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145 Americana, the Spanish translation of the word American, positions one both within and beyond the nation-state. To say “yo soy Americana” can mean that I am a citizen of a specific country—the United States—or a citizen of a region or hemisphere—the Americas. I remember the first time I identified myself as Americana in a Latin American country, my host hesitated, smiled, and gently responded in Spanish “But, of course, dear. We are all American.” People from the Caribbean, Central America, and the southern cone have long claimed this term. The fact that today most people around the world associate the term solely with the United States speaks to the economic, political, and cultural influence this country has exerted on its neighbors to the south and north for generations. In the course of my life, I have encountered multiple meanings of the term American—some personal, some national, and some hemispheric—and I have tried to understand what relevance each one has for me. This quest has deeply informed my work as a historian, but it began much earlier in my life, during my childhood in a refugee family. Act One My family emigrated from Cuba a few years after Fidel Castro’s triumphant march into Havana. Although my parents welcomed the end of Fulgencio Batista’s dictatorship, they became disillusioned by the Castro government’s failure to enact the promised democratic reforms. Many elements of the new authoritarian state troubled them: the neighborhood watch committees that monitored their every move; the censorship and eventual shutdown of the independent press; the suspension of free elections; the deportation of the 10 Americana MARÍA CRISTINA GARCÍA 146 MARÍA CRISTINA GARCÍA clergy. My father, a lawyer (and Fidel’s law school classmate), was especially disturbed by the lack of due process, the mass trials and public executions of those considered enemies of the state. A student of history, he knew that it was only a matter of time before the revolutionary government turned on its initial supporters; already neighbors were turning against neighbors. For months my parents debated whether to leave their home and homeland, and in the end chose to do so because they wanted their children to have choices: the choice to read and study what they wanted; the choice to express themselves freely without looking over their shoulders to see who was listening; the choice to be religious or not. The family drove to José Martí International Airport with one suitcase per person and a few U.S. dollars—the maximum allowed by the state. The plane ride to the United States took approximately forty-five minutes. They arrived in Miami essentially penniless, without any idea of where to go or what to do next. It was May , . By , they had been joined by close to half a million of their compatriots , and hundreds of thousands more would follow in the decades to come. My parents left Cuba with their two children, my brother José Ramón and me, who were both under the age of five, and my maternal grandmother. Aunts, uncles, and cousins followed over the coming months. The family never imagined that the move would be permanent. Cubans have migrated back and forth across the Florida Straits for generations as tourists, students, merchants, and political exiles, and they thought they were part of that migratory tradition . Given the United States’ long history of intervention in Cuban and Latin American affairs, they, like most Cubans who left during the s, thought they would eventually return to their homeland. The United States, they argued, would never tolerate a communist government so close to its shores. At midnight each New Year’s Eve, with the local Spanish-language radio station, WQBA, playing the Cuban national anthem in the background, we ate the traditional twelve grapes, drank Spanish cidra, and toasted “Next year in Havana!” Within a decade we had abandoned that toast. Because my father found employment as legal counsel for a well-known U.S. corporation, we lived in different cities around the Caribbean—Nassau, San Juan, Miami—but the United States is the country we came to call home and whose citizenship we claim. My childhood memories are most attached to south Florida, where my siblings and I spent most of our formative years. My brother José Ramón and I—as well as our U.S.-born sister, Victoria—attended a Catholic parochial elementary school in Coral Gables, Florida...

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