Fidel died

Mi mamá y su corazón en Cuba

Fidel died. That’s what the text said this morning. I burst into tears, guttural weeping ~ ringing out over half a century of lies & betrayal. My family's pain, my history. My story. My heart is like a freight train - rumbling and squealing, sparks flying.
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A text from a friend, ‘’is your family celebrating?” No. I am not celebrating this man’s death - I am weeping. Grieving. The rape, pain, and horror of a land and its people is flooding through my heart right now. I am riding a wave and I’ve no idea where it will land.
 
One man’s death is not a revolution. Millions of people’s surviving, thriving, and loving, IS. Death, we all can do that. Life? Well, THAT one's a choice. When will we remember we are ALL people - feelings, heart and wonder? When will we choose to use the magic of our existence to create. I am. I will. I promise. 

Last year I wrote Fidel a letter. I never sent it to him, but read it at at a few lit tables, where it was criticized for boring lit reasons. I haven't re-read it in six months. This morning, it seems just right for me. For you.

Fidel,

Decades before I was even a hint of a thought on the screen of time, you took over the land that became the mysterious backdrop to my life story. Singing Guantanamera at family gatherings and hearing from my Kennedy-hating relatives how the US abandoned ship during the Bay of Pigs, I witnessed hues of pain and resentment about what it was like to live in Cuba during those early years of the revolution.

Deprivation, fear and escape from an abundant island saturated with richness, beauty and excessive splendor. Governmental laziness that led to betrayal. Betrayal climaxed in a mass exile bandwagon that much of my family, including my parents and my three oldest siblings, felt forced to get on. My father still recounts the decision to leave as easy, the process of leaving, devastating.
Every breath I have taken outside of Cuban airspace is a breath you denied me. You don’t know me but you do know my kind.

On your hands rests the blood of the ones who breathed their last as they drowned in the sorrow of separation from their loved ones. Boarding flights and floats that would never arrive on dry land. Drowned in the last breaths of departure from the soil that brought blood and rhythm to their souls. Rapture of their despairing moans still can be heard.

My kid-mind used to wonder why a land that brought smiles to so many people and elicited so many excited questions, was a land where people got into homemade rafts with babies and grandmas at midnight to paddle across an ocean deep with the hope that they’d survive. With the dream that they will find work once they wash up on our shore. Those who did survive, making it past the Coast Guard’s sometimes cruel use of water cannons to prevent them from making it to dry land, started from scratch.

This is my family history.

My inheritance.

When people learn I’m Cuban and after they get over the fact that I’m not short enough or dark-skinned enough to be Cuban, the same questions always follow. ‘’Have you ever been there? Why not? Can you teach me to salsa??”  Most, including myself, are intrigued by the music, the colorful expressions of sun, sand, sky and sea in the landscape and in the people.

The thing is, the Cuba I know contrasts the Cuba in people’s most innocent and sweet minds. Growing up in a post-revolutionary family in a post-Mariel boatlift Miami, I’ve got something to say to you, Fidel, questions. This is personal.

Why did you take over my parent’s homeland and force them out? I don’t mean the political answer. I mean the personal one.

Why?

Why did you let your people steal my grandmother’s wedding ring right off her finger as she was stepping on to her last flight out of her homeland?

What was the deal with los Niños de Pedro Pan? The Peter Pan kids? Why the fuck did you let the story line run that there weren’t enough seats aboard flights out of Cuba so my brothers and my sister couldn’t fly out with our parents? My brother didn’t even recognize our mother when he saw her again, three months later, because she had gone so grey with grief. Your power rested in separating families – weakening the bonds of family, safety, and love.  Your power lies in weakness.

Remember how you promised everyone who stayed that everyone would be treated equally? Funny, then why are the vast people of Cuba starving? You promised everyone was going to be treated equally and then starved the people of your country?

September 15, 2015, a nine-foot makeshift sailboat carrying eleven men, one 16 year-old girl, and a dog made it to Miami Beach after six days at sea. Back in 2007, almost 50 years after your take over, a friend of mine rescued 22 Cubans who had washed up on an outlying island in Key Largo. Fortunately all of these people made it to dry land when discovered, so the ‘’dry foot policy’’ applied to them. Unlike the 12 immigrants sent back to Cuba in 2006 after being found clinging to a part of an old bridge that’s missing several chunks. Unfortunately, the chunks they were hanging on to weren’t connected to land, so theoretically, they were wet feet.

Seriously?!

How is your family doing?

I was 26 when you and I shared space the first time. You didn’t know I was there. Way on the Upper East Side of New York City, in a cathedral that now allows conference as its religion, you and I crossed paths. I was finishing up a midwifery conference. You were about to attend a world summit. The building was closed to the public. As soon as I learned you were “in the building,’’ ice shot through my veins. My throat like a fist, I couldn’t breathe. I looked for the exit sign but I couldn’t see straight. Panting. Looking around, no one else was acting like their lives were in danger.

You were in. I wanted out.

The Cuba I am, that my family is, and the Cuba you are, are different lands.

The Cuba I am is Courage. Fortitude. Faith. LOVE. Honesty. 

Your Cuba is a lie. And I pray it dies with you. No. Actually... I pray that the ashes from which the death of your lies burn, rise into the Phoenix that I am and that our Cuba really is.

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