Like members of just about any ethnic group, Cuban-Americans, are generally represented in literature, film and television as caricatured stereotypes. The men are often depicted as hot-headed and rife with machismo. The women are portrayed as quick to gossip. While every Cuban-American, no matter the gender, are often presented as overly nostalgic for how superior Cuba was before Fidel Castro and quick to label anyone they don’t agree with as a “comunista” with all these opinions spouted out over a meal of arroz con pollo and a soundtrack of Salsa music.
But just as citizens of the United States would be outraged if everyone from our diverse country was played in another nation’s popular culture as obese, cowboy hat wearing, pickup truck driving, gun toting ignoramuses, so should Cuban-Americans find it ridiculous to be seen as a monoculture. Sometimes Cuban-American writers can use the labels placed on their culture to surprising effects. Richard Blanco in his memoir, The Prince of Los Cucuyos, uses his Cuban-American family to display his alienation as he came of age. Meanwhile Cristina Garcia, in her novel, Monkey Hunting, demonstrates just as people from the United States consider their nation to be a melting pot, the same could easily be said of Cuba.
The first figure in entertainment to shape the worldwide collective mind of what a Cuban-American is, was the entertainer Desi Arnaz. Arnaz fled to Miami from Cuba in the less well known Revolution of 1933, and shot to fame as the star of the 1950’s most popular television show, I Love Lucy. The literary critic Gustavo Pérez Firmat observed in his book, Lost in Translation from Life on the Hyphen-The Cuban-American Way, “several generations of Americans have acquired many of their notions of how Cubans behave, talk, lose their temper, and treat or mistreat their wives by watching Ricky love Lucy. I once had a Cuban-American student who claimed he had learned to be a Cuban male by watching I Love Lucy reruns from his home in Hialeah”.
In the 1970’s another popular television show ¿Qué Pasa, USA?
further captured the U.S. public’s imagination of what a Cuban-American family looked like. This PBS production found laughs and drama in the conflict of three generations of Cuban-Americans living under the same Miami roof. There are two grandparents, two parents, and two children with the elder sibling born in Cuba and the younger born in exile in Miami. Yeidy M. Rivero in her essay “Interpreting Cubanness, Americanness, and the Sitcom” describes the motivation behind that show’s production, “¿Qué Pasa U.S.A.?’s main purpose was to help Cuban-American adolescents to comfortably embrace their Cubanness and Americanness, the veiled message was for their parents and extended family members: Cuba is the remembered, loved, and nostalgically imagined homeland; the U.S.A. is the present and, for better or for worse, it is ours and our children’s and grandchildren’s new home”.
A young Richard Blanco was one of the Cuban-Americans influenced by this series. He documents throughout The Prince of Los Cucuyos how much television affected his young mind. So it is not much of a leap to assume The Prince of Los Cucuyos was greatly inspired by a show that paralleled Blanco’s childhood in ¿Qué Pasa U.S.A.?. Both the fictional Peña family from the sitcom and the real Blanco family of the memoir featured a three-generation household in a suburban Miami neighborhood. Both works feature dialogue that transitions between being spoken in Spanish and English without blinking an eye.
Blanco realizes for many potential readers of his generation television is a “safe place”. The hours spent in front of a screen with remote control in hand, shaped the values and conventions of many that grew up in the late twentieth century. So in the first half of the book he smartly sets up his family to be reminiscent of what viewers would experience on a sitcom like ¿Qué Pasa U.S.A.?. Abuela, Blanco’s grandmother, is portrayed to comedic effect as a schemer, one who always has a trick up her sleeve. Abuelo, Blanco’s grandfather, is portrayed with a familiar sitcom trope, as the fish out of water. In the chapter “Losing the Farm,” Abuelo sets up a chicken coop in the backyard that spirals out of control with an overabundance of poultry and rabbits. When animal control is called in to their Westchester home Abuelo is stunned that his new country is not as free as he assumed. Abuelo then spouts out dialogue that would fit every stereotype of how a Cuban exile would describe the differences between the US and Cuba. “What do you mean I can’t have chickens? I can have all the chickens I want – cojones – this is a free country. That’s why I came here from Cuba and now you tell me I can’t have chickens”.
The Prince of Los Cucuyos is very smartly set up
with the comedic structure of a sitcom before slowly delving into more serious issues, giving the readers candy if you will before slowly seeping in some medicine. The absurd interaction between Abuelo and animal control ends peacefully. At the end of the chapter, however, what started off as a comedic situation ended tragically.
Once a night each week the Blancos’ neighbors would have a loud, vulgar domestic squabble. The entire Blanco family would come into Richard’s room to listen to the fights as though they were entertainment. “Caridad and Pedrito’s epic fights were more titillating than any R-rated movie we’d ever sneaked into or any of Mama’s telenovelas on the Spanish channel”. One could imagine such a scenario of a family watching from a window their neighbors’ fighting as a recurring schtick in ¿Qué Pasa U.S.A.? or any number of other sitcoms. It also fits into crass stereotypes of Cuban-Americans as loud, dramatic, and unconcerned of who hears what they have to say. But then Blanco gives us a resolution to these next door neighbors’ disputes, that no television sitcom would ever dare present to an audience. The husband next door shot his wife and then himself in a murder-suicide. Abuelo as the person who discovers the bodies cuts a different figure when he states in shock, “How could he – his own wife and then himself ¿Por que, Pedrito, por que?”.
As The Prince of Los Cucuyos progresses Abuela shifts from a stock comical character who says whatever comes to mind, similar to the grandparents on ¿Qué Pasa U.S.A.?, to a more menacing figure. In the latter chapters of the book, Richard reveals how much her bold statements of how he should appear traumatized him. In one passage he reminisces, “But now that I was twenty pounds overweight, she was mortified: ‘Bad enough being a sissy – but a fat sissy’”. As a child this commentary seemed acceptable, if not to be expected. This was the culture that Blanco had grown up in. This is how he figured all Cuban-American households worked. It was part of their culture. How shocked a young Richard would be to learn there was not just one Cuban culture, but a myriad of them.
As mentioned at the beginning of this essay, it would be foolish to try to capture everyone in the US has having the same heritage and norms. There are Italian-Americans, African-Americans, and Asian-Americans. Just as one could put any region of the world with a hyphen in front of American to serve as a descriptor of some subculture, so could you do the same for the people of Cuba.
The scholar Fernando Ortiz in his essay, “The Human Factors of Cubanidad,”
pointed out that every Cuban originally came from somewhere else. Even the “Natives” according to Ortiz came from other American lands mentioning by name the Guajiro, the Jíbaro, the Macurije, and the Tairona people. “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 over the centuries the entrances would not cease: from the Mediterranean, the Alps, northern Europe, people of the most far-flung provenances”.
For Ortiz there was no one monoculture of Cubans or later Cuban-Americans as an episode of ¿Qué Pasa U.S.A.?, or an excerpt from The Prince of Los Cucuyos could lead one to believe. But there was a tie that bound all Cubans and Cuban-Americans everywhere. Ortiz dubbed that quality, Cubanidad.
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.
This Cubanidad was evident for Blanco in his book’s final chapter, “El Farito”. In this section Blanco and his family are enjoying the day at Bill Baggs Park reminiscing about the past in Cuba, as Blanco had been witness to countless times before. The difference this time was a peer named Ariel was present. Ariel was a more recent exile from Cuba. Through the lens of someone his age, Cuba no longer seemed theoretical to Blanco, but rather an actual place that if not for decisions made by his parents where he could have grown up. Blanco could feel a connection to his people, his heritage,
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.
Cristina Garcia’s novel Monkey Hunting beyond serving as an entertaining read also provides a primer in just how many diverse ingredients make up the ajiaco of Cubanidad. The first character readers are introduced to is Chen Pan who comes from China. By going from a man who only knows Chinese to learning about African culture and the Spanish language, Chen Pan goes through the path of Creolization that Benitez-Rojo described. “Creolization is not merely a process (a word that implies forward movement) but a discontinuous series of recurrences, of happenings, whose sole law is change”.
As we meet Chen Pan’s various descendants as the book progresses, we learn the family’s journey from China to Cuba was not a straight line. Chen Pan in 1857 embarks from China to Cuba, but later we meet his granddaughter who was born back in China in 1899. In other chapters we meet Chen Pan’s great-great grandson, Domingo, who was born in Cuba, but has Chinese and African genes in him, fled to New York City and halfway through the book is back in Asia fighting in the Vietnam War on behalf of the United States.
A surprisingly small percentage of the book takes place in Cuba. Chen Pan during his plantation enslavement and his eventual escape along with the memories that Domingo has of his family’s time on the island are the only portions in Cuba. But the scenes set on Cuba do portray the island’s multiculturalism vividly. There is a Chinatown where fish sellers are quoting Confucius. There are Spanish descended assistants working for Chinese employers. Finally, there are African slaves, one of which Chen Pan makes his home with and eventually, if the family tree at the front of the book is correct, spawns his children.
Another important theme to Monkey Hunting
is how crucial migration is to the vibrancy of Cuban and Cuban-American culture. There was a line the one character who did make a round trip journey from Cuba to China and back again, Lorenzo, said towards the end of the book that had great relevance toward this theme. “History is like the human body… overly hot or cold or rotting with stagnation”. The dialogue was meant to refer to the wars and the political upheavals that took place throughout the century chronicled in the novel and the effect these historical events had on the characters. But it’s interesting to also consider the quote in light of a society as a whole and the benefits of transculturation that ensues because of the constant influx and outflux of a diverse group of people.
“After so many years in Cuba, Chen Pan had forgotten much of his Chinese. He mixed his talk with words from here and words from there until he spoke no true language at all”. Language is not a barrier to cohabitation in this book. Chen Pan and Lucrecia, his wife of African descent, share a happy life together in spite of neither being able to speak to the other in their native tongue. There was a parallel in the relationship between his descendent, Domingo, the American soldier by way of Cuba, and his Vietnamese partner Tham Thanh Lan, nearly a century later.
Migration often happens due to forces outside of the migrants’ control. The nineteenth century Cuban renaissance man Jose Marti gave great thought to how the conflict between imperialist powers and their colonies led to migration both to and from Cuba. Marti himself was forced to migrate to the U.S.. While in exile he expressed how he believed imperial conflicts stemmed from the European countries and the U.S., not bothering to understand the ajiaco that makes up Cuba. “Let the heart’s fires unfreeze all that is motionless in America, and let the country’s natural blood surge and throb through its veins! Standing tall, the workmen’s eyes full of joy, the new men of America are saluting each other from one country to another”. To Marti each land and each people are different, if people from one land do not bother to attempt to know the people from another land, there is bound to be conflict.
That is a philosophy that Marti seemed to live by and believed those in power should also follow. “The government must be born from the country. The spirit of the government must be the spirit of the country. The form of the government must be in harmony with the country’s natural constitution. The government is no more than an equilibrium among the country’s natural elements”.
Marti, as a man who died in battle in independence against Spain so that Cuban could govern itself, could undoubtedly relate to a line Chen Pan delivers to his grandson, “In your life there will be two paths, one easy and one difficult. Listen well: Always choose the difficult one”.
The characters of Monkey Hunting are not nearly the political revolutionaries that Marti was, but simply by existing they all find themselves in violent and dangerous conflicts. Monkey Hunting goes along with Marti’s theory that those in power do not seek to comprehend those they rule. Often the people with the least, immigrants that enter a new land with nothing to their name like Chen Pan or Domingo’s father, Pipo, bear the harshest brunt of this lack of care.
Chen Pan begins the book as a slave,
shipped across the world to chop sugar cane at a plantation. Then in midlife his body is put in grave danger when he finds himself in the middle of the Cuban Wars of Independence. Chen Pan’s granddaughter that he never met, Chen Fang, ends the book as a political prisoner in 1970 China. She’s been accused for working with French intelligence, because of a love affair she had with a Frenchwoman. The one time this character has ever truly been in love, she finds herself punished for it. Finally, there is Domingo, a Cuban exile whose father died by suicide after never getting over the trauma of jailed in Castro’s Cuba. Alone in New York, Domingo decides to enlist in the armed forces which ship him off to Vietnam. A landmine explosion leads to Domingo losing part of his intestines.
Perhaps this history of migration towards Cuba, as fictionally documented in Monkey Hunting, gave the large numbers of Cubans who fled to the United States, post-Castro, the courage to leave. If they are only a generation or two removed from people who traveled across the world to get to Cuba, then uprooting your family to leave Cuba might not seem as psychologically daunting. It makes one wonder if all the Cuban-Americans who are chronicled sticking together in the Miami of The Prince of Los Cucuyos, did so for the obvious reason that they have a common language and place of birth, or for the less obvious reason that they are travelers, willing to make home wherever will have them.
“Cuba siempre sera Cuba, Cuba will always be Cuba, and Cubans will always be Cuban”, the character of Ariel says in the final chapter of The Prince of Los Cucuyos. This character of Ariel serves as a funhouse mirror reflection for Blanco, as he tried to imagine what his life would be like if his parents hadn’t fled Cuba until after he was born. If Blanco had spent a requisite time on the island, like Ariel had, he wondered would he feel less alienated from his family? Blanco has an epiphany when Ariel panics in the ocean, traumatized from a near death accident while leaving Cuba and leans on Blanco for support. “we were cubanaso and gringo, one and the same, with one nameless country for a moment, until we slowly loosened our embrace”.
At that moment he sees their commonality.
Their life experiences might have been very different. Ariel with his seeming confidence with roasting a pig and his trouble with the English language, might appear very different from Blanco who would grow up to write poetry in English. For that matter the characters of Chen Pan and Domingo and the Peña family of ¿Qué Pasa U.S.A.? along with the historical figures of Jose Marti and Desi Arnaz, all Cubans or Cuban-Americans all seem to be of many different cultures. But Fernando Ortiz would undoubtedly describe them all as having Cubanidad.
Cuba was a nexus where so many different cultures intersected. Saying literature or a fictional character or a living person possesses Cubanidad might simply be saying it represents humanity in any of its many diverse forms.
