CUBANET ... CUBANEWS

April 17, 2000



Mariel: An Unexpected Bridge

By Uva de Aragon. Published Sunday, April 16, 2000, in the Miami Herald

Twenty years ago this week, the Mariel Boatlift began. Uva de Aragon, whose family settled in Washington, D.C. in the 1960s, always wondered about her compatriots growing up in Cuba. After Mariel, she met and befriended new arrival Reinaldo Arenas and found that the twain across the Florida Straits indeed could meet and bind.

Uva de Aragon is assistant director of the Cuban Research Institute at Florida International University. She has published several books and writes a weekly column in Spanish for Diario Las Americas.

One of my greatest fears during the first 20 years of exile was that I would not be able to communicate with my compatriots whenever I could return to Cuba. By the early 1960s the vast majority of my relatives, classmates and teachers -- almost everybody I had known during my 15 years on the island -- had left the country.

Letters stopped arriving from Havana. There was no travel to Cuba. In Washington, D.C., where my family settled, the Cold War rhetoric portrayed Cuba as a dark, far-away house of horrors. Our annual summer vacation in Miami was the closest we could get to home.

And yet, as I watched the fleeting beauty of the cherry blossoms every spring and the leaves turn into blazing hues of red and gold every fall, I held on to childhood images of palm trees, sandy beaches and the caring, tender gaze of the grandmother I was never to embrace again.

My nostalgia found comfort in the vague intuition that on the other side of the murky waters dividing Cubans, there was someone just like me who, unsuspectingly, shared the same dreams and fears.

In the middle of long winter nights, I wrote poems to this distant brother or sister, who, in spite of geographic and ideological differences, I would someday be able to recognize as that mirror-image of myself.

In the spring of 1980, two years after I had moved to Miami with my family, 10,000 Cubans stampeded into the Embassy of Peru in Havana seeking political asylum. During the next few months, more than 100,000 Cubans entered the United States through the Mariel boatlift. In the ensuing weeks, I worked as a volunteer at Tamiami Park helping the new refugees fill out immigration forms.

There I learned that the writer Reinaldo Arenas was among the newcomers. One of Arenas's novels had touched me deeply, and I wanted to meet him. So when he was invited by the University of Florida for a reading of his works, I decided to attend. A few days later, we were sitting together on a flight to Gainesville.

It was Reinaldo's first airplane ride, and he expressed his amazement over every little detail with a childish innocence, which I later realized was an intrinsic part of his charming personality. The short trip held some surprising revelations for me as well. Reinaldo and I were a year apart, shared the same astrological sign and had read many of the same books.

A series of mishaps after his presentation made us miss the last flight out, and we had to stay overnight. We spent hours together that evening, sipping wine and talking about literature and Cuba.

Our life experiences had been very different, but we were both writers, belonged to the same generation and shared a history and culture that spanned centuries before our birth. I had finally met that mysterious soul mate I had invoked in my poems during the cold winter nights of exile.

During the next decade our friendship grew. Together we traveled to writers' conferences, celebrated birthdays, held poetry readings and visited Key West, his port of entry to the United States.

On Dec. 7, 1990, terminally ill with AIDS, Reinaldo Arenas shot himself. During his last years, he worked feverishly and left behind a considerable literary corpus, which served to bring Cuban literature to the attention of critics and editors.

Twenty years have passed since the Mariel boatlift and the first day I met the young writer from home who contributed so profusely to Cuban letters and to my own understanding of my country. I did not recognize it then, but Reinaldo Arenas and the ``Marielitos'' represented for me, and perhaps for many more exiles, the beginning of a long process of coming to terms with our own identity and with Cubans in the island.

They opened the door not to the Cuba of our faded memories, but to its new and complex realities. We learned through them that in spite of all the differences, we were one and the same people.

Despite some initial negative impressions of the Mariel boat people, today the vast majority are successful, law-abiding members of our community. In 1980, the new exiles seemed to dress and speak differently. Twenty years later, it is hard to tell them apart from the Cubans who preceded them.

Never before have such a large number of refugees been absorbed into a society with such ease. It is a tribute to the American system, to Miami and to the ``Marielitos.''

Castro remains in power in Cuba but many things have changed in the world and in the minds and hearts of Cubans in the island and in the diaspora since those lonely, nostalgic years of my exile in Washington. Cubans know each other better now. Families and friends communicate across the Florida Straits by e-mail and phone. Dissidents in the island talk on Miami radio shows. Flights take off daily from this city headed for the Jose Marti Airport. Long-time exiles like myself have returned to visit in rising numbers.

Annual remittances to Cuba have soared into high nine-digit figures. It is hard to believe that the slow, growing process of reconciliation could now be reversed.

Unintentionally, the Mariel refugees built the first bridge.

Copyright 2000 Miami Herald

[ BACK TO THE NEWS ]

SECCIONES

NOTICIAS
...Prensa Independiente
...Prensa Internacional
...Prensa Gubernamental

OTHER LANGUAGES
...Spanish
...German
...French

INDEPENDIENTES
...Cooperativas Agrícolas
...Movimiento Sindical
...Bibliotecas
...MCL
...Ayuno

DEL LECTOR
...Letters
...Cartas
...Debate
...Opinión

BUSQUEDAS
...News Archive
...News Search
...Documents
...Links

CULTURA
...Painters
...Photos of Cuba
...Cigar Labels

CUBANET
...Semanario
...About Us
...Informe 1998
...E-Mail


CubaNet News, Inc.
145 Madeira Ave,
Suite 207
Coral Gables, FL 33134
(305) 774-1887