We Came All the Way from Cuba So You Could Dress Like This?

by Achy Obejas

  Then the Catholic volunteer comes back and asks the Colombian girl something in English, and the girl reaches across me, pats my lap, and starts reading from her Spanish-language Bible: Your breasts are like two fawns, twins of a gazelle that feed upon the lilies. Until the day breathes and the shadows flee, I will hie me to the mountain of myrrh and the hill of frankincense. You are all fair, my love; there is no flaw in you.

  Here’s what my father dreams I will be in the United States of America: A lawyer, then a judge, in a system of law that is both serious and just. Not that he actually believes in democracy—in fact, he’s openly suspicious of the popular will—but he longs for the power and prestige such a career would bring, and which he can’t achieve on his own now that we’re here, so he projects it all on me. He sees me in courtrooms and lecture halls, at libraries and in elegant restaurants, the object of envy and awe.

  My father does not envision me in domestic scenes. He does not imagine me as a wife or mother because to do so would be to imagine someone else closer to me than he is, and he cannot endure that. He will never regret not being a grandfather; it was never part of his plan.

  Here’s what my mother dreams I will be in the United States of America: The owner of many appliances and a rolling green lawn; mother of two mischievous children; the wife of a boyishly handsome North American man who drinks Pepsi for breakfast; a career woman with a well-paying position in local broadcasting.

  My mother pictures me reading the news on TV at four and home at the dinner table by six. She does not propose that I will actually do the cooking, but rather that I’ll oversee the undocumented Haitian woman my husband and I have hired for that purpose. She sees me as fulfilled, as she imagines she is.

  All I ever think about are kisses, not the deep throaty kind but quick pecks all along my belly just before my lover and I dissolve into warm blankets and tangled sheets in a bed under an open window. I have no view of this scene from a distance, so I don’t know if the window frames tall pine trees or tropical bushes permeated with skittering gray lizards.

  It’s hot and stuffy in the processing center, where I’m sitting under a light that buzzes and clicks. Everything smells of nicotine. I wipe the shine off my face with the sleeve of my sweater. Eventually, I take off the sweater and fold it over my arm.

  My father, smoking cigarette after cigarette, mutters about communism and how the Dominican Republic is next and then, possibly, someplace in Central America.

  My mother has disappeared to another floor in the building, where the Catholic volunteer insists that she look through boxes filled with clothes donated by generous North Americans. Later, my mother will tell us how the Catholic volunteer pointed to the little gray flannel gym jacket with the hood and the American flag logo, how she plucked a bow tie from a box, then a black synthetic teddy from another and laughed, embarrassed.

  My mother will admit she was uncomfortable with the idea of sifting through the boxes, sinking arm-deep into other people’s sweat and excretions, but not that she was afraid of offending the Catholic volunteer and that she held her breath, smiled, and fished out a shirt for my father and a light blue cotton dress for me, which we’ll never wear.

  My parents escaped from Cuba because they did not want me to grow up in a communist state. They are anti-communists, especially my father.

  It’s because of this that when Martin Luther King, Jr., dies in 1968 and North American cities go up in flames, my father will gloat. King was a Communist, he will say; he studied in Moscow, everybody knows that.

  I’ll roll my eyes and say nothing. My mother will ask him to please finish his café con leche and wipe the milk moustache from the top of his lip.

  Later, the morning after Bobby Kennedy’s brains are shot all over a California hotel kitchen, my father will greet the news of his death by walking into our kitchen wearing a “Nixon’s the One” button.

  There’s no stopping him now, my father will say; I know, because I was involved with the counterrevolution, and I know he’s the one who’s going to save us, he’s the one who came up with the Bay of Pigs—which would have worked, all the experts agree, if he’d been elected instead of Kennedy, that coward.

  My mother will vote for Richard Nixon in 1968, but in spite of his loud support my father will sit out the election, convinced there’s no need to become a citizen of the United States (the usual prerequisite for voting) because Nixon will get us back to Cuba in no time, where my father’s dormant citizenship will spring to life.

  Later that summer, my father, who has resisted getting a television set (too cumbersome to be moved when we go back to Cuba, he will tell us), suddenly buys a huge Zenith color model to watch the Olympics broadcast from Mexico City.

  I will sit on the floor, close enough to distinguish the different colored dots, while my father sits a few feet away in a LA-Z-BOY chair and roots for the Cuban boxers, especially Teofilo Stevenson. Every time Stevenson wins one—whether against North Americans or East Germans or whomever—my father will jump up and shout.

  Later, when the Cuban flag waves at us during the medal ceremony, and the Cuban national anthem comes through the TV’s tinny speakers, my father will stand up in Miami and cover his heart with his palm just like Fidel, watching on his own TV in Havana.

  When I get older, I’ll tell my father a rumor I heard that Stevenson, for all his heroics, practiced his best boxing moves on his wife, and my father will look at me like I’m crazy and say, Yeah, well, he’s a Communist, what did you expect, huh?

  In the processing center, my father is visited by a Cuban man with a large camera bag and a steno notebook into which he’s constantly scribbling. The man has green Coke-bottle glasses and chews on a pungent Cuban cigar as he nods at everything my father says.

  My mother, holding a brown paper bag filled with our new (used) clothes, sits next to me on the couch under the buzzing and clicking lights. She asks me about the Colombian girl, and I tell her she read me parts of the Bible, which makes my mother shudder.

  The man with the Coke-bottle glasses and cigar tells my father he’s from Santiago de Cuba in Oriente province, near Fidel’s hometown, where he claims nobody ever supported the revolution because they knew the real Fidel. Then he tells my father he knew his father, which makes my father very nervous.

  The whole northern coast of Havana harbor is mined, my father says to the Cuban man as if to distract him. There are milicianos all over the beaches, he goes on; it was a miracle we got out, but we had to do it—for her, and he points my way again.

  Then the man with the Coke-bottle glasses and cigar jumps up and pulls a giant camera out of his bag, covering my mother and me with a sudden explosion of light.

  In 1971, I’ll come home for Thanksgiving from Indiana University where I have a scholarship to study optometry. It’ll be the first time in months I’ll be without an antiwar demonstration to go to, a consciousness-raising group to attend, or a Gay Liberation meeting to lead.

  Alaba’o, I almost didn’t recognize you, my mother will say, pulling on the fringes of my suede jacket, promising to mend the holes in my floor-sweeping bell-bottom jeans. My green sweater will be somewhere in the closet of my bedroom in their house.

  We left Cuba so you could dress like this? my father will ask over my mother’s shoulder.

  And for the first and only time in my life, I’ll say, Look, you didn’t come for me, you came for you; you came because all your rich clients were leaving, and you were going to wind up a cashier in your father’s hardware store if you didn’t leave, okay?

  My father, who works in a bank now, will gasp—¿Qué qué?—and step back a bit. And my mother will say, Please, don’t talk to your father like that.

  And I’ll say, It’s a free country, I can do anything I want, remember? Christ, he only left because Fidel beat him in that stupid swimming race when they were little.

  And then my father will reach over my mother’s thin shoulders, grab me by the red bandanna around my n
eck, and throw me to the floor, where he’ll kick me over and over until all I remember is my mother’s voice pleading, Please stop, please, please, please stop.

  We leave the processing center with the fat Hungarian lady, who drives a large Ford station wagon. My father sits in the front with her, and my mother and I sit in the back, although there is plenty of room for both of us in the front as well. The fat Hungarian lady is taking us to our hotel, where our room will have a kitchenette and a view of an alley from which a tall black transvestite plies her night trade.

  Eventually, I’m drawn by the lights of the city, not just the neon streaming by the car windows but also the white globes on the street lamps, and I scamper to the back where I can watch the lights by myself. I close my eyes tight, then open them, loving the tracers and star bursts on my private screen.

  Up in front, the fat Hungarian lady and my father are discussing the United States’ many betrayals, first of Eastern Europe after World War II, then of Cuba after the Bay of Pigs invasion.

  My mother, whom I believe is as beautiful as any of the palm trees fluttering on the median strip as we drive by, leans her head against the car window, tired and bereft. She comes to when the fat Hungarian lady, in a fit of giggles, breaks from the road and into the parking lot of a supermarket so shrouded in light that I’m sure it’s a flying saucer docked here in Miami.

  We did this when we first came to America, the fat Hungarian lady says, leading us up to the supermarket. And it’s something only people like us can appreciate.

  My father bobs his head up and down and my mother follows, her feet scraping the ground as she drags me by the hand.

  We walk through the front door and then a turnstile, and suddenly we are in the land of plenty—row upon row of cereal boxes, TV dinners, massive displays of fresh pineapple, crate after crate of oranges, shelves of insect repellent, and every kind of broom. The dairy section is jammed with cheese and chocolate milk.

  There’s a butcher shop in the back, and my father says, Oh my god, look, and points to a slab of bloody red ribs thick with meat. My god my god my god, he says, as if he’s never seen such a thing, or as if we’re on the verge of starvation.

  Calm down, please, my mother says, but he’s not listening, choking back tears and hanging off the fat Hungarian lady who’s now walking him past the sausages and hot dogs, packaged bologna and chipped beef.

  All around us people stare, but then my father says, We just arrived from Cuba, and there’s so much here!

  The fat Hungarian lady pats his shoulder and says to the gathering crowd, Yes, he came on a little boat with his whole family; look at his beautiful daughter who will now grow up well-fed and free.

  I push up against my mother, who feels as smooth and thin as a palm leaf on Good Friday. My father beams at me, tears in his eyes. All the while, complete strangers congratulate him on his wisdom and courage, give him hugs and money, and welcome him to the United States.

  There are things that can’t be told.

  Things like when we couldn’t find an apartment, everyone’s saying it was because landlords in Miami didn’t rent to families with kids, but knowing, always, that it was more than that.

  Things like my doing very poorly on an IQ test because I didn’t speak English, and getting tossed into a special education track, where it took until high school before somebody realized I didn’t belong there.

  Things like a North American hairdresser’s telling my mother she didn’t do her kind of hair.

  Like my father, finally realizing he wasn’t going to go back to Cuba anytime soon, trying to hang himself with the light cord in the bathroom while my mother cleaned rooms at a nearby luxury hotel, but falling instead and breaking his arm.

  Like accepting welfare checks, because there really was no other way.

  Like knowing that giving money to exile groups often meant helping somebody buy a private yacht for Caribbean vacations, not for invading Cuba, but also knowing that refusing to donate only invited questions about our own patriotism.

  And knowing that Nixon really wasn’t the one, and wasn’t doing anything, and wouldn’t have done anything, even if he’d finished his second term, no matter what a good job the Cuban burglars might have done at the Watergate Hotel.

  What if we’d stayed? What if we’d never left Cuba? What if we were there when the last of the counterrevolution was beaten, or when Mariel harbor leaked thousands of Cubans out of the island, or when the i Games came? What if we’d never left?

  All my life, my father will say I would have been a young Communist, falling prey to the revolution’s propaganda. According to him, I would have believed ice cream treats came from Fidel, that those hairless Russians were our friends, and that my duty as a revolutionary was to turn him in for his counterrevolutionary activities—which he will swear he’d never have given up if we’d stayed in Cuba.

  My mother will shake her head but won’t contradict him. She’ll say the revolution uses people, and that I, too, would probably have been used, then betrayed, and that we’ll never know, but maybe I would have wound up in jail whether I ever believed in the revolution or not, because I would have talked back to the wrong person, me and my big mouth.

  I wonder, if we’d stayed then who, if anyone—if not Martha and the boy from the military academy—would have been my blond lovers, or any kind of lovers at all.

  And what if we’d stayed, and there had been no revolution?

  My parents will never say, as if somehow they know that their lives were meant to exist only in opposition.

  I try to imagine who I would have been if Fidel had never come into Havana sitting triumphantly on top of that tank, but I can’t. I can only think of variations of who I am, not who I might have been.

  In college one day, I’ll tell my mother on the phone that I want to go back to Cuba to see, to consider all these questions, and she’ll pause, then say, What for? There’s nothing there for you, we’ll tell you whatever you need to know, don’t you trust us?

  Over my dead body, my father will say, listening in on the other line.

  Years later, when I fly to Washington, D.C., and take a cab straight to the Cuban Interests Section to apply for a visa, a golden-skinned man with the dulled eyes of a bureaucrat will tell me that because I came to the U.S. too young to make the decision to leave for myself—that it was in fact my parents who made it for me—the Cuban government does not recognize my U.S. citizenship.

  You need to renew your Cuban passport, he will say. Perhaps your parents have it, or a copy of your birth certificate, or maybe you have a relative or friend who could go through the records in Cuba for you.

  I’ll remember the passport among my mother’s priceless papers, handwritten in blue ink, even the official parts. But when I ask my parents for it, my mother will say nothing, and my father will say, It’s not here anymore, but in a bank box, where you’ll never see it. Do you think I would let you betray us like that?

  The boy from the military academy will say oh baby baby as he grinds his hips into me. And Martha and all the girls before and after her here in the United States will say ooohhh ooooohhhhh oooooooohhhhhhhh as my fingers explore inside them.

  But the first time I make love with a Cuban, a politically controversial exile writer of some repute, she will say, Aaaaaayyyyyyaaaaaayyyyaaaaay and lift me by my hair from between her legs, strings of saliva like sea foam between my mouth and her shiny curls. Then she’ll drop me onto her mouth where our tongues will poke each other like wily porpoises.

  In one swift movement, she’ll flip me on my back, pillows falling every which way from the bed, and kiss every part of me, between my breasts and under my arms, and she’ll suck my fingertips, and the inside of my elbows. And when she rests her head on my belly, her ear listening not to my heartbeat but to the fluttering of palm trees, she’ll sit up, place one hand on my throat, the other on my sex, and kiss me there, under my rib cage, around my navel, where I am softest and palest.

&nb
sp; The next morning, listening to her breathing in my arms, I will wonder how this could have happened, and if it would have happened at all if we’d stayed in Cuba. And if so, if it would have been furtive or free, with or without the revolution. And how—knowing now how cataclysmic life really is—I might hold on to her for a little while longer.

  When my father dies of a heart attack in 1990 (it will happen while he’s driving, yelling at somebody, and the car will just sail over to the sidewalk and stop dead at the curb, where he’ll fall to the seat and his arms will somehow fold over his chest, his hands set in prayer), I will come home to Florida from Chicago, where I’ll be working as a photographer for the Tribune. I won’t be taking pictures of murder scenes or politicians then but rather rock stars and local performance artists.

  I’ll be living in Uptown, in a huge house with a dry darkroom in one of the bedrooms, now converted and sealed black, where I cut up negatives and create photomontages that are exhibited at the Whitney Biennial and hailed by the critics as filled with yearning and hope.

  When my father dies, I will feel sadness and a wish that certain things had been said, but I will not want more time with him. I will worry about my mother, just like all the relatives who predict she will die of heartbreak within months (she has diabetes and her vision is failing). But she will instead outlive both him and me.

  I’ll get to Miami Beach, where they’ve lived in a little coach house off Collins Avenue since their retirement, and find cousins and aunts helping my mother go through insurance papers and bank records, my father’s will, his photographs and mementos: his university degree, a faded list of things to take back to Cuba (including Christmas lights), a jaundiced clipping from Diario de las Américas about our arrival which quotes my father as saying that Havana harbor is mined, and a photo of my mother and me, wide-eyed and thin, sitting on the couch in the processing center.