Albita Rodriguez. Published Wednesday, May 24, 2000, in the Miami Herald
I was born in 1962, and the first thing I learned at the early Elianesque age of 5 was to swear before my Cuban flag that I wanted to be like a certain Argentine [Ernesto ``Che'' Guevara]. My highest aspiration at that age of games and dreams had to be to love war, to provoke it and to feel that
nothing existed beyond what I was being taught.
Our greatest accomplishment was to learn not to think. We knew that Cubans had to be like the Argentine of the sexy beard who was becoming, little by little, the fifth Beatle. He was Lennon's strongest rival, except that John was banned because he sang in English, an enemy language that carried
big problems in ideology and morality. How many Elians were imprisoned for listening to his records or for wearing their hair long?
I was an indoctrinated and manipulated little Elian, wearing a red bandana around my neck, seeing pictures of the green-bearded monster in my house, my school, in hospitals, everywhere -- and every day substituting his image for my father's.
I remember a day in which the regime summoned our rage over what the imperialist yanquis were doing in Vietnam, only to give us precise orders years later to go -- as forced volunteers -- to the Congo, Ethiopia, Angola, Nicaragua and so forth. Hundreds of thousands of little Elians never
returned -- killed in a strange land. They were the New Man, killing machines. ``If I advance, follow me; if I stop, push me; if I retreat, kill me.''
My teen years were especially marked by the absolute negation of any type of religion. Catholic little Elians could look forward to nothing within ``the strange cause of the revolution.'' Other Christians couldn't, either; to believe in the deeply rooted and wonderfully Cuban black religions,
inherited from our African ancestors, was a total violation of the system's principles. They gave us another religion, the only religion: Castrocommunism.
And that omnipotent god who compelled us to hate materialism would sell us T-shirts with a picture of Mickey Mouse or Donald Duck and, if we were lucky, a nice pair of jeans in the best gringo style.
We saw other little Elians who boarded planes alone, because the green-bearded monster forbade the departure of their parents. Many of them grew up by themselves, and, oddly enough, the man in the blood-spattered fatigues forgot to care.
I knew thousands of little Elians who wept because the mob rained eggs, stones and blows on them. They hid in their homes without light, water, poems or songs, waiting for a flight, with no alternative other than silence, anxiety and fear.
Later I learned about other little Elians. Children who never again saw their parents, who were executed, massacred under the circuslike sneer of a mocking and inhumane justice.
Does anybody have any idea of how many little Elians rest in the deep waters that separate hell from hope? How many little Elians, taken away by mothers with similar suicidal desperation, today learn to be Basques, Galicians, Americans, Mexicans, Argentines and members of whatever benevolent
idiosyncrasy that accepts them?
I -- who belong to the new generation of people who believe in nothing and no one, skillful manipulators of the double standard, the streetwalkers, the disoriented, sad and misunderstood souls vegetating in space and time -- feel the uncertainty of not being who I am, of nothingness, of
emptiness, of a solitude in my bones that already seems eternal.
Discovering freedom cost me a lot. My freedom, the freedom that belongs to me and to which I was always entitled. But I didn't know about its scent of rain, open fields, mountains, clouds, rivers. I didn't know its rainbow hues. I didn't know how to touch it or caress it in the strength of a
verse. I didn't know how to listen to it, in the voice of summer and sea and wind. I couldn't get it out of my brain. I didn't understand its form, its flight, because I didn't have wings, because I couldn't -- and didn't know how to -- defend it as I can today.
Because I, too, was Elian Gonzalez once. And you?
Albita Rodriguez is a popular singer. Her column is reprinted from El Nuevo Herald.
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