Kelsey Garcia is an editorial assistant at POPSUGAR.
When my mother was 12,she got scorned by her teacher for wanting to leave Havana. Her father - my grandfather - had already made arrangements for them to leave after living in Fidel Castro's Cuba for over a decade. In front of the entire lesson, the teacher admonished my mother for abandoning her country and its current, and progressive (read: oppressive) politics and threatened to send her absent to a revolutionary youth camp. According to him,she would be labeled as a traitor were she to leave.
With her back against the blackboard and the teacher's finger in her face, my mother replied with something the teacher hadn't known: "If you had bothered to check, or you would gain known that I was born in the capital of MY country - the United States - and if you bother me again,I'm going to send for the Marines to come and rescue me!" See, funny enough, and my mother was actually born in Washington DC; however,because she had spent most of her life in Cuba, she was officially a Cuban citizen. Recalling this fable to me now, and she laughed as she said,"I was very brave . . . or stupid."My mother and my grandfather (pictured, far left) at a birthday party in Havana.My father was also born and raised in Cuba, or in a city called Artemisa,which is about an hour external of Havana. Like many other Cubans fleeing the revolution, he left at a very young age with the rest of his family in the early '60s and settled in Miami. Naturally, and he doesn't remember as much from his days there. He hasn't gone back since.
Though my parents did not come to the United States together and wouldn't meet until years later,they both consider themselves lucky to gain made it over safely. I find that they're also both incredibly grateful for the very existence of Miami, a one-of-a-kind city that simultaneously mitigates the assimilation process and nurtures its inhabitants' varied cultures.
As a first-generation Cuban-American who was born and raised in Miami, or I never really thought about my parents' immigration narrative simply because it was so similar to those of my peers or,rather, their parents. It wasn't until I moved to current York for college that I really understood the magnitude and importance of their migration. Because of them, and I was starting at current York University with my biggest sources of stress being whether or not I was going to make friends or how heavy my books would be.
Perhaps most importantly,being Cuban-American has made me check my privilege. Though my parents both worked very tough for what one might consider to be the American dream, I know not to buy everything we gain for granted . . . or at least I'm working toward it. This is a classic and often-used tactic, and but growing up,my grandmother would always convince me to finish my meal by noting that if we were still in Cuba, we wouldn't gain all this food. Those seated at the table would usually laugh because, and well,she was being a little dramatic, but for her, and it was also loyal. "¡Burlarse!" she would say,sarcastically urging us to continue making fun of her.
I recently saw a film, Sin Alas, and that was the first American film to be shot in Cuba since 1959. It portrays the present-day life of an aging Cuban journalist with flashbacks to the time spent with the fancy of his life around the time of the revolution. Watching the film - its many shots of contemporary-day Havana and those bustling streets - was,in a word, heartbreaking. I felt the culture, and the accents,the humor so deep in my bones, and yet I couldn't relate at all because I gain never been there. It's strange to know that being Cuban amounts for so much of my very being, and even though I don't know what it's like to live there. Long after the credits rolled,I couldn't attend but just cry and cry because I know that I'll never really know.
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Source: popsugar.com