By Lien Estrada
HAVANA TIMES — One of my youngest cousins just had a birthday. The very day he was born, his father disappeared at sea trying to reach the United States on a small boat. I understand there were eight boats tied to each other with ropes. The last two broke loose — his and that of a friend.
When the news came over Radio Martí, where they read the list of Cuban women and men who arrived alive on the shores of Florida, as well as those who did not arrive, Rogoberto Verdecia was on the list of the missing. For this reason, the first pair of shoes that “the family from the North” always brings is for my little cousin, and we — his family on the Island — never stop showering him with affection. That is, aside from his own personal merits.
This story, which carries a rather bitter mark, is not so unique. One only has to think of the March 13th tugboat, and all the Cuban rafts and small boats that have tried to reach the other shore — there have been many over all these years. This, in my view, turns this Island and its people into quite a lamentable case. Because of these and so many other events that have been experienced and are still experienced to this day.
When a friend asked me — and it was the first time anyone had asked me this question — what Fatherland meant to me, I understood that I had never had one. Jose Marti must have felt something similar when he wrote in one of his verses: “Without a fatherland, but without a master.” Returning to the answer I shared with my friend about what I understood that word to mean: “The place where one is born, and that offers me the opportunity to live and to fulfill myself as a human being.”
For me it is very clear that if I do not have the possibility of fulfilling myself, I cannot call that land mine — because I would have the obligation or the duty to seek other lands (other Fatherlands/Motherlands), as thousands, millions of Cuban women do on other continents, in other places, in order to be / to exist / to live.
Obviously, one can have other conceptions of the same term, and dismiss outright what I think, feel, and experience. But it is because of what I have lived in my own family and in my own person that I base what I say on that. Scholars maintain that Marti fought for a fatherland (motherland) he did not know! A young man who left the Island at 16 could not have been fighting for the same one at 44! And yet, he continued to consider it his land. His 20 years in New York and his time in Spain and Latin America were important, certainly — but Cuba without Spanish colonialism remained his dream.
This is respectable. And I understand it. Just as I can understand those for whom it is all the same, because these issues are not among their interests. And there are also those who say they carry the fatherland (motherland) in their heart. Because we almost always have an imaginary idea of what we want. We never have exactly what we desire — or what we think it is. And we live under what we “believe,” “conceive,” “think”…
And that is why, even if I tell myself many times, “My fatherland is New York,” because I feel that it is so, nothing can assure me that it is exactly so — because I might have an experience that contradicts what until now (as a Cuban) I believe it would be like, or that this place would allow me to fulfill myself.
In any case, I am convinced that under slavery no land is good — neither one’s own nor a foreign one. No Fatherland (Motherland) would be worth it. Under humiliation, oppression, hunger, and suffering one cannot even be grateful for the oxygen one breathes. And that is what I consider Cuba has been: suffocating. Not because I say so — but because those who have left can say it (millions of women and men), and those who want to leave can say it (other millions who remain within its borders). Because being born is not enough to say that one lives. Life and its development — especially in human beings — is far too complex to be resolved with ration cards, speeches, and sacrifices in the name of ideals that never contemplate a light at the end of the tunnel.
Of course, I can change my concept of Fatherland/Motherland. Perhaps I need to grow much more in order to understand that I lacked more elements to create a better conception of the idea. That is fair. Nonetheless, what I am convinced of is that under a yoke (to use the apostle’s term), an eternal yoke, one cannot feel any good. It is hard even to wake up each morning and go to work or to study or to produce anything. As Charles Bukowski would say: “It is a feat just to put on your underwear when you get up each morning.”
Still, it does not leave me indifferent when news reaches me of other fatherlands where none of their daughters and sons have to emigrate. Where they know how to enjoy life properly because their economies allow it. They are able to be decent women and men. I am impressed, for example, to know that 95% of Germany’s population travels (and always has). They leave and return to their country as if to their own home. For me, that is having a Fatherland/Motherland. And understandably, I too would like to live this in my own land where I was born — with no greater drama than working, earning money, and having the freedom of that fulfillment I believe I should have (without making my neighbor vulnerable, without degrading myself).
Read more from the diary of Lien Estrada here.