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I was 4 when I came to the United States from Cuba. My
memories of the island are short, vignetted fragments; bits and pieces that I’m
not entirely sure I completely recall or I’ve imagined them from stories. If I
close my eyes I can see my “circulo infantile”, or day care, and I remember how much I hated
the food there. I remember the rocking chair that my father brought from the
Soviet Union for me, and frying an egg with my cousins in my grandmother’s tiny
kitchen. I am Cuban but I am not entirely Cuban, a double life juxtaposed
between rice and beans and McDonalds. Cuba is where I was born, but America is
the way I think, the anthem that brings me to tears, and the land I call my
definite home.
Going to visit Cuba has always been as surreal as visiting a
safari. From the standpoint that I need a visa to get into the country where I
was born, a place where visiting should be my birthright, things are bizarre.
The people there face impossibilities that I can’t imagine every day. I can’t
imagine a world without the Internet, without Twitter and YouTube and Google; a
world without credit cards and fast food chains, liberties that are “self
evident”, and air conditioning. It’s a place where when you compare what the people make to
the price of necessities, it might just be the most expensive country in the
world. The island of my parents, with its classic cars, pot holed streets,
deteriorating buildings, has always been in my mind a place stuck in another
time that I don’t entirely understand.
I am just another tourist in my own country.
