Leaving Us for Nowhere: The Cuban Pursuit of "the American Dream"

On Becoming Cuban: Identity, Nationality, and Culture. Louis A. Pérez Jr. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1999

 

Cuando en la calle todo sigue siendo igual
y en los tejados alguien sueña con volar.
Cuando la gente se disfraza de animal
cuando no queda más remedio que callar.
Rezando a Dios, se pierden por el mar.
Dejándonos hacia ningún lugar.

—Carlos Varela, "Desde ningún lugar" ¹

EVER SINCE I STARTED VISITING THAT ISLAND MORE THAN HALF A DECADE ago, I began to discover the prominent place Cuba and things Cuban occupy in the tropics of the Usonian imaginary. ² Always upon my return to the United States, as people found out where I had been, everyone without exception would invariably be interested in knowing all about the place. At first I was overwhelmed by this uncharacteristic interest in foreign lands. Usonians are generally not that curious, especially with regard to places "Latin," no matter what colorful combination of sombreros, señoritas, and picante sauce these countries of "brown peoples" might awaken in their memory. I remember reflecting upon the irony that my homeland, Puerto Rico, has remained for the most part invisible and unknown to most Usonians even when it has been a U.S. colony for more than a century. In their collective imaginary the continued colonial reduction of Puerto Rico is a moment somewhere outside the margins of history, a faded vignette more than an episode, like the repressed memories of an unrestrained and sinful act best forgotten. Thus, as a colonial subject used to dealing with a colonizer for whom conscience seems to be a handicap to memory, a perverse modality of imperial hegemony that predicates the nonexistence of the colony as a function of the denegation of all rights to self-determination for the colonial subjects, I was at odds trying to reconcile the way Cuba shines bright next to the obscure place occupied by Puerto Rico in the album of U.S. imperial souvenirs.

Soon it became obvious that the existence of government prohibitions that make Cuba inaccessible to most residents of the United States is only partly the cause of so much curiosity. Cuba is forbidden but not forgotten. Indeed, most people in the United States seem to be as anxious to know about Cuba as a mother who waits impatiently for news of her son in the battlefront. Visiting Cuba only helped complicate matters further. As it turns out, four decades of condemnatory rhetoric have not eclipsed a reciprocal Cuban fascination and admiration for things Usonian. Until recently the reasons for this fatal attraction were hardly studied and for the most part poorly understood. Louis A. Pérez's monumental work comes to fill that void and begins to explain how Usonians created in Cuba "a place to live dangerously but without taking risks" (194) and how Cubans met them there by embracing Usonian modernity and the promises of consumer culture to the point of acquiring "the North American sense of the Other, even as it involved themselves" (351). Pérez's task is an arduous one indeed as he sets out to document his presuppositions over an entire century of the most convoluted history: Cuba from the 1850s to 1959.

The work is purposefully polemical from the start as it sets out to dethrone "the application of force as a method of domination" (11) and replaces it with a vision of imperial hegemony that "was experienced mainly as a cultural inflection" (10) and which relied on a great deal of Cuban complicity for its effectiveness and success. Presenting Cuban national identity as a cultural artifact open to handling and contestation is enough to provoke the worst passions on all the multiple sides of the Cuban divide. ³ As if...