By Gustavo Pérez Firmat
De
las islas no se despide nadie para siempre.
Dulce María Loynaz
What sort of an exile is someone
who has spent four-fifths of his life in another country and who has no
intention of returning to Cuba
to live no matter what the political conditions on the island? In exile he grew
up and grew old. In exile he acquired a language, met all of his friends,
married, had children, pursued a career, endured illnesses and separations. He’s
certain that he will die in exile. He’s just as certain that he will die an exile. What sort of exile is this
person, whose homeland is no longer his home?
•
In the movie The Lost City, Andy García’s character, Fico Fellove, declares:
“I’m only impersonating an exile. I’m still in Cuba.” When Fico says this, he has
just arrived in New York City
from Havana. I
wonder what Fico would say were he still in New York forty years later. Perhaps he would
say this: “I’m only impersonating a Cuban. I’ve always been in exile.” Time turns
exile into a chronic condition, in the literal sense of the adjective: a way of
being in the world inseparable from the experience of temporality. The chronic
exile never says, I am an exiled Cuban. He always says, I am a Cuban exile: the
noun, the substantive, is exile.
•
It is often thought that an exile
spends his (or her) time in remembrance, but for the chronic exile, it’s not quite
true. Even when he was young and still had relatives who, unlike him, had spent
most of their lives in Cuba,
he was not the source of memories but the one who received them, and later, the
one who relayed them. He was the executor of the nostalgia of others: his parents
and grandparents, his aunts and uncles, all those members of his typically distended
family that included people whom he barely knew. His own memories of Cuba, such as
they were, seemed less urgent, less necessary, than those of the grown-ups
around him. It still seems that way, even now that he is the only grown-up
around him.
•
When the chronic exile longs, he
longs for a time when the people around him still had memories. He longs for
the days of temporary, rather than chronic, exile. Virgil Suárez, one of the
chronic exile’s heroes, writes in a poem: “How far do your roots extend? Far
enough to do damage.” That is, not far enough.
•
Years ago a Miami newspaper carried a item about a man
who had been paralyzed as a result of a stroke. He would spend his days in a
wheelchair by the window of his Miami
Beach condominium, facing south, mumbling to himself
the only word he was still able to pronounce: Cuba. The chronic exile believes
that he is like that man. Rather than recollection, his exile involves
iteration: Cuba,
Cuba,
Cuba.
What is this Cuba
that he iterates? What are the modes of his iteration?
•
Three ways of thinking about Cuba: as país, as pueblo, and as patria. Not living among Cubans (el pueblo), and not having gone back to Cuba (el país), the chronic exile thinks of Cuba as his patria, a personal possession, an
imaginary homeland, a country he cannot leave or lose. This Cuba goes with him
wherever he goes. It dreams with him. It wakes up with him. It gets sick with him.
It will die with him.
To the three ways of thinking about Cuba correspond the three faces of
Cubanness: cubanidad, cubaneo, and cubanía. Cubanidad,
a word that goes back to the first stirrings of a Cuban national consciousness
at the beginning of the nineteenth century, designates a civil status embodied
in birth certificates, passports, naturalization papers. By contrast, cubaneo isn’t borne out in documents or
decrees, but in a loose repertoire of gestures, manners, customs, words. Rather
than naming un estado civil, cubaneo names un estado de ánimo – a mood, a temperament, structures of thought
and feeling: what used to be called “national character.” Its frame of
reference is not un país – a political entity – but un pueblo – a
social and cultural entity.
The third face of Cubanness is cubanía, one of those rare words that
actually has a birthday, since it was coined by Fernando Ortiz in a lecture at
the University of
Havana on November 28, 1939. Cubanía is not accident of birth, or a
menu of manners and mannerisms. According to Ortiz, cubanía inheres in “la conciencia de ser cubano y la voluntad de
quererlo ser.” Unlike cubanidad,
which requires external verification, cubanía
demands an act of the will. Unlike cubaneo,
which requires the society of like-minded people, cubanía requires only a willingness of the heart. It does not find
expression in a nation – un país – or
in a people – un pueblo – but
in something more abstract and ineffable – in a homeland, una patria.
Cubanía
doesn’t depend on place of residence or country of citizenship; it has little
to do with language or demeanor; and, perhaps most importantly, it cannot be
granted or taken away. It is the expression of Cubanness most available to
those of us for whom Cuba
itself remains an unachievable blend of ser
and querer ser, a redemptive form of
wishful thinking. If cubanidad is
political and cubaneo is
prepolitical, cubanía perhaps should
be described as postpolitical, as the nationality of those without a nation.
Touched by cubanía, the chronic exile no longer feels like a stranger in his
own skin.
•
Iteration begins with memory fatigue. Like seeing childhood friends too
often, after a while – years, decades – repeating the same stories over and
over becomes unpleasurable. Worse: it becomes unpainful. The memories have lost
their sting as well as their savor. Like a muse-less museum, or a house with
closets but no skeletons.
•
Or iteration begins with memory loss, which is what happened to the
paralyzed man. Unable to remember Cuba, he could only utter “Cuba.” After
the memories fade, what remains is the impulse to address, to point and name.
Iteration is deictic, directional. Looking south, the man in the wheelchair could
not see the island from where he sat, but his head was turned that way, one
could say he was headed that way, though he would never reach the place toward
which he was headed. This turning toward Cuba, as distinct from returning to
Cuba,
is the chronic exile’s mode of iteration. An invalid’s apostrophe.
•
In the 1930s Xavier Cugat recorded “Miami Beach Rhumba,” a song about a
young woman who, on the way to Cuba
to learn how to rhumba, found what she was looking for in Miami Beach:
I started out to
go to Cuba,
soon I was at Miami Beach.
There, not so very
far from Cuba,
oh what a rhumba they teach.
Palm trees are
whispering “yo te quiero,” what could I do but stay a while?
I met a Cuban
caballero, we danced in true Latin style.
So I never got to Cuba, but I got
all its atmosphere.
Why even Yuba and
his tuba, they played a night right here.
Like the girl in the song, the chronic exile makes do with atmosphere. Almost anything can create it:
a riff, a whiff, a word, a gesture, a smoke. Atmosphere cannot be seen but it
can be felt. Rather than a sense of place, the chronic exile is trailed by
atmosphere. He feels it around and inside him. He exhales it and he inhales it.
For him, a Cuban atmosphere is both landscape and inscape, environment and in‑vironment. Those he meets often think
that he is the atmosphere, a Cuban
caballero or a whispering palm tree. But he knows better: the atmosphere others
see in him is not the atmosphere in which he dwells, perceptible only to him. A
locale without a location, with contours rather than coordinates, this rarefied
air he breathes is his portable island.
•
Atmosphere is feeling, affect – or rather, a particular affect. If
exoticism, according to Victor Segalen’s classic definition, is the feeling
that diversity stirs in us, the chronic exile’s atmosphere is the feeling
stirred in him by something as familiar as his own first name, but also something
that has been lost, like his own first name. We move through the familiar as
through a vacuum. Only when the familiar becomes estranged from the everyday does
it precipitate into atmosphere.
•
Since tourism is touring, turning,
some may think of atmospheric Cubanness as virtual tourism, a mental and
sentimental retour au pays natal accomplished
by traveling in place, without ever moving from the house from which the
chronic exile gazes at his homeland. But whereas the tourist seeks the unknown,
the unfamiliar, the chronic exile worships sameness: Cuba, Cuba, Cuba. The tourist comes and goes, while
the chronic exile, having left once, has decided not to leave again.
•
Nonetheless, he knows that he has become
some sort of tourist, an occasional Cuban, sporadic rather than diasporic. In the almost fifty years that he
has spent in exile, there have been many days when he has not heard a word of
Spanish, but none when he has not heard a word of English. This is one reason,
among others, why the chronic exile talks to himself – in Spanish.
•
Cuban graffiti: Havana,
during the balsero exodus of the
1990s: “Yo me quedo”; Miami,
at about the same time: “Yo no voy.” The chronic exile dissents from both sentiments.
He cannot leave because he already left. He cannot stay because he never left.
Were he to indulge in graffiti, he would scrawl on the walls of his house: “Yo
aquí, allá ellos.”
•
In the 1950s, Cuban children used
to learn geography from a textbook by Leví Marrero, Geografía de Cuba, whose first illustration showed a map of the
world with Cuba
at its center. Its caption: “El mundo alrededor de Cuba.” Anyone familiar with Cubans
will recognize that the belief that the world revolves around Cuba is more than
a cartographic projection. It’s one of countless examples of the ombliguismo that scholars and pundits
have discussed (and of which these pages may be another instance). A line from
a song by the Cuban-American singer Willie Chirino sums up Cuban exceptionalism
in four words: Como
Cuba,
ni Cuba.
Like Cuba,
not even Cuba.
If islands are exceptions to the rule of continents, Cuba is an exception to an
exception, an incontinent rule unto itself.
The second illustration in Geografía de Cuba offers another map of Cuba, but this
time the perspective is different. The caption reads: “Cuba vista
desde el norte.” In Cuban slang “el norte” is the United States. For the last
half-century, “Cuba
seen from the North” has encompassed the gaze of hundreds of thousands of
Cubans. Looking at this map, the chronic exile sees himself looking at his
homeland, that is, navel-gazing.
•
The poet Orlando González Esteva, another
of the chronic exile’s heroes, likes to say, “El futuro ya pasó,” by which he
means both “the future already happened” and “the future passed us by.” The
reason, González Esteva adds, is not that we are no longer who we were, but
that we have already been who we were going to be.
•
The chronic exile knows that, whatever happens in Cuba, it will
have happened too late. Change may come to Cuba – it may have already – but no
change will come to him. In this he resembles those hundreds of thousands of other
exiles, on both sides of the Florida Straits and also within them, who did not
live to see the day of their country’s liberation. Exile ends, chronic exile
goes on.
•
But. Sin embargo.
•
But perhaps he is needlessly betting
against himself. But perhaps his bitterness has misled him, making him believe
that there are no third acts in an exile’s life. Eduardo Galeano, not one of
the chronic exile’s heroes, once wrote that nostalgia is good but hope is
better. It may be that when our day finally does come – it may have happened
already – the cocoon of exile will fall away from him like dead skin. It may be
that he will discover that he has not lost the ability to connect and commune.
Hope – esperanza – is a word that he that
has seldom used, an emotion that he has never embraced. When he was younger, he
used to toast to a next year in Cuba
without really believing it. The toast was an obligatory formality, one of the
rituals of exile. More given to regret than to expectation, he always enjoyed living
in the land of what-might-have-been,
his only país. Will he allow himself
to give up what might have been for what could be?
•
He tells himself that it would be a
relief not to have to explain what kind of Cuban he is, which side he is on: for
or against, gusano or revolucionario. He fantasizes about the
day when he can identify himself as Cuban without his interlocutors
wondering, usually silently, what he means. (His worm’s eye views never have
been a secret.) Like others before him, he visualizes un puente, un gran puente spanning the distance between the aquí and the allá. Not a bridge to Cuba, but a bridge between Cubans. Were
that day to come, he would scrawl new graffiti on his wall, no longer a wall: yo aquí, pero con ellos; allá ellos, pero conmigo.
as) con los luchadores independentistas cubanos del siglo XIX, centuria en la que se conforma la nacionalidad cubana, nos dice: “El estudiante cubano mantendrá su acatamiento y reverencia solamente a los símbolos que los mambises nos trajeron ensangrentados del campo de batalla por la libertad: nuestro himno, nuestro escudo, nuestra bandera de la estrella solitaria (…). 
