrid where Díaz lived.25 For Ricardo, things were not always what they seemed to be either. He was convinced that the Cuban government was spamming his Hotmail account and hinted that it might also be Cuban government interference which had made it difficult for him to place a small advertisement for a flatmate in a Madrid-based newspaper. In the polarized discursive space in which the Exiles and the government occupy diametrically opposed positions, there can only be two categories of people: those with backgrounds and trajectories similar to one’s own (and hence trustworthy persons) or those with dissimilar backgrounds and trajectories (and hence 109

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intrinsically untrustworthy). The Children of the Revolution have failed to become the New Men and Women they were meant to be, and therefore occupy an ambiguous and impure space in between belonging and not-belonging for both the government and the Exiles. The fact that both sides made use of religious terminology from reconquista Spain speaks of their shared legacy and of historical memory forged through enduring and intimate ties with Spain.

On Labelling and Name Calling The Children of the Revolution belong to a generation which has been labelled by the state since they were born, first as the New Men and later, for those who left Cuba, as traidores. The government has been so successful in its circulation of the terms traidor and gusano, ‘worm’ or ‘maggot’, that many Spaniards are familiar with them and will use them about Cubans in the diaspora (even though the Cuban government has become much more guarded in the use of the gusano label). One male informant thus recounted an episode in which a Spaniard called him a traidor, after which the two ended up in a fight. In other cases, Children of the Revolution subvert the meaning of the labels through creative use. A young writer published by a diasporic Cuban publisher based in Madrid, but who was himself living in Paris, was proud to call himself a gusano. When I met him in Spain, he said he had been a ‘tremendous gusano’ in Havana and that he had always been gusaneando, ‘worming’ or ‘maggoting’, with his friends – that is, engaging in what would have been deemed by the authorities ‘antisocial’ behaviour.26 In other cases, labelling initiates reflections on belonging. This was the case of a woman in her thirties who said that when she was told by a consular official that she was considered a ‘deserter’ (desertora), and therefore would not be able to return to the island for at least five years, she was forced to realize that she had to build a new life in Spain. Quite apart from the demeaning and derogatory nature of name calling and labelling, it is also an instrument of the Cuban state in dealing with its citizens in the granting and withholding of rights, such as access to mobility in and out of Cuba. Alexis, who was born in Havana in 1965 and has lived in Spain since 1991, found that he was unable to include a number of Cuban artists living in the island in an anthology of Cuban art: ‘They [the Cuban authorities] began to say “No, if so-and-so is in it we can’t be in it, and if so-and-so who lives in such and such a place, and who is a traidor [we can’t contribute]”’. This exclusive discourse made it impossible to publish a comprehensive anthology. Alexis said that ‘we had to do a catalogue of Cuban art practically without counting on Cuba’. What is at stake in such controversies is the power to control the boundaries of the nation. Cultural or academic events organized outside Cuba often involve painstaking negotiations with the Cuban authorities over which diasporic writers 110

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or intellectuals can and cannot be allowed to speak. Frequently, exit visas for the island-based participants in these events are withheld at the last minute. Thus Carlos, an actor, was scheduled to participate in a festival of Cuban culture in Nantes, France, in 1995, to which hundreds of Cuban artists and writers were invited. He left Havana before the festival started to teach a juggling course in Paris. The organizers of the festival also invited Cuban artists from the diaspora, but the event was effectively cancelled at the last minute by the Cuban authorities, who decided to withhold all exit permits for island participants. One result of this and similar incidents is that opportunities for dialogue and encounters between Cubans from within and outside the island are obstructed (see also Sánchez Mejías 1996). As for Carlos, he found himself in Paris with the money he had earned from the juggling class and decided to stay. When I met him he was living in Madrid. Periodic relaxations of travel restrictions and toned-down government rhetoric towards Cubans abroad have not changed the fact that those leaving Cuba continue to be excluded from the nation both literally and metaphorically (Duany 2000a; 2007: 171); they are prevented from returning to live on the island (Aja Díaz 2000: 3), and investing in it. Despite the increasing transnationalism of Cuban émigrés – as witnessed in remittances, telephone calls and travel – the Cuban government ‘holds an anachronistic notion of sovereignty based on the reinforcement and defense of territorial borders’ (Duany 2007: 171). Against this background, many of the Children of the Revolution were acutely sensitive to categorizations and resisted labelling during conversations or interviews with me. Whereas the Exile generation has an immediate relationship to their homeland, the later generation has an ambivalent relationship to Cuba as a homeland and site of belonging. They replied to my questions with counterquestions about me, or showed signs of irritability at my probing about Cuba, sighing loudly or rolling their eyes, as if I was asking them to talk about a slightly embarrassing episode in their past which they would rather forget about. When I asked an author in his late twenties how Cuba figured in his fiction, he said it was merely coincidental because he happened to have been born there and spent his childhood on the island. Another intellectual and writer told me he finds it difficult to ‘exercise as a Cuban’, in the sense that a lawyer or dentist practises their profession. In other words, they saw being Cuban as something incidental to their lives. The contrast with the previous generation, for whom being Exile Cubans was core to their very being, could hardly be greater.

Becoming and Feeling Like a Traidor: Iván and Maida For Cubans living in Spain, whether undocumented or with residence permits, there is no escaping some interaction with the Cuban state, if for nothing else 111

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than to renew their passport. A consulate is a place of encounters between citizens and servants of the state and, as such, a site where ideas of belonging and nationality crystallize. In these encounters, consular officials fix trajectories and draw exclusive borders around the nation-state. In effect they produce diasporic subjects. As a small space of Cuba on Spanish soil, the Cuban consulate in Madrid is ironically situated not far from the Exiles’ Centro Cubano. On the two occasions I went (to apply for a visa for myself ), queues snaked down the dimly lit corridors. The atmosphere was subdued and tense. Inside the waiting room people were sitting on the floor along the walls. A young mother with a toddler was turned down. When she protested that she had travelled far, the receptionist said that everyone has ‘a long way to come’. Such scenes of bureaucratic disdain do not of course distinguish themselves from similar scenes in many other consulates around the world. Arguably, however, an ethnography of encounters between consular officials and Cuban citizens would be fascinating, but such fieldwork was not possible.27 Instead I solicited narratives about consular encounters from the Cubans I knew in Madrid. Here is one such story. Iván was one of those Children of the Revolution who was officially informed that he was considered a traidor. Iván’s parents are both Communist Party members and Iván used to be a member of the Young Communists. As an adolescent he went to a boarding school similar to La Lenin, and he later did his university degree in the Soviet Union. During his years as a university student he also travelled extensively in socialist countries. During this period, like many of his contemporaries, Iván was asked to provide information about his peers to the Cuban intelligence services. He managed to avoid this by saying that he spent all of his time studying and did not have time for socializing and getting to know other Cuban students.28 In 1989, all Cuban students in the Soviet Union were called back to Cuba. Although many of his friends defected at this moment, Iván returned to Cuba and soon found himself struggling to survive in Havana during the harsh years of the Special Period. When his partner Ana María graduated as top of her year from the University of Havana but lacked shoes to wear for her graduation ceremony, and when he himself had to do clerical work in the tourist sector to earn dollars on top of his full-time job as a researcher, Iván started to think that he had made a mistake in coming back. He worried that he might never have another chance to leave Cuba. Then, in 2001, Iván was invited to participate in a conference in Spain. After the conference, he was offered a short-term teaching position at a Spanish university and obtained permission from his Cuban workplace to stay a couple of months longer than planned. Yet this time he did not plan on returning. Iván moved into a shared flat in central Madrid with a friend of Ana María’s from university and found work relatively fast through friends from his school and student days. He started to remit money to his family at this time.

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Meanwhile, Ana María applied for permission to participate in a conference in Spain. The waiting time was nerve wracking and at one point Iván’s and Ana María’s line managers in Cuba were in contact with each other discussing whether it would be wise to let Ana María leave since Iván was already abroad. Ana María obtained permission in the end and joined Iván in Madrid six months after they had said goodbye to each other at Havana’s José Martí airport. Ana María had never been outside Cuba before, but within a week she had to make up her mind about staying or going back. She decided to stay. Iván managed to obtain a residence permit in Spain within a year of arriving because he was fortunate enough to have arrived prior to the 2000/1 amnesty for undocumented migrants. Yet in the autumn of 2002, Iván’s Cuban passport expired and he therefore needed to go to the consulate, which he had up until then avoided. A valid passport is a prerequisite for the renewal of residence permits in Spain and is also needed for a number of other administrative procedures. At the consulate he was interviewed about his reasons for not returning as well as his current job. Since Iván worked for a Cuban diaspora magazine, he preferred to lie. He had not told his parents about his job either, but thought that his father, who worked for the Party, would have been informed through Party intelligence sources. He was worried enough to instruct me on what to say and what not to say to his father about his job in Spain before I left for Havana. Likewise, when an acquaintance from Cuba passed through Madrid on a work-related trip, Iván and Ana María removed all signs of the journal in case the acquaintance slipped a word about it to someone in Cuba. At the consulate, Iván was asked to sign a declaration in which he renounced his right to return to Cuba again. At first he refused, saying that in fact he would like to go as soon as possible. At the time, his elderly grandfather had become unwell and had asked Iván to come home. The official left him no choice if he wanted his passport renewed, so Iván signed the statement. The same official then informed him that he had become a traidor to the revolution. Since the revolution had ‘given him everything’, including his education, it was ungrateful of him to leave. Although he resided legally in Spain and possessed a valid Cuban passport, he was therefore unable to travel to Cuba. Iván never saw his grandfather again and was unable to attend his funeral in Havana in the winter of 2002. Given his parents’ continued loyalty to the Party, he felt unable to explain the reason for his absence. The experience also further alienated him from the revolutionary project that he had once firmly believed in. Around the same time, Ana María found out that the consulate considered her a migrante (‘migrant’), a category that does not entail bans on visiting Cuba. Ana María was, however, unable to visit Cuba as long as her stay in Spain remained undocumented. Ivan and Ana María married in Madrid in 2002 partly to facilitate her residency application. Yet it was not until 2005, after several failed attempts and after living in Spain for four years without a residence permit, that 113

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Ana María obtained her permit. Her sponsor for the residence permit application was Diego, a student friend of Iván’s from his days in the Soviet Union. In February 2006 Ana María was able to visit her family and that of Iván in Cuba. Iván was still barred from returning to Cuba because he was classified as a traidor, which was to last five years. When I met them in their family home on the outskirts of Havana in May 2002, neither Iván’s grandfather nor his parents seemed to be aware that Iván probably would not be allowed into the country again even if he applied. Iván had been evasive on the telephone to his parents, and for their part they did not ask any direct questions about his job or his failure to return home to Cuba for a visit. From my first meeting with Iván’s father in central Havana, I sensed an ambiguity towards me. I worried that I would not be invited to the family home, which would have been very difficult to explain to Iván upon return. It was therefore with relief that I accepted an invitation to a family birthday party, only to find myself in an awkward situation where both Iván’s family as hosts and myself as guest seemed complicit in acting out a performance for the benefit of the absent Iván, whose remitted US dollars – delivered by me in a white envelope – probably partly paid for the party. During my visit, Iván’s mother said to me that she hoped Iván would not ‘get into trouble’, by which I think she referred to politics, but she did not elaborate and her husband quickly changed the subject at this point in the conversation. Iván’s father seemed tense at my presence in the house and repeatedly explained to me that the poor transport connections would make it difficult for me to return to central Havana where I was staying. He insisted that I could therefore not stay too long, and in any case they had no spare beds so I would not be able to stay the night (which I had never intended to do, nor suggested). In the context of Cuban social norms, which dictate that visits should be unhurried and that hosts should protest vigorously when their guests want to leave, Iván’s father’s behaviour was very unusual. When both the mother and grandfather started crying, I sensed that he wanted me to leave immediately. My presence inevitably reminded the family of their absent, even treacherous son, on whom they were simultaneously economically dependent to some degree, and I became a representative and embodiment of fractures and tensions in the family related to Iván’s absence. As Lisa Maya Knauer has observed, the position of intermediary between members of a transnationally distributed family is an ‘uncomfortable position of deciding how much and what to reveal’ (Knauer 2009: 163). My embellishment of the visit when I later recounted it to Iván inevitably became part of the tacit performance of complicity involved in his decision not to explain his reasons for emigrating in too much detail and his parents’ corresponding silence on the topic.29 For both Ana María and Iván, migrating to Spain was enabled by their education and subsequent professional careers. Once in Spain they found accom114

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modation and work through school and university friends. It was the very same social capital which caused Iván to be labelled a traidor. Labelling is however not the exclusive prerogative of the state. Like Ana María, Maida had avoided the official traidor label and had therefore been able to go to Havana to visit. Maida was a member of the Young Communists until shortly before leaving Cuba, and her relatives remaining in Cuba continued to be Party members. Maida came to Madrid to study in 1996, joining her then partner who was doing a doctorate at a Spanish university and who had left Cuba a short time earlier. Maida was born in Havana but spent most of her childhood in the Soviet Union because of her mother’s studies. She continued her studies at a Russian school in Havana and did not enter the Cuban educational system until she matriculated at the University of Havana. Her knowledge of Russian helped her when she arrived in Madrid, where for a while she made a living as a tourist guide and also did translation work. Maida’s mother left Cuba in 1994 and moved to South America, but visited Europe regularly on work-related travel. Apart from her mother, the rest of Maida’s family was still in Cuba. Her father, who enjoyed privileged status in Cuba as an academic, had already visited her in Spain three times when I met her. He and Maida’s other relatives in Cuba were dedicated communists and Party members. Maida herself had been back to visit once since leaving, but it had been an awkward and stressful time: I didn’t feel like seeing anyone and I fell ill too … I had chicken pox. There was nobody around, my father was working; I just wanted to die. The only thing I wanted was to go back [to Madrid] … I didn’t relax for a single moment. There were all these family things. I had never said to them that I wanted to leave … because I thought I might just go for a while and I never wrote a letter to them saying ‘Dear friends, I have decided never to come back ever again’, you know, because I never saw it like that. I thought to go back the day Fidel [Castro] dies and so … it was very hard and very sad … I wanted to come back here [to Spain] at once, it was very strange.

While she was in Cuba, Maida did not feel like talking to her family about her decision to stay in Spain: I am a quedada [‘stayee’] and … it was very uncomfortable for me to talk about. In fact it wasn’t talked about at all. But [her sister-in-law] sent me a letter saying that she couldn’t believe that I had become a traidora. I have the feeling that she, in her most profound being, considers me a traidora, because I have committed treason to the patria [giggles]. I stayed, I am a quedada, and many Cubans still think like this. They believe firmly that you have to stay in Cuba and fight … This has nothing to do with the fact that their kids have clothes and food thanks to all the traidores who are not in Cuba.

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What was perhaps most painful for Maida about her sister-in-law’s accusation was that she also felt herself that she was a traidora: ‘In my most profound being perhaps I also felt a bit inferior, a little bit like: Yes, I was a traidora and I didn’t fulfil expectations’. This commitment to or complicity with the revolution – in spite of leaving – constitutes a crucial difference between the Exile generation and the Children of the Revolution. To sum up, whether practised by the government or by other diasporic groups, labelling has economic, legal, social and practical implications. It places the labelled persons in a sphere apart, at once Cuban and non-Cuban; Cuban since they deserve to be labelled, but non-Cuban in that they have become gusanos, lumpen or traidores. As the Cuban-American scholar María de los Angeles Torres has commented, the restrictions placed until recently upon visiting diasporic Cubans is yet another example of this practice of simultaneous exclusion and inclusion: Although we return with a Cuban passport, we are categorized in a strange category called ‘of Cuban origin,’ which segregates us from the population as well as from foreigners. In this border zone we have no rights, no official links to the nation. We can only spend our money, and even that is subject to restrictions and a unique ritual in which we have had to convert our dollars into government-issued coupons marked with a ‘B,’ a monetary category invented for ‘la comunidad.’ [i.e., Cubans living outside Cuba] … We are Cubans and we are not Cubans at the same time. (M. Torres 1995a: 32)

Name calling and labelling are ways in which both the government and established Exile groups deal with Cubans whose subject positions or trajectories differ from their own. They are practices that draw boundaries reflecting exclusive perceptions of nation, personhood and belonging.

Counter-discourses of Cosmopolitanism While Maida admitted that she herself felt like a traidora, many of the Children of the Revolution embraced postmodernity and discourses of hybridity and cosmopolitanism to counter the territorializing discourse which rendered them traidores. As Alexis, the conceptual artist, put it: ‘I think the important thing is the possibility we have of identifying with something that goes beyond the country we live in. Inevitably we come from a place and inevitably we carry a culture, but apart from that we are what we see … It’s this transglobal sense where culture and identities aren’t borders, but rather road crossings’. Alexis based his claims to transnationality in his family history of mestizaje, or racial mixing, of French, Spanish, Chinese and African cultures and peoples. He associated Cuba and Cubanness with a political project that he rejected, and which had censored him from 1989 until he left the country in 1991. During Alexis’s final year in 116

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Cuba he was under what he called ‘almost total censorship’, and said he was not allowed to give lectures, concerts or exhibit his works anywhere: Unfortunately in Cuba, as in any totalitarian system … inevitably everything becomes political … For example, a critique of language or a critique of art in Cuba become a critique of the discourse; a critique of the discourse is a critique of the revolution; against the institutions; against Fidel [Castro]; against communism. And it ends up being a political discourse, when it might have started simply as a restructuring of language, or a new way of thinking.

Yolanda, who had been a magazine editor in Cuba, had likewise felt constrained by the politicization of her life: I didn’t want to have anything to do with it [politics], but it drowns you out, everything is related to it. Life there [in Cuba] is [like] that. It is reflected in all aspects of life, culturally, economically. I said to myself that the only option is to leave. Where to, I didn’t know. I didn’t know if I’d end up somewhere better or worse. Of course I hoped I’d be going to a better place.

Alexis’s experiences of censorship made him mistrust ideologies and make postmodern theories of hybridity his own. For others of his generation, cosmopolitanism had also become an attractive subject position, but sometimes through different trajectories. Maida, however, had a more private and less politicized explanation for leaving Cuba: I also feel that even if the system in Cuba had been different, I would still have left. Perhaps I wouldn’t have left definitively, but not to see Paris, not live in Madrid? … A friend of mine says it is because Cuba became too small for me after I finished my studies. I really don’t have a conflict with living in Madrid. My conflict is more to do with my profession. I would like to find a better job where they pay me better, but I really like living here, I love the city and my friends here and, yes, I think I’m happy … It’s not that I’m laughing all day long, but when you sum up your life, then yes, I like my neighbourhood, I like my house, my friends, I like what I’m doing and I love this city, you know. Yes, maybe one day I’d like to go and live in Barcelona because there are more job opportunities and I also like Barcelona, but in any case to live somewhere else would mean breaking up from here. We live in a cosmopolitan world where people move about. The good thing is to have a choice. That is what I always claim for Cuba, the capacity to decide. What makes me angry is that they [the Cuban government] take that right away from you … That is the luxury the Europeans have, the possibility to decide whether to live in one place or another.

Yolanda echoed Maida’s feelings: I had this feeling that I couldn’t advance there, it was like walking backwards, regressing. Professionally I felt fine in my job … but what was my wage? One hundred

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and ninety-eight pesos monthly [approximately $8] – nothing, nothing! This was not enough for two days of living. This was not what I lived off of … You felt tied down. I just wanted to try going somewhere else and I couldn’t see why I shouldn’t be allowed to. Then the politics … it just doesn’t interest me at all. Why do I have to switch on the TV and watch that shithead speaking rubbish? Why was I obliged to go to marches at work? Quite simply, it doesn’t interest me. It’s not that I’m against or I’m in favour, but it doesn’t interest me. There [in Cuba], however much you worked, and however much you wished for something, everything is limited. I would never feel good there. I couldn’t see the light at the end of the tunnel … The only way you could make good money was through illegal means, so if you were caught you’d be sent to jail and I wasn’t inclined to run that risk. Here of course I’m illegal too [laughs], but the situation is different. Here it is worth it, running a risk.

There are differences between Alexis’s political rejection of Cuban nationalism and his conscious embracing of what he calls the ‘transglobal’, and Maida’s and Yolanda’s more privately motivated reasons for leaving. These differences are indicative of gendered ways of positioning and articulating relations to Cuba within their generation. As for the previous generation, men tended to politicize their experiences more than women, and men were more likely to reject the idea of visiting Cuba. Thus, while Maida had been back to visit, Alexis was adamant he would not go: I already know that country … I would go first to, I don’t know, Japan, Australia, Samarkand, any place I don’t know … But apart from what it means in the sense of knowledge … there is one thing I wouldn’t like, and that is to have to apply for a visa to my own country. I just don’t feel like it, to have to pay the same political logic that repressed me [to get a visa]. I said to my mother … that the day she wants to see me, I’ll pay her ticket and she can come. It is the last money I would ever give Fidel [Castro], the last, it’s that simple.

Along with this ‘transglobal’ identity, Alexis rejected any thought of missing Cuba: ‘I don’t miss Cuba … There were so many years towards the end of my time there during which I was so profoundly unhappy that my brain defends itself … I really don’t miss Cuba. Right now, for instance, I have come back from New York and Miami, and I miss Miami and New York. I don’t miss Cuba’. This did not mean that Alexis discarded the idea of longing or missing people and places, but he was determined to overcome it. He did not want to succumb to nostalgia and longing: If, on the one hand, tradition strengthens a sense of belonging, of identity, on the other hand we need to structure a new seed that is not rooted in territory but rather in abstract conditions that will above all allow us mental sanity. Otherwise you will live permanently with one foot here and the other there. You have to be where you are and not convert yourself into what you might have lived or what you are going to live. That

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is one of the big challenges that I have for the construction of my idea of being beyond the territorial: I try to write to my friends in Miami, not writing to them [about] what I am doing, I try to write to them [about] what I am thinking at that instant, not what I am going to do tomorrow or the day after … It’s very difficult exactly because sometimes a long time passes without seeing people and you have to restructure time, but I make an effort in trying to reconstruct the constant present, the permanent present.

These are untidy projects though. Thus while Alexis was busy cooking a ‘fusion meal’ for me, as he called it, his Spanish wife Alicia said to me that she thought he and his friends were trying to recreate their Cuban lives in Barcelona. Alexis’s self-conscious cosmopolitanism, with its embrace of fusion and hybridity and its explicit rejection of nostalgia, was in its own way an indication of what he and other Children of the Revolution did not want to be or be seen to be, namely nationalist Exiles looking back on their lost past. But their cosmopolitanism is not free-floating; it springs from experiences in specific historical contexts. Alexis drew, for example, on the mestizaje idiom that the Cuban government also uses in its discourse on Cuban national identity to invoke the island’s multicultural and multiracial heritage. Yet for him, mestizaje relates not to the nation but to his personal family history. Similarly, Alexis recited a poem by José Martí when he talked to me about his own trajectory: ‘I come from everywhere / To everywhere I’m bound’.30 Although Martí’s peripatetic life, most of which he spent in exile, lends itself easily to Alexis’s reading, his legacy is also eagerly claimed by both the government and Exile groups alike for their national projects, as noted in Chapter 2. Rather than using the mestizaje discourse and the poetic legacy of Martí to claim a space within the nation, Alexis sees these cultural traditions as ‘road crossings’. The theme of rejecting nostalgia is echoed in an article by de la Nuez: It’s not that I have no memory of the years I lived in Havana, but I see no reason to give in to a fundamental nostalgia … Among other things [this is] because my memory – vital, erotic, intellectual – has been extended and has strayed into an alleyway in Managua, an instructive encounter on the banks of the Mississippi, in certain nocturnal itineraries of Miami Beach, on a boat during a strange early morning in Acapulco, in almost all the bars of Barcelona and in other intimate but somehow decadent bars in Madrid. (de la Nuez 1999: 126)

Yet Maida thought cosmopolitanism had come at a price: I think my personal tragedy with Cuba is that I cannot go back to live in Cuba. I know rationally that I will probably not go back to live in Cuba because I’m not interested, I’m interested in other things. But the fact that I cannot go back is painful, very painful. More than anything else related to Cuba, this hurts me.

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Another way of avoiding the ‘national slot’ is by disclaiming Cubanness altogether. In an introduction to a collection of essays by Children of the Revolution, de la Nuez describes them as characterized by irony, ‘irreverence towards the founding fathers’ and by ‘mockery of the essence of Cubanness as an invariable entity’ (de la Nuez 2001a: 16). He continues: ‘They distance themselves from the constructions of Cubanness made by the official culture on the island, which is marked ever more strongly by a closed and essentialist reading … but they equally distance themselves from the Cuban-American paradigm’ (ibid.: 17). Behar describes a similar phenomenon as post-utopia, ‘a translation into Cuban of the idea of postmodernity’ (Behar 2000: 135), characterized by ‘diasporic consciousness, nomadism, and a sense of multiple identity’ (ibid.: 145). Rojas, a Cuban historian who lives in Mexico City, argues that the memory politics of the Cuban government, with its ‘selective archaeology of the colonial and republican past’, has created an exile in time for the Cubans living on the island, whereas those living outside are exiled in space (Rojas 2001b: 54). The logical implication here is that one can be in diaspora while being physically in one’s homeland, which is what de la Nuez argues. He defines himself as postcommunist and an ex-Cuban (de la Nuez 2001b: 14). When I interviewed him in Barcelona, he said that his post/ex predicament started before he even left the island. This position was for him related to a rejection of nationalist claims to territorial exclusivity.31 By contrast, some only came to think of themselves as living in exile or diaspora a while after they had left Cuba. Diaspora in this sense becomes processual and is not exclusively dependent on physically leaving the homeland, thus pointing to the importance of the imagination in diasporic experience. To emphasize this aspect, James Clifford uses diaspora as a verb: to diasporize and re-diasporize, underlining not only processual aspects, but also the agency of those who define themselves as in diaspora (Clifford 1997: 248). Thus understood, diaspora is a contested and contingent historical process rather than something already given or predicated on place alone. In a similar vein, the poet Lourdes Gil, based in New Jersey, has proposed seeing Cubanness as a long genealogy of flights from territorializing discourses. Cuba’s indigenous Siboney people fled the Spanish conquistadores by throwing themselves into the sea. Then the Africans brought to Cuba fled to the mountains to escape slavery. Later, the Cuban-born criollos (locally born people of Spanish ancestry) were expelled or chose exile voluntarily. Gil finds in these repeated stories of flight a precursor to present day exile as well as ‘insile’: ‘The insular flight starts in Cuban territory proper; the original flight installs itself in the history of the country as an internal and autochthonous displacement’ (Gil 2000: 35). Others lay claim to a Cubanness rooted in the body, subverting the revolutionary discourse that territorialized Cubanness and made it an attribute of a political stance.32 This is how Rafael, a journalist, responded when I asked him if he thought of himself as an exile: 120

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I see myself as a Cuban … If I have to be an exile legally, that’s fine, or if I have to have a [Spanish] passport or DNI [Spanish identity document]. But to exile myself? Nobody can exile me … You can only compare that with death, with abandoning your body, nobody can exile me from my body unless they kill me.

What Rafael and others are attempting is effectively a new mapping of Cubanness, independent of territory. One young historian who was involved with Encuentro readily admitted that he had often thought he should do research on something which was not related to Cuba: ‘But this nationalism, which has done so much damage, keeps drawing me back to Cuba’, and so he resigned himself to continuing his research on Cuba. What he does instead is to uncover an alternative historiography of Cuba in his research, in a search for more inclusive narratives of nation.

Conclusion The Exile generation are suspicious of anyone from the island whom they see as morally tainted by the sheer fact that they have chosen to remain, except for a few celebrated dissidents. In contrast, the Children of the Revolution are suspicious of totalizing ideologies, whether communist or anti-communist. They are weary of nationalist symbols, often the same on the island as among the Exiles, such as busts of José Martí, the national flag, the national anthem and so on. They do not claim moral superiority based on when they decided to leave the island. For them, distinctions are to be found not in a person’s trajectory but in their discourse. As René Vázquez Díaz, based in Stockholm, has put it: ‘nothing is more like a Cuban communist than an anti-communist Cuban’ (Vázquez Díaz 1994a: 8). Like him, the Children of the Revolution therefore sometimes disagree as much with people of the Exile generation as they disagree with the government. Where the Exiles are characterized by bitterness towards the government and determination to redeem what they have lost, the Children of the Revolution are characterized by subversion and a degree of cynicism. In particular, the men of this generation entertain counter-territorial imaginaries of identity and belonging. Diasporic and cosmopolitan discourses are attractive to this generation because they enable them to escape national labelling and national, territorially defined collectivities. The erstwhile bearers of the future of socialist Cuba, now living in Spain, have appropriated cosmopolitanism to narrate subjectivities free from the constraining labelling practices they have been subjected to since they were children. This new cosmopolitanism is based on a prior experience of actually existing socialist cosmopolitanism and is in part a response to the contraction of the socialist world. It is also informed by Cuba’s colonial history and legacy of slavery and migration, and their encounter with exclusive discourses of belonging

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in Spain, the former metropole. In Alexis’s words, cosmopolitanism constitutes ‘road crossings’ of culture and identity, where Cuba’s New Men and New Women can refashion themselves outside the national slot. Some of the Children of the Revolution have been labelled as traidores by the government, and are therefore unable to visit Cuba (although not all of them would want to go). While the earlier political Exiles are recalcitrant enemies of the Cuban government, the Children of the Revolution playfully subvert ideologies of exclusion through irony. At the same time, however, some of them admit to feelings of guilt or complicity with the revolution, which invested so many expectations in them. It is exactly such interior tensions and clashes of loyalties and rationalities which make their perspectives cosmopolitan as defined by Beck (2002). This is not merely a ‘banal cosmopolitanism’ (Beck 2004) of consuming the other through travelling, eating ethnic food and so on. It is an existential struggle to carve out a space for identification in which subjectivities are not defined and contained by nationalist terms. It is not an easy project, as Maida’s admission of guilt, Iván’s awkward silence about not visiting the island and the comments of Alexis’s wife all imply. It is a project attempted by subjects who tread between relative privilege and relative marginality, who must somehow reconcile these contradictions in one human body. It is a very self-conscious project, as attested to in declarations of not knowing other Cubans, or in the dismissal of stereotyped images of Cubanness – for example, in the form of assumed sexual prowess, superior dancing skills, and so forth. And it is finally a project fraught by tensions and ambiguities between the known and familiar, and the unknown and unfamiliar. The revolutionary nationalist project produced subjectivities, provided cultural tools, and facilitated the construction of social networks that enabled the cosmopolitanism of these diasporic Children of the Revolution. Ultimately, however, the social and discursive practices of the Children of the Revolution subvert the closed understanding of identity and nation of the government and claim through travelling – imaginary and actual – a cosmopolitan sociality. Through the creation of websites, such as that of the Escuela Vocacional V.I. Lenin, the Children of the Revolution are creating a diasporic public sphere, the crucible of ‘a postnational political order’ (Appadurai 1996: 22). In Alexis’s words: We transcend the discourse of the nation … It’s transpolitical, transcultural, transnational, transsexual and I’m fascinated with it, most of all because it gives me a territory of freedom – in quotation marks of course, freedom doesn’t exist – but it is a territory in which we talk about what we have in common instead of that which separates us.

It seems then that the New Men and New Women are heralding a new Cuba after all, one in which belonging is not based on national and territorial exclusivity. This cosmopolitan sensitivity may turn out to be one that Cuba’s Children of the Revolution share with other diasporic groups who have also found themselves in predicaments of exclusion from territorially-based identity projects. 122

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Notes   1. Bruce Robbins defines ‘actually existing cosmopolitanism’ as ‘not merely an abstract ideal, like loving one’s neighbor as oneself, but habits of thought and feeling that have already shaped and been shaped by particular collectivities, that are socially and geographically situated, hence both limited and empowered’ (Robbins 1998: 2). In this instance I am referring to the international socialist space of education, which gave thousands of young Cubans a chance to study and travel in other socialist countries, and which brought thousands of other young people to Cuba to study.   2. From my observations, traidor constitutes a quasi-legal category. Cubans in strategically important sectors and former cadres of the Communist Party – that is, those citizens who were most expected to embody the ideals of the Hombre Nuevo – are more likely to be labelled traidores than others. It has not been possible to obtain any information on how many Cubans are officially considered traidores, what their professional and class profiles are, or what the gender distribution is.   3. It also bespeaks a fundamental ambiguity within the Cuban revolutionary project, namely the aspiration to being both nationalist and socialist. An ambiguity relating to cosmopolitan aspirations is clear already in the Communist Manifesto, itself a cosmopolitan document sketched by ‘Communists of various nationalities’ (Marx and Engels 1958: 33), which, while exhorting ‘working men [sic] of all countries’ to unite, at the same time sees the cosmopolitan character of the bourgeoisie as exploitative: ‘The bourgeoisie has through its exploitation of the world-market given a cosmopolitan character to production and consumption in every country’ (ibid.: 37).   4. The quote is taken from Fidel Castro’s 1974 inauguration speech for the Escuela Vocacional V.I. Lenin: ‘Inauguración: Discurso de Fidel’, Lalenin.com. Retrieved 31 January 2011 from: http://www.lalenin.com/escuelalenin/modules/news/article. php?storyid=273.   5. For a literary account based on a true story of a particularly dramatic flight from the Soviet Union to Spain via Germany, see Díaz (2002).   6. See www.lalenin.com.   7. ‘Sobre este sitio’, Lalenin.com. Retrieved 21 November 2003 from: http://66.34.237.194/lalenin/modules/news/index.php?storytopic=56.   8. See http://www.fundacion-vento.com/portada/modules/portada/.  9. ‘Historias de alumnos: leninista sin experiencia’, Lalenin.com. Retrieved 13 November 2009 from: http://www.lalenin.com/escuelalenin/modules/news/article. php?storyid=479. 10. Dayrbd. 2009. ‘Re: leninista sin experiencia’, Lalenin.com. Retrieved 25 January 2011 from: http://www.lalenin.com/escuelalenin/modules/news/article.php?storyid=479. 11. See the postings by Gehisy and Yansely88 at ‘Re: leninista sin experiencia’, Lalenin. com. Retrieved 25 January 2011 from: http://www.lalenin.com/escuelalenin/modules/news/article.php?storyid=479. 12. Cantelar, Zunilda. 2005. ‘Encuentro en Miami, Crandon Park, Key Biscayne 2005’. Lalenin.com. Retrieved 1 September 2006 from: http://www.lalenin.com/modules/ news/article.php?storyid=283.

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13. Retrieved 21 November 2003 from: http://66.34.237.194/lalenin/modules/news/ index.php?storytopic=56. Note that this webpage is no longer available. 14. See www.lalenin.com/grampa/grampa.htm. 15. See ‘Falleció Fidel Castro’, Lalenin.com. Retrieved 25 January 2011 from: http:// www.lalenin.com/grampa/grampa.htm. 16. See ‘Resucitó Fidel Castro’, Lalenin.com. Retrieved 25 January 2011 from: http:// www.lalenin.com/grampa/grampa_fidel_mort.htm. 17. Eckstein (personal communication). 18. See www.cubaencuentro.com. 19. Jiribilla is a word used in Cuban Spanish for a small excitable or disruptive child. 20. Manuel Henríquez Lagarde. 2001. ‘Un encuentro consumado’, La Jiribilla, issue 8, June 2001. Retrieved 13 November 2009 from: http://www.lajiribilla.cu/2001/ n8_junio/205_8.html. 21. See ‘The J.D. Files/Los expedientes de J.D.’ La Jiribilla, issue 16, August 2001. Retrieved 19 November 2009 from: http://www.lajiribilla.cu/2001/n16_agosto/jdfiles. html. 22. ‘Carta abierta de La Jiribilla a Carlos Monsiváis’, La Jiribilla, issue 9, June 2001. Retrieved 31 January 2011 from: http://www.lajiribilla.co.cu/2001/n9_junio/243_9. html. 23. ‘Servando Gonzalez. Historian, semiotician, writer, political satirist, intelligence analyst’, personal webpage. Retrieved 26 January 2011 from: http://www.intelinet.org/ sg_site/index.html. 24. González, Servando. 15 May 2002. ‘El extraño encuentro de Jesús Díaz con la muerte’, Cubanet. Retrieved 8 April 2011 from: http://www.cubanet.org/opi/05150201.htm. Cubanet is partly sponsored by the National Endowment for Democracy. All remaining quotes in this paragraph are from this source. 25. This incident took place prior to Díaz’s death. 26. See Berg (2004a) for a discussion of discourses on ‘antisocial behaviour’ in 1990s Cuba. 27. There are two reasons for this. Firstly, given the strained relationship between official Cuba and its diaspora, and the government’s mistrust of Western researchers (see Chapter 1) – which I also experienced during my fieldwork in Havana in 1998 – I did not even attempt to gain access to the consulate as a site of research and participant observation. Had I filed a request, I consider it highly unlikely that a permit for such research would have been forthcoming. Secondly, presuming I had gained permission, doing research with Cuban consular officials would have compromised me irreversibly in the eyes of many diasporic Cubans. I would simply have been labelled a government informer and many doors would have been firmly shut on me. It was already a balancing act to maintain contact with different groups within the diaspora, but a clear and visible connection with the consulate would unequivocally have labelled me as a government agent of some kind. 28. See the memoir by Eliseo Alberto (2002), in which Alberto recounts how he was asked to write informes (‘reports’) on his family, including his father, the acclaimed poet Diego Alberto, to the intelligence service when he still lived in Cuba.

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29. In some cases, this pact of silence is broken when Cubans remaining on the island are officially informed that their relative is considered a traidor. This happened to a woman whose mother, a former Communist Party member, was interviewed on Radio Martí, an exile radio station in Miami funded by US federal funds. After the broadcast, two officials appeared at the daughter’s door informing her that her mother henceforth was considered a traidora. 30. Yo vengo de todas partes / Y hacia todas partes voy. The lines are from Martí’s ‘Yo soy un hombre sincero’, in Versos Sencillos, first published in 1892. The translation used here is from Martí (1982). 31. This echoes the description by the exile writer Gustavo Pérez Firmat of a ‘residential or inner exile’ that his family chose to construct after the revolution but before leaving Cuba (Pérez Firmat 2000: 30). 32. I return to this issue in Chapter 6.

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Chapter 5 T he M igrants

n The most recent diasporic generation consists of those Cubans who I call the Migrants. They arrived in Spain after the Special Period in Cuba; that is, from the mid 1990s onwards. Motivated mainly by a hope of improving their material standard of living – some also by a sense of adventure and a wish to see the world – they have emigrated in a variety of ways, including through job-related travelling, marriage to a Spaniard, or they have taken the route via Rusia (see Chapter 2). Some say they made the decision because they suddenly found they had the chance and seized it. The Migrants see themselves as economic migrants even if many of them are also critical of conditions in Cuba and would like to see political changes. Given a choice they would prefer to be able to travel in and out of Cuba, but since that is impossible they felt pushed to emigrate. Some say they would like to return permanently if the economic situation in Cuba were to change, although this desire tends to wane as time passes in Spain. Thus, while the Exiles oppose links with and travel to Cuba for political reasons, what holds the Migrants back is money and visa requirements, not ideology. In this, they are very similar to the ‘new Cubans’ Eckstein identifies in Miami (Eckstein 2009), and the Cuban dancers in New York City that Knauer has written about (Knauer 2009). However, not only is travelling to Cuba more expensive from Spain, immigrants also have a lower earning potential in Spain compared to those in the US and hence are not able to visit the homeland as frequently. The Migrants are a heterogeneous lot and their profile is still changing. Compared to the previous generations, more come from the provinces of Cuba, more of them are non-white, and fewer have degree-level qualifications. Among the women, some have no formal labour market experience. There are thus class differences between the Migrants and the previous generations of Cubans, which make the Migrants more like other Latin Americans and less like other Cubans in Spain. While the Exiles and the Children of the Revolution emphasized the differences between themselves and the labour migrants, the Migrants were more likely to compare themselves with other immigrant groups and they felt they par-

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ticularly shared predicaments and hopes with other Latin American immigrants in Spain. The discourse of exceptionalism of the two previous diasporic generations is thus to some degree rejected by the Migrants, although not completely, as I discuss below. Among the Migrants there is a large group of professional dancers who have defected while on tour with dance troupes. According to one former Tropicana dancer, almost the entire troupe defected in 1996 on a tour in Spain.1 It did not seem an exaggeration when he claimed that you can reconstruct an entire Tropicana troupe in Madrid.2 The dancers are young, in their twenties or thirties; most are non-whites. They often relate their decision to migrate to the limited opportunities left for them in Cuba, and to their aspirations to make it in the capitalist world (el capitalismo). In Cuba they were not used to job insecurity, but in Spain they often have to find jobs outside their profession in order to survive. Some manage to find intermittent short-term contracts for performing, but are subjected to racial and national pigeon-holing, barring them from performing roles that are not in some way related to them being Cuban. Like the Children of the Revolution, but unlike the Exiles, members of this generation have migrated individually, but often see their move as part of a household livelihood strategy. They have left parents, partners and young children behind and endeavour to support their family through remittances, but find that it is difficult to earn enough. The mother is usually the central figure in the family for them and the person to whom they remit money when they can, and who they telephone on a regular basis. They tend to relate to news of Cuba through a pragmatic, personalized concern for the well-being of their kin and share with Children of the Revolution a concern for the plight of Cubans on the island. By contrast, most Exiles have few or no remaining close kin in Cuba and tend to view life on the island through a politicized lens. Some among the Migrants were recruited in Cuba to work in Spain. In such cases, the Cuban state keeps part of their salary – for example, by paying the workers in Cuban pesos at a rate favouring the state, or by retaining a part of the salary until completion of the contract – and the negotiation of the contract goes through a state agency. Many of the Migrants who had arrived in Spain on such contracts felt they had been cheated when they realized how little their wages would stretch in Spain. They had never been abroad before, and what sounded like a lot of money when they signed the contract in Cuba turned out to be barely enough to survive on in Spain, let alone save up as they had planned. These Cubans are mainly construction workers or work in the hospitality sector, but the of letting Cubans work abroad for hard currency while the state keeps a part of the salary is also used for medical professionals working in Latin America and Africa. Like other recently arrived immigrants, Cubans are only legally allowed to take jobs in three sectors – namely construction, agriculture and hospitality – and only on the condition that they obtain a work permit. For immigrants without 128

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stable work it is difficult to rent apartments or even rooms, as landlords and rental agencies often require proof of permanent paid work prior to agreeing to sign a lease. The Cubans of the Migrant generation thus share precarious livelihoods and uncertainties of legal status with other immigrants. Like other immigrant groups, many have found rooms or flats in the old Jewish quarter, Lavapiés, in central Madrid.

Love, Marriage and Migration Some Cubans of the Migrant generation have arrived in Spain through marriage to Spanish citizens. This does not automatically entitle them to residence permits, but they cannot be expelled from the country either. In the late 1990s and the early 2000s the rate of marriages between Cubans and Spaniards contracted in Cuba, and registered by the Spanish authorities, averaged just under 1,400 annually, of which three quarters were between Cuban women and Spanish men.3 Although significant numerically – even if not all Cubans married to Spaniards later settled in Spain – this group proved elusive to track down. Some had never had reason to contact Cuban associations or other points of contact for recently arrived migrants, such as NGOs or trades union migrant services. Another reason is related to the stigmatized image, both in Cuba and in Spain, of Cubans marrying foreigners. Scholarship on marriage migration emphasizes the complexity of cross-border marriages, the mutual imaginings of marriage partners, and the historically constituted power relations that make some patterns of cross-border marriages more common than others (see, e.g., Constable 2005). In Spain, the representation of Cuba as a tropical sexual haven for tourists has clear resonances with the colonial history of slavery and sexual relations between white men and black women. Black Cuban women especially have become associated with the phenomenon of jineterismo. Jineterismo, literally ‘horseback riding’, is a racialized term used in Cuba for a wide spectrum of livelihood practices, from hustling to transactional sex. Although the phenomenon is not new, it has become closely associated with discourses of moral malaise in the aftermath of the economic crisis and the reintroduction of the US dollar as legal tender, and is linked to postcolonial anxieties about sovereignty (see Berg 2004b). In the 1990s, images of Cuban women selling sex captured the imagination of Western media, and Cuban women’s bodies were often used to chronicle the economic crisis in Cuba (Cabezas 1998: 79). In Spain, where sexualized images of Cuban women have been embedded in unequal power relations for centuries, jineterismo became synonymous with prostitution, especially of black Cuban women, and the figure of the jinetera (a woman engaged in jineterismo) a symbol of a sexually voracious and available woman. At the time of my fieldwork, the Spanish daily El País even featured 129

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numerous adverts for ‘Cuban jineteras’ in its ‘relax’ section playing exactly on this trope, while glossy magazines and chat shows on TV also frequently represented Cubans as sexual obsessives, much to the chagrin of Exile Cubans in particular. Meanwhile, in Cuba, intercultural encounters between Cubans and foreigners were loaded with significance relating to anxieties over the future of socialism and national sovereignty. Specifically, sexual relations between Cuban women and foreign men became a symbol of the ambiguous and problematic aspects of Cuba’s reinsertion into the global tourist market. Such relationships were discussed and depicted widely, including in film, fiction and music in the 1990s (Whitfield 2009: 29). Films such as Cosas que dejé en la Habana/Things I left in Havana (dir. Manuel Gutiérrez Aragón, 1997), En la puta calle, literally ‘In the Fucking Street’ but released in the US as Hitting Bottom (dir. Enrique Gabriel, 1998) and Lista de espera/Waiting List (dir. Juan Carlos Tabío, 2000) all explored sexual relations between Cubans and foreigners in the context of Cuba’s crisis. Common to them was the depiction of heterosexual relationships between Cubans characterized by intimacy and sexual satisfaction, juxtaposed with relationships between Cubans and Spaniards, depicted as sexually unsatisfactory and lacking in real ‘love’.4 Against this background, Cuban women who marry foreigners are widely assumed, in both Cuba and Spain, to have been engaged in jineterismo, and thus to be marrying for financial reasons and in order to emigrate. It is thus not difficult to understand why Cubans who had migrated through marriage were often reluctant to be interviewed by me, and why in some cases their spouses were hostile to them seeing me. Those I did get to know were often keen to explain in detail how and where they had met their partner and how long they had known each other before marrying, as if to protect themselves against any suggestions that they had been jineteando, like both Raisa and Adrián below. I made contact with 32-year-old Raisa through an NGO assisting immigrants in settling in Spain. Raisa was originally from central Cuba, but had moved to Havana with her parents when she was eighteen. She arrived in Madrid in 2001 on a variation of the via Rusia migratory route, namely on a visa to go to Germany. Raisa’s visa had been sponsored by Pilar, a Spanish woman with whom Raisa had made friends in Havana. It took three years to get all the necessary permits and documents sorted out for Raisa’s exit from Cuba, and she considered it ‘the best thing that has ever happened in my life, in spite of all the nostalgia and all the friends I have had to leave behind’. When I met her, Raisa shared a flat in central Madrid with Pilar. She was undocumented and worked long days as a cleaner and nanny, looking after a young child. After some months, Pilar married and moved out, but Raisa stayed in the flat although she could hardly afford the rent. In Cuba, Raisa was qualified as a library assistant but had worked as a masseuse in addition to her library job to make ends meet. She had also briefly worked in the tourism sector. She explained that she had not been in a desperate economic situation, nor had she had any 130

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political ‘problems’, but she felt frustrated by her life in Cuba. She was also in an unhappy marriage with a husband she did not trust and who had an alcohol habit. In Madrid she enjoyed the fact that even on her meagre salary she was able to go out with friends. In Havana, the dollarized tourist bars had been firmly beyond her means, and there were no places left to go out if you could only pay in Cuban pesos. Even before Raisa left Cuba, Pilar found a job for her and she started almost immediately upon arrival in Madrid. Also through Pilar, Raisa met a Spanish man, Paco, with whom she fell in love and started a relationship. Both Pilar and Paco introduced her to their respective families and friends, and Raisa said they had all welcomed her into their lives. She had no Cuban friends she said, but she was in touch with one acquaintance from her hometown, a gynaecologist working as a waiter in a Cuban restaurant. She had met a few other Cubans in Madrid and had tried to stay in touch with them but nothing had come of it. Raisa felt there was too much mistrust and that Cubans were too calculating to want to meet her if she had nothing to offer them materially. Raisa’s parents were both Communist Party members and atheists, but Raisa had always felt attracted to Catholicism, which she learnt about from her grandmother, a devout Catholic. During the 1960s, Raisa’s parents were away from home most of the time, participating in political mobilizations and doing voluntary work in agriculture. Raisa’s older brother, who was born in 1965, was therefore mostly raised by their grandmother. The grandmother secretly had Raisa’s brother baptized, and planned to have Raisa, born four years later, baptized as well, but her parents prevented it. As an adult, Raisa had long hoped to be baptized, but she did not want to upset her parents, with whom she lived, and resigned herself to waiting. Soon after arriving in Spain, she started weekly catechism classes with a local priest. Paco’s family, and especially his mother, were very supportive of her and Raisa was greatly looking forward to her baptism. Raisa was hoping that with time she would be able to legalize her situation and to find work in a library, or else to set up a massage clinic. However, when I interviewed her, Raisa had outstayed her exit permit from Cuba. She had applied for a visa for Spain, but because she was undocumented she had had to apply for it through the Spanish Consulate in Havana. She was granted the visa but needed to go to the Consulate in person to collect it. This was impossible for her, not only because of the cost of a return airfare to Cuba, but also because upon re-entering Cuba she would have to apply for another exit permit to leave again. Raisa was very indignant about this situation and also anxious about what would happen to her. She had a recurrent nightmare in which she found herself back in Cuba and unable to leave again: [My nightmare is] that I am back in Cuba, for some bureaucratic reason. I have to get a certain document and it has taken too long and I can’t leave again. Paco is here [Madrid] and I don’t know what to do with my life and my work and I can’t leave 131

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Cuba. I’ve had this dream about four times now and when I wake up I feel a tremendous anxiety. I have asked other Cubans and they have told me the same has happened to them, that they have a recurrent dream about being back in Cuba and not being able to leave. It’s horrible, horrible! Imagine if it really happened, I don’t even want to think about it. When I leave Spain, or when I go to Cuba, I only want to go with all my papers in order, with a residence permit, so I know for certain that I can go back to Spain again. Otherwise, I’m not leaving. I feel very sorry for my parents and my grandmother who I would love to see again and I hope it won’t take too long, but I don’t want to go without papers.

Raisa was staving off any suggestions of impropriety on her part through her detailed account of how she had met Paco, and was seeking a connection to her ‘adopted’ Spanish relatives as well as a release from what she saw as socialist Cuba’s moral malaise in Catholicism. Being white, working in a Spanish home and socializing mainly with Spaniards, she was protected from the kinds of discrimination that non-white Cubans, such as Adrián, were exposed to on a daily basis.

Adrián: Commodifying Cubanness More than the other two diasporic generations, the Migrants frequent the numerous Cuban bars and restaurants in Madrid. ‘Cuba-mania’ in Spain has made Cubanness a saleable commodity and some Migrants are what could be called ‘professional Cubans’, making a living from being Cuban. They work as santeros (practitioners of Cuba’s syncretic religion, Santería), dance and percussion teachers, waiters in Cuban restaurants, or as ‘animators’ in Latin night clubs. While the niche for making a livelihood out of being Cuban provides an entry into the job market, it entails exposure to demeaning and racist stereotyping from both fellow Cubans and Spaniards. As an example, Adrián, a dancer and mulato who worked in a Santería shop in central Madrid, said he is sometimes reluctant to tell people he is from Cuba: ‘The image of Cubans here is that Cubans are made for fucking and dancing and that’s all’. He also took care to tell me that he had married a Spanish woman out of love, not necessity: I didn’t have to leave Cuba, I lived well in Cuba, I was privileged … I am not like other Cubans, I am a bit different. I have travelled a lot in my life. I adapt easily to other countries. I came to Spain because I fell in love with a woman. I didn’t leave because I had to or for political reasons. I fell in love, the relationship didn’t work out, and here I am. Since I was nineteen years old I have travelled the world, I was a dancer in the Conjunto Folklórico Nacional [Cuba’s National Folklore Troupe, founded in 1962]. I fell in love in a night club; I was here with the Conjunto and we had gone out to dance. I saw this woman; we looked at each other a lot. The next day, when I was dancing on stage I saw her again. I thought it couldn’t be true, but it was, and she saw me.

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… After the show I changed quickly and went to the same club and there she was. It was a very passionate story. I returned to Cuba, but then came back to Madrid because of her … Now … I pay US $300 a year [for an overseas residence permit, PRE], and I can go to Cuba as often as I want. I have my work here and that’s it. I have been all over: to the Dominican Republic, USA, France, Spain a lot of times. Spain has always attracted me a lot, it made an impact on me, it has a lot of magic, it talks to me. I never thought I wanted to leave Cuba, but I always knew that if I were to leave, I would go to Spain. I arrived here the 17th of May 1999. I had a visa that ran out after three months, and after that time I was here sin papeles. I worked for a removals company, and they paid 4,000 pesetas per day, so I only did it one day. I had to look for work. I think that probably was one of the reasons why my relationship failed, because I didn’t have a job or money or anything. I was desperate and confused.

After a few months in Madrid, Adrián found more work: ‘Things became better when a friend of mine offered me work in a cafeteria. It was only on Sundays, but I was paid 1,000 pesetas per hour and so I would take home 10,000 every Sunday’. Adrián and his Spanish partner had a son together, but before he was born the relationship had broken up. Adrián thought that many relationships between Cubans and Spaniards fail: ‘We lived together from day one. But one thing is to come here on a tour another thing is living together. Your different characters will start to clash, and the relationship failed … I came because of love, which failed, but I stayed because of love for Spain’. When I met him, Adrián felt more settled: I have only been here a short time, but I have a normal life. I don’t like drugs … I live like a normal Spaniard. I can’t complain, I have been very lucky. I am thinking of buying a flat, I have done well and I want to continue doing well. I found the job in the shop through a friend, Pedro. I used to be a customer in the shop, and when he wanted to leave he introduced me to the manager and told him I knew a lot about Cuban folklore. The 4th of October 1999, I started working in the shop.

The shop was one of a small chain of four shops in Madrid selling amulets, ritual objects, esoteric herbs and so on, and offered sessions including such things as tarot-card reading, astrology, readings of shells, using a mixture of rituals and beliefs from the Caribbean, South America and beyond, but with an emphasis on Cuban Santería. According to Adrián, most of his customers in the shop were Spanish women seeking advice on problems in their relationships. I asked him if he thought he might move back to Cuba in the future: I don’t think so, even if Cuba made a 180-degree change. It would have to become more like Spain. My son is a cubañol [a neologism for Cuban-Spanish]. I am always going to teach him to say ‘Qué volá, acere’ [a Cuban saying used between friends with black, male working-class connotations, equivalent to ‘How are you?’]. When he is bigger I’ll take him to Cuba with me.

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Adrián also had an older son from a previous relationship, but he still lived in Havana with the mother. Adrián had arranged and paid for his Cuban-born son to come to Madrid to visit and was hoping to be able to repeat the visit in the future. The desire to make his Spanish-born son familiar with Cuban culture and expressions, and to travel to Cuba with him, is starkly different to the way many Exiles had attempted to instil Spanishness in their children. While the Migrants do not have to cut ties to Cuba and renounce going back for visits, as previous generations have sometimes had to do, they are in a more precarious situation with regard to integration into Spanish society. They have arrived in Spain at a time when legalizing residence has become an increasingly elusive goal for non-EU citizens. The restriction on access to the labour market for non-nationals in particular makes it difficult for them to find regular employment. At the same time, they have to be careful not to fall into any of the categories of Cuban émigrés who are not allowed to visit by the Cuban authorities. Those who have previously worked in entities belonging to the Ministry of Culture, such as dance troupes, can apply for a permit to live abroad, but not everyone can afford the cost of it, to which should be added the relatively high cost of a Cuban passport (€91), which is only valid for two years. If a period lapses between the expiry date of one passport and the application for a new one, the Cuban consulate will sometimes require the applicant to pay for the interim period as well. Those who have been back to visit Cuba often find that even after a short period abroad, the physical decay of the city and the poverty shocks them: ‘I went back to my world and I was disgusted’, Adrián told me. A woman in her early twenties said that everything looked old and worn out and burnt by the sun when she went back to Havana after four months in Spain, where she had been working as a dancer. She then decided to quit her dance education in Havana and married the manager of the show she had been working with in Spain, in order to obtain permission to leave the island. When I met her, however, she was going through divorce proceedings. Some of the Migrants arrive in Spain without any prior connections through friends or family and know very little of the challenges awaiting them. But as a man in his forties said to me: ‘even if somebody had told us about the situation here and how difficult it is, we wouldn’t have believed them’. In spite of their precarious situation, they often maintain that they are treated better than other migrants because they are Cuban: ‘I don’t have the feeling that I’m in a foreign country. When you tell people you’re Cuban, everybody treats you differently than if you’d said you were Moroccan or Ecuadorian. They don’t discriminate against us Cubans. I feel there is a bit of racism towards other peoples, but not with Cubans’, a white woman in her thirties, who had lived in Madrid since 1999, told me. Notwithstanding, non-white Cubans often find themselves subjects of racialized and sexualized othering. 134

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More than the previous two generations of Cubans discussed, the Migrants who have arrived via Rusia share socio-economic backgrounds and a precarious legal situation in Spain with other Latin American immigrants. Like Cubans of the other diasporic generations, they nevertheless often assumed a patronizing stance towards other migrants: ‘Cubans are different from other migrant groups. The Dominicans and the Ecuadorians, for instance, they never leave their little colonies. They are like tribes, they live up to ten people in a flat’, said Adrián. Raisa also thought Cubans superior to other immigrants: You will never see a Cuban begging, and Cubans are never involved in the same dirty business that some immigrants are in order to subsist. You’ll never see a Cuban selling stuff in the metro [an ethnic niche for Senegalese immigrants] … Cubans have almost all been able to find more normal jobs, even if they are immigrants’ jobs, such as looking after children or waitressing, or in agriculture and construction, that kind of thing. But Cubans are not like the Africans that you sometimes see, or these people from Eastern Europe.

Cubans, in short, maintained a discourse invoking a precarious, but nonetheless, relatively privileged position for themselves in the racialized hierarchy of immigrants in Spain. However for non-white Cubans this is a fraught position as it simultaneously exposes them to discrimination and sexualization. This discourse of differentiation coexists alongside another discourse which invokes similarities with other new migrant groups, especially other Latin Americans, in terms of lifestyle, aspirations and the hardship of missing your family and struggling to remit money to them.

Lucy: ‘In Spain I Have More Freedom’ I got to know Lucy in a café in central Madrid where she had worked as a waitress for a couple of months. Most of her colleagues were immigrants like herself from various Latin American countries. Lucy was white and in her twenties or early thirties. She had been in Spain with her husband for a year and eight months. She had left an eleven-year-old daughter by a previous husband in Cuba with her own mother. Lucy thought that anyone who wanted to could find a job in Madrid and that she and her husband had been lucky to find good jobs. They had been recruited in Cuba to work on foreign-owned cruise liners and made the decision to defect together while they were still in Cuba. Lucy informed her family about their plans, as she had to make sure her daughter would be looked after. Her husband’s family by contrast did not know of their plans. On their final trip, the cruise ship went to Egypt and Italy before reaching Seville. Lucy and her husband were uncertain about where to get off, but since

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another Cuban crew member deserted in Seville, the remaining crew were told that they would not be allowed to go ashore. Lucy and her husband therefore made a quick decision to leave in the middle of the night. Lucy said that she was scared, but they were not caught. They later learned that all the Cuban crew members had defected, one by one. When they set foot in Seville, Lucy and her husband had only US$80 in cash, as their wages were normally retained until they had completed their period of employment and returned to Cuba. From Seville, Lucy and her husband made their way to Madrid, the only place where they knew anyone. They were welcomed by their friends, who told them about the Centro Cubano where they went the following day. Lucy was offered a job in the Cuban restaurant adjacent to the Centro and started working straight away. Her husband found a job promptly as well, even though neither of them had residence permits. When I met Lucy, both she and her husband had residence permits obtained through the amnesty of 2000/1. They stayed with their friends until they found their own flat one year and four months after arriving. Lucy was hoping to bring over her daughter soon and told me she called Cuba every other Sunday. Of course she missed Cuba a lot, she said, but at the same time there were compensations. In Madrid she felt she could save up to buy a flat, buy new clothes and other things she liked, and had the possibility of going out with friends. She said she had a freedom that she did not have in Cuba. When Lucy and her husband went to the Cuban consulate to ask for new passports they were both interviewed by the vice-consul. As Lucy recounted, the vice-consul asked them why they had left Cuba (or rather, why they had failed to return to Cuba), to which Lucy replied that she wanted a better standard of living. The vice-consul said that he thought that they did well in Cuba from their jobs on the cruise liners. But Lucy countered that it was too insecure since it only entailed a couple of months’ work every now and again. After the interview, nine and ten months respectively passed before they were given new passports, but unlike Iván, they were not labelled traidores. ‘Of course I hope to go back to my country. We’ll see how long it takes’, Lucy said. ‘There are people here who have been waiting for forty years’, she added, referring to the Cubans at the Centro Cubano. While Lucy knew about the Exiles, other Migrants did not. When I asked Adrián, he told me that Cubans in Spain have come either through marriage or via Rusia. He had never met or heard of Cubans who had lived in Spain prior to the Special Period in Cuba. Likewise, while the Migrants often make use of the services of the Centro Cubano and the exile-run Ropero de la Caridad del Cobre (see Chapter 3), they were often not aware that these services were run by other Cubans and they did not recognize the volunteers as co-nationals. In general, neither the Exiles nor the newly arrived seemed interested in any further contact. Strikingly, when a young, recently arrived woman asked about how to become actively involved with a Catholic community, the women attending her in the 136

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Ropero did not invite her to the meetings of the Cuban Catholic Circle they were members of but instead advised her to contact her local parish. Lucy and other Migrants were emphatically not interested in political activities, and some stated with pride that they had not been ‘in trouble’ – that is, they had not been involved in politics before leaving. Most of them came of age in the 1990s when the economic crisis was at its most difficult. This led them to a pragmatic, family-oriented stance, while politics receded to the background. In this respect as well, they have more in common with the ‘new Cubans’ in Miami than with Exile Cubans in Spain (see Eckstein 2009: 158). Whereas the Children of the Revolution tend to define themselves in opposition to or in conflict with the government, the Migrants define themselves as inmigrantes, ‘immigrants’, and stress that they did not leave Cuba for political reasons. As Oscar, who had defected while on tour with Tropicana said: ‘The word exile sounds like something political to me and I have nothing to do with politics’. This is not necessarily because they identify with the government, as some Exiles claim about them, but because many of them think of ‘politics’ as an immoral pursuit, something that decent people should stay away from. Paradoxically this makes them appear ‘immoral’ to both the Exiles and the Children of the Revolution. César, an actor introduced below, said in a typical statement that, ‘politics doesn’t interest me … I would completely erase it from the dictionary. Politicians don’t interest me at all, not at all’. Adrián said he had been a member of the Young Communists, but that he had been ‘very confused’. Now he considers himself ‘apolitical’ because he finds politics to be very ‘dirty’ (cochina).

César and the Elusive Abundance of El Capitalismo César was thirty-three years old and had lived in Spain for four years when I met him through a mutual acquaintance, who worked for a trade union service for immigrants. He lived in Barcelona where he had a job as a drama teacher in a primary school. In Cuba he had been an actor, although for a period before leaving he had worked as a domestic to supplement his meagre wages with hard currency. When I met him he had not worked as an actor for two years. He said he had left Cuba because he had been given the chance to work in Spain and he had been curious to try his luck: The idea came here in Spain. I was working in a play, which was a success in Cuba. A Spanish director … liked the play and he invited us to the Alternative Drama Festival in Madrid. It was a success here as well, and I thought that doors were beginning to open for me [so] what would be the harm in trying it out? Afterwards I presented a monologue, which premiered in Havana where I won a prize for acting. I was given the chance to perform it in the same theatre in Madrid. It was a success there as well

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and we did a tour of Salamanca, Medina del Campo, Murcia and Barcelona. When I arrived in Barcelona – well, Barcelona is a city that bewitches you, an impressive city. I liked it a lot. I came for two weeks and I’ve been here for four years now … That’s what happened.

I quote César at length on how he came to Spain because his experience is similar to that of many other actors and dancers. The chance of performing abroad combined with the impossibility of travelling in and out of Cuba with ease make many of them decide to stay in Spain. They later find that it is difficult to continue working within their fields, but if they return to Cuba they fear they may not have another chance of travelling again. César was lucky enough to have an overseas residence permit (PRE) and was thus allowed to travel back to Cuba at any time. He had been back once in the four years he had lived in Spain. When I asked him what it had been like going back, he sighed. Then he said: ‘It was hard, very hard for me’. He said that he had noted la tristeza, the melancholy or gloom, of people. Yet he also insisted he had been much happier in Cuba and that he would go back again as soon as he had a chance: I think I’ll always go if I have a holiday, because … when you’re here … your ‘machinery’ works to a different rhythm, a different colour, another form of life. There’s this phrase that we Cubans, who are here, say … if we feel down … we always say the same: ‘I need a holiday. I need to go and recharge the batteries in Cuba’ … To recharge the batteries means to find a bit of happiness again. I think I was happier, a lot happier … in Cuba.

I asked him why he needed to ‘recharge the batteries’: Right now, for instance, I need to go to Cuba to charge my batteries because I have had a week of nostalgia and tristeza … I have woken up in dreams several times. I dream that I am in my house in Cuba and that when I open my eyes I’ll be in my house and I’ve said to myself: ‘When I get up I’ll go and visit Ernesto’ – he’s a neighbour – and when I open my eyes I realize that I’m in Spain … There are some incredible contradictions, because when you’re there you don’t value what you have, and you don’t know what’s going on outside [of Cuba] either.

Like those Children of the Revolution who arrived after the onset of the Special Period in Cuba, the Migrants often find the degree of consumerism in Spain overwhelming. Coming to terms with the contrast between the perennial scarcity of food and goods in Cuba and their abundance in Spain takes time. They also find the sight of homeless people and beggars shocking and distressing. César spent his first months in Barcelona scavenging the rubbish bins in amazement at what he would find, such as televisions, beds, furniture. He found it upsetting to see people discard food, particularly just after arriving:

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These were things that caused me a lot of pain because it reminded me of my country, of my family. I was always reminded of my mother. We are three brothers and I am the youngest. I am thirty-three years old and a week before leaving Cuba my mother would sit down in her chair in the mornings thinking, with tears in her eyes, what she was going to give us to eat, me and my brothers. Imagine, I am thirty-three years old and my mother is still feeding me! … So when I arrived here and saw somebody throwing food away with a complete naturalness, and you see other things thrown away – it just doesn’t seem fair to me.

César put on weight after arriving, but as he said, he could not stop himself from eating: ‘I can’t castigate myself. I am thirty-three years old and for thirty years of my life I was on an obligatory diet, eating what I was given [lo que me daban; that is, the food ‘given’ using a ration book at state shops in Cuba], so now I eat anything I feel like, whatever I feel like at the moment’. César was not the only one to find the easy availability and abundance of food both exhilarating and stress-inducing. Oscar, introduced below, felt compelled to eat everything as if he would never get a chance to eat again, but had to learn to control himself, lest he jeopardized his job prospects as a dancer. Others said they had not been able to eat for months without feeling guilty about their family in Cuba, who did not have enough food. Conversely, the first question many relatives of Migrants asked me in Cuba of their relatives abroad, was ¿Está gorda/o? (‘Is s/he fat?’). I quickly learnt that the hoped-for answer was ‘yes’. On seeing photos from Spain, they would discuss how gorda/o their relative was. In this culturally embedded understanding, being thin is associated with sadness, poverty and Cuba’s economic crisis, which the Migrants were hoping to escape by leaving the island. Being gorda/o on the other hand is considered a sign of happiness and wealth. Although excessive fatness is not considered attractive or beautiful, being gorda/o is an instantly recognizable sign of spiritual and economic well-being. For the Migrants, the issue of plenty versus scarcity in food and goods was recurrent in many narratives, particularly with regard to their first few weeks or months in Spain. A visit to a branch of El Corte Inglés, an upmarket department store, was an obligatory and for many an important and memorable moment after arriving in Spain. El Corte Inglés was founded by a Spanish return-migrant from Cuba, Ramón Areces. Areces was born in Asturias in 1904 but emigrated to Cuban as a 15-year-old and learnt his trade in Havana, where his uncle secured him a job in the El Encanto department store. El Encanto burnt down in 1961 in an incident attributed to counter-revolutionary activities. Long before that, however, Areces had returned to Spain, and with the help of his Havana-based uncle he acquired a small shop in central Madrid, which became the first El Corte Inglés.5 Today, El Corte Inglés is ubiquitous in Spanish cities and is Europe’s largest department store chain.6 Perhaps it was the connection to Cuba which made shopping at El Corte Inglés a rite of passage, and a symbol of leaving Cuba and

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truly arriving in the capitalist world (el capitalismo) for Cubans across the generations. The Exiles relished in the story of how El Corte Inglés was founded by a return migrant like themselves, who made his fortune in Cuba; a trajectory they identified with. They would point out that the department store concept was virtually invented in Cuba before it was ever heard of in Spain. One male Exile recounted with pride – appropriately over coffee and cake in a cafeteria in El Corte Inglés – that when he and his wife arrived in Madrid in 1961 he had been offered a job by Areces himself. His wife had worked for Areces’s uncle in Havana before leaving. In short, for the Exiles, El Corte Inglés was a reminder of what Cuba once was, whereas for the Migrants it was a symbol of all that Cuba is not. The first visit to El Corte Inglés is therefore often both traumatic and delirious. Rafael, a journalist, recounted how he ‘lost himself ’ in the food hall of El Corte Inglés when, on his first visit, he saw a live lobster with its claws tied up: ‘This terrible thing happened to me, it was the most kitschy moment and it has marked my life. There was a Before and an After the lobster’, he told me, only half-jokingly. Standing in front of the fish-tank, Rafael insisted that his friends, who were with him, buy the lobster so he could set it free. When they argued that there is no sea in Madrid and that it would die anyway, he broke down in tears in front of the fish-tank: ‘Of course the lobster was really me’, he finished off the story with a smile. On the same visit, his friends stopped him from buying a full trolley-load of vegetables; ‘I wanted to have it all to myself, so I would have vegetables when they finish [cuando se acaben; that is, when the shop runs out]. So they had to explain to me that here the vegetables never finish’. Carlos, an actor, said that he will never be as badly off in Spain as he was in Cuba because he can always go to El Corte Inglés, buy a bottle of rum and steal some seafood, go home, get drunk, eat lobster and reminisce about Cuba. Mirta, introduced below, told me how she had circulated photographs of a smiling Cuban friend shopping among the full shelves of El Corte Inglés to her family and friends in Cuba, so people ‘know what it is like’, she explained to me. El Corte Inglés, in all these narratives, is the symbol of consumption and abundance, epitomizing the virtues of el capitalismo as opposed to socialist Cuba. Yet many Cubans of the Migrant generation emphasized another kind of abundance in Cuba, namely of non-commercialized, high-quality cultural production, and affordable access to cinemas and theatres. Raisa was surprised at the ignorance of Latin American culture in Spain: I’m so surprised that here in Spain people know so little about Latin American culture, at least the general public … In Cuba ordinary people know lots more about Latin American culture in general. They know Latin American cinema, the music of Argentina and Brazil. They know singers and musicians from these countries, from Mexico and Chile. But here, if I ask people about writers or about films … people don’t know them, and I’m really surprised about it.

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She continued: In Cuba there are so many radio programmes that are cultural in nature, and you learn lots from them. They play good music and they give you lots of information about culture in general; it’s the same for television. I’m impressed with how bad television is here. I mean, it’s very good technically, that’s all very good, the images are excellent, the set designs are always very good, the camera movements and so on, it’s all very effective. But the programmes themselves? All these gossip programmes … And that’s apart from all the commercials, sometimes it’s up to ten minutes of adverts … That’s the only thing I don’t like there, that the diffusion of culture is a bit … poor.

This observation and complaint was shared by many younger Cubans, who were not used to commercialized mass culture. As an actor, César felt he had been pigeon-holed in racial and national terms and he was frustrated about the dearth of interesting roles offered to him: As an actor I have not been asked to play a character who wasn’t a Cuban and I don’t think I’ll ever get the chance. It’s quite tough. I had a five-year career behind me. I left a country behind thinking that I was going to continue and that I’d have a chance to do lots more, but on the contrary you are boxed in even worse and all you can do is to play a Cuban. It’s not even a character you have to study for, it’s like they don’t take us to be people, we’re just characters.

He said that what he missed most of all was his work, his mother and his family, and his friends. To alleviate his nostalgia, César said he would sing Cuban songs, cook Cuban food and get together with his Cuban friends. He also had a family photo album that he took with him everywhere. He kept his ‘warriors’, Santería deities, in his home in Barcelona too. The connection between food, music, sociality, family, religion and feeling at home was exactly what many of the Children of the Revolution were careful to say in particular that they did not experience. The contrast between César’s ways of coping with nostalgia and the comment by an author belonging to the generation of the Children of the Revolution, who said that he would get sick of Cuban food if he had it every day, just like he would tire of Italian food, speaks of two different modes of being in diaspora. Thus, with regard to the consumption of Cuban food and music, the Migrants and the Exile generation are very similar to one another, except that the kinds of food and music that the two generations respectively consider Cuban are different. Unlike most members of the previous generations, César did not discard the idea of a permanent return to Cuba: I’ll be here in Spain for as long as God wants [por el tiempo que dios quiera], that’s the way it is. As long as things go well for me and I can develop myself in the ways I like, I’ll stay here. If not … I’ll go back to my parents’ house. They are always waiting for me there.

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While César considered his parents’ home or house (for which there is only one word in Spanish, namely casa) a place he could always go back to, he was not so clear about his relationship to Cuba: I abandoned Cuba. Well, I didn’t abandon Cuba, I am still Cuban and I still live in Cuba, or I still have my permit [the PRE] and I hope to keep it. I don’t think I’ll ever renounce Cuba politically … I am not an exile, no. I see myself as an emigrant. Yes, I am an emigrant, a temporal emigrant I think. For the moment I see myself as temporal.

César was certain that he did not want to migrate again ‘because you have to go through many things; many, many things. You’re under-valued and made to feel horrible, horrible’. One of the ‘many, many things’ for César and others, was the impossibility of sharing their experiences abroad with his family and friends back home. The things left unsaid and the difficulties of explaining life abroad to someone who has never been away often amounted to a barrier between Cubans living on and outside the island. At least César hoped that one day he would be able to support his family economically, thus making the hardship worthwhile: My parents are retired now, they were [members] of the Party. They believed in the revolution and fought for the revolution and now they are retired and they have nothing … They live with the same melancholia as the twelve million other inhabitants there. It causes me pain and sadness to be here and have all these things, to have everything within reach, and yet not be able to support them economically, because I still can’t. I am constantly thinking that I have to pay three hundred dollars to the Ministry of Culture, for nothing, for a piece of paper [the PRE]. I have to pay my apartment, electricity, gas, water, food, transport, and on top of it all my passport is running out: more money; my PRE is running out: more money … I can’t do anything for my family and it makes me feel terrible … But at least it’s one mouth less to feed, it’s a little bit less pressure on them and I try at least to give my mother some happiness on the telephone.

Since press coverage in Cuba about Western countries tends to emphasize social and economic inequality, poverty and instability, César was careful not to cause undue anxiety to his mother: ‘Of course the idea they put in our heads is that capitalism is very bad … and that in el capitalismo you live with fear. They [Cubans in Cuba] think that we must work lots here, which is true’. This fearful image of el capitalismo is more prevalent among middle-aged to elderly Cubans on the island, whereas younger Cubans who have grown up with little faith in official discourse and propaganda, and with increasing exposure to Hollywood productions and mass tourism, tend to think of el capitalismo as a space of plenty and boundless opportunities. César found that neither of these images were appropriate: ‘Life is hard anywhere, the only difference is that when you’re in your own country, in your own house, you know exactly where the sugar is and where the salt is, but if somebody comes in from the street, he’ll have to search for himself ’.

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Therefore, César sometimes preferred to be evasive to his mother about his situation in Spain, particularly during periods when he was out of work. When he worked as a waiter for six months, he did not tell his mother. Through letters from friends and neighbours, he knew that his mother often talked about him and he sometimes felt the need to invent stories to keep her happy: Once, about two years ago … I had an attack of melancholia and I told her I was a bit sad, that I wasn’t acting, that things weren’t as I had thought … And my brothers called me on reverse charge to say that I had to call my mother to put her at rest because she would get up every day crying, thinking of what was going to happen with me, and I had to call her and ask a Catalan friend of mine to tell her a story, like to a child, to tell her a story that I had a new job, that she [the friend] was an actress who worked with me … A week later I called my brother at work and he said ‘Mum is very content since you have been working’ … Maybe she didn’t even believe it, but it’s just … a story to help her dream.

César’s story is rich in paradoxes. He insisted on seeing himself as a temporal emigrant who had chosen a life in Barcelona because he was ‘bewitched’ by the city. He hoped and desired a life in which he can exercise his profession without the racial and national pigeon-holing he was met with in Barcelona. As an émigré, he felt obliged to support his family economically, yet was unable to do so. As with Yanet, introduced in the Introduction, César said that his homeland was his family and the family home, not a nation or fatherland.

Oscar: ‘I Had to Start from Zero’ Oscar was thirty-three years old when I met him through a lawyer doing pro bono work for SOS Racismo, an anti-racist NGO founded in France but which now also has chapters in Spain. Oscar contacted the NGO because he needed legal help to apply for a residence permit but could not afford to pay for it. He had been in Spain for a year and a half and was fortunate enough to have arrived before the amnesty for undocumented immigrants in 2000/1. With the assistance of SOS Racismo, Oscar filed an application for a residence permit, which he was later granted. Before defecting he had been a dancer with Tropicana for eleven years and had been on several international tours. Seeing former colleagues succeeding professionally in Spain encouraged Oscar to consider defecting himself: I made the decision not because of political problems but because I had already fulfilled all my goals in Cuba and my aspirations were higher … My artistic career as a dancer started from nothing and I reached the highest point I could aspire to, which was to become a soloist with Tropicana. I had no other goals to which I could aspire [in Cuba], so when I saw the competition between dancers here, I suppose that was

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what made me decide … It’s something I don’t regret, but I wouldn’t recommend it to anyone either.

Another factor contributing to his decision was his sexuality: being gay, Oscar said he did not want to be the ‘dishonour’ of his family for the rest of his life. In Havana, he had lived with a partner for several years. Even so, he had never discussed this with his family. Only once after leaving Cuba did his mother ask him on the telephone if he had ‘changed’. Particularly during his first months in Madrid, the gay and transvestite nightclub scene fascinated him, and he said that he had been ‘going out all the time’. In that period, he felt as if he were still on tour. When his money ran out after a couple of months, he realized that he had to start looking for a job and a permanent place to live. This was when Oscar started realizing the dizzying implications of his decision to defect: ‘When I made the decision, I had to start from zero with everything. It was like being born again … I don’t have a home, I have no friends, I have no family, I have nobody to help me … Everything is from zero, you have to make new friendships, new work contacts, everything is very difficult’. Before making the decision to stay, Oscar imagined his life would be easier and that he would have more money. He belongs to the generation of Cubans, for whom el capitalismo signifies wealth and abundance: I thought I was going to live very well. The image we have of capitalism in Cuba is that … everyone has everything, but what they don’t say is that without work you won’t achieve anything. But there are still many, many people who work and don’t achieve … Like me, for example, I am working to pay the apartment and with a noose around my neck as we say, because some months the hotel performances don’t pay enough for me to pay my expenses. That’s why I’d like a stable job, so I know I have my salary every month.

Oscar said he was often sad and missed Cuba, although he said he tried to deny it to himself. He remitted money to his mother as often as he could spare anything: Since I’ve been here I have sent money to my mother about six times. I send a hundred or two hundred dollars … Those have been the months that I have earned the most. Last month, for example, I couldn’t send her anything, and this month I can’t either … So that they shouldn’t miss me too much I send them lots of things instead.

When feeling sad, Oscar said he would sleep to forget about it. But it was not merely missing Cuba that made him sad; not having a residence permit contributed equally and made him feel ‘less worthy than everyone else’. Oscar hoped that a residence permit would make finding a job easier for him. He was aware that his career as a dancer would be short and he hoped he might find a job as a waiter once he had a residence permit. After receiving his permit, he did indeed start working in a Cuban restaurant managed by a Cuban friend and owned by the friend’s Spanish partner. Oscar said that he wanted to be able to ‘live here, but to go [to Cuba] and come back; go and come back’. In Spain, he thought, no 144

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Cuban can be happy, ‘for you are not in your land [tierra], you will always yearn for something’.

A New Politics of Memory and Homeland Both Exiles and Children of the Revolution had experiences of participating in civic organizations: the Exiles often in Spanish Societies, the Children of the Revolution in the Young Communists. The Migrants by contrast have fewer such organizational experiences to draw upon and are disinclined to identify with larger collectivities. Like the ‘new Cubans’ in Miami, they have therefore not developed an ‘organizational nexus’ of their own (see Eckstein 2009: 38). There are no equivalents to the Centro Cubano or the journal Encuentro among the Migrant generation. I suggest that this is because they ‘exercise their agency not so much against the structures of the nation-state but in indifference toward it’ as Daniel has aptly put it in an account of different waves of Tamil refugees in Britain (Daniel 1998: 344). They share a pragmatic orientation towards the family and have friendship groups of other Cubans of their generation with whom they socialize and share accommodation. If need be, they may invoke nationalist discourse, but only in order to achieve a specific goal. Yet one NGO, Puente Familiar con Cuba (‘Family Bridge with Cuba’), did mobilize recently arrived Cubans. Puente was founded by a group of Cubans in Madrid in 1996. The president and founder, Rigoberto Carceller Ibarra, was a former political prisoner in Cuba who was released through mediation by Spanish politicians and subsequently given political asylum in Spain. He and his family have Spanish citizenship and have lived in Madrid since the early 1990s. I had been in Madrid for some months before finding out about Puente, but when I called and introduced myself to Rigoberto, he promptly invited me to visit the organization the following day. After the first visit, I became a volunteer with Puente. Nobody ever seemed to think I might be an agent or a spy. On the contrary, Rigoberto often jokingly said that I was doing a study of ‘the great nutters of the exile community’ (los grandes locos del exilio). Puente’s work was to collect medicine through donations from chemists, pharmaceutical companies and private persons in Spain. The medicine was then packed and sent to specific individuals in Cuba with Spanish tourists visiting the island. The tourists either delivered the parcel directly to the person they were destined for or left them with one of a number of volunteers across the island who were in turn responsible for delivering them to the addressee. Puente had ensured an agreement with several airlines flying to Cuba from Spain so that they did not charge excess luggage fees for medicine. The idea was for the medicine to reach the individual in Cuba who needed it, regardless of creed or religion and, importantly, without any interference by state organizations. Cubans on the island would 145

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found out about Puente by word of mouth and would write to the Madrid office explaining their situation and needs, often attaching their medical files. During my fieldwork, Puente received on average thirty petitions a day, sometimes soliciting help for several persons in a household. Apart from sending medicine to Cuba, Puente also ran a baseball team of Cubans in Madrid and a free legal-advice service for recently arrived Cubans manned by volunteer Spanish lawyers. It served as a point of contact mainly for those Cubans who had arrived since the economic crisis of the mid 1990s. Puente was subsidized by both the local government of Madrid and the Spanish Agency for International Cooperation. These subsidies and financial support by private individuals paid the salaries of Rigoberto and Mirta, the information officer, who both worked full-time for Puente. The volunteers in Cuba were not paid, but Puente aimed to reimburse their transport costs for distributing medicine. Many of the volunteers in Cuba were related to volunteers in Madrid, and many were also active in local Catholic churches in Cuba. A number of Catholic clergymen in Cuba were involved with local groups of volunteers. Unlike the Centro Cubano (see Chapter 3), Puente counted Spaniards among their volunteers. Many of them had become involved after a holiday in Cuba, and were motivated by humanitarianism rather than politics. Puente’s premises were in Valdeacederes, a working-class neighbourhood in northern Madrid with a high proportion of immigrants. Puente occupied parts of the ground floor of a modern apartment block and consisted of a large room, where the volunteers packaged and repackaged medicine and vitamins, a small kitchen, Rigoberto’s office, a storage room and a toilet. The main room was often chaotic and full of boxes of medicine waiting to be unpacked. The walls were decorated with patriotic insignia such as the Cuban flag, a map of Cuba depicting the pre-revolutionary provincial borders, a picture of Félix Varela, a patriotic Catholic clergyman of the nineteenth century,7 quotes by José Martí, and tourist posters of Cuban landscapes. In respect of decor, Puente was thus somewhat similar to the Centro Cubano of the Exiles, yet the location in a modern residential block opposite a derelict grocery shop in Valdeacederes, the large open room and the many boxes piled high, added up to a very different ambience. In the windowsill of Rigoberto’s office several plastic crocodiles were lined up to symbolize Cuba (the outline of the island somewhat resembles a crocodile). I did not ask about the decor, but on my first visit Rigoberto commented that often Cubans visiting for the first time ask if Puente is ‘part of the government’. ‘It’s because the government has ensured that all symbols of the nation are associated with the government and not the people’, he expanded. While making use of largely the same nationalist imagery as the Exile generation, Puente nevertheless placed its emphasis on contact with Cubans on the island and creatively used the tourism infrastructure to transport its goods to Cuba. Rigoberto saw Puente’s work as part of ‘the social capital of the nation’. He explained:

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Thousands of people in Cuba have benefited from our project. They are very tired of speeches [discursos] … I think there is nobody in the entire world who speaks as much as Fidel [Castro], he speaks seven and eight hours consecutively sometimes, so we Cubans are tired of speeches and of words. This [Puente’s work] is something very simple. We don’t ask who you are, where you’re from, what you think, we don’t mind. All we say is: ‘here is what you asked for’.

In other words, Puente did not fit into a traditional political schema of pro- and anti-Castro, and Rigoberto often stated that his interests were with ‘the individual’ and not ‘the people’ or any other larger entities or constructs. To underline the non-political nature of Puente’s work, Rigoberto often emphasized that ‘we’re not the alternative to anything’. As he said, ‘the initiative of this NGO is to treat the individual … It is difficult for we are trapped between lots of different interests. For some we are a Castroite association because we help Cubans on the island and they think that is a way of helping Castro. For Castro we are an antiCastro institution because we resist manipulation’. At the premises in Madrid, on a daily basis a group of volunteers sat around a large table at the end of the main office, packing medicine. ‘This is like everybody’s little house’, as Mirta said about Puente. Often the mood was cheerful, but there was also an underlying sense of pain and loss. José Antonio, a middle-aged, unemployed veterinarian and regular volunteer, said that you have to keep the longing at bay, and Conchita, an elderly retired teacher whose husband lived in Cuba, said that ‘you have to carry the pain inside, lest it overwhelms you’. Around the table, the talk often took the form of somebody asking, ‘Do you remember … ?’ and before long everyone shared and exchanged stories and anecdotes from Cuba. Sometimes the stories were about el capitalismo, the pre-revolutionary period in Cuba. Those who were too young to have known el capitalismo listened to the others’ stories. More often the stories were about the vagaries of socialist Cuba, such as the queues in shops and waiting times for consumer goods. Through the story-telling, memories were kept alive and shared. As Mirta explained: There is always a desire to keep memories alive. How do you keep your memories alive? Either you remember alone, but how do you make it more alive? By sharing it with others of course, and that’s what we do here … We repeat everything about five hundred times, but we’re happy like that and we laugh at our disgrace, what else can we do? … We have laughed at the story, you know, of: ‘Do you remember when the bus broke down and we never made it?’ You remember it, and of course when it happened you didn’t find it funny, but that’s what it was like. I remember, and it makes me a bit sad, but at the same time it maintains the sensation that there is a reaffirmation in these memories, like, ‘Look, I can still remember it’.

Several volunteers had been back to visit Cuba a number of times. Such visits support Puente’s work as they strengthen communication between volunteers in

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Spain and Cuba. The positive valuation of visits constituted a clear contrast to the Exiles’ condemnation of contacts with the island. Yet, as Rigoberto underlined, Puente’s work was also often met with suspicion inside Cuba. Mirta told me that when she went back to Cuba in 2000 with a Spanish friend they were stopped by customs. The customs officer inquired why Mirta was carrying so much medicine: ‘Was she going to open a pharmacy? What were her plans?’ He was hostile and suspicious. Mirta became nervous and thought they were never going to get through customs and that the medicine would be confiscated. She decided to bluff and said loudly so everyone around would hear: ‘Compañero’ [Comrade], and this made the customs officer listen, ‘do we both agree that the only thing that prevents medicine from entering Cuba is Yankee imperialism? I am carrying medicine for the Cuban people!’ By then he was paying attention, and Mirta continued: ‘The Comandante en Jefe [lit. Commander in Chief, but here meaning Fidel Castro] himself has said that all medicine from Spain is allowed into the country, didn’t you know?’ After this, the customs officer let her in with the medicine. Mirta was shaking with fear as she walked out of the airport terminal. But when she told me the story, we both laughed wholeheartedly at how the unpleasant customs officer changed at her invocation of the Comandante and how her cunning and creative use of official discourse ensured her entry with the medicine. As she said, ‘You might as well mention the Comandante straight away’. Mirta’s handling of the incident with the customs officer, the insistence that the medicines carried by Puente’s representatives get through and are destined for ‘individuals’, and that, therefore, Puente is not ‘an alternative to anything’, illustrates what might be called a discourse of anti-politics, which circumvents politically constructed collectivities or groups.

Mirta and the Ambiguities of Distance Mirta arrived in Spain in 1993, when she was twenty-one years old. Her husband, Israel, was with her. He was the same age as her and left Cuba with half of his university degree completed. The two of them made the decision to leave together based on the economic hardship in Cuba – this was during the harshest years of the Special Period – and because of Mirta’s difficulties at work. She worked as a radio journalist and did a series of programmes about social issues in Cuba, including prostitution, alcoholism and Aids. The programmes were accused of having ‘ideological weaknesses’ (debilidades ideológicas) and of not being clear enough about the ‘revolutionary message’ for the youth, and they were therefore discontinued. Since Mirta’s teenage years, she had felt that her future might be outside of Cuba. After the closure of the radio programme, she felt she had two options: Either I find a job in the tourism sector to earn a living and shut up and don’t get into more trouble … Or, I had the option of leaving Cuba. Since my husband had also 148

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considered this option – well, in a way it was the most comfortable option. It is always easier to leave than to stay and struggle in one way or another. So I settled for the easiest option in this case, and I left.

Indeed, so too did most of her colleagues from the radio station. Mirta and Israel thought that Spain was the ‘more civilized’ option as a destination, compared to the US. Mirta said she was not interested in ‘the American lifestyle’. She thought that ‘the sense of humanity [and] quality of life’ would be more valued in a European country. When they arrived in Madrid, Mirta and her husband moved in with Israel’s brother and Spanish sister-in-law for a couple of days. They then applied for political asylum and subsequently lived in an asylum seekers’ centre for two years, before receiving Spanish residency. Mirta said she enjoyed her time at the centre and that she made many friendships with people of other nationalities. During this period and afterwards, Mirta and Israel survived through jobs as waiters and by giving classes on a private basis to school children. Mirta was aware that many Cubans in Spain tend to think that everything in Cuba is still the same as when they left, even many years later, but she made an effort to stay informed. She regularly read Cuban newspapers on the internet and attended every meeting and seminar about Cuba that she heard of. She was also always interested in hearing other Cubans’ experiences. Mirta said she often missed Cuba: ‘Yes, there is nostalgia scrambling about constantly, like “if only …” We are always moving between recollections of what was and dreams of what may yet be’. Yet she did not want to go back to live in Cuba in the current situation, ‘not even if I had a million dollars a month’, she said. She had been back to visit and found it difficult to enjoy her time in Cuba as other people’s interactions with her constantly made it clear to her that she no longer lived in Cuba: Sometimes there are moments when I tire of talking to people and hearing of their problems. Everybody will come to see me and tell me their problems, more than anything to see if I can do something for them. They don’t ask for money directly, but everybody comes … You feel impotent … [and] in the end you go back to Spain with a list of two hundred persons who need your help. These are people you don’t even know. People have this necessity to ask you about everything and … to tell you about their wishes and desires, in particular those who want to leave Cuba, and they ask if I know a Spaniard who would marry them. Of course it is sad in the sense of persons who are not there any longer, my father, my grandmother … you understand, friends who die … This is painful to go back to and confront when all you have is a memory. But really when I go to Cuba, I go to enjoy it all; that is, I don’t go to complain about things.

Mirta’s immediate family remained in Cuba. Both her mother and sister were involved with Puente’s work, as were Israel’s parents. In the spring of 2002, Mirta and I were in Havana at the same time and I was able to help her distribute packets of medicine. I also visited her family and in-laws and went to church with

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them to meet the local Puente volunteers. Mirta’s mother-in-law was a former Party member who was forced to renounce her job as a researcher when she left the Party. The family was getting by with remittances from their two sons residing abroad and what Mirta’s father-in-law earned illegally by selling homemade handicrafts to tourists. While Mirta was in Havana, she lived with her mother, grandmother, sister and brother-in-law in the small, roof-top flat in central Havana where she used to live before leaving Cuba. Unlike Maida and many other diasporic Cubans who had been back to visit, Mirta did not feel alienated: Nothing surprises me. When I go to Cuba, I know what I am going for. I have never gone with enough money to have the life of a tourist in Cuba or the life of the Cuban living abroad who arrives and rents I don’t know how many cars, etc. … Of course I would have liked to have brought more money for my family for food … but I had what I had, three hundred dollars the first time and three hundred and fifty the second time. For two families [her own family and her husband’s] it’s very little, but it lasted me my twenty-one days.

In this comment Mirta touched on a sensitive point for many of the Migrants, namely the familial obligation and expectation that they would provide for those still in Cuba. Since many of the Migrants were surviving through odd jobs and often went through periods of unemployment, they were not always able to remit money to their relatives, let alone visit them. Many only wanted to return to visit if they had enough to ‘live the life of the tourist’, as Mirta put it. In the context of Vietnam, Carruthers interprets such ‘potlatch returns’ as the expression of a desire ‘to display in its most instant and visible form the social mobility the returnees have achieved through migration, and at the same time perform a critique of communism for failing to deliver decent standards of living to people’ (Carruthers 2002: 433). I never heard any Migrants say anything that would support a similar assertion in this case, but inside Cuba conspicuous consumption is certainly seen as a problematic phenomenon exactly because of its potential for a critique of socialism. It is patently obvious that young Cubans engaged in conspicuous consumption are not embodying the ideals of the Hombre Nuevo, and as such their consumption practices are an embarrassment to official Cuba. Yet for Cubans of the Migrant generation, the desire for potlatchstyle returns may be more strongly connected with a wish to display those aspects of ‘pleasurable consumerism’ (Fusco 1998: 163) that many young Cubans are attracted to. On one of her last days in Havana, I went with Mirta and her in-laws to mass in the local Catholic church in the small town outside Havana where her in-laws lived. On the way up to the church, we stopped to chat to acquaintances of the family. Before going to church, we paid visits to several neighbours to say

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goodbye. All of a sudden, Mirta started crying. She said she did not want to go back to Spain; that she did not belong there; that all of ‘her people’ are in Cuba. Mirta’s father-in-law handed her a batch of videotapes of baseball from Cuban TV for her to take back: ‘When you sit down to watch this with Israel you will feel good again and forget everything’, he said. Mirta composed herself, and the next time I saw her she was back in Madrid working with Puente as usual. In Madrid she said: I think of Cuba every single day, and it is not just because of my family. I really have a feeling of love for the streets, the parks, a lot of places, not just for the people who are in Cuba, because there are many people in Cuba who I love deeply … But even if all the persons I love – and there are a lot of them – if my whole family left, I would still have feelings for a lot of places, for the smell of the sea, the smell of rubbish. When I went back to Cuba, I would stop at the rubbish bins in the streets to smell them. I said: ‘Why, they smell the same’, and my mother would say to me, ‘Mija [term of affection], they always smell of rubbish’.

Not everyone had been able to go back to Cuba to visit as Mirta had, and for many it was a fraught issue. Several Migrants recounted recurrent nightmares similar to Raisa’s about being back in Cuba and not being able to leave again. Virgen arrived in Spain in 1999 and had not been back to Cuba since. She told me that she decided ‘on a whim’ not to go back to Cuba while on a tour with her dancing company. This was Virgen’s nightmare: ‘I dream I am back in Cuba. It is like a prison and I can’t get out again. I call my [Argentinean] boyfriend in Spain on the telephone to ask him to come and get me out, but he can’t hear me. I shout down the telephone, but he doesn’t hear me’. Mirta recognized the dream: You have all these nightmares. All Cubans have the same nightmare I think, or very similar ones, about trying to leave [Cuba] and you can’t. This nightmare was recurrent for me until I went back [to Cuba] for the first time in ’97. I dreamt that I went to Cuba and there was always a problem at the airport: I couldn’t get in or they wouldn’t let me in with my suitcase, or I dreamt that I found myself naked in the airport or that they wouldn’t let me out of it. The theme of not being allowed out of Cuba again once I was there, this dream repeated itself until I had gone for the first time and I have never again had that dream.

Raisa’s, Virgen’s and Mirta’s nightmares were the nightmares of many others too, who longed to go back to visit friends and family, to ‘recharge the batteries’ as Virgen said. Adrián told me he was ‘back in Cuba every night’ in his dreams. Yet, as the recurrent nightmares illustrate, many were also terrified they might not be allowed to leave again if they did go back to visit. After visiting Cuba, Mirta’s dream changed: ‘Instead I have had a dream of going back to Cuba with my

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husband on a bicycle, carrying the suitcases with us … It gives me the impression that I see myself closer to Cuba now … The distance is not only physical, it is also a mental distance’. Like Yanet’s imaginary cityscape (see Introduction), which incorporated both Getafe in Madrid and Miramar in Havana, Mirta rearranged physical distance in her dream to construct an emotional landscape in which she could cycle from Madrid to Cuba. In yet another dream, Mirta went to the iconic ice-cream parlour Coppelia in Havana and afterward to a pizza restaurant close by. In her dream, everything was ‘just like it used to be in Havana’, as she said, seemingly rid of the anxiety related to leaving and coming back.

Conclusion More than the other two generations, the Migrants were often in a precarious situation with regard to residence permits and jobs. Like other recent immigrants from Latin America, Africa and Eastern Europe, they found themselves stuck in low-paying, casual jobs, often in the informal sector. The Exiles arrived in Spain at a time of economic growth and with few legal restrictions on immigrants. They also had financial resources, skills and work experience that helped them find work relatively easily. By contrast, both the Children of the Revolution and the Migrants arrived in Spain in a period of unemployment, increasing regulation of the labour market and restrictions for immigrants. Yet the Children of the Revolution often had prior experiences of living outside Cuba – through studying abroad or professional travelling, for example – and they also had networks of friends who were able to help them find jobs that matched their qualifications, even if some started out working as cleaners, waiters, and so forth. Many of the Migrants, however, had fewer such resources on which to call. The riches of el capitalismo turned out to be more elusive than they appeared from the distance of Cuba, and racial pigeon-holing and discrimination affect them more. At the same time, it is bureaucratically easier for the Migrants to visit Cuba, provided that they manage to regularize their situation in Spain. Most of them did not think of their move to Spain as definitive, and they continued to be involved in the lives of their families in Cuba. If at all possible, most of them remitted money to their parents or other close kin. The Migrants had not developed strong organizations of their own and had not been attracted to Exile organizations either. Two factors seemed especially important to explain this. Firstly, they were recent immigrants with few economic resources and little spare time. Secondly, their Cuba was very different to that of the Exiles, and they did not share in the Exiles’ anti-communist ideology and orientation towards the past. Instead, they were pragmatically oriented toward the future.

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Both of the two previous generations of diasporic Cubans nationalized their memories, albeit in different ways. The Migrants by contrast identified with the house, street or neighbourhood they grew up and lived in, but tended not to invoke larger entities or a national territory. When they talked about Cuba, they referred to affective relations with family and friends, or to the neighbourhood they grew up in, not the nation or the patria: theirs were minimal homelands. Partly this reflects the stability of neighbourhood populations in Havana caused by the city’s perennial housing shortage. As Fernandez argues: ‘for better or worse, this stability gave people a true sense of place. In fact, it is local identity/barrio identity that people often use to define themselves’ (Fernandez 2010: 86). Mirta, who had grown up in a small flat in an over-crowded building housing three generations of her family under one precarious roof, said she missed streets and smells. Yanet and César likewise both thought of ‘home’ as their parents’ homes or houses. Raisa felt similarly: ‘I miss my friends in Cuba a lot … More than Cuba in a general sense, I miss my friends a lot and the life I had there in Cuba’. It was this social and sensory world that the Migrants invoked as their homeland rather than an abstract patria. The Migrants, most of whom grew up during the Special Period, felt loyal to their families with whom they shared economic hardship and changes, but not to the nation. This pragmatic orientation toward the family is shared with people in Cuba who also lived through the Special Period (see ibid.: 184). Eckstein has argued that this personalized, pragmatic way of relating to home and homeland among Cubans in the US has had a greater impact on Cuba than the ideological stance of the Exile generation, ultimately serving to undermine state socialism (Eckstein 2009). Cubans of the Migrant generation in Spain are numerically a smaller group than the ‘new Cubans’ in the US, and because of the greater physical distance have fewer opportunities to travel back and forth; but it is clear that their pragmatism represents a radically new mode of thinking of home and homeland far removed from the abstract notions of ‘nation’ and patria.

Notes 1. The Tropicana is a cabaret club in Havana. 2. Something comparable has happened in the US, with New York hosting many ‘folkloric migrants’ – that is, performers from folkloric dance groups who have stayed behind when their groups were on tour (Knauer 2009: 168–69). 3. This average is based on figures for the period between 1998 and 2003 (the only years for which figures are available), with a peak in 1999. The exact figures are: 1424 in 1998, 1834 in 1999, 1695 in 2000, 1242 in 2001, 1158 in 2002 and 1001 in 2003 (Inebase).

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4. The Spanish film Flores de otro mundo (dir. Iciar Bollaín, 1999), released as Flowers from Another World in the UK, gives a sympathetic portrait of a young, black Cuban woman who marries a much older Spanish man in order to be able to emigrate. See Venegas (2009) for a discussion of Cuban cinema in the 1990s, and Whitfield (2009) for similar tropes in Cuban fiction. 5. See ‘El Corte Inglés’, El Rincón del Vago. Retrieved 23 November 2009 from: http:// html.rincondelvago.com/el-corte-ingles_1.html. 6. See ‘Trying times for El Corte Inglés: The English Patient’, The Economist, 24 September 2009. Retrieved 8 April 2011 from: http://www.economist.com/ node/14520472?Story_ID=E1_TQVNDQSN 7. Félix Varela (1788–1853) was a liberal cleric, abolitionist and patriot who was forced into exile by the Spanish colonial authorities in 1823 and died in Florida.

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and

n In previous chapters I have illustrated how different groups of people have variously remembered or forgotten different aspects of Cuban history. Diasporic Cubans often explicitly narrate their memories of homeland, diaspora and belonging in response to other narratives, notably those of other groups of Cubans, those of the Cuban government, and in response to the narratives of Spaniards. Narrated memories, in short, form part of the ‘reflexive debate’ (Goodman 2000: 161) among diasporic Cubans that this book has attempted to record and examine. But the degree of awareness of other narratives and discourses varies a great deal, and one person’s memories often bear little relation to the memories of another who left at a different time.

Time-spaces, Memory and Forgetting The Exiles are aware that there are groups of Cubans who have arrived in Spain more recently than themselves. They had often formed their opinions about other Cubans when I asked them and tended to think that more recently arrived Cubans were opportunists and untrustworthy. As José María said (cited more fully in Chapter 3): ‘For me they are worthless, because they have no real aspirations in life … They have no aspiration to study or to do anything at all’. Meanwhile, most Cubans of the Migrant generation were oblivious to the plights and lives of the Exiles. Even when they made use of the Centro Cubano or the Ropero de la Caridad del Cobre (both described in Chapter 3), they did not recognize the volunteers as fellow Cubans and they did not otherwise meet Cubans of the Exile generation. Many of the Children of the Revolution, on the other hand, did know about the Exiles and were disparaging about their politics. For them, the Exiles too often represented ‘the same again’, as one writer said, referring to the structural similarities between Exile discourse and official island discourse.

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However, both the Exiles and the Children of the Revolution spoke of the ‘immorality’ of the Migrants. The Exiles and the Children of the Revolution say they left Cuba primarily for political reasons. While few of the Exiles were directly involved in antigovernment activities, they as a group felt that their rights had been infringed by the revolutionary government and came to the same conclusion as many of their peers: that it would be better for them to leave Cuba. For many of the Children of the Revolution on the other hand, the decision to leave was a difficult and painful one to make, an existential choice, and many remembered the exact time and place in which they reached it. Maida, the architect, recalled that she decided to leave the island when she saw the balseros (boat people) leaving. Leo, a poet and lecturer, found himself at home with his wife one dark night when the electricity had been shut off, pondering his options and reaching the painful decision that the revolution he had believed in and fought for had turned against him and what he believed in. The Migrants, by contrast, are keen to emphasize that they are not political exiles but immigrants. If possible, they prefer to travel back and forth between Spain and Cuba and do not see their decision to leave the island as an existential choice or a final decision. Rather, it is a pragmatic tactic, one which ideally they would like to keep as open and as reversible as possible. The different conditions in which they left the island in turn have implications for their politics and subject positions. The Exiles have a sense of belonging to a community of other Cubans who are much like themselves, whereas the Children of the Revolution abhor expressions of community. The Migrants, who do not identify themselves with nationalism and exile politics find solace in groups of friends often consisting of Cubans who have arrived at the same time and by the same means. Many of them find that they share predicaments with other groups of immigrants in Spain who are also struggling to find work and remit money. Yet it is not only what is remembered that affects intergenerational intelligibility: forgetting is as important. The Exiles have forgotten the social and political problems of republican Cuba, while subsequent generations have learnt to remember only the conflicts and corruption of the period. While the conditions for intergenerational intelligibility of memory are already difficult in Cuba, among the diaspora the conditions are even more strained. This dynamic makes it difficult to establish mutual understanding between the generations unless one makes a concerted effort. The exile generation have lived in diaspora for decades: some Exiles have even lived outside Cuba for more years than they lived on the island. They insist on their ‘exile-ness’, for it is from this that they draw their ‘imagined moral essence’ (Malkki 1995: 228). For them, life in exile consists in ‘marking time’ (ibid.: 229), counting years and months as they pass, like Eugenia (see Chapter 3). In contrast, the Children of the Revolution and the Migrants have fresh memories of Cuba, and they remain in the midst of an ongoing process of defining themselves as 156

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diasporic subjects. A number of persons, who had only just arrived in Spain when I first met and interviewed them, became more politicized and started asserting themselves as diasporic individuals during the period of my fieldwork. Many were still ‘full of Cuba’, as Rafael put it, when I met them the first time, but gradually they started to think of themselves as living in diaspora and began to articulate diasporic narratives and subject positions. Some moved from a pragmatic or apolitical view of Cuba towards an increasingly politicized one. Ana María, introduced in Chapter 4, on one occasion told me how she only realized that she was ‘an exile’ (una exilada), in the sense of a person who lives in exile, when she was attending a reception for the launch of a new book by a diasporic writer some months after she had arrived in Spain. Likewise, it is unlikely that most of the Exile generation thought of themselves as exiles until some time had passed: ‘Of course, you don’t realize until you’re outside’, as Norma said. Many of the Exiles in fact believed for years that they would be returning to Cuba shortly. It is likely that both the Children of the Revolution and the Migrants will develop more thoroughly diasporized narratives of themselves and their trajectories over time in the same way that the Exiles have. Conversely, if entry and exit restrictions are eased, they may develop more transnational lives, provided they have been able to legalize their situation in Spain. Events and discourses in both Cuba and Spain will influence these and other future developments. Time and space interact with memory in other ways too. Thus, over time, diasporic Cubans sometimes construct memories of Cuba through references that did not form part of their identification with their homeland when they still lived there – for example, by relocating the site of attachment. The descendants of Spanish emigrants to Cuba replicated their parents’ and grandparents’ cultural practice of establishing community based on attachment to homeland when they founded the Centro Cubano. While they still lived in Cuba they thought of Spain as their homeland – hence the Spanish Societies – but when they ‘returned’ to the erstwhile motherland they transferred their feelings of belonging to Cuba. In effect, Cuba only became their homeland through their dislocation from it. Takeyuki Gaku Tsuda has described a similar phenomenon for returning Japanese-Brazilians in Japan (Tsuda 2000). In Brazil, they defined themselves as Japanese, but in Japan they find themselves feeling more Brazilian, partly because their linguistic and social skills do not coincide with majority Japanese understandings of Japaneseness, and partly as resistance to conformist pressures. Some of the returning migrants stage a carnival to assert their new ethnic identity as Brazilian, though they would have scorned samba as a lowly cultural phenomenon while living in Brazil (ibid.: 65). In Wimmer’s research among Cubans in Zurich, rituals and dances, which in Cuba are related to the Afro-Cuban Santería religion, are stripped of their religious connotations and instead become markers of a new diasporic identity for the Cuban participants. Even Cubans, who in Cuba never would have participated in Santería rituals, because they considered it ‘primitive’ or counter-revolutionary, 157

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take part. Still, not the entire Cuban community of Zurich participate. Some lines of distinction are maintained, and Cuban intellectuals do not, as a rule, participate in the dance parties (Wimmer 1998: 12). This relocation of markers of attachment to homeland can also take the form of new distinctly diasporic likes and dislikes. Ana María, for example, commented: ‘It is weird, in Cuba I never would have listened to this kind of music. Maybe it’s because I am away from Cuba, but now I listen to Lecuona all the time’.1 Norma, of the Exile generation, had a similar experience: ‘I couldn’t stand Celia Cruz and now I like her … In Cuba I couldn’t stand her!’2 Both women constructed memories of Cuba by reference to indices of a past that they would not have identified with previously. The fact that the two musicians in question – Ernesto Lecuona and Celia Cruz – both left Cuba after the revolution may of course have influenced the way that Ana María and Norma thought of them while they were themselves still living in Cuba. Yet more than that, the two examples speak of the construction of a mode of being that relates to Cuba in a distinctly diasporic way. For both women, diasporic memories of their homeland related to music that outside Cuba was perceived as expression of ‘Cubanness’. In effect, Cruz and Lecuona became examples of ‘diasporic souvenirs’, objects that do not reconstruct a narrative of roots and homeland but instead tell the story of exile. This process has the potential to turn the homeland into ‘an exotic place represented through its arts and crafts, objects usually admired by foreign tourists’ (Boym 1998: 523). The popularity of all things Cuban in the West, not least Afro-Cuban music and religion, has the potential to contribute to a redefinition of such practices for diasporic Cubans and lead them to a more inclusive definition of Cubanness, or to an identification of themselves as Caribbean or Latin American rather than Cuban. Further research among more recently arrived Cubans in particular is needed to explore this question. What is clear from the ethnography presented here is the complexity, contingency and fluidity of ideas of home and belonging. What also emerges clearly is the importance of the diaspora location, rather than any innate ‘Cuban identity’. Sometimes diasporic Cubans use the same nationalist symbols as the government to remind them of Cuba, but in the diasporic context the meaning of the symbols changes. Ana María had, for example, seen national flags in other Cubans’ houses and decided that she also wanted to have one. By placing a little Cuban flag in a bedroom in Madrid, its significance changes from public affirmation of a political stance to a private and intimate reminder of origin and belonging. Svetlana Boym has discussed a similar example among Russian exiles in the US: ‘several people told me that they never displayed matreshki and khokhloma when they lived in Russia because then they seemed kitschy’ (Boym 1998: 518). For Ana María, the Cuban flag conjured up Cuba – not as it had been while she lived there, but as a thoroughly diasporized homeland. 158

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Other times diasporic ‘memoryscapes’ (Yoneyama 1994) are constructed through reclaiming. Lourdes, a social worker, said that she had bought all the albums of The Beatles in ‘an attack of nostalgia’, not because she used to listen to The Beatles when she lived in Havana; in fact, they were banned. Rather, listening to The Beatles was something she had longed to do when she was young and lived in Cuba. Paradoxically, she insisted that listening to The Beatles in Miami was a way of remembering Cuba: ‘What a way of remembering Cuba!’ as she exclaimed to me. She continued: It’s not really a question of remembering Cuba. Firstly, Cuba is my experiences, Cuba is not a plate of rice and beans [typical Cuban fare] because in Cuba I never ate it. Perhaps [remembering] Cuba is to live next to the sea because I’m a habanera [from Havana] and I like the sea … What can I say? To remember Cuba, should I fill my house with Cuban flags? In Cuba I didn’t do it, why should I do it here? That would be to not remember … to remember Cuba is to continue my life in its normal way. What I didn’t do there, there is no sense in doing here. That would be to propose a kind of tinned Cuba.

Lourdes cherished her exclusively private memories of Cuba, ones that have no territorial anchoring as her beloved ones have left the island as well: ‘Cuba is the life I had there: my habits, my tastes, my way of relating to people, my way of loving … My affective world is in Cuba or it was made in Cuba, it is not in Cuba: I don’t know where it is any longer, for everyone has left for other places’. Thus memories of Cuba change their meaning and significance in diaspora and have the potential both to de-territorialize and re-territorialize, but most importantly they are constantly in a process of change and redefinition. Rather than in cultural content or baggage, it is in the ever-changing dynamic of contestation, definition and redefinition that Cubans identify themselves as Cubans and through which diasporic subjects emerge.

The ‘Pain of Cuba’: Emotional Landscapes of Belonging Diasporic Cubans often found it difficult to empathize with the experiences of other Cubans. Nonetheless, I found that Cubans shared an idiom of bodily pain and suffering for expressing the experience of dislocation. ‘The pain of Cuba’ was what Rafael, a journalist who left Cuba in 1998, called it. Rafael said that for him the experience of living away from Cuba was like having a permanently fractured limb that will always make you walk with a limp. Other diasporic Cubans also described their bodies as severed, injured or in constant pain: ‘the fever of exile’ a female poet called it. For Norma the rupture with the homeland had caused a feeling of ‘the body cut in half ’, and a young female dancer described diaspora as a depletion of bodily energy. In an interview with Ruth Behar, the Cuban 159

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artist Rolando Estévez explains the same pain from the perspective of those left behind: ‘Seeing someone leave is like dying and seeing yourself from above, mutilated, lost … You are left with the absence of those who formed you, those who deformed you too’ (quoted in Behar 2000: 147, original ellipsis and emphasis). These expressions are echoed in literary texts where exile Cuban writers have invoke phantom limbs to express the experience of dislocation (see, e.g., Marrero 1995; Pérez Firmat 2000). In the official language of Cuban nationalism, the nation – as in many other nationalisms (Boyarin 1994: 24) – is imagined as a body where the diasporic population represents the sick or feeble limbs. Yet rather than suggesting that ‘the pain of Cuba’ is the expression of an experience of expulsion from the nation-asbody, I suggest that Rafael’s and others’ bodily pain refers to their own physical bodies, not the abstract body of the nation. In experiences of flight and crisis entailing sudden and dramatic ruptures, Michael Jackson argues that life sometimes ceases to be narratable (Jackson 2002: 91). In these situations, individuals often resort to the body to express what they otherwise cannot put into words. For diasporic Cubans, the body becomes the only concrete and durable connection back to the homeland, literally ‘the only one fixed point of reference’ (Lambek and Antze 1996: xiii). As Rojas has it: exile is … forever a flight with no return … The exile leaves his [sic] land [tierra] behind, bound for another which is alien to him, but in only one or two years that country [tierra], that city, where he was born and grew up, where he hated and loved, where he was unfortunate and happy, will be as unknown and strange [to him] as the one that now generously lets him in … The only possible nation [patria] will be his own body. (Rojas 1998a: 95)

The body becomes ‘the home-away-from-home, the resting point for so much homelessness’ (Behar 2000: 145). ‘The pain of Cuba’ is thus an expression of the diasporic experience of irreconcilability of times and places, while the body remains one and the same, indissoluble and mnemonically marked. It is an obviously poetic and aestheticizing idiom in which to express intimately lived experience, and it is important to recognize the deep resonance of poetry and metaphorical language in Cuban culture. Cubans often evoke poetry to lend authority to personal accounts or to express sentiments that do not lend themselves to everyday language. Boym has argued in the case of Soviet exiles in the US: ‘What might appear as an aestheticization of social existence to the “native”, strikes the immigrant as an accurate depiction of the condition of exile. That is, of course, when the first hardships are over and the immigrant can afford the luxury of leisurely reflection’ (Boym 1998: 501–2). For most of the Cubans I met, the pain of Cuba was present to varying degrees of intensity, including among the Migrants, even when they mostly could not afford this ‘luxury of leisurely reflection’. 160

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Speaking of life away from Cuba in terms of ‘the pain of Cuba’ was thus a culturally embedded idiom, which expressed lived experience and which resonated with other Cubans. However, I never heard anyone refer to ‘the pain of Cuba’ in public, nor did anyone seem to recognize or acknowledge the commonality of this bodily idiom. While memories of Cuba are used politically, the lived pain of diaspora remains private and was often invoked in narratives of the home left behind, or in memories of school and childhood. ‘I was born in Havana, Cuba, the 15th of September 1967, in the neighbourhood of Lawton, in 153 Luz Street on the corner of Reyes. This was my maternal home’. Thus began José María’s account of his childhood in Cuba. Such accurate descriptions of dates and addresses also served to frame memories and embellish the narrator’s claim to Cubanness. José María continued to share with me tender recollections of his childhood in Cuba: I have some very strong memories from my childhood. I have very good memories but also very unpleasant memories. Of the good memories, maybe Cuban nature, the dawns in Cuba stand out. [There is] this scent in the dawn that I have never again felt in any other country – and I have been here in Spain many years and I spent two months in the US as well – but I have never felt this scent again. The mix of colours in Cuba, of tastes, I don’t know, maybe I’m very sentimental, but they are incredible memories.

Others mentioned the ‘smell of Havana’, of rubbish, of the sea, of a grandmother’s kitchen, the scent of a particular eau de Cologne that was used for small children on Sunday family outings in 1950s Havana.3 Or the sense of taste, of Cuban coffee, sweet and black, sent by friends or family from the island, of Cuban food, of rum. Such private, intimate memories of Cuba are anathema to the collectivist and militaristic symbolism of the government. Instead they are emotional landscapes – that is, imagined spaces of remembrance. They are evoked through sensory and bodily memory and longing, but also through an energetic, albeit often implicit, disavowal and rejection. Firstly, as a disavowal of nationalist-revolutionary discourse, in which identity is equated with territory, thus excluding diasporic Cubans from any claim on Cubanness. Secondly, as a disavowal of exoticized, gendered and racialized images of Cuba. Seen in this way, the Cuban diaspora as a subject comes into being partly through an identification with that which is simultaneously rejected. However, the rejection is neither uniform nor complete. Some claim a Cubanness of the past, irretrievably lost from the present. Others are making their own territorial counter-claims – for example, by keeping the deeds of their houses in Havana and planning to reclaim them. Yet others explicitly reject territorializing and exclusionary discourses on Cubanness. Some remember their homeland in terms of relationships to other people. For all of them, Cuba is remembered through intimate sensory experiences, both pleasurable and painful. Clara, a poet, said: ‘I have a profound link to the island. It is

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something visceral, an unnameable essence, a tenderness’. For Lourdes, the social worker, memories of Cuba were part of her bodily memory: I am Cuba … I don’t have to invent a memory of Cuba. When I think of a man who kissed me, I think of Cuba. When my children were born, I think of Cuba … The strongest emotions, the most intense feelings, the greatest happiness and perhaps the most lacerating pains all happened in Cuba. So every time I think of something in my life, I remember Cuba.

Francisco, a poet who left Cuba in 1992, conjured up a landscape of belonging through literature and books: I read a good deal of Cuban literature. I’m reading books that I hadn’t read in Cuba. I have a good library, apart from my library in Havana. One of my daughters travelled to Cuba in ’95 … and she went to my house, which until now has not been confiscated, and she brought back all the books she could carry … With those books and others I have bought later, some that friends in Cuba have sent me and some that Spaniards who have been to Cuba and who have bought old books from antiquarians and then seen that they were mine – because they have my signature or the little seal of my library [in them] – and these Spaniards have brought them back for me. It’s true, I have [received] six or seven books that way. We’ll see, maybe I’ll recuperate my library from Havana and I will have it again in the Canary Islands.

All of them remembered Cuba through private emotional landscapes. Alexis, the conceptual artist, on the other hand, associated Cuba and Cubanness with a political project and said he did not even want to remember or miss Cuba. Alexis’ stance in turn makes clear the rejection of territorialized and politicized discourse that is implicit in conjuring up emotional landscapes of belonging. In other words, what is specifically not said or remembered forms part of what is actually remembered. It may seem tempting at this point to agree with Appadurai and Breckenridge, who have argued that diasporas: ‘are indifferent to the idiosyncracies [sic] of nation-states and often flow through their cracks and exploit their vulnerabilities. They are thus a testimony to the inherent fragility of the links between people, polity and territory and to the negotiability of the relationship between people and place’ (Appadurai and Breckenridge 1989: i). Yet a caveat to the liquid metaphors is needed for diasporas cannot be ‘indifferent’ to nation-states. Diasporic Cubans cannot, for example, freely travel to visit their homeland, whether inhibited because they are in Spain sin papeles or because the Cuban state will not allow them to return. Nor are their relatives free to visit them, restricted by Cuban authorities and by the necessity of visas for entering Spain. And these restrictions do not even take into account the inequalities in the global economy which mean that many Cubans in Cuba earn a monthly salary of less than $10

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when exchanged into hard currency, and with which they will not be able to travel anywhere. The memories of diasporic people may traverse boundaries and roam freely in time and space, but it is an act of defiance that often finds itself stopped by border controls and inequality if attempted in real life. Said perceptively observed that ‘[e]xile is strangely compelling to think about but terrible to experience’ (Said 2001: 173). Hence the pain of Cuba. Yet clearly there are differences between the sorrow of the Exiles and the practical and material obstacles faced by recent Migrants and their concern for close relatives still on the island.

The Homeland and Diasporic Alienation ‘The pain of Cuba’ makes the experience of loss of the physical homeland feel present and recent, yet diasporic Cubans often had a sense of temporal and spatial alienation. With the passing of time in diaspora, memories of Cuba gradually came to seem timeless, while at the same time they inevitably became more and more removed from the present. Clara, a poet, put it succinctly: ‘When I do go back it will be a dis-encounter. You are not going back to the same country, nor are you the same person’. This sense of both spatial and temporal alienation is a common trait for diasporas (see also Rapport 1998), but the temporal has tended to be subsumed under the spatial in diaspora scholarship. Only two people I met consciously tried to avoid their memories from ‘freezing’ in the past. One was Leo, the poet and former lecturer. He arrived in Spain with his wife in 1974, then still ruled by Franco, after spending four years in a labour camp in Cuba. Both Leo and his wife were keen to move directly on to France as they expected the atmosphere in Spain to be stifling and repressive. They decided to leave Cuba because they felt the revolutionary government had betrayed its heterodox principles and had taken a Stalinist turn, which they disagreed with. They were not planning to stay in Franco’s Spain, about which they had heard so much from Spanish exiles in Havana. Upon arriving, Leo was surprised to find Spanish society dynamic and changing. In effect, he arrived in the middle of the transition to democracy and decided to stay. The surprise of finding Spain so different from what he had expected it to be made Leo resolve that he would never become like his Spanish exile friends in Havana, who failed to stay informed of changes in their homeland during their years in exile. Thus he started his ongoing struggle to stay ‘on time’ with Cuba. He made sure to ask newly arrived Cubans about everyday and mundane aspects of life in Cuba. When I returned from Havana he enquired among other things about the range of goods available in dollar-only shops, and when I accidentally mentioned a central hotel we had a detailed conversation about its pool, which Leo used to swim in. Leo was also interested in detailed information about the 163

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neighbourhood of Havana where he used to live. He had not been back since he left, but said he did not miss anything nor did he feel any nostalgia. He seemed instead to be able to travel freely to his private remembered Cuba, which nonetheless was continually ‘updated’. Mirta (see Chapter 5), also tried to stay informed of developments on the island. The fact that she had been back to visit several times since leaving the island in 1993 made it easier for her. She said to me that most Cubans outside Cuba think that Cuba is still the same as when they left, regardless of whether they left two, ten or forty years ago. But she did not want that to happen to her and said that every time she calls her family she asks them about the price and availability of milk and other everyday goods. She also asks what goods are for sale in the dollar-only shops so she knows ‘what is going on’, as she put it. Through staying informed of even everyday events in Cuba, Leo and Mirta constructed a diasporic time-space that defied the temporal and spatial alienation separating them from Cuba, and which negated the importance of physically leaving the island. But for many it was difficult to convey their experience of life in Spain to their families back home who often have little understanding of what life is like outside Cuba. While some recent Cuban immigrants in the US are able to maintain a family life embedded in Cuba through frequent visits (Eckstein 2009: 159), this is usually not possible for Cubans in Spain. Many are trapped for prolonged periods as undocumented migrants, and plane tickets are also prohibitively expensive. It is important to remember that only a few Cubans are allowed to travel and that, until the breakdown of the eastern bloc, most journeys abroad were to other socialist countries, including Sandinista Nicaragua, Angola, Ethiopia and other socialist African states. Internet access and mass-media outlets in Cuba remain state controlled. Cuban media tend to focus on social discontent and upheaval in capitalist societies, although this has changed in recent years. From the early 1960s and until the tourism boom of the early 1990s, when Spaniards in large numbers started visiting the island, images of Spain in Cuba were shaped by the memories of Spanish émigrés and republican exiles, the majority of which had left Spain before the Second World War. Their recollections were of a torn and impoverished society, reeling from a brutal, fratricidal war. Since the opening up of tourism in Cuba, Spanish tourists and investors, as well as visiting Cuban émigrés, have brought images and stories of daily life in Spain to Cuba. Likewise, the inflow of magazines and newspapers sold to tourists today provide an important source of information about the world outside to Cubans on the island. Until recently, however, Cubans did not have access or exposure to contemporary firsthand accounts of life in the former colonial power.4 Changes in Cuba apart, experiences in the diaspora have also varied widely. From being a poor, isolated, emigrant-producing country ruled by a conservative, Catholic dictator to a democratic, welfare state integrated into the EU, Spain has 164

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changed dramatically in the period since the first Cubans arrived in the 1960s. As Norma put it: ‘In these thirty years, Spain has gone through huge changes: this is not the country I arrived in’. In other words, Cubans of different diasporic generations have left radically different countries, but they have also effectively arrived in different countries. It is often during return visits to Cuba and in interaction with Cubans who left at different times that the resulting alienation manifests itself. This was the case for Maida, the architect. She went back to visit only a few years after leaving and was dismayed at the physical deterioration of Havana: Old Havana is fabulous, but the rest of Havana is falling to pieces, with an absolute carelessness … As if people don’t realize that everything is … in ruins … As if people are tired now and the majority are just waiting patiently for Fidel [Castro] to die while they’re trying to put food on their tables as best they can … It’s like a paradise lost more than anything, because the Havana that I loved isn’t there, among other reasons because my people aren’t there. This was also very important: I suddenly found myself in a Havana without my universe around me. My grandfather had died, my mother isn’t there, my friends have all gone, somehow my world didn’t exist.

Going back thus becomes an ambiguous and fraught experience because it exposes the temporal and spatial distance that separates diasporic Cubans from the place they consider home. Several said they wanted to leave again as soon as they arrived, and that the decay and poverty appalled them. Ernesto, a black artist who arrived in Spain in 1991 through marriage to a Spanish woman, had been back to visit Cuba several times. He said of his latest trip that, ‘I realized I’m becoming old when I went back to Cuba. There are new people now, new generations’. This is why the space of exile is ‘odd’, as Tweed has it: the longed for and remembered homeland does not exist as a social reality (Tweed 1997: 87). Instead, for Maida, Ernesto, Rafael and other diasporic Cubans, Havana has become an imaginary city, a memory landscape. Hence many diasporic Cubans have little interest in hearing about Cuba from others, who have arrived more recently, as it only exposes their distance from it. Ernesto once told me: [The] last time I came back from Cuba I had a depression. I am neither from here nor from there any longer. I felt out of place. Here I am considered a Cuban or a foreigner, but there they called me a galleguito [diminutive of gallego, someone from Galicia, but here shorthand for anyone Spanish] … I feel Spanish, there is no way back. I live here.

A little later he said that ‘I have Spanish nationality now, but I am still Cuban and I will be Cuban until I die. I took Spanish nationality to be able to go to the US to visit my father, who has lived there as an exile for many, many years. He left while I was still studying’. Ernesto’s depression and his difficulty in reconciling being Cuban and Spanish speaks of the territorialization of identity and

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the exclusionary racializing discourses that both Spanishness and Cubanness are constructed around. Yet Ernesto did not find solace in socializing with other Cubans: ‘The relationship with Cubans abroad is very difficult. I don’t want to live in a ghetto, these people who always talk the same about Fidel and eat beans’. Indeed, many diasporic Cubans oscillated between the desire to meet with others to share memories and experiences, and abhorrence and fear at such intimacy. Some thought that sharing memories with other Cubans who are not immediate family or close friends may entail risks for relatives remaining on the island. Two informants, for example, told me that an ex-wife and a girlfriend respectively had been asked to provide information about them to Cuban state security. Interaction with strangers may also expose rifts and hostility between the interlocutors, and is therefore sometimes best avoided. Mario, whose family history was introduced in Chapter 2, had his own reasons for avoiding contact with other Cubans. When the Cuban authorities requested that he return to Cuba from Czechoslovakia, it was because they claimed he was guilty of ‘ideological feebleness’ (debilidades ideológicas). Mario thought his petty-bourgeois background made him suspect after the dogmatic turn of the revolution in the 1960s. Fearing the newly opened UMAP labour camps, Mario was not keen to return. Fortunately for him, the boat meant to carry him and his Czech wife back to Cuba stopped at Rotterdam. Here, Mario and his wife – who were otherwise under close surveillance – were allowed to go ashore, and they managed to escape their escorts in a department store. They went on to apply for political asylum in Spain against the advice of the Dutch police, who warned Mario of Franco’s dictatorship. Yet Mario thought that apart from Cuba, Spain would be the only country in which he would be able to feel at home. Mario said he shunned contact with other Cubans for ten years after arriving in Spain because he was convinced that they would all be intelligence agents, either for the CIA, the KGB or Cuban intelligence. While far from all Cubans would be as categorical as Mario, many claimed not to be interested in knowing other Cubans, particularly if they left the island in a different period to themselves. Yet sometimes hostility and mistrust is overcome if only fleetingly. Thus, at a reception for the diasporic journal Revista HispanoCubana, Leo, the poet, had a daiquiri with Manolo, frail and elderly, a descendent of one of the first presidents of the Cuban republic. Forty years previously, they had confronted each other in war during the Playa Girón / Bay of Pigs invasion: Leo was then defending the revolution; Manolo was among the CIA-backed exile Cuban invaders. When I later asked Leo about this encounter, he said that the most important lesson for Cubans to learn is to live peacefully with each other, a maxim he lived out himself. Against the advice of friends and acquaintances, Leo always opened his doors to newly arrived or visiting Cubans. Although he was friendly with Leo, Manolo on the other hand was weary of contact with other 166

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Cubans and told me that he could always spot a government agent: ‘It’s a feeling, you can always tell’, he said to me. Diasporic Cubans are thus not only divided by alienation and fractured memories, but also by a shared mistrust.

The ‘Fluids of Destiny’: Beyond Trench Thinking When there was some degree of actual interaction between the generations, it often came about through key individuals who served as points of contact between different groups, and individuals whose personal background situated them somewhat awkwardly between groups or generations were more inclined to maintain contacts beyond their generational group. A group of intellectuals and writers found common ground in their love of poetry and art, which transcended both generational categories and territorial boundaries. One of them said to me many times: ‘I have long since stopped choosing my friends on political grounds’. He was alluding to the fact that many diasporic Cubans socialize only with Cubans who share their political beliefs, which tend to coincide with generational categories. Felipe Lázaro, whose autobiographical essay I cited in the Introduction, was a part of this group. In an as yet unfinished, organically growing poem, Lázaro pays homage to friends and acquaintances, island-based and diasporic, some of them deceased, not all of whom share his political convictions, but whose writing or company he relishes. One version of the poem appears in the anthology Poetas sin fronteras (‘Poets without borders’), published in Madrid by a diaspora Cuban publisher, which includes contributions from displaced poets from the Americas at large (Lagos 2000). Lázaro’s poem is titled ‘Un sueño muy ebrio sobre la arena’ (‘A very intoxicated dream about sand’), and lists his friends and acquaintances by name in a poetic celebration of intoxication: ‘They say that the nectar of the gods is forbidden to man / But they confound the syrup with the fluids [jugos] of destiny’, begins the poem (Lázaro 2000: 164). It continues as a praise poem to sensuality and joie de vivre, and revisits bars in Madrid and Havana. Since the poet left Cuba at the age of twelve and has not been back, he is unlikely to have patronized most of the Cuban locales mentioned in his poem, but he nevertheless invokes them as part of his personal memory, peopled by his friends. The poem thus conjures up an imaginary and ever-changing space of Cubanness that transcends territory, one that is private and yet shared. What is interesting about the poem in this context is the way it carefully avoids politics to celebrate instead the ‘fluids of destiny’, which for Lázaro himself involved the ‘unexpected path of exile’ (Lázaro 1999: 77), but for others it included the option to stay. In his celebration of life and intoxication, Lázaro is also implicitly criticizing the austerity of the revolution and its emphasis on sacrifice and death. A number of Cuban writers have explored the tension between the revolutionary Christianderived ideals of sacrifice, and a hedonist urge most often associated with Ha167

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vana, the night, sexuality and drunkenness (see, e.g., Machover 1995; Serrano 1995; Rojas 1998a; Prieto 2001). Nationalist movements in Cuba, including the revolution, have valued and even fetishized sacrifice and death for the nation. A favourite slogan on the island, for example, is ‘Fatherland or Death’ (Patria o Muerte), and the Cuban national anthem contains the stanzas: ‘Do not fear a glorious death / For to die for the Patria is to live’. To this, a number of writers have responded tongue-in-cheek: ‘To die for the Patria is not to live / It is to die for the patria’ and ‘To live without Patria is also to live’ (respectively Ramón Fernández Larrea and Gustavo Pérez Firmat, both quoted in de la Nuez 1999: 128). By invoking this tension, Lázaro places himself comfortably in an established tradition that subverts the political ‘trench’ thinking in favour of ‘fluidity’. Like other Exiles, Felipe Lázaro did not want to visit Cuba as long as Castro is in power: he did not want to jeopardize his exilic status. But the young Felipe’s experiences also inclined him to be critical of Exile nationalism. Shortly after arriving in Miami, Felipe’s father took him to a large political meeting of other newly arrived Cubans. Felipe instantly recognized the occasion from the many similar meetings he had already witnessed in Cuba: after all, the flags and the anthems were all the same. Later, Felipe’s father took his son and daughters to Spain, from which he had emigrated himself earlier in the century. But Felipe’s sisters found Spain backwards and Felipe did not want to comply with the requested deference to Franco (Lázaro 1999). From the reminiscences of his intuitive understanding of the similarities between Exile and island nationalist fervour, and between the adulation of a dictator – whether Batista, Castro or Franco – the adult Felipe Lázaro explains his dislike for polarized political thinking (ibid.).

Gender The conceptual and territorial exclusivity of official discourse on Cuban identity and Cubanness has until recently meant that leaving Cuba also automatically entailed moving outside the realm of Cubanness and becoming a traitor to the nation. This territorialized discourse relied on a particular sexing and gendering of the national subject: the revolutionary Cuban subject was male and heterosexual. It is thus no coincidence that homosexuality has been a thorny issue for the revolutionary government, nor that Ernesto Che Guevara wanted to create an Hombre Nuevo, although the word hombre in Spanish, like man in English, has the double meaning of ‘man’ and ‘mankind’. Women occupy an altogether more marginal space within this realm of Cubanness and, furthermore, one in which they are assigned a role principally through their function as mothers (Holgado Fernández 2002). Leaving the island is therefore less charged in both ideological and practical terms for women. For example, women were not sent to the UMAP labour camps upon applying to leave the country, whereas men were. Young men 168

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of military age are not permitted to leave the island while women are under no such restrictions. Finally, given the structures of global tourism, Cuban women are more likely than Cuban men to find marriage partners among visitors to the island. Since leaving the island through marriage is not considered an act of treason, more Cuban women than men are therefore likely to be able to travel freely in and out of the island after leaving.5 The possibility of migrating is thus mediated by gender. Experiences in Spain have changed over the years. The Cuban women who arrived in Spain in the 1960s and 1970s, most of whom were white and middle class, felt constrained by patriarchal structures and rigid gender roles. In Spain during the 1970s it was not socially acceptable for a married woman to continue working outside the home as it was among their social group in Cuba. Whereas only 17 per cent of Cuban women worked outside the home in 1953 (Lutjens 1997), among the Exile generation many women had paid work. Isabel, who arrived in Spain with her parents and seven-year-old son in 1970, found she had fewer social rights in Spain, including the right to divorce. As was recounted in Chapter 3, she was estranged from her husband for political reasons and he decided to stay in Cuba. In Spain, Isabel was reproached by her father’s Spanish relatives for leaving her husband behind, and thus neglecting what they understood to be her duties as a wife. At work, her colleagues did not believe she had ever been married at a time when having a child out of wedlock was highly stigmatized. To begin with she did not dare tell anyone at work that she had a child for fear she would be sacked, but found herself the subject of malicious gossip in her neighbourhood as a single mother. In contrast, Isabel said she felt more respected as a working woman during her stint in New York than she ever did in Spain. Norma, also of the exile generation, said that her neighbours circulated rumours about her working in an ‘American bar’, a euphemism for a brothel. Other women who arrived in Spain in the 1960s and 1970s and on into the 1990s recounted similar experiences of disapproval and stigmatization in their workplaces and neighbourhoods. Especially non-white Cuban women who arrived in Spain after Cuba’s opening up for tourism have been affected by the rise in sex tourism and the associated racialized discourses on Cuban women. Yet diaspora was also a liberating experience for some women. Notwithstanding discrimination and harassment, women were often able to find new roles for themselves and seemed less troubled by their lives in diaspora. Men more often tended to politicize their experiences and accuse the Cuban government of depriving them of what was rightfully theirs, whether a career, property or simply a life in their homeland. The solution to their predicament thus becomes a political question, not a pragmatic process of rebuilding a life, as it was more often for women. The story of Graciela and her husband illustrates this gendered aspect of diasporic experience.

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Graciela’s parents were both dedicated members of the Communist Party (then the Socialist People’s Party) before the revolution. In the years leading up to the revolution, her mother went into exile in Mexico and her father joined Castro’s guerrilla groups in the Sierra Maestra. Already as a child, Graciela knew she did not want to become involved in politics. She could not understand at the time why ‘abstract causes’ and the Party were more important to her parents than their own family. As she explained to me, rather than dedicating her life to ‘grand causes’ she wanted instead to commit herself to a ‘myriad small domestic causes’. Both of Graciela’s parents went on to become members of the revolutionary government. But Graciela and her husband, a writer and intellectual, decided in the early 1960s that they wanted to leave Cuba. Graciela’s husband was a practising Catholic, something which made him ineligible for a university appointment, and he was barred from publishing. Then, in 1964, before they were able to leave, Graciela’s mother and her then husband were arrested and accused of being CIA agents. Graciela decided to stay in Cuba as long as her mother was under suspicion. In the seven years following, Graciela tried everything possible to ensure that her mother and her mother’s husband were given a fair trial. In the meantime, she also gave birth to two daughters. Over time, Graciela realized that she would not be able to influence the outcome of her mother’s case. She decided that she did not want to sacrifice her daughters’ childhoods to rescuing her mother, and the family left Cuba for Spain. In Cuba, Graciela gave up work to look after the house and family and to be her husband’s secretary. Despite her husband’s political difficulties, he was still considered an intellectual of note. But in Spain he was unknown and unable to find work that corresponded with his qualifications and aspirations. Graciela therefore quickly became the breadwinner of the family, working first as a secretary, then as an estate agent and salesperson. In the 1980s, the Spanish Ministry of Foreign Affairs, under the then socialist government of Felipe González, asked her to work for the government. Graciela thought she had been offered this position because of her personal and family networks in the highest circles of the Cuban government, for she had not until then been involved with diasporic politics. In the capacity of advisor to the Spanish government, Graciela was involved in negotiations between the two governments, and in the 1990s she organized a number of meetings between Cuban intellectuals from both within and outside the island. In 1996, when the government of José María Aznar took power, Graciela was sacked and, ironically, accused of being an agent of the Cuban government by the Spanish media. After that Graciela was involved with Encuentro described in Chapter 4. Graciela’s remarkable – and unusual – professional career was put into relief by her husband’s difficulty in adapting to life in exile, which eventually led to their divorce: ‘Exile destroyed my marriage’, she said to me. For Graciela and other women, the changes between living in Cuba and in diaspora were less disrup170

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tive than they were for their husbands. For Graciela, life in diaspora became an opening to a new career and trajectory in which she could constructively engage with her homeland. But for many men, the downward social mobility and loss of authority associated with migration were destructive experiences, ones which deprived them of their ability to perform the roles of primary breadwinner and head of the family, and did not provide any alternative roles that were socially meaningful to them.

Life Stages and Life Crises Although members of the three diasporic generations are defined by the moment of leaving Cuba and not by their date of birth, they do broadly correspond to age groups. Most Cubans of the Exile generation are today elderly, whereas the Children of the Revolution and the Migrants tend to be younger. Relatively more of the Exiles are active in political groups and NGOs than Cubans of the other two generations. As I have argued in the preceding chapters, this is related to different experiences with civic organizations. It may also indicate that the importance of the experience of diaspora and the degree of identification with diaspora politics might wax and wane during the course of life. Could it be that some of the differences between the generations can be explained by age and life stage? As in the case of Catalan ethnicity and the use of Catalan language analysed by Oonagh O’Brien (1994), some aspects of identity may ‘fit’ certain life-cycle stages better than others. During fieldwork in French Catalonia in the 1980s, O’Brien found that speaking Catalan was restricted to the older generation, and initially it made sense for both informants and anthropologist to draw the conclusion that it would only be a short time before spoken Catalan would be obsolete. However, O’Brien’s long-term involvement with the townspeople she was studying revealed that Catalan had been selectively used by different age groups for decades. This led her to the insight that Catalan language use varied through the life course of individuals. It seems equally to be the case that subject positions with regard to diaspora change over time and that life stage events and crises have some influence. In Madrid, some retired Cubans had immersed themselves fully in diasporic political and cultural activities and spent most of their time attending meetings and seminars centred on Cuban themes. For Gladys, a university lecturer, being a Cuban émigré had not always been important to her. She married a son of Spanish republican exiles in Havana and left Cuba for Mexico with him and his family in 1961. In Mexico, Gladys socialized primarily with other Spanish exiles and with Mexicans. She explained: with Cuba it was perhaps like a feeling that I had lost it forever. That was the impression I had when we left in that airplane and I said to myself that I would never return

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again … I erased Cuba from my head completely … I think it was a defence mechanism. It was so painful. Of course I still wrote to my friends from university and so on, and I would go to Puerto Rico where my parents settled down and see Cubans there … But Cuba didn’t interest me.

Some twenty years later, after a successful career in academia and after raising a family in Mexico, Gladys divorced her husband and started to think differently about her experience of diaspora: This was when I said to myself that … I wanted to find the Cubans, to find my people. Of course in that period it was very difficult to go to Havana, I’m talking about ’79 or ’80, so I said to myself that I would go to Miami first, to see who I’d meet. I had lots of relatives in Miami who I hadn’t seen for twenty years, I had a whole lot of friends there I hadn’t seen. I spent a week in Miami and it was fantastic, they threw parties for me, they took me out and I said to myself that these are my people, and immediately I decided to go to Cuba. It took a lot of work … but I went and I recovered a part of Cuba I had left behind. It was only a part, not all, for I found myself in a Cuba that had nothing to do with me. It really had nothing to do with me. I had a couple of cousins who I had a good time with, I had some friends from university still, but there was this atmosphere of reserve, of no trust. I found it to be in a very, very bad state physically, it was very deteriorated compared to what it had been like twenty years earlier when I left, but also with regard to relations between people.

Gladys said to herself that her visit had been ‘the end of the story’ and that she would never go back again. However, shortly after her visit to Cuba she was required to travel to the island a number of times because of her work. On one of these visits, Gladys had a traffic accident and thought she was about to die. Having seen her father die in Texas with a Cuban flag hanging on the wall above him, she had always sworn that she wanted to die in Cuba. Yet when she thought that she was about to die in Cuba, she prayed that she would be allowed to die in her neighbourhood in Mexico City. This experience further reinforced her feeling that Cubanness was something expendable in her life. Then, in the late 1980s, she moved to Madrid and met other Cubans, including a group of writers: I had no interest in politics, but through my contact with [an Exile writer and politico] I began for the first time ever to take an interest … I realized that I had lived in an exile, which wasn’t mine, I had lived the exile of the Spanish … I became more and more involved … Thanks to them [the writer and his wife] I recovered my Cubanness.

Gladys has since then taken a scholarly interest in Cuba and has written a semiautobiographical novel set in Havana. In her novel, the character based on herself dies in Cuba. After becoming involved in diasporic politics, Gladys did not want to return and also found out she was on a blacklist of the Cuban authorities.

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Like Gladys, other diasporic Cubans became interested in diasporic politics and in things Cuban late in life, sometimes after repeat migration or following life crises such as a divorce. At other times, retiring from work and seeing offspring leave the family home gave people the impetus to revitalize an interest in Cuban culture or politics. For some, it became an all-important and defining part of their lives. The relationship between memory and life cycle, ageing and life crises is complex. To what degree does life-stage account for the different ways of relating to Cuba in the lives of Exiles on the one hand and the two subsequent generations on the other? More research over a longer time span is needed to answer this question fully. It seems obvious that a retired person in an economically comfortable position would be more inclined to engage in diasporic politics than a young person struggling to find work and remit money: ‘When one has to survive, it is not recommended to lose time in melancholia’, as de la Nuez puts it (de la Nuez 1999: 124). Yet contextual factors are also important. In an essay in which he reflects on how he came to ‘inhabit diaspora’, de la Nuez describes his relief at not being pushed to engage with things Cuban after leaving the island: ‘Why should I now officiate as Cuban’ or seek a ‘Cuban career’? He asks rhetorically (ibid.: 124). Not engaging with ‘Cuba’ or ‘Cuban issues’ can therefore also be a way of dealing with or inhabiting diaspora. For some recently arrived Cubans, networks of Cuban friends or relatives provide contacts, employment and housing, and sometimes these groups of Cubans remain the primary social group. For some of the Migrants it was the very fact of being Cuban that provided them with their livelihood, in jobs as santeros or dance teachers, for example. In the case of those Children of the Revolution who worked for Encuentro, living in diaspora was as much a lifestyle as it was for the Exiles, and as much a livelihood as for those teaching Cuban dancing. For them, being Cuban was no less important than for the Exiles, although the meaning of Cubanness was entirely different. Meanwhile, most Cubans who left the island as young children have integrated into Spanish society and express little or no interest in Cuba and diasporic politics. Only a few of them have joined organizations or groups founded by their parents’ generation, such as the Centro Cubano, and their numbers are not enough to keep the level of activities going, a fact deplored by their parents’ generation. Does this mean that the diaspora will disappear unless it is continually renewed through migration, or will the Spanish-born second generation grow up to identify as diaporic Cubans? Again there are differences between the different diasporic generations. Whereas Exile parents emphasized the need for their children to integrate into Spanish society, parents in the Migrant generation were more likely to attempt to maintain an attachment to Cuba for their children. Race and class are important for understanding these differences, as are changes

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in public understanding and attitudes vis-à-vis multiculturalism and immigrants, and the possibilities for leading transnational lives. The Exiles’ whiteness, Spanish heritage and class position arguably facilitated their integration, however painful an experience the settlement in Spain proved for many of them. The Migrants are in a different position, and, furthermore, they have arrived in a context of mass immigration in Spain. As scholars of transnationalism have argued, transnational migrant practices are often motivated by experiences of exclusion or the threat of it in host societies. Transmigrants simply want to keep their options open in an insecure world (Glick Schiller, Basch and Blanc-Szanton 1992a). The different historical experiences of the diasporic generations of Cubans in Spain aptly illustrate this point. Diasporic groups themselves also go through periods of waxing and waning regarding political activity, influenced by global, home and host-state events and discourses. One important future area of research will therefore be to gauge how diasporic politics and memory change over time. What will happen to the Children of the Revolution and the Migrants as they grow older and raise their children in Spain? Will their experience of diaspora become more important to them? How might it change with the arrival of newer generations of Cubans? How will a future regime change in Cuba affect the diasporic generations?

Identity Discourses In Miami, Cubans have successfully produced a hyphenated Cuban-American identity. Eckstein and Barberia found that some Cuban-Americans born in the US consider Cuba their homeland even if they have never visited the island (Eckstein and Barberia 2002). But the situation in Spain is different in important ways. My research shows that Spanish-born children of Cuban parents are oriented towards Spanish society and that only few nourish an interest in Cuba. Sergio, who said he had ‘seen the best and lost it’ (see Chapter 3) said that he consciously tried not to transmit any feeling of Cubanness to his sons because ‘one cannot keep living in the past’. He did not want to force his sons to live in a past which was not theirs, he insisted. ‘In Miami there are so many problems with parents trying to make their children stay Cuban’, he said. When I asked Sergio’s two sons Felipe and Raúl, who were twenty-three and twenty-one years of age respectively, they both said that their father never talked much about Cuba. They also said that they felt they were ‘Spanish of pure stock’. Yet Raúl said he would like to visit Cuba one day: I have this curiosity about it. I would like to go there, to see where my father lived, where he played when he was a child, to see the bakery where he went to buy bread … I don’t know, I would just like to see it … He has never insisted on this, he has always thought that we were Spanish. 174

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Sergio himself thought that: my sons can go to Cuba if they like, I suppose they might want to find out more about Cuba one day … But the cubanía [Cubanness] here ends the day I die. In Miami, since there are so many [Cubans], it may continue, but here in Spain, no … That’s the way it is and that has been my fate. They [his sons] know I’m Cuban, but I don’t go on about it. They know where the island is and not much more. Of Cuban history [they know] nothing. I don’t want it, they are Spanish and they have to know the past of Spain, not that of Cuba … I say that I must like chorizo and salchichón [Spanish sausages]: I must enjoy football and bull fighting – but of all these things I don’t think I’ll ever enjoy bull fighting. I don’t aspire for my sons to like the mambo and the cha-cha-cha and to eat tamales [a Cuban dish made with maize] … Why not? It would be a bit absurd, that’s what I think anyway. My sons are Spanish, and that’s the end of the story.

It is likely that Cubans who have left Cuba more recently, and primarily for economic reasons, will aim to maintain closer links with the island. They are also more likely to transmit a sense of Cubanness to their offspring, like Adrián and others of the Migrant generation (see Chapter 5). Sergio and others who left in the 1960s and 1970s often migrated as complete family groups and had fewer possibilities for maintaining contact with relatives on the island because of government restrictions. These factors are likely to have implications for ways of remembering and for subject positions. Yet there are also other ways of transmitting a sense of Cubanness. Lourdes, the social worker now based in Miami, recounted how she was trying to ensure that her grandchildren, who were born in Puerto Rico and Spain respectively, would retain a sense of Cubanness. During a summer holiday when two of them visited her, she took them to the Niagara Falls: ‘Before I went with my grandchildren we read the poem by Heredia … I said to them that we will try to discover the places that he went. Imagine: from the eighteenth century to the twenty-first … That is also Cuba, to read the poem by the first Cuban and remember’.6 New technologies such as the internet and e-mail, and better telecommunications, obviously make it easier to maintain long-distance communication today than previously, but distance and cost still matter. Cubans in Spain cannot as a rule return with the frequency that some Cubans in the US can (Eckstein and Barberia 2002). Yet the comparison with Cuban communities in the US is illuminating. Three main factors seem to be of importance: the sheer size of the Cuban communities in the US that have ensured the creation of a successful enclave, the political support from both the US government and local state politicians in Florida for the exile Cuban cause, and the ready availability in the US of hyphenated identity discourses. It remains to be seen whether hyphenated or hybrid identities will become a part of identity discourses in Spain. At least for the moment this is not the case, and if Adrián’s son grows up thinking of himself as a cubañol – part Cuban (cubano) and part Spanish (español) – he might be the only 175

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one. In Spain, discourses of soil-based belonging hold considerable strength, and regional identities have been actively reinvented and politicized since the transition to democracy. Internal migrants from southern Spain and their descendants are still identified and represent themselves as ‘migrants’, even decades after they settled in the industrial centres of Catalonia and the Basque Country. There is thus little conceptual space for hyphenated or hybrid identities. The relatively small size of the Cuban community in Spain and their geographical heterogeneity also contrast with that of the US, where entire neighbourhoods in Miami are populated in the majority by Cubans who have arrived at the same points in time (ibid.). The writer Pérez Firmat remembers his school days in Miami as a continuation of Havana: ‘it seemed that we had never left, that our lifelines had not veered to the north … we were defying distance, denying discontinuity’ (Pérez Firmat 2000: 68). Cubans in Spain have never been able to make a similar imprint in Madrid or any other Spanish cities. Another factor that has implications for defining available identity discourses is race. Implicit understandings of Spanishness as white mean that non-white Spanish citizens are seen as and referred to as ‘immigrants’ even when they are not. Thus, as a case worker for the NGO SOS Racismo explained to me, in media coverage of a racial attack on a young, black Spanish man, the victim was consistently described as a ‘migrant’ although he was in fact Spanish-born and held Spanish nationality. As many Cubans were quick to point out, North African immigrants are more exposed to discrimination and racially motivated attacks, which have been a particular problem in the relatively less affluent areas of southern Spain where immigrants carry out a large proportion of the manual, agricultural labour (Martínez Veiga 2001). However, there is still no publicly recognized space for non-white Cubans to define themselves as Spanish or even Cuban-Spanish, an issue César was struggling with (see Chapter 5). Compared to the situation in the US, Cubans in Spain have the advantage of speaking Spanish, although their accents do mark them out. Even Sergio’s two Spanish-born sons, who to me sounded like any other young madrileños (inhabitants of Madrid), said that Spanish people often notice a slight Latin American lilt in their speech. Sometimes, mainland Spaniards would presume they were from the Canary Islands, but dark-skinned Cubans cannot pass as Canary Islanders. Far beyond the scope of this book, but illuminating nonetheless, would be a comparison with immigration from Caribbean former colonies to the United Kingdom. Such a comparative analysis would need to pay attention to the historically and politically divergent processes of both colonization and decolonization and the emergence of different postcolonial discourses in the two former metropoles as well as in their former colonies. In Spanish discourses on colonialism, it is often proudly asserted that the Spanish were ‘not racist’ in their colonial ventures since they mixed with both the indigenous and slave populations. Yet Verena Martinez-Alier’s study of race relations in nineteenth-century Cuba shows 176

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that Spanish colonial administrators went to great lengths to establish criteria for ‘purity of blood’, and that race was an all-pervasive category in social interaction (Martinez-Alier 1974). To state – as many white Spaniards and Cubans readily do – that the existence of mestizaje between Spanish colonizers and African slaves proves that the colonizer were ‘not racist’ fails to take into account historical and present relations of inequality. Mestizaje does not preclude the existence of discrimination and social divisions (Kutzinski 1993: 5). Rather, as Peter Wade has argued, mestizaje and discrimination are two sides of the same coin, ‘coexisting and interdependent’ (Wade 1993: 3). The different histories of migration, with the Spanish migrating in large numbers to Cuba after independence, as well as differences in postcolonial relations, should provide interesting grounds for a comparative analysis. While in Britain, the term ‘black British’ has attained currency, there is no comparable Spanish term. Spain has only recently experienced ‘an imploding imperial frontier’, one which brought migrants from former colonies and created a multicultural society in Britain (Hennessy 2000: 253). As Alistair Hennessy has observed, this has made Spain marginal to Paul Gilroy’s ‘Black Atlantic’ (ibid.: 253). A comparative analysis of the different postcolonial discourses of the two countries would prove interesting in teasing out the origins of and conditions for the availability of new discourses of identity and belonging.

Notes 1. See Chapter 3, note 2. 2. Celia Cruz (1925–2003), a salsa singer, went into exile in the US during a tour immediately after the revolution. Cruz was banned from returning even when her parents died. She herself vowed not to return as long as Castro was in power. 3. Tom Rice has called for anthropologists to pay more attention to the senses in understanding how people construct their selves and argues that the visual has long been over-privileged (Rice 2003). Olfaction was the sense that my informants returned to time and again as conveying their memories in the most unadulterated form. Ballinger has noted both sight and sound as important in memory making for her Istrian Italian informants (Ballinger 2003: 169). 4. In 2000, only about 20,000 Cubans on the island had an internet account. The number may have decreased since then because of government crackdowns (Duany 2007: 166). 5. I have not been able to find figures on the gender distribution of Cubans possessing the PRE, or overseas residence permit. 6. José María Heredia Heredia (1803–1839) was a Cuban poet who was forced into exile in the US and Mexico by the Spanish colonial authorities because of his political commitment to Cuban independence. He is often referred to as ‘the first Cuban’. ‘Ode to Niagara’ is one of his most celebrated poems.

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n Interpretations of the background to the Cuban diaspora – a political revolution and the subsequent radical transformation of the society and economy towards socialism – are politicized and highly contested. Yet the extraordinary success of the Miami-based Cuban diaspora in putting its case high on the US political agenda and in capturing world media attention has resulted in a situation where the internal diversity and the multiplicity of experiences within the diaspora have been eclipsed in favour of a monolithic narrative of anti-communism and political radicalism. Thus, to paraphrase Max Castro, the stories of ‘the multiple real and possible’ Cuban diaspora has yet to be written (Castro 2000: 305). This book is a contribution towards that end. For Cubans in diaspora and in Cuba, politics and memory are intertwined, meaning that different groups contest and dispute each other’s memories. The frequent upheavals in Cuba throughout the twentieth century, and polarized public and political discourses, have contributed to the zeal with which both the government and diasporic groups attempt to impose their interpretation of the past upon each other to the exclusion of any other interpretations. By conceptualizing the diaspora not as a community but as three diasporic generations I have grounded diasporic memory making in a changing historical context, and reflected analytically on the often implicit or tacit dialogues between narratives. Many Cubans, especially of the two first diasporic generations, emphasized the individual character of their narratives, as if resisting the grand, collective narrative of the revolution. They were also self-consciously authored in response to the stories of others. There are obvious differences between the territorialized memories of the Exile generation, who lament the passing of a world they regarded as theirs, and the memories of deprivation of the two subsequent generations. The Exiles tend to remember in national terms – for example, through commemorat-

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ing republican holidays or hanging pictures of recognizably national symbols in their homes. They reject the revolutionary government and adhere to their own counter-nationalism, which paradoxically mirrors the revolutionary discourse in many respects. The Children of the Revolution equally adhere to a national project, but they subvert and criticize both revolutionary and Exile nationalism. They feel no nostalgia for the ruined cityscape of Havana and vehemently reject feeling attached to Cuba as a territory. Instead they embrace cosmopolitanism. Encuentro de la cultura cubana, the journal produced by Children of the Revolution until 2009, redefined Cubanness as a legacy of shared culture rather than as an attribute of geographical territory and destiny. Thus what they do share with the Exiles is an attachment to an idea of Cuba, but they are careful not to assume or to be seen to assume any notion of a shared legacy with other Cubans qua their being Cuban. Finally, the Migrants conceive of their homeland in terms of relations to significant others rather than a particular territory. They feel no piety towards the Special Period deprivations that impelled them to leave Cuba. Instead, they herald a new ‘minimal homeland’ in which Cuba is remembered as poverty and deprivation, but ‘home’ is understood as networks of kin, friends, the street or neighbourhood but not the nation. The memories of the Exiles have developed and evolved over their long years in diaspora to become what they are today, in some cases making them, if not rose-tinted, then violet-scented (see Chapter 3). It seems unlikely that the Children of the Revolution and the Migrants will develop similarly nostalgic memories, although this is an empirical question which can only be answered by future research. However, the different status of Havana for the three generations – abundance and opportunity for the Exiles, but scarcity and sex tourism for the subsequent generations – may suggest why the Exile generation is more prone to territorialize their memories than the Children of the Revolution and the Migrants. For all, however, the homeland has become an imagined entity anchored in different time-spaces. The ethnography presented in this book shows that differences in historically embedded experiences and trajectories provide starting points for the diasporic production of difference rather than similarity or sharedness. Why, one might ask, is the Cuban diaspora in Spain characterized by such fragmentation, when that of Miami is often portrayed as unitary and monolithic? In reflecting on why this is so, I return to the question of context raised in the introduction. Brettell has reflected on the reasons why ethnic communities appear in some places and at some points in time, but not in others, comparing Portuguese migrants in Toronto and Paris respectively (Brettell 2003). Her argument is strongly contextual: we need to look, she argues, at the historical context of both home and host society to explain the emergence or non-emergence of an ethnic community. Brettell’s work has obvious implications for literature on diasporas in general, and 180

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for a comparison between the Cuban diaspora in Spain and Miami specifically. I shall therefore briefly summarize it. In Toronto, Brettell carried out a traditional anthropological ‘community study’ among Portuguese migrants, a community clustered in an ethnic neighbourhood replete with Portuguese shops and restaurants, a Portuguese church and Portuguese immigrant families. Women worked in factories close to the Portuguese neighbourhood of the city, and men worked in the construction industry in the inner city. In Paris, however, she found no such ‘Little Portugal’. Numbers could not explain this, for there were many more Portuguese immigrants in Paris than there were in Toronto. Thus, she had to look for an explanation in contextual factors. In Paris she found that immigrants were fairly evenly scattered throughout the city, with no especially Portuguese neighbourhoods. In terms of employment, in Paris, Portuguese women tended to work as maids in private homes, making it difficult for them to meet other Portuguese immigrant women. Portuguese men in Paris worked in similar jobs as those in Toronto, but in Paris construction work took them to the outskirts of the city, and they often commuted to work, making after-work socializing less frequent. Apart from these factors, Brettell also considers the politics and policies of immigration in Canada and France respectively. In Canada, the emphasis is on multiculturalism and immigrant groups are encouraged to retain their language and culture. As in the US, the ‘ethnic vote’ counts in Canada, and Portuguese immigrants, like other migrant groups, have formed clubs and associations to represent their ‘ethnic voice’ in mainstream society. By contrast, in France, policy and politics emphasize the need to ‘become French’; that is, to assimilate. Thus, structural, ideological and political factors differ between the two countries and cities, explaining why in Toronto there is a thriving ethnic community, while in Paris there are social networks of Portuguese immigrants but not an identifiable ethnic community. A very similar argument could be made about the difference between the Cuban diaspora in Miami and that of Madrid. The small number of Cubans and their residential and labour-market dispersal means that it is perfectly possible to live in Madrid without interacting with other Cubans beyond one’s own friends and acquaintances. Since friendship groups tend to consist of people of roughly similar trajectories and ages, many Cubans simply do not know Cubans of other diasporic generations, and some are not even aware of them. This constitutes a very significant difference between the diaspora in the US and in Spain. While Cubans in Miami also tend to socialize among their own (Eckstein 2009: 47–48), they would at least know of Cubans of other cohorts and most would have some degree of interaction with them. In Miami, the sheer number of Cubans, their residential clustering and the ethnic enclave they have established means that you can live in the city without leaving the Cuban community at all. This is not possible in Madrid or anywhere else in Spain. In Miami, there are also recurrent 181

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public events celebrating and displaying the Cuban diaspora, providing spaces where Cubans and Cuban-Americans of different cohorts and generations meet and interact, even if one group, the Exiles, have monopolized their organization (ibid.: 54–57). Furthermore, in the US, Cubans have successfully made US policy on Cuba an important electoral issue nationally, creating an ‘ethnic policy cycle’ tied to the presidential election cycle (ibid.: 112–26). By contrast, Spanish policy towards Cuba has never been affected by the strong influence of Cuban Exile groups. Both under Franco and subsequent democratic governments, Spain has maintained a close relationship with its former colony, and Cuban Exile groups have not been able to influence this policy (see Chapter 2).1 Finally, Cubans in Spain share language and culture with the host society to a different degree than in the US. In Miami, an ‘English-only’ political movement emerged in the early 1980s as a reaction to growing bilingualism and Cuban Exile influence (ibid.: 49–54). There, Cubans continue to be seen as ethnic others. In Spain, as I have shown, Cubans of the Exile generation were often return migrants or descendants of Spanish émigrés. Even for those Cubans with only remote or no Spanish ancestry, there is a cultural affinity and a shared history and religion with people in Spain.2 Certainly there are ways in which Cubans distinguish themselves from the Spanish, but these have not been recognized as the basis for ethnic identification or mobilization among Cubans themselves. Mark-Anthony Falzon argues that we need to decentre the notion of homeland, both geographically and analytically for diasporic peoples (Falzon 2003: 665). He describes how Bombay (as his informants continue to call it) has become a cultural centre for the global Sindhi diaspora. This diaspora originates in the province of Sind in present-day Pakistan. Yet while Sindhis retain a nostalgic, emotional attachment to Sind, it is Bombay they return to for socializing with coethnics, whether relatives or friends, for business, pleasure and marriage matchmaking. Bombay, not the homeland, is thus the centre for a cultural regeneration of the Sindhi diaspora, the ‘cultural heart’ of the diaspora as one Sindhi explains. For the generation of Exiles, Miami plays a role akin to that of Bombay for the Sindhis, but younger and more recently arrived Cubans often say that they do not ‘like Miami’ even if they have never been there. What Miami signifies for them is nostalgia, American consumer culture and exilic ‘kitschiness’. Such different geographies of longing and belonging constitute a significant rupture between the generations. For the Exiles, Cuba is literally a lost world and the Cuba of today is therefore almost irrelevant to them. Consequently, they are not interested in hearing about Cuba from newly arrived Cubans. Similarly, they refuse to acknowledge any changes that have occurred in Cuba since they left, as expressed in demands for the reinstatement of the constitution of 1940, or in the expectation that confiscated properties will eventually be given back to their prerevolutionary owners – that is, the Exiles. Subsequent generations of the diaspora 182

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do not have the same originary place that they long to go back to. There never was a period before ‘the fall’ for them; they harbour no nostalgia for political control, food scarcity or power cuts. Falzon’s work shows that the original homeland may not be central to the cultural imaginary of a diaspora. The Cuban diaspora, furthermore, shows us that not only can homeland change over time, as it did for Norma and don Orlando, but also that it may be de-territorialized. Said has argued that nationalism and exile are intrinsically or essentially associated (Said 2001: 176). In a similar vein, Brian Keith Axel argues that diasporas and the nation-state are ‘complexly related’ (Axel 2002: 426) and mutually constitutive of each other (ibid.: 54 n.33). Malkki finds that ‘[o]ne of the most illuminating ways of getting at the categorical quality of the national order of things is to examine what happens when this order is challenged or subverted’ (Malkki 1995: 6), such as by diasporic groups. Yet this does not mean that diasporic or displaced peoples necessarily challenge national orders or nationalisms; in some instances the condition of exile itself produces exclusive nationalisms or counter-nationalisms. I have argued for an approach in which the politics and memories of each generation are understood as a response to particular contexts and to hegemonic discourses – of the Cuban government as well as of previous generations of the diaspora and of the host society – on nation and the past. These complex relationships extend to dynamics within the diaspora, which are subject to change over time as diasporic subjects themselves and their contexts change. This has implications for understanding the interplay between time and space in the production of diaspora. In the Centro Cubano de España, the time-space coordinates by which the Exiles orient themselves are exhibited in the maps of Cuba showing the prerevolutionary provinces, and in a ritual calendar that reflects their Catholicism and republicanism. The Centro Cubano celebrates Epiphany and Independence Day, but not 26 July or May Day. Through such memory mapping practices, Exile Cubans show their resistance to the revolutionary ordering of time and space. However, for Cubans of the subsequent generations, this spatio-temporal order makes little sense. Christmas was abolished in Cuba in 1969 and was not reinstated until the visit of the Pope in 1998. The result is that many younger Cubans have scant or no recollection of Christmas traditions. They have grown up celebrating 26 July as the national day and hardly know what Epiphany is. Thus the Migrants’ NGO Puente Familiar con Cuba was planning to celebrate the day of the Committees for the Defence of the Revolution, the neighbourhood-watch groups instated by Castro. In the event, the party was cancelled, but when I mentioned it to Iván, one of the Children of the Revolution, he replied that it must be because they are fidelistas, ‘Fidelites’. For Mirta, who was involved in organizing the party, however, the idea was simply to celebrate a public holiday. The different orientations in time and space of the diasporic generations are also evident in the peña organized by a group of people of the Exile generation. 183

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During meetings of the peña, the participants conjured up shared geographies of remembrance, often in the form of reminiscences of the cityscapes of Havana. But radical changes in the city, such as the closure of shops or the renaming of places since the revolution, make it difficult to reach across the generations. Apart from changes in the cityscape itself, the use of space in bourgeois pre-revolutionary Havana was not the same as in socialist Havana. Thus the Exiles’ memories of exclusive social clubs contrast with the mass public meetings and the dormitories of boarding schools remembered by the Children of the Revolution. Redefinitions of public and private spaces and spheres render memories mutually unintelligible, while differences in spatio-temporal orientations make geographies of remembrance specific to each diasporic generation. The diasporic generations also inhabit diaspora in distinct ways, related to the conditions of when, how and why they left Cuba. Malkki (1995) has argued that, for Hutu refugees from the 1972 ethnocide in Burundi, the different conditions they encountered respectively in a township and in a refugee camp in Tanzania, shaped their ideas of history and identity. Malkki explores how ‘the social, imaginative processes of constructing nationness and identity can come to be influenced by the local, everyday circumstances of life in exile’ (ibid.: 3). For Cubans in Spain, it is the changing contexts of leaving Cuba and arriving in Spain that have shaped memories and narratives. Like Malkki, I have been concerned to show how diaspora and memory is given form through the local and the everyday, in its changing forms. Axel’s suggestion that we understand homeland ‘as a temporal modality – an anteriority – that contributes to processes of subject formation’ (Axel 2004: 49 n.6) is helpful here. Traditionally, space has been the overarching dimension of diaspora; it is displacement from an original homeland, which is taken to define diasporic groups. Axel calls it the ‘container model’ of diasporas, wherein a city, a nation or a region becomes the obvious ‘container’ or context for a particular diasporic group (ibid.: 30). In contrast, by understanding diasporic subjects through their trajectories, the temporal dimension is foregrounded. Thus diasporic aspects of group identity may wax and wane over time (Cohen 1997: 24), and diasporas may be undone through regrouping or return migration (Van Hear 1998). A group might be considered and consider itself diasporic at one point in its history but not at another (Tweed 1997: 141). Added to this complexity is the question of the changing identification with diasporic discourses over the life course of individual subjects, as discussed in the previous chapter. Understanding different ways of articulating relations to the homeland in a generational perspective enables us to overcome ‘the essentialization of origins’ (Axel 2002: 411) and to focus instead on the intersections between time and space, in terms of dynamics of change in both homeland, host country and within the diaspora. It brings out the relational and temporally contingent character of discourses and practices.

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There is nothing self-evident about processes of diasporization. Discourses invoking ancestry, authenticity and belonging, whether emanating from displaced people or hegemonic national movements, are contextual, political claims, never natural or given. Homeland is constructed through its absence and cannot be taken for granted in the way it is assumed in some diaspora literature (e.g. Safran 1991). This calls into question the very stability of homeland and suggests that it is contingent, conjunctural and contextual. I have argued that individuals’ narratives of when and how they left Cuba – emphasizing some elements and submerging others – simultaneously tell larger stories about nation and belonging. However, being Cuban does not matter equally to all: some think of their exile as central to who they are, others celebrate discourses of cosmopolitanism, while yet others prefer to think of themselves as migrants. In these aspects, Cubans resemble other diasporic groups that have been generated by political upheaval in their home countries, such as Tamils (Daniel 1998) and Iranians (Sreberny 2000) in the UK, Istrian Italians in Italy (Ballinger 2003) and Hutu refugees in Tanzania (Malkki 1995). Such historically produced diversity of subject positioning suggests that diasporas are the outcome of processes of marginalization and nation-building rather than displacement per se. It also suggests that a historically grounded generational approach as developed in this book, might be helpful for understanding processes of diaspora formation and of dynamics of social differentiation within other migrant groups. Recent diaspora literature has criticized the fixation on a single traumatic displacement, and trajectories of Cubans in Spain illustrate the sheer difficulty of defining one such moment of displacement. This does not mean, however, that such a moment is not central for diasporic subjects: the Exile generation continuously refers back to the moment they left Cuba, for example. Yet their family histories reveal multi-generational transnational mobility across the Atlantic. In effect, the Exiles, while promulgating an essentialist and homeland-fixated discourse on diaspora formation, embody at the same time the breaking point of diaspora thus defined. Equally paradoxical, the routes-orientation of Yanet and other young Cubans like her can be understood as a complex outcome of the nationalist aspirations and territorial exclusivity of the revolutionary government, its quest for rooting. Memory narratives can be powerfully emotional, laden with a sense of loss and mourning. Yet they can also be playful and subversive of the idea of nation and homeland. In short, they constitute dynamic and changing responses to hegemonic regimes of exclusion, whether at home or elsewhere, mediating that tension between ‘separation and entanglement, of living here and remembering/ desiring another place’ that for Clifford (1997: 255) is characteristic of diasporas. The Exiles narrate their experience as one of rupture, yet as Ricardo remarked (in Chapter 3), there were also striking continuities between the nation of the Exiles and that of the government. The Children of the Revolution on the other hand 185

Diasporic Generations

emphasize continuity, such as de la Nuez’s non-territorialized post/ex-Cuban state (see Chapter 4). They have, however, experienced ruptures from being the first-generation Hombre Nuevo (New Man) to becoming traidores of the socialist state. The Migrants finally embody the limits of nationalism. They not only reject the nationalism of the Exiles and that of the government but think of themselves in post-national and post-territorial terms. The de-territorializing subjectivities of the two most recent generations are clearly related to processes of exclusion in Cuba, Spain, and within the diaspora itself, and to the waning symbolic power of revolutionary Cubanness to younger Cubans. The project of forging a socialistpatriotic identity of Cubanness has become an ‘identity failure’ (Gupta and Ferguson 1997: 14) for many of those expected to be the Hombre Nuevo who are instead creating more inclusive narratives of Cubanness. The extent and implications of such subjectivities among other migrant groups for our understanding of diaspora, nation and belonging, and the relationship between disjuncture and continuity, raise questions about the conceptual framework of diaspora. In the case of Cubans in Spain, the concept of diasporic generation helps us understand the ways in which different diasporic subjects align themselves with, contest and produce discourses of diaspora, belonging and homeland.

Notes 1. The right-wing government of José María Aznar (1996–2004) did espouse a harder line on Cuba but nothing resembling the US embargo and restrictions on sending remittances and personal visits. 2. The religious aspect was especially strong for the Exile generation, yet even for followers of syncretic Afro-Cuban religions, Catholic rites and practices remain important.

186

G lossary

n balseros – ‘rafters’; used about those Cubans who tried to leave the island during the 1990s on small homemade rafts bodega – small grocery shop, many set up by Spanish immigrants to Cuba el capitalismo – ‘capitalism’, the capitalist world Centro Asturiano – Asturian Centre; one of several Spanish Societies started by Spanish immigrants to Cuba Centro Cubano de España – Cuban Centre in Spain; an association started by Cuban immigrants to Spain along the lines of the Spanish Societies in Cuba Centro Gallego – Galician Centre; one of several Spanish Societies started by Spanish immigrants to Cuba Círculo Católico – Catholic club for Cubans in Spain Comandante en Jefe – Commander in Chief; used about Fidel Castro who was Commander in Chief of the Cuban armed forces until 2008 converso – a Jewish convert to Catholicism; also used about former Communists El Corte Inglés – a chain of upmarket department stores in Spain El Encanto – a famous department store in pre-revolutionary Havana Encuentro de la cultura cubana – a diasporic Cuban magazine, edited and produced in Madrid between 1996 and 2009 gorda/o – fat Grampa Digital – satirical diasporic Cuban website Granma – the official daily paper of the Cuban Communist Party gusanos – literally ‘worms’ or ‘maggots’; used about Cubans who are against the revolution Hombre Nuevo – New Man jineterismo – literally ‘horseback riding’; used in Cuba about social practices aimed at generating a hard-currency income with sexualized and racialized connotations; in Spain used about Cuban prostitutes jinetera – someone who engages in jineterismo, above jineteando – the act of jineterismo, above La Jiribilla – internet-based cultural magazine, edited and produced in Havana la Lenin – used of the Escuela Vocacional V.I. Lenin, a secondary school in Havana leninistas – alumni of the Lenin school, above marielitos – Cubans who left the island through the port of Mariel in 1980

187

Glossary

mestizaje – literally racial mixing; used in Cuba, and more widely, about the process of racial mixing that is integral to the self-understanding of Latin American nations mulata – woman of mixed white and black parentage la paranoia – paranoia patria - fatherland peña – a discussion group perla de la Antillas – pearl of the Antilles; used about Cuba in colonial times Permiso de Residencia en el Exterior (PRE) – permit to reside abroad; a permit issued on certain conditions by the Cuban state to Cubans living abroad Puente Familiar con Cuba – Family Bridge with Cuba; a diasporic Cuban NGO based in Madrid quedada/o – literally ‘stayee’; i.e., someone who has overstayed their permitted time for being outside Cuba reconquista – reconquest; used about the Christian reconquest of Islamic Spain, but here metaphorically about Spanish investments in Latin America Ropero de la Caridad del Cobre – second hand clothes outlet run by exile Cubans in Madrid; named after the Cuban patron saint, the Virgin of Charity Santería – syncretic Cuban religion santera/o – practitioner of Santería, above sin papeles – literally ‘without papers’; used about undocumented immigrants in Spain Sociedades Españolas – Spanish Associations traidor/a – traitor trinchera – trench la tristeza – sadness, gloom, melancholy Tropicana – a famous cabaret club in Havana via Rusia – literally ‘via Russia’; used to describe a way of leaving Cuba and arriving in Spain by way of a Russian visa

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I ndex

n A Ackerman, Holly 12, 64 Aguilé, Luís 77 Aja Díaz, Antonio 12, 15, 64, 111 Alberto, Diego 125n28 Alberto, Eliseo 96n4, 125n28 Álvarez Suárez, Mayda 96n10 Amit, V. and Rapport, N. 4 Amit, Vered 31 antagonism of Exiles towards Cuba 61, 78, 81, 82 anthropology constructionist bent in 25n6 relationship-building in 35–7 socio-cultural anthropology 28 Apap, Joanna 14 Appadurai, A. and Breckenridge, C. 162 Appadurai, Arjun 122 Aragón, Manuel Gutiérrez 130 Arango, J. and Jachimowicz, M. 14 Arango, Joaquín 14 Arcocha, Juan 76 Areces, Ramón 140 Argentineans in Spain 25n9 attachment to homeland 157, 158, 182 of migrants to Cuba 173, 175, 180 Axel, Brian Keith 8, 11, 183, 184 Ayuntamiento de Madrid 14 Azicri, Max 61 Aznar, José María 18, 186n1 B Bach, R.l., Bach, J.B. and Triplett, T. 63 Bach, Robert 13 Ballinger, Pamela 5, 35, 37, 81, 177n3, 185 Balseros (Carles Bosch and Josep María Domènech film) 68n9 Baquero, Gastón 108

Basque National Party 26n15 Batista, Fulgencio 47, 51, 75, 76, 168 Baumann, Gerd 4 Bay of Pigs invasion 54, 166 Beck, Ulrich 98, 122 Behar, R. and Chávez Mayol, H. 38n3 Behar, R. and Suárez, L.M. 38n3 Behar, Ruth 6, 27, 29, 38n3, 57, 61, 96n8, 120, 159, 160 Belmonte de los Caballeros: A Sociological Study of a Spanish Town (Lisón Tolosana, C.) 45 Belnap, J. and Fernández, R. 49 belonging emotional landscapes of 159–63 identity and 10–11, 38, 118–19, 121–2, 177 imagery of roots and 3–4 multiple belonging 94 and not-belonging, contradictions of 98–102 and not-belonging, occupation of space between 109–10 patria, belonging (and exclusion) 91–2 Betancourt, Madeline Cámara 56 Bollaín, Iciar 154n4 Borneman, John 63 Boswell, T.D. and Curtis, J.R. 68n8, 96n5 Boyarin, Jonathan 57, 160 Boym, Svetlana 44, 158, 160 Brettell, Caroline 180, 181 Brown, Jaqueline Nassy 9, 11–12 Brubaker, Rogers 25n5 businesses of Exiles, confiscation of 56 Busquets, Julio 17, 18 C Cabezas, Amalia Lucía 129 Cadiz 26n20 conference participants 20 encounters in 19–22

203

Index intergenerational memories 20–21 multiple links to Cuba, evidence of 21–2 mutual recriminations between conference participants 22 Candea, Matei 30 Cantelar, Zunilda 123n12 El Capitalismo (capitalist world) 128, 137–43, 144, 147–8, 152, 187 Carceller Ibarra, Rigoberto 12, 145, 147, 148 Carruthers, Ashley 43, 151 Castles, S. and Miller, M.J. 58 Castro, Fidel 15, 17–18, 26n15, 28, 54, 56–7, 63, 64, 67n3, 74–6, 80, 90, 102, 105, 115, 117–18, 123, 124n15, 147–8, 168, 183 Exiles’ attitude towards 92–4 Castro, Max 179 categorization, sensitivity towards by Children of the Revolution 111 Centro Cubano 37, 75, 77–8, 85–6, 95, 112, 136–7, 145, 146, 155, 157, 173, 183, 187 Children of the Revolution 8, 22, 23, 24, 32, 34, 97–125, 171, 173, 174 arrival in Spain of 41, 97 belonging and not belonging, contradictions of 98–102 belonging and not-belonging, occupation of space between 109–10 categorization, sensitivity towards 111 community, relationship with idea of 101, 156 connection with Exiles, difficulties for 102 continuity, emphasis on 185–6 cosmopolitanism, counter-discourses of 116–21 cosmopolitanism, embrace of 98, 102, 116, 119 creative subversion of labels 110 Cuban officialdom, relationship with 102 Cubanness, redefinition of 101, 119–20 cultural perspectives 99, 108 cynicism 121 employment (and unemployment) 99–100, 152 Encuentro de la cultura cubana (‘Encounter with Cuban culture’) 106–10, 121, 145, 170, 173, 180, 187 exclusion 98, 123 Exiles and, differences between perspectives of 71, 98, 99, 100, 101, 102, 108, 109–10, 116, 121, 128, 155–6 future, orientation towards 108 Hombre Nuevo (‘New Man’) 23, 56–7, 97, 102–4, 123n2, 151, 168–9, 186, 187 hybridity, embrace of discourses of 116, 119



labelling 110–11 leaving Cuba, decision on 156 Lenin school (la Lenin) 104–6 Migrants and, differences in perspectives 155–6, 157 Migrants and, similarities and differences between 127–8, 137, 139, 141–2, 145, 152–3, 156–7 name-calling 110–11 narratives of 99, 100, 101, 115–16, 116–17, 117–19, 119, 120–21, 122 national project, adherence to 46, 180 personal experiences 99–100, 101, 111–16, 116–20 political perspectives 71, 99, 108, 156 postmodernity, embrace of discourses of 116 postnational political order and 122 race and class 41 socialist cosmopolitanism 97 socialization patterns 101, 152 strategic purpose 128 subversiveness 121 totalizing ideologies, suspicions of 121 tradition, protagonists of rupture of 101 traidores, becoming and feeling like 111–16, 123n2, 125n29 traidores, labelling as 116, 122 transnational social networks 99, 152 transnationalism 98, 157 Chileans in Spain 25n9 Chomsky, Aviva 48, 50, 54, 67n7 Círculo Católico 78, 187 class, age and race Children of the Revolution 41 Exiles 19, 40–41, 59–60, 74 Migrants 41–2 Clifford, James 5, 25n3, 25n5, 37, 120, 185 Cohen, Robin 184 Colectivo IOÉ 61 Communist Manifesto 123n3 community establishment by Exiles of 72–3 Exiles’ sense of 41 of migrants 156 relationship with idea of 101, 156 tenuous notions of 5 Constable, Nicole 11, 129 continuity, emphasis on 185–6 contracted migrants 128 cosmopolitanism 123n1

204

Index cosmopolitan mobility 20 counter-discourses of 116–21 embrace of 98, 102, 116, 119 socialist cosmopolitanism 97 Cruz, Celia 77, 158, 177n2 ‘Cuando salí de Cuba’ (‘When I left Cuba’) 77 Cuba colonization of 48 contested past of 47-8 cultural authorities in 107 cultural productions in 140–41 decision to leave (and trauma of actually leaving) 71–2 descendants of Spanish migrants to 70–71 economic crisis in, catalyst for migration 41 emigration from, trend in 12 Foreign Relations Ministry 25n11 Hombre Nuevo in 23, 56–7, 97, 102–4, 123n2, 151, 168–9, 186, 187 immigration to, unique mix of 50 independence of 48–50, 54 intercultural encounters in 130 leaving, perspectives on 70–76, 80, 91, 156 links between Spain and Cuba, Exiles’ resistance to 54–5 longing for 79–83 Military Units to Aid Production (Unidades Militares de Ayuda a la Producción), UMAP in 57, 88, 89, 166, 168–9 moral and political system in, confusion and disorientation in 92 municipios, changes post-revolution to 96n5 National Union of Writers and Artists (UNEAC) 57 officialdom in, relationship of Children of Revolution with 102 officials in Cuba, strained relationship between diaspora and 124n27 old and new, conflicts between 87–92 perla de las Antillas (‘Pearl of the Antilles’) 18, 47 population of 26n19 pre-revolutionary Cuba, Exiles’ portrayal of 48 professional and managerial classes, exodus from 59–60 revolution in, Exiles’ attitude to 42, 46, 48, 56 Spanish influence in, strength of 51 Spanish migration to 15, 17–18, 50–53, 67n7 ‘Special Period in Peacetime’ (Periodo Especial en Tiempos de Paz) 7, 23, 42, 63–4, 101, 112, 127, 137, 139, 149, 153, 180

tickets to leave, purchase of 95n1 trips to, Exiles’ mixed feelings about 81–2, 83 vision of change in (and maintenance of ) 74–5 ‘Year of the Liberation’ (Año de la Liberación) 57 Cuban diaspora in Spain background to, interpretations of 179 blogosphere of 109 cultural idioms of 11 cultural tools of 11 de-territorialization of homeland for 183 exclusive nationalisms and 24 formation of 12-16 fragmentary nature of 180–81 history and context of 6, 12, 13–14, 66–7 inter-generational incomprehension within 43 mass migration from Spain to Cuba and 15, 17–18, 50–53, 67n7 memories of politics and 179–86 Miami diaspora, comparison with 13, 28, 180–81 narratives of 157 pain of Cuba and 159–63 politicized nature of 22, 35 politics of memory and 179–86 prevailing views of 29 race, fraught issue for 18–19 subjectivities within 157 see also Children of the Revolution; Exiles; Migrants Cuban government, race and 55 Cuban Republic (1902–58) 47, 53 Cuban Revolution 54–6 gender and 56–7 scholarship on 27–8 Cubanness 3, 9, 16, 22, 23, 44, 158, 161–2, 166, 168, 172, 173 commodification of 132–5 cultural traditions of 119 diasporic modes of 38, 158 ethnicized conceptions of 31 gusanos (‘maggots’) and 60-61 identity and 174–7 racialized stereotypes of 98 re-gendering of 57, 168–71 reclamation of 46 redefinition of 101, 119–20, 121, 180 revolutionary 57, 186 soil-based language and 3 space of, ever-changing nature of 167 stereotyped images of 122

205

Index cultural affinity between Spain and Cuba 182 cultural complexity 5 cultural domination of Cuba by US 49, 74 cultural events 16, 111, 171–2 cultural expressions 21, 55, 158 cultural idioms 11, 30 cultural imaginary of diaspora 183 cultural meeting places, Spanish Societies as 50 cultural perspectives 99, 108 cultural politics of diasporas 6 cultural radio programmes 141 cultural regeneration 182 cultural tools 11, 122 cultural traditions 119, 157 cultural work, Cubanness and 38 cynicism 121 D dance professionals 10–11, 128 Daniel, E. Valentine 145, 185 Daniel, Yvonne 28, 34 de Certeau, Michel 69 de la Campa, Román 16, 28, 38n3, 53, 59, 74, 75, 82 de la Cuesta, Lionel A. 54 de la Fuente, Alejandro 26n19, 38n1, 50, 55 de la Nuez, Iván 63, 97, 101, 119, 120, 168, 173, 186 de Paz-Sánchez, Manuel 47, 55, 57 diasporas belonging and 3–6 characterization of 6, 185–6 conceptualization of 11 container model of 184–5 continuity and 185–6 Cuban diaspora in Spain, formation of 12–16 Cuban diaspora in Miami and in Spain, differences between 181–2 cultural imaginary of 183 cultural politics of 6 ethnography, context and 33–4 exclusive nationalism and production of 24 expansion of term 25n5 generational outlooks within 45–6 homeland and 182, 183 homeland, diasporic alienation and 163–7 identity discourses and 157, 174–7, 184 life stages, life crises and 171–4 nation-states and 162–3, 183, 185 rupture and temporal aspects of 184

see also roots; routes diasporic generations 7–9, 39–67 assimilation, foreignness and 40 balseros (boat people or ‘rafters’) 64, 68n9, 156, 187 conceptualization of 39–46 Cuban diaspora post-1959, creation of 58–9 diasporic generations 39–67 Eckstein, Susan and 44 economic crisis in Cuba (1990s) 63–5 emigration from Cuba to Spain (1959–1980s) 59–63 emigration from Spain to Cuba 15, 17–18, 50–53, 67n7 framework of 22 Lisón Tolosana, Carmelo and 45 Mannheim, Karl and 45 parental memories of Cuba and 43–4 personal agency, loss and 43 politics and memories, framing of 46 polythetic classification 42 remembering and, modes of 40–41 research in US on 44 revolutionary subjects, creation of 56–7 significance of generations, ethnographical perspective 45 sociological conceptualization of generation 42–3, 45 US research 44 youth experiences, generational outlooks and 45–6 Díaz, Duanel 18, 76 Díaz, Jesús 60, 106, 107–8, 109, 123n5, 124n24 Díaz, Norberto 66 Díaz, Pablo 107 Diaz Martinez, Manuel 106 dictatorships, right- and left-wing 92–3 Dilley, Roy 33 displacement 6, 11–12, 24, 29, 120, 184, 185 personal experiences of 1–2, 90–91 distance, ambiguities of 148–52 Domínguez, Francisco 16 Domínguez, Jorge I. 57 Dresch, Paul 35 Drinot, Paulo 96n4 Duany, Jorge 3, 12, 111, 177n4

206

Index E Eckstein, S. and Barberia, L. 40, 60, 174, 175 Eckstein, Susan 7, 11, 12, 13, 38n3, 39, 40, 41, 44, 45, 53, 54, 60, 61, 63–4, 65, 68n8, 75, 83, 96n11, 96n13, 124n17, 127, 137, 145, 153, 164, 181 Eiras Roel, Antonio 67n7 EIU (Economist Intelligence Unit) 12, 26n13 emigration from Spain to Cuba 15, 17–18, 50–53, 67n7 employment for Children of the Revolution 99–100, 152 for Exiles 70, 71 and housing for Migrants 129, 173 Encuentro de la cultura cubana (‘Encounter with Cuban culture’) 106–10, 121, 145, 170, 173, 180, 187 Estévez, Rolando 160 ethnographic fieldwork 22 Barcelona 32 Children of the Revolution 34 classic ethnographies 30–31 complicity and 37–8 context and 33–4 Cuba and its diaspora, challenge of writing about 27–9 Cuban diaspora, prevailing view of 29 Exiles 34 interviews 33–4 literature on Cuba 28 Madrid 31–2 Migrants 34 multi-generational mobility 33 multi-sited field 30–32 mutual antagonism amongst some Cubans 31–2 nation and nationalism, importance of 34 opposing views, dealing with 27–8 participant observation, mistrust and 33 politicization of Cuban diaspora 35–8 practical difficulties 31–2 relationship-building in 35–7 research in politicized field, difficulties of 35–8 social anthopology, context in 33 toleration in Cuba of 29 exclusion of Children of the Revolution 98, 123 exclusionary nationalism 94–5 Exiles 8, 22, 23, 32, 34, 35, 36 antagonism towards Cuba 61, 78, 81, 82

Bay of Pigs invasion 54 Castro, attitude towards 93 Centro Cubano 37, 75, 77–8, 85–6, 95, 112, 136–7, 145, 146, 155, 157, 173, 183, 187 Children of the Revolution and, differences between perspectives of 71, 98, 99, 100, 101, 102, 108, 109–10, 116, 121, 128, 155–6 Círculo Católico 78, 187 class and age 19, 40–41, 59–60, 74 community, establishment of 72–3 community, sense of 41 confiscation of businesses of 56 connection with, difficulties for Children of the Revolution 102 Cuando salí de Cuba (‘When I left Cuba’) 77 decision to leave Cuba (and trauma of actually leaving) 71–2 descendants of Spanish migrants to Cuba 70–71 dictatorships, right- and left-wing 92–3 distrust towards other Cubans 93 exclusionary nationalism 94–5 forced labour camps, memories of 57 fractured families 86–7 Havana, memories of 18–19, 74–5, 94, 95 homogeneous nature of background of 70 ideology and difference 92–3 intergenerational commonalities 42–3 leaving Cuba 70–76, 80, 91 links between Spain and Cuba, resistance to 54–5 links to Cubans in Miami 72, 77, 82, 99 longing for Cuba 79–83 loss, geographies of 77–9 Migrants and, differences in perspectives of 46, 155–6, 156–7, 163, 171, 174 moral and political system in revolutionary Cuba, confusion and disorientation in 92 moral standing and identity as 73 multiple belonging 94 narratives of 71, 72–3, 73–4, 75, 76, 79, 80, 88, 89–90, 91, 92–3, 94–5 old and new Cuba, conflicts between 87–92 parental memories of Cuba 43–4 past as foreign country for 94–5 past loss, reminiscence of 73 patria, belonging (and exclusion) 91–2 peña (discussion group) 79, 81, 183–4, 188

207

Index personal experiences 71–2, 72–3, 75, 76, 79, 80, 81–2, 83–6, 86–7, 87–92, 92–3 politicization of everyday life 83–6 politics of 44, 54, 59, 71 pre-revolutionary Cuba, portrayal of 48 professional and managerial classes, exodus from Cuba of 59–60 racial attitudes 19, 74 representation of self for 81 revolution, attitude to 42, 46, 48, 56 Ropero de la Caridad del Cobre 78, 137, 155, 188 self-understanding 81 Spain of Franco, Cuban post-revolutionary arrivals in 70–76 standard of living for, lowering of 70 time and space, complexity of mobility across 94 time-spaces of 79–83 trips to Cuba, mixed feelings about 81–2, 83 victimization in Spain of 75–6 vision of change in Cuba (and maintenance of ) 74–5 experience of diaspora, being born again and starting over 143–5 F Fagen, R.R., Brody, R.A. and O’Leary, T.J. 59 Falcón, Pilar 18 Falzon, Mark-Anthony 6, 182, 183 Fernández, Damián J. 19, 25n8, 26n19, 27–8, 38n1, 43, 55, 63, 153 Fernández, D.J. and Betancourt, M.C. 29 Fernández Larrea, Ramón 168 Fernandez, Nadine T. 29 forced labour camps, memories of 57 forgetting Cuban community in Miami, forgetfulness of pre-1959 Cuba 63 intergenerational intelligibility and 156 memory and, time-spaces and 155–9 repudiation, acts of (actos de repudio) 90 social forgetting 19 see also memories Fornet, Ambrosio 107 fractured families 86–7 Fraga, Manuel 18, 26n15, 55 Franco, Francisco 40, 41, 62, 168 Fullerton, Maryellen 96n3 Fusco, Coco 151

future, orientation of Children of the Revolution towards 108 G Gabriel, Enrique 130 Ganguly, Keya 94 García, María Cristina 12, 13, 68n8, 85, 194 García-Abásolo, Antonio 67n7 García-Montón García Baquero, Isabel 61–2 gender 40, 168–71 diasporic experience, gendered aspects of 169 exclusion, gendered discourses of 11 gender roles, rigidity in 169 gendered differences 42, 118 gendered images of Cuba 161, 168–9 Hombre Nuevo, gendered differences and 56–7 labour market, gender niches in 14 generational differences 39–46 generational interaction 167–8 Gil, Lourdes 120 Gilroy, Paul 4, 177 Glick Schiller, N., Basch, L. and Blanc-Szanton, C. 40, 174 González, Servando 109, 124n23, 124n24 Goodman, Roger 38, 155 Granma 47 Guevara, Ernesto ‘Che’ 56, 57, 86, 96, 97, 168 Gupta, A. and Ferguson, J. 186 Gutiérrez Alea, Tomás 67n6 H Haines, Lila 16 Hall, Stuart 25n3, 69, 94 Handler, Richard 25n6, 38 Harvey, David 98 Havana, memories of 18–19, 74–5, 94, 95 see also Cuba Helg, Aline 19, 50, 67n7 Hennessy, Alistair 17, 51, 55, 177 Henriquez Lagarde, Manuel 108, 124n20 Heredia Heredia, José María 177n6 Hernández-Reguant, Ariana 7, 28, 29, 38n2, 108 Herzfeld, Michael 35 heterogeneous nature of migrants 127–8 Hintzen, Percy 7, 11 Hoffmann, B. and Whitehead, L. 29 Holgado Fernández, Isabel 26n22, 168 Hombre Nuevo (‘New Man’) 23, 56–7, 97, 102–4, 123n2, 151, 168–9, 186, 187

208

Index home belonging and, disjunctures and continuities 24 definitions of 9–12 home-away-from-home for migrants 160 homeland belonging and 157 Cubans’ conception of 180 definitions of 11–12 diasporic alienation and 163–7 generational perspective on 184–5 new politics of 145–8 see also displacement homogeneous nature of exiles 70 homosexuality 96, 144, 168–9 hybridity, discourses of 116, 119

J Jackson, Michael 69, 160 Jenkins, Timothy 36–7 jineteras 17, 26n17, 130 jineterismo 129–30, 187

I Ibarretxe, Juan José 26n15 identity 4, 44, 73, 161, 171 barrio identity 153 belonging and 10–11, 38, 118–19, 121–2, 177 collective identity 3 Cuban identity 158, 168, 186 diasporic identity 11, 157–8, 184 discourses of 174–7 ethnic identity 157 history and, ideas of 184 identity politics 9 identity-work 4–6, 25n6 in diaspora 157-8 moral standing and 73 multiple identity 120 narratives of 94–5 national identity 57, 119 race and 11, 55 renegotiation of 32 shared sense of 105 territorialization of 165–6 transglobal identity 23, 118 ideology and difference 92–3 Iglesias Garcia, Fe 50, 67n7 Immigration Law (Ley de Extranjería) 1985 14 individual migration 128 Inebase 68n12 Instituto Nacional de Estadística (Spanish National Institute of Statistics) 25n10 intergenerational commonalities 42–3 intergenerational incomprehension 43, 78, 156 Izquierda Unida 20

L labelling creative subversion of labels 110 Children of the Revolution 110–11 Lagos, Ramiro 167 Lambek, M. and Antze, P. 160 Lambie, George 17, 26n14, 54–5, 61 Lázaro, Felipe 8–9, 167, 168 Lecuona, Ernesto 96n2, 158 Lenin school (la Lenin) 104–6 Levitt, P. and Waters, M.C. 40 Lewis, O., Lewis, R.M. and Rigdon, S.M. 28, 57 life stages, life crises and 171–4 Lisón Tolosana, Carmelo 45, 46 living standards 28, 53, 70, 73, 75, 127, 136 loss, geographies of 77–9 Lumsden, Ian 57, 96n12 Lutjens, Sheryl L. 169

K King, R. and Zontini, E. 14 King, R., Fielding, A. and Black, R. 13 Kirschenblatt-Gimblett, Barbara 25n5 Knauer, Lisa Maya 114, 127, 154n2 Knight, Franklin W. 3, 49 Knight, F.W. and Palmer, C.A. 67n5 Krull, C. and Kobayashi, A. 44 Kutzinski, Vera 17, 177

M Machover, Jacobo 76, 168 Mahler, S.J. and Hansing, K. 38n3 Malinowski, Bronislaw 30 Malkki, Liisa H. 5, 31, 35, 73, 157, 183, 184, 185 Mallo Gutiérrez, Tomás 67n4 Maluquer de Motes, Jordi 14, 49, 50, 51, 63, 67n7 Mannheim, Karl 42, 45 Marcus, George 30, 32, 37–8 marielitos (Cubans who left through port of Mariel) 63, 90, 96n13, 187 Markowitz, F. and Stefansson, A.H. 25n4 Marrero, Teresa 160 marriage migration 129–32

209

Index Martí, José 12, 20, 48–9, 77, 119, 121, 125n30, 146 Martí, Oscar R. 48–9 Martín Fernández, Consuelo 12, 15, 68n9, 70 Martínez-Alier, Verena 17, 176–7 Martínez-San Miguel, Yolanda 12 Martínez Veiga, Ubaldo 176 Marx, K. and Engels, F. 123n3 mass immigration 174 Massey, D.S. et al. 58 Masud-Piloto, Felix Roberto 49, 58, 59, 60, 61, 68n8 Mejías, Sánchez 111 memories forgetting, time-spaces and 155–9 intergenerational memories 20–21 narratives and 185 new politics of 145–8 nostalgia of images of Cuba in Spain 17–18 parental memories of Cuba 43–4 past loss, reminiscence of 73 politics and memories, framing of 46 politics of memory for migrants 46 pre-revolutionary Cuba, Exiles’ portrayal of 48 remembering, modes of 40–41 youth experiences, generational outlooks and 45–6 see also forgetting Méndez Rodenas, Adriana 38 Mestizaje 119 Miami 9, 13, 20, 27, 32, 33, 38, 41–2, 44, 46, 60–61 contacts with Cuba, difficulties of 61 Cuban community in, forgetfulness of pre1959 Cuba 63 diaspora in, comparison with Cuban diaspora in Spain 13, 28, 180–81 Exiles’ links to Cubans in 72, 77, 82, 99 marielitos (Cubans who left through port of Mariel) and Cubans in 63, 90, 96n13, 187 Michalowski, Raymond J. 35 Migrants 8, 23–4, 32, 34, 127–54 arrival in Spain of 127 attachment to Cuba 173, 175 born again and starting over 143–5 El Capitalismo (capitalist world) and 128, 137–43, 144, 147–8, 152, 187 Children of the Revolution and, similarities and differences between 127–8, 137, 139, 141–2, 145, 152–3, 155–7



class and race of 41–2 commodification of Cubanness 132–5 community of 156 contracted migrants 128 dance professionals 10–11, 128 distance, ambiguities of 148–52 economic crisis in Cuba, catalyst for 41 employment and housing for 129, 173 Exiles and, differences in perspectives of 46, 155–6, 156–7, 163, 171, 174 freedoms in Spain not available in Cuba 135–7 heterogeneous nature of 127–8 home-away-from-home for 160 homeland, conception of 180 homeland, new politics of 145–8 individual migration of 128 marriage, ‘love’ and migration 129–32 mass immigration, context of 174 memory, new politics of 145–8 narratives of 131–2, 132–4, 135, 137–9, 140–41, 142–3, 143–4, 147–8, 149–50, 151–2 nationalism, limits and 188 nostalgic memories of 180 personal experiences of 130–31, 131–2, 132–5, 135–7, 137–43, 143–5, 148–52 politics of memory for 46 Puente Familiar con Cuba (‘Family Bridge with Cuba’) 145–8, 180, 188 racial stereotypes 132–3 Special Period in Cuba, reflection on 42 migration history of 22 individual migration 128 marriage migration 129–32 mass immigration 174 postcolonial migration 16–19 Spanish migration to Cuba 15, 17–18, 50–53, 67n7 Military Units to Aid Production (Unidades Militares de Ayuda a la Producción), UMAP in Cuba 57, 88, 89, 166, 168–9 Mintz, Sidney W. 5 Monsiváis, Carlos 108, 124n22 Montaner, Carlos Alberto 106 Moore, Robin 50, 55 moral standing 73 Morales Padrón, Francisco 67n7

210

Index Moreno Fraginals, M., Pons, F.M. and Engerman, S.L. 67n5 Mörner, Magnus 67n7 Morris, Emily 64 multi-generational mobility 33, 58, 185 multiculturalism 119, 174, 177, 181 multiple belonging 94 N name-calling 110–11 Naranjo Orovio, C. and Serrano, C. 47 Naranjo Orovio, Consuelo 49, 50, 51, 67n4, 67n7 narratives 69 Children of the Revolution, of 99, 100, 101, 115–16, 116–17, 117–19, 119, 120–21, 122 Exiles, of 71, 72–3, 73–4, 75, 76, 79, 80, 88, 89–90, 91, 92–3, 94–5 Migrants, of 131–2, 132–4, 135, 137–9, 140–41, 142–3, 143–4, 147–8, 149–50, 151–2 nationalism diasporas and nationalisms 24 exclusive nationalism 23, 24, 94–5, 183 of Exiles 24, 42 limits of, Migrants and 188 national project, Children of the Revolution, adherence to 46, 180 rejection by Exiles of revolutionary 46 Navarrete, William 12 Needham, Rodney 42 Nugent, Walter 50 O O’Brien, Oonagh 171 Olwig, Karen Fog 4, 5, 32, 45 O’Reilly Herrera, Andrea 38n3 Ortiz, Fernando 28 Ortner, Sherry 38 P Pain of Cuba 159-63 El Pais 67n2, 68n10 Pan-Montojo, Juan 67n4 Paris 75, 110–11, 117, 180–81 Partido Popular 21, 26n15 past as foreign country for Exiles 94–5 patria, belonging (and exclusion) 91–2 Pedraza, Silvia 42

peña (discussion group) 79, 81, 183–4, 188 Pérez, Lisandro 41–2, 54, 74, 75 Pérez Firmat, Gustavo 9, 125n31, 160, 168, 176 Pérez-Stable, Marifeli 28, 29, 48, 49, 53, 63 Permit to Reside in the Exterior (Permiso de Residencia en el Exterior) or PRE 15 personal agency, loss of 43 Perón, Juan 75 personal experiences Children of the Revolution 99–100, 101, 111–16, 116–20 Exiles 71–2, 72–3, 75, 76, 79, 80, 81–2, 83–6, 86–7, 87–92, 92–3 Migrants 130–31, 131–2, 132–5, 135–7, 137–43, 143–5, 148–52 Pew Hispanic Center 12, 13 politics Children of the Revolution, political perspectives of 71, 99, 108, 156 everyday life, politicization of 83–6 of Exiles 44, 54, 59, 71 of memory for Cubans in diaspora 46 postnational political order 122 Ponte, Antonio José 49, 106 Portes, A. and Bach, R.L. 68n8 Portes, A. and Rumbaut, R.G. 40 Portes, A. and Zhou, M. 40 Portes, Alejandro 13, 44 postmodernity 46, 49, 116, 117, 120 Prieto, José Manuel 38n3, 68n8, 168 Puente Familiar con Cuba (‘Family Bridge with Cuba’) 145–8, 180, 188 Q Quiroga, José 38n3 R racial attitudes of Exiles 19, 74 racial stereotyping of migrants 132–3 Rapport, N. and Dawson, A. 4 Rapport, Nigel 163 revolutionary subjects, creation of 56–7 revolution in Cuba, Exiles’ attitude to 42, 46, 48, 56 Rice, Tom 177n3 Rieff, David 68n8 Rival, Laura 3–4 Robbins, Bruce 123n1 Rojas, Rafael 9, 44, 48, 76, 96n4, 120, 160, 168 romance of Cuba 104

211

Index Romano, Vicente 61, 70 roots, notion of 2–3, 4, 5–6, 9, 17, 24n1, 25n3, 158, 185 diaspora and 3-4 Ropero de la Caridad del Cobre 78, 137, 155, 188 Rosaldo, Renato 18, 104 Rosendahl, Mona 28–9 routes, notion of 2, 4, 5–6, 25n3, 51, 185 Rumbaut, R.D. and Rumbaut, R.G. 40 Rumbaut, R.G. and Portes, A. 40 Rumbaut, Rubén G. 40, 44 Rushdie, Salman 69 Russia, emigration from Cuba to Spain by way of 65–6 S Safa, Helen I. 19 Safran, William 4, 185 Said, Edward W. 6, 69, 163, 183 Sartre, Jean-Paul 76 Scarpaci, J.L. Segre, R. and Coyula, M. 53 Scott, Rebecca J. 48 self, Exiles’ representation of 81 Serrano, Pío E. 56, 57, 168 sexuality 40, 92, 144, 168 slavery 17, 48, 67n5, 120, 121, 129 Smith, L.M. and Padula, A. 102 social forgetting 19 socialist cosmopolitanism 97 socialization educational socialization 104 inter-racial socialization 19 patterns of 40, 101, 152 SOS Racismo 143–4, 176 Spain Argentineans in 25n9 autonomous regions in 26n15 Children of the Revolution, arrival in 41, 97 Chileans in 25n9 Cultural Centre in Havana of 106–7 emigration from and immigration to 13–15 of Franco, Cuban post-revolutionary arrivals in 70–76 freedoms in, not available in Cuba 135–7 Justice Ministry 68n14 ‘Law of Historical Memory’ (Ley de la Memoria Histórica) 66 links between Spain and Cuba, Exiles’ resistance to 54–5

Migrants, arrival in 127 residence permits in, problem of 14 victimization of Exiles in 75–6 Spanish Civil War (1936-9) 45, 53, 66 Spanish National Institute of Statistics (Instituto Nacional de Estadística) 25n10 Spanish Societies (Sociedades Españolas) 10, 16–17, 18–19, 50, 51, 70, 77–8, 84, 85–6, 145, 157 as cultural meeting places 50 ‘Special Period in Peacetime’ (Periodo Especial en Tiempos de Paz) 7, 23, 63–4, 101, 112, 127, 137, 139, 149, 153, 180 Migrants’ reflections on 42 Sreberny, Annabelle 185 standards of living 28, 53, 70, 73, 75, 127, 136 subversiveness 121, 185–6 T Tabío, Juan Carlos 130 Talai, Vered Amit 5 Thomas, Hugh 47, 48, 49, 50, 54, 57, 69, 70 time-spaces alienation and separation in 164 attachment, memories and 157–8 complexity of mobility across 94 coordinates of, different perceptions of 102, 180, 183 exile and longing for Cuba in 79–83, 95 of Exiles 79–83 memories and forgetting in 155–9 memories and shared references in 106 Tölölyan, Khachig 6, 25n5, 28 Toronto 180–81 Torres, María de los Angeles 38n3, 60, 61, 116 Torres, Rafael 25n9 totalizing ideologies, suspicions of 121 tradition, protagonists of rupture of 101 traidores becoming and feeling like 111–16, 123n2, 125n29 labelling as 116, 122 translation 30 transnationalism 40, 98, 111, 157, 174 transnational social networks 99, 152 Tsuda, Takeyuki Gaku 25n4, 157 Tweed, Thomas A. 9, 68n8, 94, 165, 184

212

Index U United States Cuba and 24 cultural domination of Cuba by 49, 74 memory transmission, research on 44 US-Cuban relations, fraught nature of 28–9 uprooting (desarraigo) 2–3, 24n1 US-Cuban relations, fraught nature of 28–9 V Van Hear, Nicholas 184 Varela, Félix 146, 154 Vázquez Díaz, René 29, 121 Venegas, Cristina 154n4

Vertovec, Steven 25n5 Vicent, Mauricio 17, 26n16, 67, 67n2 Virgin of Charity (Virgen de la Caridad) 2, 9 W Wade, Peter 177 Werbner, Pnina 5, 28 Whitfield, Esther 130, 154n4 Willer, A. and Glick Schiller, N. 67n7 Wimmer, Andreas 12, 157–158 Y Yoneyama, Lisa 159

213