Is Cubanness love?

By Elíades Acosta Matos

One of the most accurate (and at the same time most inexact) ways to define ourselves as a people was expressed by Dr. Ramón Grau San Martín, former president of the republic, promoter of the Authenticism and the coiner of unforgettable phrases. Who doesn’t remember his “Cubanness is love”?

And who hasn’t at one time violated that precept, in the face of an inconsiderate neighbor, the offenses of an insolent stranger, or the wrongdoing of a fellow citizen?

I imagine that every one of the 14 Cubans who were kidnapped and tortured during an interminable October weekend in Cancún, Mexico, by other Cubans who had smuggled them into that country in transit to the United States invoked (not exactly with gratitude) Dr. Grau and his entire family.

And for good reason. In that case, that expansive, ecumenical and loving Cubanness was expressed in beatings, electric shock and ears cut off with spatulas and knives, all because neither those people nor their relatives had paid the $10,000 per person stipulated for the smuggling.

“What angers me the most about this,” later said the cousin of one of the victims – all of whom were returned to Cuba after being rescued by Mexican soldiers alerted by the neighbors – is that the people who phoned [the relatives in the U.S.] and committed the torture were Cubans, our own people.”

This case could be used to carry out a philosophical exercise. We might ask ourselves if the links established between people belonging to the same human group, the same nationality, are solid or weak. Or if those links are decided by belonging to underlying social groups or classes, if what determines brotherly love is being born on the same soil or under the same sky.

Of if they are decided by the economic, personal and group interests that are created in the course of life, which, under extreme conditions as in the case of the undocumented Cubans in Cancún, can reach the most inhuman expressions criminal cruelty if affected.

As usually happens in reality, the correct answer can be found between the emotional and the sociological nature of what we call Cubanness, in a spot equidistant from Dr. Grau and Dr. Marx. It is what makes us capable of welcoming and sheltering strangers for the mere reason that they were born in our own barrio on the island, or compels us to slam the door on whoever affects our pocket or our interests, even if he was born under our own roof.

Cubanness by itself – as demonstrated in the case of Cancún and in the existence of slums such as Las Yaguas in Havana, or San Pedrito in Santiago de Cuba, at the time when the seraphic Dr. Grau was president and the corrupt natives filled their pockets with public money – is not an antidote against misery, suffering, greed or barbarity.

It is in the face of these situations and these dilemmas that we hear again, with renewed force, Martí’s call to attack wrongdoing at the root. And facing an illegal and uncontrollable emigration that has become a business, a quest for easy money by a handful of criminals; facing a precarious and blockaded national economy that has not achieved (because it hasn’t been allowed to achieve) the citizens’ aspirations for well-being; facing a Cuban Adjustment Act that acts as a bait to emigrants and traffickers just so it may satisfy the interests of politicians (which are irreconcilable with the existence of the Revolution), there will be more sociology than feelings, more interests than nationality, more selfishness than solidarity.

And the Cancún spatulas, in the hands of Cubans, will continue to fall pitilessly on other Cubans. People will disappear or be forced to prostitute themselves to pay for emigrating, as presumably has happened to women who disappeared after they arrived in Mexico through the smugglers’ maze.

It is a palpable fact that some of those who emigrated illegally through the coast of Florida are doing so now through third countries, especially Mexico. And it is not a big problem for the Cuban-American mafias to shift their attention to such sites. With them travel the Cuban imitators of the Sopranos, with their electric prods and their pistols.

It will be thus while the powerful sun called the 1966 Cuban Adjustment Act continues to control and keep in orbit so many bastard interests, so many sordid worlds, so many satellites filled with brute and merciless force, with greed for money no matter what the cost, even the health and lives of other Cubans.

And we’re talking only about illegal immigration, because in the statistics on legal immigration and naturalization, judging from the official U.S. statistics for last year, there’s a lot of topics for discussion. [1]

Before 1959, Cuba was the second-largest source of immigrants to the U.S., surpassed only by Mexico; still, Cuba ranked above countries that were a lot larger, such as China, India or Indonesia. In 2006, Cuba occupied the sixth place. In 2008, U.S. citizenship was granted to 49,500 Cubans. The breakdown was 2,562 naturalizations for reasons of family reunification; 3,183 for having close relatives who were U.S. citizens; 12 for reasons of work. Under the nebulous state of “refugees and asylum-seekers,” American citizenship was granted to 43,455 Cubans, 87.78 percent of the total!

We might ask ourselves if we’re not witnessing an absurd situation, an ossified relic of the Cold War, a tragic comedy like the film by Laurel and Hardy, in which they kept guarding the trenches where they were forgotten by their leaders during World War I, patrolling for weeks after the fighting ended.

How can we explain 43,455 refugees from a country that is not at war, a country against which the United States has not declared hostilities (at least legally). The combined number of “refugees and asylum-seekers” from countries that are at war, where American soldiers die every day, such as Iraq, Liberia, Afghanistan and Rwanda, barely rose to 2,960, in other words, 5.9 percent of the number of Cubans.

How can we explain the basic ill that generates the trafficking of people and the criminal and painful sequels, the very existence of the Cuban Adjustment Act and its absurdities?

By acknowledging that that ancient and natural human movement that historically has been called “emigration,” that for centuries has linked nearby nations such as Cuba and the U.S., has become a political hostage in the hands of those who have never accepted the reality on the island after January 1959.

On that sacrificial stone are immolated daily the lives, logic, even common sense. On that original vice was forged the criminal aberration of Cancún. It is there, and for that reason, that these blood-curdling news have cast in such bad light the clever and slippery Dr. Grau San Martín and his charming – though inexact – definition of Cubanness.

How long will that go on?

Elíades Acosta Matos, philosopher, doctor in political sciences, and writer, is a member of the Progreso Weekly/Semanal team.

[1] 2008 Yearbook of Immigration Statistics. Office of Immigration Statistics, Homeland Security. www.ntis.gov