Home is where I lay my head. There’s no place like home. Home is a state of mind. There’s countless clichés thrown around about what exactly constitutes a home. For the Cuban-American author and the characters they create, home is a much more complicated idea. In short stories such as Ana Menéndez’s “Her Mother’s House” and Roberto G. Fernandez’s “Raining Backwards,” home is a central theme and a concept which creates complications for its characters. The protagonists of both stories are children of exiles. Their parents or grandparents fled Cuba when Castro took over, leaving the characters unsure if there is an answer of whether the US or Cuba feels more like home.
In “Her Mother’s House,” the central character, Lisette, tried to make sense of her parents’ tales of trauma. Lisette amalgamated the two terrible Cuban heads of state as a kid reminiscing, “Batista Castro was one man, the all powerful tyrant of the Caribbean”. A grown up Lisette visits Cuba and takes time to find her mother’s childhood home. It’s quite unlike how her mother’s stories painted it. But again Lisette must make up a reality. This time the story is not for a child to make sense of an adult world, but rather to protect an adult’s memories of childhood. So she lies to her mother telling her, “Everything was the same”.
Roberto G. Fernandez takes a more playful approach with “Raining Backwards”. He gently parodies the idea that one can ever go home again. Abuela recruits her grandson, Michael, to build a boat so she can float from Key Biscayne back to Cuba. Abuela is depicted as having dementia or at least not of being of sound mind. She embarks on the open sea planning to ride the currents south to the island of her youth. As an adult Michael realizes he read the map wrong and the Gulf Stream possibly took his grandmother north to some “iceberg off the coast of Norway having died alone like an old tropical Viking”.
The scholar Fernando Ortiz would not believe Lisette in “Her Mother’s House,” nor Abuela in “Raining Backwards” would need to journey so far to find Cuba. Ortiz wrote in “The Human Factors of Cubanidad,” Cuba is in each Cuban’s heart regardless of their geographical location.
Ortiz defines Cubanidad as what it means to be Cuban.
Cubanidad in his opinion, does not depend on whether you live in Cuba, nor that you have a Cuban passport. Cubanidad for Ortiz comes not from an ethnicity, a race, an upbringing, nor a religion. Instead he said, “Cubanidad is belonging to the culture of Cuba”. There is no blood test, no DNA swab, in Ortiz’s perspective to prove one possesses Cubanidad. Rather one knows it when they see it, whether in real life or in literature.
One of the defining characteristics of this Cubanidad for Ortiz is described with the metaphor of ajiaco. Ajiaco is a stew of the indigenous Taino, a mishmash of legumes and meats, “cooked with boiling water until it gives off a very thick and succulent broth, and it is seasoned with the very Cuban chili pepper (ají) that gives the stew its name”. The mixture of many ingredients coming together is what makes the stew delicious, and it is also what makes the Cuban culture beautiful to Ortiz. As a port of transit Cuba has brought together Natives, Africans, Asians, Europeans, Middle Easterners, all on one island. And best of all for Ortiz, ajiaco like Cuba itself, “is not a finished stew, but rather a constant cooking”.
In another work by Ortiz, “Cuban Counterpoint: Tobacco and Sugar,” he explains why because of this ajiaco metaphor, it is best to study Cuban culture and literature through a lens of transculturation rather than via acculturation. Acculturation he describes as “the process of transition from one culture to another”. That is not what he believes occurs in the ajiaco of Cubanidad. Transculturation is a better term he believes because that describes all the various cultures that are coexisting and thriving and cooking together in Cuba.
Though Ortiz would not live long enough to read “Raining Backwards”
his theory would have Michael who never step foot in Cuba, possessing just as much Cubanidad as his Abuela who has strong memories of living on the island. Michael’s life in the US would be just another ingredient in this ajiaco of Cuban culture that he passes on to his grandchild at the end of the story.
Ana Menéndez in her essay “Traveling With My Selves” reveals that she mined her own personal history for her short story, “Her Mother’s House.” Both Menéndez and Lisette, the protagonist of “Her Mother’s House,” have Cuban exile parents who met after they fled to the US. “I always thought of them as Cuban. But I never knew them when they were ‘Cuban,’ and I realize now that I only understood their identities through the prism of exile”. Especially poignant to Menéndez is when her mother, who she always held up as a paragon of being Cuban, admits due to her Spanish and Lebanese heritage to never have felt Cuban until she came to the US. Then once in the US she never quite feel American either.
As both Menéndez, her creation, Lisette, and their respective mothers feel not at home in the US, nor in Cuba, one might wonder how long this theme of never feeling at home will continue in Cuban-American literature. After studying literature of other exiled people, Menéndez considers this sense of homelessness might be a central feature for Cuban-American storytellers for generations to come. “Beowulf. the Old English epic poem, was written in England around the year 975, but it took place in Denmark and Sweden. In a 1966 lecture, Jorge Luis Borges noted the irony. ‘This indicates” Borges cheerfully points out, “that after three hundred years living in new lands, the Anglo-Saxons still felt homesick for their old homelands on the Baltic Sea”.
Interestingly in “Her Mother’s House,” even the Cubans who never left the island do not have a secure feeling of home. When Lisette visits her mother’s childhood home, her family’s former servants who have taken over the home for a decade, see her as a threat. They assume, “You are here to take the house”.
Ortiz could point at this restlessness stemming from the fact that every Cuban originally came from somewhere else. Even the “Natives” according to Ortiz came from other American lands. “Since 1492 the Whites of Europe have arrived, and they have not stopped coming. If in Columbus’ caravels there were Castilians, Andalusians, Catalans, Galicians, Basques, Jews, Italians, and one or another Englishman”.
Later Ortiz mentions the African slaves, the Asians, and the Middle Easterners who all ended up for one reason or another as part of the Cuban ajiaco. “The whole gamut of culture run by Europe in a span of more than four millenniums took place in Cuba in less than four centuries. In Europe the change was step by step; here it was by leaps and bounds.
But for Eliana Rivero, it is nurture rather than nature that gives Cuban-American literature
its confused sense of where home is. It isn’t the relocation of great-great-grandparents relocating to Cuba, it is the more recent fleeing from Castro’s Cuba, that makes home a central theme in Cuban-American literature. For Rivero what makes Cuban-American literature stand apart is the authors’ constant reminder that they are exiles, “whether lived or inherited, cultivated or learned”. This feeling from Cuban-Americans is that they do not quite belong here in the US, or there in Cuba. This absence of belonging, Rivero believes is a defining characteristic of Cuban-American literature.
“Raining Backwards” fits into Rivero’s theory. When in this story Abuela has the idea that on a handmade boat she can sail back to Cuba, the narrator, her grandson Michael, goes along with it and aids her. In old age Michael realizes Abuela probably never ended up there in Cuba, nor back here in the US. Instead Michael figures she probably ended up somewhere else, maybe “inside some floating iceberg off the coast of Norway”. It’s an absurd notion that she ended up on the on other side of the world, but one that neatly fits into Rivero’s idea that Cuban-Americans feel neither truly American, nor Cuban. To Michael they are drifting aimlessly through the currents of the world.
Certainly many exiles and descendants of exiles do feel lost at sea. But as Roberto G. Fernandez and Ana Menéndez prove in “Raining Backwards” and “Her Mother’s House,” there are talented Cuban-Americans using this confusion over where they can feel at home as inspiration for creating entertaining and enlightening literature.
