Cuban Catholics in the United States, 1960-1980: Exile and Integration

4. Identity and Ideology

Chapter Four Identity and Ideology We are a people with particular values, history, traditions, language. Why lose that? Why stop being who we are? —Bishop Eduardo Boza Masvidal Cubans living in exile after the 1959 Revolution developed an intense and single-minded nationalism and a clear and unflagging militant, anticommunist , anti-Castro discourse that became a part of the community’s very identity. In creating new communities abroad, Cubans did not relinquish their claims to the land they had left. They celebrated their past, denounced the “new Cuba,” and articulated their intention to reconstruct Cuba once freed from the Marxist nightmare. In time, nostalgia for the homeland colored memories, intensifying the exile drama and deepening the determination with which they acted. For years after the events leading to their departure, exiles filtered life through a lens colored by their sense of betrayal, not just intellectually and ideologically, but emotionally, born of displacement and experience. Most exiles could not come to terms with the enormity of the catastrophe, and they began new lives driven by the pain and anger of their trauma as well 108 as their determination to return. They found jobs and adjusted to the new environment but held on to their identity with an intensity that seemed to increase with time. This trauma molded their political style, behavior, and discourses, characterized by militant politics, violent language and action, and little tolerance for compromise. Their deeply felt sense of loss did not reside in quiet anguish; it waited in ambush to explode in fierce rhetorical episodes whenever the question of Cuba emerged in structured debate or polite conversation. Their rhetoric and tone often shocked North Americans used to comparatively moderate discourses in their own politics. Cubans displayed a zeal fueled variously by a crusading spirit, anger and outrage, a sense of patriotic obligation, and perhaps more. They gained a welldeserved reputation for their emotionally charged discourses expressing absolute contempt for the Cuban Revolution and seeking its destruction. If faith traditions provided Cuban Catholic refugees with the basic principles and institutions around which to form new communities, faith in the same way influenced how they thought about themselves as exiles. Consciousness of exile involved their sense of nationality as well as their opposition to the new political and socioeconomic forms emerging in their homeland. They did not think of their nationality independently of their faith; indeed the two remained inseparable. At the same time, faith and communism remained always irreconcilable, prompting them to maintain a commitment to the church’s social doctrines as a concrete alternative to totalitarian forms. Recovery of their nation required retaining a commitment to nationality and articulating constantly their intransigent rejection of communism. These two ideas permeated their thought and remained constant companions in Catholic exile identity and ideology. Nationalism During the nineteenth century many Cubans had perceived the Catholic Church to be linked with Spanish colonial interests and not much related to the aspirations of the Cuban people themselves. As the church became increasingly Cuban during the twentieth century, Catholicism on the island incorporated nationalism and patriotism into its expressions and aesthetics . By the 1940s and 1950s, Catholics sought what they considered to be a healthy balance between the universal precepts central to their faith Identity and Ideology 109 and allegiance to their particular history and culture, and they defended Cuba’s national integrity and independence at a time when their country remained dominated by the United States. At the same time, most Catholics rejected what they considered extreme or xenophobic nationalism often accompanied by anti-clericalism and associated with socialism, which they viewed as promoting secularism and state control of the educational system. At the National Congress at the end of 1959, Catholic Action leader Mateo Jover explored the relationship between nationalism and faith, outlining the patriotic obligations of Catholics. In his address “Charity and Love of Country,” Jover noted that because humankind lives in concrete and imperfect social and political settings, patriotism has to be more than an abstract and sentimental idea. True nationalism and patriotism for Cubans, therefore, meant developing a daily and habitual commitment to improving Cuba, which included thinking about the common good, participating in the country’s public life by voting, remaining vigilant and criticizing developments when necessary, maintaining a sense of social obligation , observing the law, and opposing colonial and imperial impositions that undermined the nation’s integrity. At the same time, Christians needed to avoid...