Miami’s Cuban aristocracy, trapped in past?

THE AMBIGUOUS PATRIOT
Is Miami's Cuban Aristocracy
Trapped In The Past?
By Francesca Fernandez

I remember the first time my grandmother pulled me onto her lap and told me about Cuba. Her hands stroked my hair as she described the town where she was born, a charming village on the sea marked by ornate bell towers. There were big, airy houses, exotic mulattos, redolent in their bright dresses, courtyards where music echoed, the heady scents of coffee and tobacco lingering from open doorways. Just a few minutes away, fields of sugar cane stretched, interrupted by majestic mogotes, strange vine-covered land formations native to only Cuba in the entire world.

To my 6-year-old mentality, these ramblings were the stuff of fantasy, fairytales and dreams. My overactive imagination lent my grandmother's memories colors more brilliant than she'd ever seen. Those mulattos were bursting from their dresses, and gold dust floated down from the sun to cover the ancient cobblestone streets of Havana. My grandmother was actually a fairy, spirited from her mystical home and forced to live among mortals.

Of course, my grandmother was merely remembering her home and youth in the way most of us do, glorifying the little details that jump up to catch at our minds, seeing everything through the rose-tinted glass of time. She was part of an elite people who prospered once on a beautiful island, rich with culture, abundant soil and delightful music.

Like many Cubans, my parents and their families, part of an upper-middle-class who thrived in Cuba before Fidel Castro came into power in 1959, immigrated to the United States because of the threat that Castro's social restructuring posed to their comfortable lifestyles. The move was traumatic for their parents, my grandparents. They had come from a beautiful place where they held high-paying professional positions, enjoyed lavish living and had plenty of time to travel about their exotic country with their children on month-long beach vacations. Suddenly, all they had were the clothes on their backs and the rations of food being given to them by the U.S. government.

My grandfather worked as a janitor in a local high school, my grandmother, after the arduous task of mastering a new language, was able to snag a position as a Spanish teacher in one of Downtown Miami's most dangerous public schools. They experienced the degradation and the staggering losses. Their children, on the other hand, were too young to appreciate the difficulties. They viewed the move as an adventure with new holidays to celebrate, (they had never before heard of Halloween). They were oblivious to the painful efforts their parents went through to build their lives again, adjusting to a new culture, sending their children to college by selling encyclopedias door to door.

They prevailed, though. Their children thrived, received educations, got jobs and had families. But the Cuban old-timers did more than procreate in a new society. They generated a whole new "Cuban" culture, smacking with nostalgia and flagrant pride. Over two-thirds of the Cuban-American population lives in Florida, most of them in Miami. Allowed to mutate and grow, this Americanized version of Cuban culture has taken on a life of its own, spawning driven, Cuban patriots in the youth culture of Miami, instilling in them a sense of pride and duty toward a country that died, (Okay! It died already!), fifty years ago.

This is what really confounds me. Somehow, through osmosis or hypnosis, the Cuban immigrants of the late 1950s managed to transfer their fierce loyalty and fanatical allegiance to their grandchildren, most of whom have never seen Cuba and can barely manage the Spanish language.

I don't get it. But the proof is visible throughout Miami- Dade County. In a Miami Beach club, a crowd of drunken, rowdy guys will erupt into the eerie war cry,"Cuba Si! Castro No!" On their hip and trendy cars there are decals of the Cuban flag. Other visual cues to this strange patriotism can be found in their rooms and apartments. These kids stick together, linked by the dislocated subculture they have perpetuated, traveling in cliques to the same universities and cities, returning to Florida to marry other Cubans.

Don't get me wrong. I think a little pride in one's heritage is admirable. But what I see happening to many third-generation Cuban-Americans is downright pathetic. They are so closed off from the rest of the country they actually live in, so immersed in their own little version of Cuban aristocracy, that they have little awareness of the amazing diversity in culture they have access to by virtue of being American citizens.

The irony is this: This hampered cultural cluster was born and cultivated exclusively on American soil. How is it that a group of educated and, many times, privileged American young adults, contemporary in all other modes of thinking, has developed such fierce love and devotion to an imaginary country? Are they dissatisfied with our ambiguous and hypocritical government? Have their ideas about what Cuba once was been blown to such sensational proportions that they choose to live in an altered reality in order to escape their lack of faith in the country they belong to?

I wouldn't venture to guess, but I would like to say one thing to my passionate contemporaries: Get over it. Cuba will never be what it once was. Turn some of that heart-felt devotion toward this country, the United States of America. Such fervor is sure to generate progress in the nation you actually inhabit.