Emigration: A sentimental vision
By Luis Sexto
Emigration is sometimes scary, other times it’s a moving experience. Will we be able to evaluate the damage it has caused to the ethical integrity of the Cuban republic or to the integrity of each and every emigrant? Fifty years of Cuban emigration have even contributed to distort some aspects of the past, namely before 1959. So much distortion has lead to the belief that emigration started with the revolution. But archives have not disappeared. If you just take a look at the Bohemia magazine collection, you will see that the mid 1950s witnessed the same long lines in front of the American embassy in Havana. As much as 20,000 resident visas were granted in the period.
Those photos and figures invite us to the question: although the island was until the 1950’s mainly a country of: Spaniards, Haitians and Jamaican, Italian and Polish, why does this trend seems to revert itself by the second half of the century? At first sight, there is a cause: in the mid fifty’s there were, according to statistics, around one million unemployed and an impoverished rural population. Historical chronicles recall a repressive and cruel government indeed. Or is it that Ventura, Carratalá and Martín Pérez are innocent angels charged with bloodshed?
Allow me to go over a well known fact which can not be put aside. Batista´s overthrow was followed by the flight of those committed to the regime, some thieves and criminals, or others who preferred to await abroad the return of normality, in an ambiguous condition of immigrant and exile. After that, the agrarian reform, as well as the nationalization of enterprises and small private properties, encouraged those who, while attempting to rebuild their wealth abroad, waited for the Americans to move the clock backwards. That combination of facts might partly explain the migratory trend.
After the first waves – of those somehow forced to emigrate – thousands of others chose to travel, most impelled by economic reasons, as Cubans were progressively obtaining from Washington a few advantages as potential immigrants to American territory. Journalist Luis Ortega was aptly synthetic when he said that, through the Cuban Adjustment Act, the U.S. gave the Cuban certain privileges never granted to other nationalities. What is really amazing – as the contentious journalists put it — is not that nearly a million people have left the country, but that there are still eleven million left.
Migrating always has a political side, because to leave one’s country also implies dissatisfaction with the dominant state of affairs. But the American media was decisive in transforming the immigrant into a political refugee aspiring to go back and retrieve his positions and values. To migrate is a human asset; to leave the native land behind one can ponder a variety of reasons. I don’t superficially judge to affirm that the decision to wander around the world is, save for nomadic people, an individual one, a personal solution to a collective problem.
The Florida Straits have thus been, for fifty years, a sentimental and emotional border as well, the backbone of an inadmissible red chronicle. And the fact that Cuba could be indefinitely fractured by such drama, by the tragedy of the family of each one of those emigrants, could appear as something scary. Obviously, each one of them carries along with some satisfactions, the sadness of being away from affection, family or love. Thousands of shoes walk the streets of Miami, or any other city, which one day chose a better shine and polish and now go around kicking an erratic ball.
And what happens on this side? There is a lot of complaining on the other side about the attitude of their country of origin, but if Washington and Miami go lobbying, voting and condemning this country as terrorist, with the further constraint of extraterritorial laws, it must be understood that hostility and prejudice are difficult to reward.
Just a few days ago, more tan 4,000 Cuban emigrants of various traits and backgrounds danced to the music of Van Van, while some 400 emigrants gathered in Havana to meet with Cuban officials. A sign of the (new) times? A reconciliation by way of the corridors of culture and dialogue? I wouldn’t like to go over the “we’re all Cuban and everything is OK” sort of platitude. There was also some of that anger and frustration provoked by the Cuban musicians in those who are there to keep us apart. It’s good business.
Despite the flight of more than one everlasting love, many of those who stayed are reluctant to believe that emigration or exile were necessary conditions for love to flourish. And today we must admit that the revolution was also a severing, separating sword. We are victims of that inevitable and silent martyrdom where dreams and passions dwell in frustration.
Ever since the 1970s, Cuba has showed an intention to renew and normalize the links with its emigration. I was, as a journalist, present in the first justly called nation and emigration meetings. I have also read some emigration writers published in Cuban books or magazines.
I think that today is the time for all of us, either in or outside Cuba, save those who choose to go the road of conflict, to face our past and evaluate our actions. And if we are to be honest, we are bound to conclude that, whatever the political circumstances and reasons of national security, there were excesses on both sides. All through this fifty year period, we have been forced to make extreme decisions. Like when we had to fill forms specifying whether we had (or not) relatives abroad and whether or not we had contacts with them. Or when emigrants had to assume the double standard and cautiously suppress any sympathies towards the government of their country of origin to avoid reprisals from those who proclaim democracy as they encircle it with restrictions.
Due to all of that, emigration is both scary and moving. To see Cuba as unable to go beyond those insufficiencies, which may explain why from 2000 till now almost as many Cuban as in the 1970-1979 period have gone to live abroad. That is scary, as scary as our inability to comprehend that the motivations of the Cuban emigration have become so diversified as to see the popular support to the blockade being reduced to less than fifty percent, according to U.S. statistics. Shall we, in front of these evidences, continue to submit the human dimension of emigration to political circumstances on both sides?
Which will be the future, to name but an instance, of all those who have been unable to visit Cuba in 15 or 20 years because they left illegally? We cannot turn the emigrant into an exile, as much as those abroad cannot fail to respect the facts and reasons of the ones inside the island. It’s above all moving to witness how a natural fact in the history of a people goes on drifting towards a painful dichotomy and slow fragmentation shown in numbers: those who leave and those who stay.
