In Miami, are we all rafters?

MIAMI — I was 9 when I first saw the rafters. They came out of one of the lugubrious side streets that descend to El Prado, very close to La Punta, in Havana. They were carrying aluminum tanks covered with blue oilcloth, wrapped over old auto tires. They talked loudly, as if going to a party, and were followed by teary-eyed women and men who spoke words of encouragement to them to a conga rhythm.

I watched them from the bench where my grandmother kept us, protected from the event. It was August 1994 and I was old enough to recognize pity in her eyes. The people were going around like crazy because “they had opened up the sea,” and the Malecón was a place filled with farewells, but the one I saw was rather brief.

The boys took to the sea after the hugs and rowed until they disappeared behind the Morro. Their entourage dissolved in minutes and we walked toward the traffic light, where we could thumb a ride back home. In the park, the policemen stood with their hands crossed behind their backs, perhaps waiting for the next farewell party.

I maintained an uneasy silence that lasted a long time. My experience then was not enough to understand the reasons for such a dramatic act. Two decades have passed and I still don’t know if I understand them.

I had no other contact with the 36,000 intrepid migrants who took to the sea that summer in Cuba. The image of the rafters gradually lost relevance as the periodic migration talks and the departures by land began.

But in Miami, the word has become common once again. And not only because the media told about 4,000 Cubans trying to arrive in homemade fleets between October 2014 and July of this year. That figure is timid when compared with the 31,314 that passed through Mexico, Canada or Port of Miami or Miami International Airport during the same period.

“Rafter,” in the chimerical city of Cuban emigration, works like a label that describes those who arrived after the 1990s. It doesn’t matter if the journey meant crossing a border, stepping on the sand of a beach, showing a passport at an airport or overstaying a visa. In Miami, the Nineties Cubans are all “rafters,” the way others were “Marielitos” or “PeterPans.”

To the émigré community of recent years, the raft represents savagery, a lack of refinement. It is, perhaps, a symbol of the precariousness and stubbornness that changed the hues of this diaspora in 1994 with the massive arrival of a generation without so much rancor toward the past and a greater desire to share the roast pork with their families on the island in December.

When referring to “the rafters,” people speak mockingly or angrily, in a resentful tone. Almost every Cuban who stepped on these shores has felt frustrated when trying to cope with protocols that insist on speaking less loudly, phoning ahead before paying a visit, toning down the passion of a kiss delivered in public.

In principle, being a rafter is an augur of possible stumbles, lack of adaptation and amazement in the presence of abundance. One is a rafter because it’s hard to dominate the technology of a city in the First World, much too broad, orderly and symmetrical.

With luck, the rafter resists the initial stumbles because he knows that they won’t last forever or be worse than those he experienced in Cuba or in his voyage to the United States of America. In his mouth, the four words that name his adoptive country resound, syllable by syllable, as if to space them loudly were the very depiction of greatness.

It was in that supercilious way that a successful friend repeated the words, the night when he tried to indoctrinate him into his new life, between Bacardi rum and good advice: “You are in the Yew-nigh-ted Stay-ts of A-ME-ri-ca.”

Ever present to a rafter is the merciful gesture of some compatriot who tries to correct his rampant unruliness with a series of instructions that are either valid or perfectly useless, depending on the context.

Experience recommends that he should follow them faithfully until he can “get off the raft” and write his own manual. That process will last from one to two years, according to the experts, and depends on the support given to the émigré so he can find a decent job, mumble some English and abandon the “grotesque” mannerisms he learned in his native barrio.

Things will be better after he manages to integrate practices of the new society, among them handling credit cards, sending postcards for Halloween, buying clothing every season and taking a cruise somewhere.

And I, who have been trekking through Miami for only two months with the same bewildered expression, am I also a rafter? I ask this question timidly, blushing, not because I reject the raft as a sad stereotype of a vulgar nation.

I was able to arrive here by plane, for the fourth time, comfortably. I live here, as I could say that I live in Buenos Aires, Monterrey or Havana, because I want to breathe in a different latitude or because there are people here who I love.

I wasn’t dehydrated by the sun; hunger didn’t break me in two. I was never greeted by a death at night and never saw a friend disappear in the water. The sea terrifies me; I avoid radical farewells. I could never have climbed on a raft, but then, I never had to do it.

Someone donated to me the sofa in his home, which means the same here as “I give you everything.” I didn’t bring poverty on my shoulders and the privilege embarrasses me.

“Rafter” is a word that leaves a sour taste in my mouth because it is solemn and implies absolute surrender to a dream. The raft brings the emigrant and his certainty: “a better life” could be in the distant horizon and looking for it might mean gambling all you’ve got. Even your life and a new start.

Helen Hernández Hormilla is a Cuban journalist living in Miami.

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