The return

By Elíades Acosta Matos

Like rivulets of water that return to the earth, the Cubans who return to their homeland to rejoin their relatives spread throughout the island. The absurd prohibitions of the George W. Bush administration are a thing of the past, but the bitter taste of time lost remains and, in some cases — and this is the worst part — the decision made by the Obama administration has come too late.

The tears of joy of reunions will be accompanied by tears of irremediable pain for those who return but cannot find relatives who should have been waiting for them. That emptiness, those ghosts, those shadows, will they pursue that handful of old-fashioned neoconservatives from the previous administration who dared to exclude cousins and uncles from the Cuban family and who were not moved even when a decorated war veteran asked for an opportunity to visit a dying father on the island?

And will they erase the demagogical smile from the faces of those who, blinded by hatred toward a political system, were and continue to be capable of promoting unnatural barriers between Cubans?

The manner in which the nefarious prohibitions that today are lifted were created, and the framework of hallucinatory persecutions that was unleashed to enforce them are revealed in all their irrationality when we recall that the federal authorities devoted more funds and functionaries to persecute the unmanageable travelers who always found a way to return to their homeland and embrace their relatives in Ciego de Avila, Bauta or Cabaiguán than to prevent terrorists from introducing into the United States artifacts that could harm U.S. citizens.

It is true that the situation created after the implementation of President Obama’s decisions is not new. The Carter and Clinton administration, just to mention two previous cases, and even those of Reagan and Bush Sr., allowed or tolerated these family exchanges.

In those years, it was not unusual for artists, athletes, academicians and politicians of either country to travel in the opposite direction. What has collapsed, allowing the return of so many postponed reunions and bringing the promise of a return to civilized rationality, has been the latest attempt to foment tensions and use the families as lances to wound the political enemy.

But, as history teaches, what is human leaps and overcomes, eventually imposes the laws of embrace over the laws of sterile confrontation. Nothing can repress forever the natural flow of affection, nobody is so powerful that it can prevent two siblings from loving each other and searching for each other, or to keep a mother or grandmother from renouncing their children or grandchildren.

That is what has triumphed here, what we see, with joy, when those who arrive embrace, crying, laughing, joking, those who await them at the island’s airports. How many wordless statements, how many manifestos could be expressed with a single showing of those images! And they occur daily and are repeated throughout the nation. That is precisely the meaning of returning.

The urgency of the topic is reflected in “The Annunciation,” the latest film by director Enrique Pineda Barnet, the same filmmaker who 20 years ago gave us the beautiful “Maiden of the Alhambra.” To this sharp connoisseur of the national soul, the topic of family reunification is today a door knock that is not sufficiently heard, an unfinished course that goes beyond politics and ideology and demands a rational and human rapprochement, precisely the one that an administration like George W. Bush’s could not provide.

Because it is a topic “between Cubans,” it must be solved by consulting the opinion of Cubans, not forgetting that the nation and its roots — like it or not — has always been here, 90 miles south of Florida.

The motives for the return are as varied as the fates of those who arrive. Some return to rejoin relatives and friends. Whey they do, they find that the house where they were born is not as big as they remembered it, that the street where they lived has changed, that the next-door neighbors have died, that the trees in the park where they played as children have decayed. They’ll also find that their current life, which may be materially better, needed this return to the homeland.

Others return to show off what they’ve acquired, to display the symbols of what they have earned with their work or cleverness. They are usually noisy, come loaded with gifts, pictures of cars, houses and swimming pools; they leave after taking more pictures and making a grand tour of cafeterias, bars and restaurants, accompanied by the inevitable phalanx of admirers.

There’s no dearth of returnees who come for medical care in the island’s hospitals, institutions that display creative ingenuity looking after their patients with great dignity despite the homicidal malice of a blockade that the changes promised by Obama still have not eliminated.

And there are those who make a silent pilgrimage to the Rincón or the Shrine of the Virgin of Charity at Cobre, to fulfill the vows they made amid uncertainty or danger, amid nostalgia and memories, the inseparable companions of all emigrants.

Those who receive the visitors here are not from the same mold, either. Some travel for hours to await the arrival of the flights, forming family clans, erecting tents near the airport and showing off the newly arrived relative as if he were a trophy.

Others say nothing. They just embrace, crying, and they caress each other, fused in a communion that says so much about distance and uprooting that it cannot be expressed in words. Some will never step into a church — and that’s their right — so they wait outside until their loved ones thank their divine protectors.

And there are some who understand why the returnee left but don’t regret remaining back here, defying shortages and dangers. They have tended to the family mausoleum, the resting place of the ancestors, the sacred forebears who give sense to personal and collective biographies.

It is a pleasure to see returnees accompanied by their children or grandchildren. True, the young people might not find in the stores all the supplies to which they’ve become accustomed, they may notice that the streets are not well lighted, or that the effusiveness of grandmothers and aunts may seem shocking to those who grew up in more restrained and distant cultures, but the mere effort to rediscover the roots of their elders is a beautiful thing to see.

Because — as a character in the movie “El Benny” says — “when it comes to nostalgia, Cubans have the monopoly.” As a people, we are renowned for our tenacious cultivation of our culture and our habits, for our resistance to diluting ourselves in the mainstream of other cultures. That side of our nature enables us to be immediately recognized as Cubans anywhere, whether it is Sydney, Chicago, Amsterdam or Barcelona.

It is true that family visits can also include a good dosage of arguments and tensions. It couldn’t be otherwise. That’s how our national life has proceeded in the past half century and the families can only reflect that situation. To argue is one of the most deeply rooted features of Cubanness, and we can argue about any topic with respect and sound reasoning. No need to fear the confrontation of ideas; but do fear the silence.

And, as it often happens, while the academicians argue and the fortune tellers scrutinize the future, life goes by, advances without realizing that it does, goes on mindless of labels and profound and convoluted analyses, revives amid the coldest freeze and persists in staying alive until the thaw comes.

Meanwhile, with that stubbornness that is so Cuban, Cuban returnees continue to spread to all four corners of the island, to rejoin their relatives and rediscover themselves. The planes continue to land; the embraces multiply. The nation is not weakened by this response to those who one day forbade this reunion, who bet on Cuba’s isolation and hoped it might be erased from the map and from affection.

An act of personal and collective reaffirmation. That’s the meaning of returning. And every day more and more Cubans return.

Eliades Acosta Matos, a Cuban writer, holds a doctorate in philosophy.