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Bastard diasporas: illegitimacy, exile, and U.S. Cuban cultural politics

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Bastard diasporas: illegitimacy, exile, and U.S. Cuban cultural politics

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Content BASTARD DIASPORAS: ILLEGITIMACY , EXILE, AND U.S. CUBAN CULTURAL POLITICS by Jesús J. Hernández A Dissertation Presented to the FACULTY OF THE USC GRADUATE SCHOOL UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY (AMERICAN STUDIES AND ETHNICITY) August 2012 Copyright 2012 Jesús J. Hernández ii Acknowledgements In completing this project I have so much to be thankful for, none the least of which are those friends, colleagues, and institutions who supported me throughout this process. My dissertation would not have been possible without the support and understanding of my committee. David Román has been more than a chair, he has been a friend and guide. He has not only fostered my intellectual and professional development as a scholar, but has nurtured and supported my health and growth as a person. I am indebted to him in innumerable ways for showing me nothing short of love over the years. From my very first graduate course, Dorinne Kondo has modeled a critical engagement with the project of ethnic studies coupled with the rigorous insights of poststructuralist theories that I strive to emulate. John Carlos Rowe kindly made his expertise available to me from our very first introduction, without knowing much about me or my work he displayed an openness and willingness to help and advise me that continues to humble me. Richard Meyer signed on to provide me with a perspective outside my department, his kind words and astute critiques always managed to provide integral moments of clarity to my busied thoughts. A debt of gratitude is also owed to many other scholars who were not part of my dissertation committee but helped me nonetheless. Ruthie Gilmore, a longtime teacher of mine, fostered and molded my nascent thoughts and ideas in ways that make me still want to return to her seminar table. Ricardo Ortíz generously filled a gap in my graduate education with his much-needed expertise in all things Cuban. Additional thanks is due iii to Janelle Wong, Jane Iwamura, Ricardo Ramirez, Roberto Lint Sagarena, and Macarena Gomez Barris. Without Suzanne Oboler's early academic instruction and advisement I would not have thought of the scholarly life as a possibility. And without Alyssa Garcia as a continuous model and caring monitor I would not have made this choice a reality. The research and writing of this project was supported by several grants including the USC All University Predoctoral Diversity Fellowship, the USC College Diversity Placement Assistance Award, and the USC Marta Feuchtwanger Dissertation Fellowship. The Mellon Mays Dissertation Development Seminar, and my fellow participants, helped shape some of my ideas early in the writing stage. The Cuban Heritage Collection at the University of Miami provided me with boundless amounts of primary and secondary documents and texts to explore in a collegial atmosphere. The Getty Research Institute afforded me a picturesque space to write. Much of the intellectual pleasure I experienced throughout my graduate education was directly related to my friends and colleagues in the Department of American Studies and Ethnicity including Emily Hobson, Laura Fujikawa, Imani Kai Johnson, Perla Guerrero, Micaela Smith, Sionne Neely, Araceli Esparza, Cam Vu, Viet Le, Michelle Commander, Carolyn Dunn, Anton Smith, Sharon Luk, Nicole Hodges Persley, and Daniel Hosang. The staff of the department, including Sandra Hopwood, Kitty Lai, Sonia Rodriguez, and Jujuana Preston, also share responsibility for making my time at USC enjoyable. I thank my family for supporting me throughout my life even if, at times, none of us are sure of what exactly it is that I am doing. Their caring questions often force me to iv recognize and to make intelligible the paths that I traverse. I give my deep gratitude to my mother and father, Judith and Ernio Hernández and to my siblings Thaila Puig, Ernio Hernández, and TJ Hernández. I thank the people who along the way have given me their friendship, love, and kindness and who have shared their visions of the world with me. They are more than friends or even family to me, they are as much a part of me as I am. Nisha Kunte, Jake Peters, and Wendy Cheng have all made graduate school and Los Angeles livable and have given me innumerable memories that I deeply cherish. Megan Asaka, Briana Masterson, and Hentyle Yapp have proven to be continuous companions no matter where our individual journeys take us. Jason Goldman's friendship has shaken me in ways that I could not possibly anticipate or describe. He is a model of the man I strive to be, and stirs within me the drive to be more open to people, to life, and to possibilities. Neetu Khanna has shared ideas, feelings, homes, and what feels like lives with me. I turn to her as a constant intellectual complement and am blessed by her eternal, compassionate fellowship. v Table of Contents Acknowledgements ii Abstract vi Introduction: Bastard Diasporas Diaspora Chapter Breakdown Enter Lear With Cordelia in His Arms Introduction Endnotes 1 3 13 15 19 Chapter One: An Illegitimate State: Literature, Genealogy, and Bastardy in Cuban America Latina/o Literature, Heteronormative Genealogies, and Illegitimate Writing Illegitimacy as an Analytic Novel Readings Conclusion: Cuban America or the Broken Homeland of Diaspora Chapter One Endnotes 20 21 36 44 64 66 Chapter Two: Rebel Daughters: Gender, Political Patrimony, and Revolutionary Subjectivities in the Cuban Diaspora Alina Fernández Marissa Chibás Vivien Lesnik Weisman Jeanine Cornillot Conclusion Chapter Two Endnotes 71 77 95 106 118 130 132 Chapter Three: Exile Acts: Exceptionalism and Familialism in the Cuban Diaspora Dissolution of the Cuban Family U.S. Immigration Law and the Cuban Exception Cuban Deviance and the Turn to Familialism The Cuban American Family Album The Pérez Family Conclusion Chapter Three Endnotes 135 138 142 170 177 181 188 190 Conclusion: Diasporic Strangers and the Inheritance of Loss Conclusion Endnotes 193 201 Bibliography 202 vi Abstract Bastard Diasporas: Illegitimacy, Exile, and U.S. Cuban Cultural Politics mines a broad range of cultural productions for insights into how U.S. Cubans conceptualize and relate to the nation-state. Analyzing contemporary literature, film, radio, performance art, and law from the mid-1990s to the present, my project evidences the variegated ways that U.S. Cuban cultural productions allow us to theorize the diaspora, family, nation, and illegitimacy. Diasporas, I argue, are the bastards of the nation-state. Foregrounding the articulations of family and nation, my project shows how diasporic communities are figured as the illegitimate kin of the proper citizen subject; they are simultaneously part of the national family yet outside the purview of full belonging and heritage or inheritance. The errant seeds of the nation-state, dispersed and disintegrated, the diasporan longs for the fictitious sense of wholeness or incorporation that is attributed to the modern subject of/ through the family and the nation. 1 Introduction Bastard Diasporas Nothing can come of nothing: speak again. -William Shakespeare, King Lear (King Lear, Act I Scene I) Bastard Diasporas: Illegitimacy, Exile, and U.S. Cuban Cultural Politics mines a broad range of cultural productions for insights into how U.S. Cubans conceptualize and relate to the nation-state. Analyzing contemporary literature, film, radio, performance art, and law from the mid-1990s to the present, my project evidences the variegated ways that U.S. Cuban cultural productions allow us to theorize the diaspora, family, nation, and illegitimacy. Diasporas, I argue, are the bastards of the nation-state. Foregrounding the articulations of family and nation, my project shows how diasporic communities are figured as the illegitimate kin of the proper citizen subject; they are simultaneously part of the national family yet outside the purview of full belonging and heritage or inheritance. The errant seeds of the nation-state, dispersed and disintegrated, the diasporan longs for the fictitious sense of wholeness or incorporation that is attributed to the modern subject of/ through the family and the nation. This dissertation is an interdisciplinary study of the ways in which the experience and condition of U.S Cuban exile is structured by notions of abjection, disavowal, and failure through narratives of illegitimate familial relations. Because the nation is built upon the metaphor or model of the family, my project primarily asks: what forms of familial relations characterize those members that leave or are disavowed by the nation? I interrogate the definition and limits of the broader concept of diaspora to productively engage the question of what happens when family members/ citizens abandon or are 2 abandoned by the nation. This constitutive disavowal of (former) citizens by the nation structures the diaspora as illegitimate. Bastard Diasporas works in conversation with several disciplines and fields of study in order to contribute to and develop upon some key themes and thoughts. Within diaspora studies, the dissertation challenges the notion that all diasporas are created equal, arguing for a differential view of diasporic communities and peoples. While some traditional scholarship conceives of diaspora as a one-way movement of peoples in a state of extended displacement (oftentimes with a desire to return to the homeland), my project departs from these, recognizing both variegated reasons for separating from the nation/ homeland and conflicted emotions and thoughts about the possibility of return. Focusing on Cuban Americans, highlights one example (resonant with other communities) of a diaspora that has a contentious relationship to the ideas and realities of homeland, the nation, and state formations. Proffering illegitimacy as an analytic position enables my project to contribute to the fields of American Studies and Ethnic Studies. By combining notions of failure and disavowal (that proliferate within the fields of queer theory and poststructuralist thought) with a focus on the structuring metaphor of the nation-state as family, my dissertation studies anew the conditions of exile, diaspora, and national belonging. Within the field of Latina/o Studies (and the subfield of Cuban American Studies), I critically intervene in and deconstruct exceptionalist theses which position Cuban American exiles in a binary as laudatory model minorities or conservative assimilationists. Examining cultural productions from a wide range of sources, in varied 3 media, and by different subjects allows for an analysis of identity, politics, and belonging as sites of contestation and contradiction that cannot be read in monolithic or absolutist terms. Finally, my project looks at several key concepts of Literary Studies. I utilize established critiques of canon-formation and literary genealogies towards a discussion of how these literary groupings are structured by heteronormative thought that is based upon notions of writing as progenitive reproduction. I also think through the persistence of nationalist literatures being the bounds of the nation-state and how these might functions for subjects who have, in fact, been disavowed by the nation. Diaspora The Cuban context never exactly fits with the term diaspora, as such its usage should always be seen as provisional and in-process. Khachig Tölölyan, a scholar and the editor of Diaspora: A Journal of Transnational Studies, attests, by way of the Cuban context, to the problem of typifying any contemporary displaced peoples as a diaspora because of the differentiation that exists within these communities, “For example, the Cuban-American 'community' contains a few assimilated members, a larger number of ethnics, and an even larger group, whose size is fervently debated, that forms an 'exile community' committed to the overthrow of Cuban communism and to a physical return to the island” (“The Contemporary” 653). Such a diversity makes an overarching categorization, inexact at best. In his study of Cuban exile and Cuban American writers and artists, Cultural Erotics in Cuban America, Ricardo L. Ortíz introduces his use of the term diaspora within the Cuban setting, “I've noticed how, especially in the past decade or 4 so, the deployment, and even the nondeployment, of the term 'diaspora' to refer to off- island Cuban experience since 1959 often seem more strategic than accurate” (2). This strategic usage is meant “to look beyond not only the discourse of exile, but even still- active, proto-national discourse of hyphenated Cuban American hybridity” (35). My own use of diaspora in this project came about as a result of a number of contexts. First and foremost was through the reading of Cuban exile and Cuban American literatures, and noticing a theme of kinship relations bearing the marks of rupture and longing that similarly characterize the diasporic condition. Second was through reading diaspora studies scholarship as a way of making useful connections across different models of thought. Third is through the critiques that emanate from scholars on queer diasporas. Fourth, and finally, is through my training in American Studies and Ethnic Studies and an interest in what I saw as the persistence of the nation- state (or at the very least the nation) despite the heralds of its inevitable demise or obsolescence. The definitional limits of diaspora for scholars has fluctuated constantly. James Clifford outlines the features of a diaspora as having “a history of dispersal, myths/memories of the homeland, alienation in the host (bad host?) country, desire for eventual return, ongoing support of the homeland, and a collective identity importantly defined by this relationship” (305). This differs clearly from other formations of displacement, “immigrants may experience loss and nostalgia, but only en route to a whole new home in a new place. Such narratives are designed to integrate immigrants, not people in diaspora” (307). Diasporas within Clifford's view are then defined by their 5 sense of difference, diasporas “live inside [the nation], with a difference” (308) and “are thoroughly modern—with a difference” (316). Yet this does not mean that diasporas are ever-elusive figures of postmodernity because even though “it is not possible to define diaspora sharply, either by recourse to essential features or to privative oppositions... it is possible to perceive a loosely coherent, adaptive constellation of responses to dwelling- in-displacement” (310). The set of requirements for defining a diaspora is further augmented by Khachig Tölölyan's rubric of diasporas in the traditional sense (in discussing Jewish, Greek, and Armenian communities): In this discursive field, a diaspora was understood as a social formation engendered by catastrophic violence or, at the very least, by coerced expulsion from a homeland, followed by settlement in other countries and among alien host societies, and, crucially, capped by generations of survival as a distinct community that worked hard to maintain its old identity or to create new ones that sustained it difference from the host society. Finally, diasporas were identified by their efforts to retain contact with kin communities elsewhere and with the homeland. (648) Other scholars such as Stuart Hall and Paul Gilroy have taken a more expansive approach, stressing the language of hybridity within their formulations of diaspora which are, “defined, not by essence or purity, but by the recognition of a necessary heterogeneity and diversity; by a conception of 'identity' which lives with and through, not despite difference; by hybridity. Diaspora identities are those which are constantly producing and reproducing themselves anew, through transformation and difference” (Hall 1990 244). i However, scholars agree that the slippage that is possible with a focus on diaspora as hybrid is also perilous if lost to abstraction and not grounded in the specificities of its historical conditions, “Diasporic subjects are, thus, distinct versions of 6 modern, transnational, intercultural experience. Thus historicized, diaspora cannot become a master trope or 'figure' for modern, complex, or positional identities, crosscut and displaced by race, sex, gender, class, and culture” (Clifford 319). ii The Cuban context fits inexactly within both of these contexts. However, there are some key differences worth noting. In her work on Chinese Panamanians, Lok C. D. Siu defines diasporas as “a collectivity of people who share a common history of dispersal from a homeland (real or imagined) and emplacement elsewhere, and who maintain a sense of connection to both places, as well as with their geographically dispersed co-ethnics” (11). The maintenance of a connection to the homeland is where I find difference in the Cuban diaspora. While Cubans may maintain an emotive and affective tie to the notion of homeland, the sense of rupture that has characterized post- 1959 Cuban diaspora relations to the Cuban state necessitates a more complex view of diaspora. Some Cubans in the diaspora may be described as having a complicated if not hostile or antagonistic relation to the notion of homeland and to the specific political formation of contemporary Cuba. This is where my interest in understanding the relationship between diasporas and their homelands came about. Could the theoretical framework of diaspora incorporate those communities in opposition to homelands? Were diasporas necessarily a continuation of the nation-state beyond its borders? For Siu's work, the allegiances of Chinese Panamanians are multifaceted, “Being diasporic, then, not only involves sustaining all these relationships at once; it is also an ongoing formation of a consciousness, a positioning, a subjective expression of living at the intersection of 7 different cultural-national formations. It is within this configuration of intertwined relationships that the complexities of their belonging emerge” (4). Similarly, Khachig Tölölyan draws attention to the alliances often formed between diasporic communities and their home countries, “In such a context, transnational communities are sometimes the paradigmatic Other of the nation-state and at other times its ally, lobby, or even, as in the case of Israel, its precursor. Diaspora are sometimes the source of ideological, financial, and political support for national movements that aim at a renewal of the homeland” (“The Nation-State 5). In this light, within the Cuban context, we could talk about a Cuban diaspora that dates back to the 19 th century when off-island Cubans, such as Jose Martí, organized revolutionary forces and funds from abroad to actively foment change in Cuba, what Nina Glick Schiller and Georges Eugene Furon might term “long- distance nationalism (17). iii However, in the contemporary moment Cubans in the diaspora, largely, do not actively participate in Cuban politics. Rather, Cuban diasporic relations to the island have to be viewed as affective or psychic rather than actual or practical, what Tölölyan describes as, “not necessarily involving a physical return but rather a re-turn, a repeated turning to the concept and/or the reality of the homeland and other diasporan kin through memory, written and visual texts, travel, gifts and assistance” (14-15). We can therefore neither assume diasporas as implicitly nationalist nor as necessarily antagonistic to the nation-state, “Whatever their ideologies of purity, diasporic cultural forms can never, in practice, be exclusively nationalist. They are deployed in transnational networks built from multiple attachments, and they encode 8 practices of accommodation with, as well as resistance to, host countries and their norms” (Clifford 307). The diaspora is not an extension of the nation-state as many scholars seem to imply, but instead forms a third party in the equation between the people and the nation and between the polity and the state, “diasporas exist neither in necessary opposition to their homelands' nationalism nor in a servile relationship to them” (Tölölyan “Rethinking” 7). My own work attends to these persistences of nationalism and nation-thinking in the space/time of the diaspora, examining how the nation and/through the family is brought to the diaspora. The nation is a fictive scale of belonging “the nation-state...always imagines and represents itself as a land, a territory, a place that functions as the site of homogeneity, equilibrium, integration” (Tölölyan “The Nation-State” 6). This sense of integration or wholeness is achieved in its coupling with the family, “While both nation and family function as classificatory units of belonging... they exist in parasitic relation to one another by virtue of a shared desire for a unity that inevitably proves to be illusory and contradictory. In other words, family and nation paradoxically coexist because neither grouping succeeds in sustaining the singularity to which each necessarily aspires” (Mitchell 52; italics in original). These fictions of the nation and family are then carried into the diaspora, beyond the bounds of either. My work takes up here where scholars have failed to address how, if at all, the idea of the national family is changed with the advent of diaspora, “too little attention has been given to the process which these [national] identities are shaped or the raw materials with which such ties are activated. In particular, authors have insufficiently explored the influences of kinship across frontier 9 and the theoretical implication for international relations theory” (Yossi 4). I argue that the nation and family are fictions that continue to provide the diasporan with a sense of coherence and integrity, even when they have been made illegitimate to both scales of belonging. To be clear, I do not mean to position Cuba as a structured, complete, or whole entity. Nor then do I wish to say that because they have been exiled from the nation that diasporas are a fractured, maladaptive, and illegitimate off-shoot of this defined, stable national family. I do not mean to presuppose that the Cuban nation was ever a stable or functional national family that the Revolution then disrupted or converted. Rather, I read and critique the Cuban nation and family as both fictions that claim to provide integrity and stability to their subjects. Within the fiction of the Cuban national family, diasporans have been positioned as failing subjects. However, the supposedly succeeding national and familial subject (if such a thing can even be imagined) only succeeds at not seeing their own failure as subject. In his examination of the importance of psychoanalytic theories of loss for Latina/o Studies, scholar Antonio Viego offers a critique that I try to be mindful of and parallel in my own work, “critical race and ethnicity studies scholars have developed no language to talk about ethnic-racialized subjectivity and experience that is not entirely ego- and social psychological and that does not imagine a strong, whole, complete, and transparent ethnic-racialized subject and ego as the desired therapeutic, philosophical, and political outcome in a racist, white supremacist world” (4). The trauma of exile, then, that my project centers on can only ever be discussed as a failure of the diasporan to adhere to the narratives of family and nation that are, in 10 themselves, fictions. The temptation to believe in the fictions of national and familial belonging would, “bracket the effects of language on the speaking organism in order to win back some empty promise of fullness and completeness” (16). In this sense, I proffer the loss of nation and family for the diasporan as compounded losses. They differ from the losses of the national and familial subject, but this does not make them qualitatively less or more. iv Scholars of queer diasporas have also offered critiques that inform my project. Oftentimes, academics address the notion of diaspora from the quite literal perspective of the nation as heteronormatively and reproductively spreading its seeds outward beyond the confines of the nation’s territorial borders, inseminating other geographies and societies with its subjects. Stefan Helmreich's attention to the etymology of the term 'diaspora' proves instructive here, The original meaning of diaspora summons up the image of scattered seeds, and we should remember that in Judeo-Christian (and Islamic) cosmology, seeds are metaphorical for the male 'substance' that is traced in genealogical histories. The word 'sperm' is etymologically connected to diaspora. It comes from the same stem, σπειρειν [to sow or scatter], and is defined by the OED as 'the generative substance or seed of male animals.' Diaspora, in its traditional sense, thus refers us to a system of kinship reckoned through men and suggests the questions of legitimacy in paternity that patriarchy generates. (245) Queer theorists such as Gayatri Gopinath, David L. Eng, JeeYeun Lee, and Jasbir K. Puar have challenged the inherent heteronormative reproductivity in this formulation of the diaspora, “in order to ask if we can imagine diaspora differently, apart from the biological, reproductive, oedipal logic that invariably forms the core of conventional formulations of diaspora” (Gopinath 6). These scholars do this by introducing the 11 concept of a queer diaspora, “Queer diasporic narratives of homelands rupture how community is naturalized as heterosexual reproduction, highlighting instead the ways in which cultural authenticity, nation, and diaspora are all actively imagined and maintained in interlocking constructions” (Lee 195). These critiques also call into question the diasporic reliance on notions of kinship and lineage, “'Blood,' 'kinship,' 'lineage': these are all terms that invoke biological reproduction and that form the foundation of most notions of diaspora. Diasporic histories with a queer presence can critique this overwhelming heterosexism and the naturalized equation of kin with diasporic community” (195). The recurring critique within this body of scholarship is against diaspora studies reification of notions of kinship and biological reproduction in discussions of the diaspora. Instead, these scholars foreground the queer to get away from these tendencies, “The methodology of queer diasporas... declines the normative impulse to recuperate lost origins, to recapture the mother or motherland, and to valorize dominant notions of social belonging and racial exclusion that the nation-state would seek to naturalize and legitimate through the inherited logics of kinship, blood, and identity” (Eng The Feeling 13-14). My own readings of diaspora are similar to these readings in orientation but not in methodology. Rather than turning away from notions of kinship and reproduction I want to understand how exactly these logics persist. In this way I compare my reexamination of the nation through the lens of illegitimacy to queer theorist Miranda Joseph's critique of community, “Where others have responded to the perceived oppressiveness of community by trying to imagine better forms of community, I undertake to account for the persistence and pervasiveness of community” (viii). In this 12 way, my dissertation seeks to theorize diaspora not as a sign of the (re)productivity of the nation but instead or simultaneously as a marker or indicator of the failure of the nation. Diasporic subjects are often disconnected from any tangible and contemporary sense of what belonging to the nation means; and in the case of the diasporas that I am most interested in, subjects are not necessarily disconnected from the nation but rather maintain contentious, and often hostile, orientations toward the particular configuration of the nation that they see as responsible for their unbelonging, their very scattering as seeds. In this way, the Cuban diaspora finds parallels another failed diaspora, “The Aeginetan case was a scattering that did not produce a new city whose collective identity was the 'true' progeny of the old polity, and hence was not 'diasporic' in the organic sense then prevailing, which required rupture, scattering and reproduction. It was a dispersion engendered by violence to the parent body” (Tölölyan “Rethinking” 11; italics in original). If diasporas are literally the seeds of the nation, sent out to inseminate new territories in the name of the mother/fatherland, Cubans can only be considered a metaphorical bastard diaspora. The Cuban nation-state has repeatedly made it clear that those who left the country (or were forcibly ejected) were no longer representative of the Cuban nation. This type of reading, I argue, in concert with the motivations of theorists of queer diasporas, “A consideration of queerness, in other words, becomes a way to challenge nationalist ideologies by restoring the impure, inauthentic, nonreproductive potential of the notion of diaspora” (Gopinath 10). This project is decidedly influenced by these queer theorizations and makes a concerted effort to evidence the influence of this body of scholarly work on my own 13 readings and criticisms of formulations of belonging, nation, diaspora, and reproduction. Yet, at the same time, I steer clear of the usage of the signifier “queer.” I take seriously the criticisms that queer theorists have by and large evacuated the term “queer” of the gay and lesbian bodies that inaugurated its discursive intervention and current cache. Therefore, while I may be discussing things in ways that some might read as queer, I recognize the fact that gays and lesbians are not always the primary subjects of my writing (or their identities as gays and lesbians is not always the focus of my analysis). I am also wary of what can be read as the valorization of the queer diaspora as always- already in opposition to the nation-state or the reproductive. To be clear, I do not think that any of these scholars necessarily engage in this. However, in highlighting illegitimacy and bastardy I wish to foreground notions of familialism as articulated through the nation in a way that offers a similar critique even when the focus is not exclusively on the displacement and dispersion of queer bodies. Chapter Breakdown “An Illegitimate State: Literature, Genealogy, and Bastardy in Cuban America,” my first chapter, analyzes the preponderance of the figure of the bastard in two works of contemporary Cuban American fiction, Ana Menendez's Loving Che and Lisa Wixon's Dirty Blonde and Half-Cuban. Evidencing the connections between a loss of familial belonging and a loss of national belonging, I offer illegitimacy as a useful theoretical framework not only to understand the conditions of diaspora, but also to critique the filiopietistic and reproductive logics of literary genealogies. 14 The second chapter, “Rebel Daughters: Gender, Political Patrimony, and Revolutionary Subjectivities in the Cuban Diaspora,” focuses on the cultural productions of four daughters of Cuban revolutionaries: Alina Fernandez’s memoir, Castro's Daughter; Marissa Chibas's one-woman performance, Daughter of a Cuban Revolutionary; Vivien Lesnick Weisman's documentary film, The Man of Two Havanas; and Jeanine Cornillot's public radio documentary turned memoir, Family Sentence. Within these narratives we see how the national identities of these women are circuited through the figures of the revolutionary fathers. I argue that beyond the official binary of good and bad subjectivities (el hombre nuevo and los gusanos) of the Cuban Revolution a multitude of unanticipated subjects emerged. These four women represent one such subject that I name the rebel daughter, a figure that reimagines both the revolutionary subjectivities and diasporic identity. Chapter Three, “Exile Acts: Exceptionalism and Familialism in the Cuban Diaspora,” historicizes the legal and cultural production of Cubans in the United States as parolees, asylees, exiles, entrants, refugees, immigrants, and citizens within U.S. law (1966 Cuban Adjustment Act, 1980 Refugee Act, 1995 US-Cuban Joint Statement on Migration). I argue that while Cubans have been privileged in terms of their access to citizenship, this exceptionalism has also continuously Othered them as exiles irreconcilably caught in between normative legal definitions of national belonging and un-belonging. Examining the texts The Perez Family and The Cuban American Family Album, we see evidence that as a mechanism to counter this process of Othering (as well as because of the structure of U.S. immigration law), Cuban diasporans have 15 continuously attempted to make themselves legitimate subjects through familialism. Enter Lear With Cordelia in His Arms Each chapter of the dissertation includes an epigraph from William Shakespeare's play King Lear. My inclusion of these is not meant to reify the centrality of the Western canon or to even appeal to it as legitimation of my own work within literary studies. Rather it is meant to signal metaphorically a turn that I hope my work accomplishes within scholarship on Cubans in the United States. Most Cuban Americanists and even Caribbeanists turn, instead, to the figure of Caliban in Shakespeare's play The Tempest. Set on a remote island where Prospero and his daughter, Miranda, have been stranded, the play is a tale of the father and daughter's exile and subsequent attempts to restore their power and position. Scholars have turned varyingly to the figures of Ariel and Caliban as the two native inhabitants of the island to understand better the position of the Caribbean in relation to the colonial center of Europe. Aimé Césaire's play, A Tempest, reworked Shakespeare to find in Caliban a figure for postcolonial Afro-Caribbean revolution. The scholar Roberto Fernández Retamar's essay “Caliban: Notes Toward a Discussion of Culture in Our America” similarly sees Caliban as a rallying cry for the contemporary conditions of the Caribbean, “This is something that we, the mestizo inhabitants of these same isles where Caliban lives, see with particular clarity: Prospero invaded the islands, killed our ancestors, enslaved Caliban, and taught him his language to make himself understood... I know no other metaphor more expressive of our cultural situation, of our reality” (14). This emerges in 16 direct response to past scholars who had touted Ariel, a spirit who is in the servitude of the magician Prospero, as an instructive figure in the play for the Caribbean peoples. Consuelo López Springfield is instructive here on the historical intellectual motivations for such a framing in her own edited volume, Daughters of Caliban: Caribbean Women in the Twentieth Century, Reference to 'Caliban' as a cultural signifier is rooted in an earlier time (1960s-1970s) when Caribbean intellectuals, struggling with issues of identity throughout the archipelago, turned to Shakespeare's Tempest for images embracing mestizaje, the process of cultural and racial admixture that shaped Caribbean societies. Caliban, the island's original inhabitant— half-beast, the offspring of a witch who was forced into servitude by Prospero—spoke in utterances; his inability to 'master' Prospero's language confirmed his 'savage' nature. To twentieth-century Caribbean writers, 'Caliban' epitomized the intermingling not only of indigenous, African, and European races but also of African oral and European written traditions, local dialects and standard European languages, a history of colonial oppression and a regional culture of resistance. (xii) To be sure, the figure of Caliban would work well within the frameworks of familial and national illegitimacy in the Cuban diaspora. Coco Fusco, the scholar and artist, similarly finds new relevance in the play by turning to the character of Miranda who, after all, taught Caliban to read. Instead, however, I turn to King Lear to offer us not one but several characters enmeshed within a narrative that includes the themes of family, political power, bastards, inheritance, exile, and betrayal. In the play King Lear who wants to retire asks his daughters to profess their love for him in order to receive power over a division of the realm. His two eldest daughters, Goneril and Regan, speak eloquently but in vain of their undying devotion to him and are thus rewarded accordingly. However, Cordelia, his youngest who genuinely loves him, refuses to say anything but that words are inadequate to express her love and instead 17 entreating that she be judged by her actions. Lear, upset by this, disowns her and she leaves with a suitor, the King of France. Edmund, the bastard son of Gloucester, plots to seize power from his brother and rightful heir Edgar. Goneril and Regan treat the King horribly and he realizes he made a mistake with Cordelia. Driven mad by this he wanders away only to happen upon Cordelia who had come to save him with a French invasion. Edmund convinces Gloucester that Edgar is trying to kill him forcing Edgar to flee under the weight of his father's suspicion. Gloucester then tries to help restore the King to power and is blinded and chased away by Regan. Edmund defeats the French forces and orders the execution of both Lear and Cordelia. Goneril poisons Regan because she discovered that they were both involved with Edmund, and then kills herself when this is all revealed. Edgar returns and kills Edmund in a duel. Lear survives the execution only to die from distress at the death of Cordelia, whose body he carries onto stage. At the end the entire royal family is dead and the fate of the nation is unclear. In Edmund we find the quintessential bastard figure, resentful of his inability to conform to notions of legitimacy and therefore made evil and scheming. We can find another connection to the Cuban diaspora in the figure of Cordelia, the youngest daughter of King Lear, who disagrees with her father and King only to be disowned from the family and thereby made to leave the country. The image of Lear carrying her dead body out on stage just before his own death conjures the return of the disavowed diasporic subject as doom for the nation. The King of France, a suitor all too willing to accept Cordelia in opposition to the King's devaluation, could be analogized in my remake of the Cuban diasporic drama to the United States which, at first, openly courted the diasporic 18 community. King Lear, analogous to Castro, is the monarch whose family and country are torn apart by his hubris and the schemes of others. King Lear is perhaps a more pessimistic choice of analogy for the Cuban situation because it portends that before the saga of the post-revolutionary period will draw to an end there will first be a high death toll. This can also be understood as a generic shift from The Tempest to King Lear. In proffering this analogy I do not mean to replace the figure of Caliban with Edmund or Cordelia but instead to offer that we add them to a nexus of possible readings and identifications within the realm of Cuban diasporic significations. Similarly, in my own work I endeavor to offer readings of cultural productions and critical theories that enhance other academic formulations of this subject, rather than to position myself in opposition to them. The figure of Caliban offered an important intervention for Caribbeanists in the advent of the postcolonial period. The historical specificity of those conditions continues to resonate today. It is my hope that in my work on illegitimacy and Cuban diasporic cultural production and in King Lear we may explore the possibilities for other theories that reverberate. 19 i See also Hall 1976 and Gilroy 1993. ii See also Tölölyan, “I have come to accept, with many misgivings, the increasing collapse of the distinction between diaspora and dispersion. When ethnics, exiles, expatriates, refugees, asylum seekers, labor migrants, queer communities, domestic service workers, executives of transnational corporations, and transnational sex workers are all labeled diasporas, the struggle to maintain distinctions is lost, only to resume in another guise” (“The Contemporary” 648-649). iii See also Clifford who calls for specificity when discussing nationalism, “It is important to distinguish nationalist critical longing and nostalgic or eschatological visions, from actual nation building—with the help of armies, schools, police, and mass media. Nation and nation-state are not identical” (307) and Tölölyan who focuses in on the idea of stateless power to describe the continuation of national ideology beyond the nation-state, “However, like the nation, the diaspora is not just an organized but also an imagined community whose ligatures are discourse and representation, ideology and the reproduction of a subjectivity of belonging, all of which are fostered by larger institutional and collective practices, by stateless power” (28). iv See Viego, “The challenge for us would be to craft analyses that can read for the historical specificity and texture of the loss that is constitutive of subjectivity in relation to those losses than can be attributed to the unequal distribution of social and material resources, losses that continually appear to accrue more on the side of some people than others. We should understand the relationship between these different kinds of loss as a dynamic one where we see the losses inter-informing each other, lending 'signifierness' to each other's explanation for what gets lost. The unequal distribution here should also be understood as the unequally distributed function of loss within narratives that attempt to explain the vicissitudes of ethnic-racialized subjectivity and experience but neglect to comment on the losses attributable to the effects of language as structure on the speaking organism. This means including as part of the more gradated and textured history we recollect, narrativize, and transmit of ethnic-racialized subjectivity and experience the fact that we are, to begin with, subjects in language—that this is our history too, to have been subject to the effects of language as structure, that our network of signifiers can be mapped. We are not pure, statuary, brute densities existing either outside language or produced through its medium but exempted from having to suffer any of its effects” (50-51). 20 Chapter One An Illegitimate State: Literature, Genealogy, and Bastardy in Cuban America Wherefore should I Stand in the plague of custom, and permit The curiosity of nations to deprive me... Why bastard? wherefore base?... Now gods, stand up for bastards! -William Shakespeare, King Lear (Edmund, Act I Scene I) The metaphor of the broken home is used to symbolize and describe dysfunctional family life. Building upon this language this chapter elucidates the broken homeland as the symbolic register of dysfunctional national life and interrogates the connections between notions of familial and national belonging as expressed through literature. This is not to reinforce the notion that such a thing as a functional family/nation exists. But rather, points to the fiction of functionality and cohesion attached to the nuclear family and modern nation that ever-eludes our present. Outsiders to these fictions, the illegitimate and the diasporic embody the contradictions of familial and national sanctity. Exemplifying the theoretical fecundity of these fictions, Ana Menéndez’s Loving Che and Lisa Wixon’s Dirty Blonde and Half-Cuban, evince a novel engagement with understanding the contemporary state of Cuban America. Using the trope of illegitimacy, Ana Menéndez and Lisa Wixon provide the reader with complex narratives that bespeak the simultaneous articulations of U.S. Cuban literature, identity, and nation today. The ‘illegitimate state’ then, that my chapter refers to, is descriptive of three mutually constituted conditions: first is the state of being illegitimate, as in how one’s identity is marked (particularly in the case of exiles) as having experienced a rupture with one’s past and origins; second, is thinking of a body of 21 literature as illegitimate – or rather as deviant in relation to heteronormative notions of literary genealogies; and finally the possibility of seeing Cuban America (or the space of diaspora more broadly) as an illegitimate nation-state, meaning a socio-political community that is a fictive byproduct of the frictions between various existing nation- states but simultaneously disavowed the claim to any of these origins. The tropes of illegitimacy that mark these two novels, I argue, are not only thematic tools/ narrative devices used by these authors to untangle the condition of exile for their protagonists’ identities, but also evidence larger theoretical frameworks for our own understandings of literature and the Cuban diasporic condition. Latina/o Literature, Heteronormative Genealogies, and Illegitimate Writing Commenting on the mainstream “boom” of Latino literature in the 1990s, Juan Flores examines the contradictory positioning of Latina/o writing along lines of national- origin, class, and race. In his reading of this popularized Latino literature, Flores argues that Puerto Rican authors, by and large, have been excluded from the national spotlight. In comparing the works of mainstreamed Cuban American authors (most notably Pulitzer Prize winner Oscar Hijuelos) to that of Puerto Ricans, Flores introduces a revealing argument. He writes, “whereas a young contemporary writer like Abraham Rodriguez can harken back to the work of Piri Thomas and the Nuyorican poets, and even Island writers… Cuban Americans like Hijuelos and Cristina Garcia have little by way of precedence in the literature produced by Cubans in the U.S. setting, the great, pathbreaking José Martí notwithstanding” (183). 22 His insistence that Cuban Americans have no literary precedence in the United States is inaccurate. It not only erases the body of literature left behind by Cuban exiles struggling to promote independence from Spanish colonial rule in the mid-nineteenth century i and the literary productions of long-standing Cuban communities in Tampa and Ybor City ii , but it also disallows for more complex understandings of U.S. imperialism by linking Puerto Ricans on the mainland to a lineage of Island writers while not taking into account the insidious forms of colonialism under which the Cuban government functioned for generations. According to Flores, Puerto Rican writers on the mainland continue in the tradition of Island writers but other Latina/o writers (i.e. Cuban Americans like García and Hijuelos, Dominicans like Alvarez and Díaz) cannot arguably hold such direct connections. The Platt Amendment to the Cuban Constitution in 1901 (which stipulated, amongst other things, the right of the United States to intervene at its own discretion in the affairs of the Cuban state) iii codified long-standing U.S. practices concerning the sovereignty of Latin American nation-states. Any sense of autonomy in the Caribbean or Latin America in the first half of the twentieth century must be understood as precarious, provisional, and always vulnerable to the imperial desires, economic needs, and political whims of the United States. That other Latin American nation-states were not officially under U.S. colonial rule, like Puerto Rico, does not by any stretch mean that they were not subject to the weight of U.S. imperialism. Therefore to see Cubans writing in the United States as not in some way directly linked to the literary history on the island (or vice versa) seems inaccurate. And yet, in his critical assessment of Latino literature 23 Flores differentiates Puerto Rican authors from other Latina/o writers (not just Cuban Americans, but also Dominican writers) based on what he deems as their nation-state's proximity to and history of colonialism, distinguishing between “the newly arrived 'Latino' writers, immigrating from countries relatively free of direct colonial subordination” and “colonial Latinos” (177; 180). Such a differentiation seems to invoke a dangerous game of oppression olympics. What Latina/o sub-group has not at one point or another been subject to colonial rule (whether by the United States or a European power)? To apply the term “colonial Latinos” to some and yet not other sub-groups requires the sublimation of centuries of history in order to focus solely on the contemporary political/legal formations. Another confounding part of this is that Flores touts the usage of the oral tradition by Nuyorican writers and yet makes no mention of this possibility within the Cuban American literary repertoire, “As a ‘lowercase literature,’ Nuyorican writing is illustrative of oral tradition and not an institutionalized, canon-forming literature conceived of as a profession” (184). Finally, the most glaring oversight in Flores's statement, though, is to the fact that Piri Thomas, who is mentioned by name as a Latino literary forefather, is of both Puerto Rican and Cuban descent. Yet, despite all this, Flores’s argument opens up intriguing questions through his fixation on these literary genealogies. What would it in fact mean for Cuban American authors to have no literary precedence? By his very mentioning of it, it seems that Flores thinks this is noteworthy. Is it meant as an explanation for or confounding component of their literary success? Are Cuban American writers successful precisely because they 24 lack a literary precedence? Or is it a paradox to Flores how Cuban Americans writers managed to succeed given their lack of a literary precedence (in contrast to Nuyorican writers)? His work is not only concerned with the literary traditions of the writers he examines, but even places itself within a lineage of literary criticism through the title of his chapter, “Life Off the Hyphen: Latino Literature and Nuyorican Traditions,” a title which follows and re-conceptualizes Gustavo Pérez Firmat’s 1994 book Life on the Hyphen and Ilan Stavans’s 1995 chapter “Life in the Hyphen.” These two seminal works are often grouped together to represent a strand of Latina/o literary criticism that focuses on and even celebrates the multiculturalism, hybridity, translation, and adaptation present in this body of work. Directly addressing this lineage, Flores writes, “Two prominent Latino critics, speaking specifically of Hijuelos, have referred to it as a Latino literature, and life, ‘on the hyphen,’ where the hyphen is embraced as an equal sign” (170). The multiculturalist criticism focuses on the possibilities present in a life (and literature) that comes from a hyphenated American identity. From within this liminal space of the hyphen (i.e. between Cuban and American or Dominican and American), rife with the work of translation and adaptation, Pérez Firmat and Stavans see pregnant possibilities, survival strategies, emergent perspectives, and new modes of identification and existence. Flores, conversely, argues that such a viewpoint presupposes political, legal, economic, and social capacities that many resident U.S. Latina/os have historically been denied (through centuries of war, exploitation, discrimination, and imperialism). Instead, he argues that Latina/o writing has long been a form of social protest that both testifies to the 25 history of oppression in the United States and in the same page galvanizes an oppositional movement. This other strand of Latina/o literary criticism, which Flores exemplifies, is labeled the anticolonialist position iv . It is from within this divergence of theoretical positions that Flores's chapter emerges, “It is the particular social situation of that literary community when contrasted with that of other Latino nationalities, their differential access to literary and cultural capital as a result of direct colonial relations, that eludes the conceptualization of Latino writing as set forth by critics like Pérez Firmat and Stavans. For if the Latino hyphen as a sign of equilibrium stands for this interplay of cultural politics at an international level, Puerto Ricans in the United States live a life ‘off the hyphen’” (179-80). Titling his chapter this way is clearly meant to engage with this lineage of literary criticism and in fact positions itself in semantic opposition to this other work by rejecting the metaphorical hyphen. It is important to point out here, however, that while Flores labels Puerto Ricans (and, ostensibly, other “colonial Latinos”) as “off” the hyphen (thus rejecting it and/or being rejected by it), he does not completely dismiss the metaphorical utility of the hyphen. Rather than saying that these theorists have formulated a paradigm for Latino literature and identity that is flawed or even wrong and then offering a new way of looking at this work, Flores merely points out that this metaphor is not applicable to the community of writers he is concerned with (namely Puerto Ricans). By then taking up the very language of the metaphorical hyphen (even if only to place Puerto Ricans in the purportedly better, more authentic, politically progressive, oppositional stance, “off the hyphen”) he reifies the theoretical utility of the paradigm (to some other subset of 26 Latina/os). So, while it would seem that he is stressing the fact that Puerto Ricans and Cubans do not have anything in common (they are in opposition to each other), in fact they are both still (Latina/os) understood vis-à-vis their relation to a hyphen. Why not just say that these theories are not a useful way of thinking about Latina/o writing and identity? Because Flores does, in part, seem to agree with Stavans and Pérez Firmat. His acquiescence to this formulation implies that it still functions for other Latina/os (i.e. Cuban Americans) because to him they in fact are on the hyphen or in the hyphen; they (and subsequently their literary production) are Americanized, sellouts, assimilationists writing from a place of privilege devoid of a history of exploitation and colonialism. In other words, the success of these Latina/os is derivative of their ahistorical position, “The new ‘Latino’ literature as it has been constructed in the 1990s, with all its assimilationist proclivities, now takes this relative newcomer experience, that of the ‘foreigner,’ as its prevalent model, while the longer-standing, resident Latino presence and literary background is more liable to be what is ‘left behind’” (183). This lack of precedence or “literary background,” for Flores, is symptomatic of or concomitant with a larger failing of Cuban American literature – mainly the politics of/in the writing. The argument seems to be that if Cuban Americans had a literary precedence and history of oppression in this country (like their Puerto Rican counterparts), then their writing would be more oppositional, less assimilationist to U.S. culture, and thereby less readily successful in the publishing industry. Arguing that Cubans have a less direct colonial relation to the United States and therefore represent an assimilationist perspective is an entirely too simplistic (and causal) 27 characterization of the dynamics at play in this literature. It is not only as foreigners adapting to a new land that these authors write, but also as those exiled from another country – from a state that is antagonistic to the United States. While it may be true that supporting this exiled community might suit the imperial (and anti-communist) motivations of the United States, that does not take into account any amount of agency on the part of these writers. U.S. Cuban autobiographical writing attempts to construct a nation-in-exile through stories of cultural adaptation and (capitalist) economic success. This body of writing does more than adhere to an ethnic assimilationist literary style/thematic, it simultaneously supports its own nation-building agenda and enacts a community catharsis via testimonial. These authors do occupy an oppositional stance, only to another state – one that Flores does not take into account as he exclusively focuses on the United States. This work has other priorities in what it seeks to protest. Therefore, what Flores marks here as assimilation must be read not as collusion to the U.S. empire but as opposition to the Communist Cuban state and in support of a diasporic reconstruction of nationalism/identity. A literary/ propaganda practice that mirrors the motivations of Cubans in the United States at the turn of the century who similarly used the space of exile to contest the Cuban political order (in that manifestation, as a Spanish colonial state). In her article, “Contesting the Boundaries of Exile Latino/a Literature,” Marta Caminero-Santangelo provides key insights relevant here to the paradox of U.S. Cuban literature. Arguing against the bifurcation of Latina/o literature, she aims to, “challenge the construction of mutual exclusivity between exile and ethnic writing, and to reexamine 28 the relationship between a fairly narrowly defined body of work (exile writing…) and the more heterogeneous… production of writing labeled ethnic U.S. Latino/a literature” (507). Caminero-Santangelo’s diagnosis of the tendencies amongst literary critics of Latina/o writing aptly pertains to Flores’s commentary, as he moves to express the differences between Cuban American and Nuyorican literature and their interplay with the publishing industry. Caminero-Santangelo continues on to warn: These categorizations are presented with a vocabulary of trends and tendencies; thus this body of critics seems to be suggesting that people who are exiled as adults will tend to write one way, while their children who grow up primarily in the U.S. will tend to write another way. But to then distinguish the two kinds of writing by name (exile writing versus ethnic writing) is to begin to construct a more essentialist definition of the terms: e.g., exile writing is nostalgic and backward-looking, whereas ethnic writing is focused on U.S. experiences of biculturalism and hybridity. (508, italics in original) This is precisely what Flores's argument does, making a distinction between what he calls “resident Latino writing” and immigrant writing, “Hijuelos helped provide the needed handle by winning the Pulitzer, the proof that a Latino book could make it into the long- elusive American mainstream, and the foundational fiction, as it were, of a legitimate, subcanonical concept of ‘Latino literature'” (169). Caminero-Santangelo takes to task the very propensity towards literary canonization along the lines of specified ethnic and political affiliations that we see present in the reasoning of Flores. In his treatment of the popular currency of Cuban American writing against the lack of attention to Nuyorican writers, Flores links contemporary publishing success with assimilation in contrast to (past) ethnic literature that evokes social protest, “The coronation of The Mambo Kings heralded the ascendancy 29 of a Latino literature which, however nostalgic for the old culture and resentful of the new, is markedly assimilationist toward American society and its culture, thus departing from the contestatory and oppositional stance characteristic of much writing by Latino authors in the past” (170). v Flores’s definition here of Latina/o literature is one that is always already resistant to American society and culture. Yet, as Caminero-Santangelo points out, conservative writers such as Mexican American author Richard Rodriguez disrupt any misperception of a unitary political ideology ever being present in Latina/o literature (or even amidst what Flores would term resident Latina/os). Her point is hardly meant to argue for a shift in Latina/o literature towards a conservative edge, but rather to draw attention to the underlying politics of ethnic formation accomplished by/in these literary classifications and groupings; she foregrounds the fact that what kinds of Latina/os, what forms of literature, and what political perspectives are included or excluded in these classifications also intrinsically define who/what a Latina/o is for the reading audience. Ironically, then, these very categorizations are self-fulfilling in that they disallow for the possibility of a politically progressive Cuban author to exist within the marketplace vi . The heterogeneity present in Latina/o writing needs to be more closely attenuated to, disestablishing any exclusionary criterion based on politics, national origin, or other manifestations of difference, “While the goal of creating solidarity around issues of marginalization and (dis)empowerment is of central concern for many in the (imagined) Latino/a community, it seems to me that to use literary classifications in this way is to ‘essentialize’ ethnic writing (‘by essence… a literature of social protest’) in a way that 30 does not allow for alternative and less popular or less attractive expressions of ethnic experience, such as the desire to assimilate” (510). vii The works of Menéndez and Wixon complicate these notions of literary genealogies that function on a heteronormative model of reproduction. viii In speaking of a tradition or genealogy, a notion of reproduction is invoked wherein successive generations are not only meant to build upon or be born out of the literary corpus of preceding generations but also arguably must revive these traditions for the use of future writers. Writers who adhere to and propagate the traditions of a particular genealogy (i.e. in Flores’s understanding, those who maintain a specific oppositional politics) are then deemed acceptable for incorporation into that family of authors. We see this rationale explicitly through Flores's usage of the term 'precedence' – that which not only comes before in order but also in importance as it sets a guide. Caminero-Santangelo also uses this logic of the heteronormative family in her description of writing by “people who are exiled as adults” and “their children” , connecting literary tendencies not only to generationality but specifically to familial relations (508). This line of thought reinscribes notions of the family and reproduction (and, by extension, the nation) into groupings of literature, creating systems of classification and dichotomies of good-bad writers, children, citizens, subjects. Those who do not conform or meet the established standards thereby represent the abject and illegitimate. ix It is not my intent to propose that Flores is completely wrong or to suggest that his analysis is faulty and that we should then return to the theories that he is writing against (namely, those of Stavans and Pérez Firmat). Instead, I propose that we take his theories, 31 learn from them, find their limits and strengths, and then reformulate them. Hence my method here is to take Flores’s point of view along with me, recognizing that while it is limited in certain ways it is also absolutely necessary for my own arguments. It is the very assumptions in his thinking that open up the possibility for new thought through exhaustive questioning. Much like Flores is dependent on the criticism of Stavans and Pérez Firmat to articulate his position, we are dependent on his. I am also not arguing for illegitimacy as a method (notice that my argument itself is based out of and in conversation with several established and ongoing arguments within the field), rather it is my goal here to point out that legitimacy and arguments based in the rhetoric of legitimacy and authenticity are not productive frameworks. Cuban American writing emerges from an overdetermined position within this paradigmatic nexus/matrix. From its inception this writing is illegitimate on multiple fronts. Exiled from the Cuban state, these writers and their literary production are no longer legitimate in relation to the island's national literature x . Nor is this writing often considered legitimately American or belonging to the American literary canon. As immigrants from another country these authors write from a position as foreigners or hyphenated (read qualified) Americans with competing national allegiances – never fully American. If even labeled Americanized, this itself is also a marker of illegitimacy – a copy of, in the style of, or attempting to be American literature but never originally of that which it aspires to emulate. Finally, as we have seen according to theorists like Flores and Rivero, Cuban American literature is not considered legitimate in relation to Latina/o writing based upon assumptions about politics. xi This writing may be 'Latino' 32 but not the right kind of Latino, something other, a sort of in-between Latino, Latino only in name, a bastardized form of Latino. The centrality of illegitimacy to the two novels becomes an important analytic for re-imagining the deviant possibilities of Cuban diasporic literature – a body of work that can be theorized as having a history (contrary to Flores's assertion) but not being fully encompassed by its past. It can certainly easily be argued that all U.S. Cuban writing after the 1959 Revolution is indelibly marked by the separation, bifurcation, trauma, and history of exile. The metaphors of illegitimacy and bastardized familial relations abound in this literature xii , much in the same way that representations of bodily vulnerability, porosity, and disintegration came to characterize/constitute a South Asian literary trope post-partition. xiii It is also true that much of this writing is conservative, generic, reproductive, and invested in notions of canons and assimilation. In this way I do not disagree with Flores completely, however, I still contend that in his call for more specificity when it comes to Puerto Rican writers he glosses over the particularities and complexities present in this (conservative) writing. Yet, while these statements are true, I am neither interested in merely creating a catalog of references to bastardy and illegitimacy in all U.S. Cuban writing, nor am I interested in calling for a re-reading of these conservative texts. Rather, I offer that we focus on that (literature) which challenges the very conditions and communities from which it arises/emerges. The writing that I am interested in examining here self-reflexively occupies the space of illegitimacy, emerging from supposedly within this canon of exile writing and yet illegible/ unintelligible as a 33 lineal literature. From within this positioning attention is drawn to the conditions of this literature's production, its historical formations, its fraught origins – even the very fallacy and overdetermination of origins. While much Cuban diasporic writing is rife with metaphors of bastardy, this bastard writing xiv allows us to understand illegitimacy in ways that push at the boundaries and definitions of canons; of Latinidiad; of conceptions of diaspora and nationhood; and of U.S. Cuban identity, politics, and nationalism. So ill at ease even in its state of being, this writing complicates the very idea of canonization because it disallows fitting into easy categorizations with other writing. This writing is not necessarily politically Left or progressive or oppositional (as is the writing lauded by anticolonialist criticism), yet nor is it always already conservative. It is not easily unified under any political perspective, or even by literary genre or form. And yet these writings offer us vantages into and critiques on our ontologies of Latina/os. In his survey of Cuban American writing, Ricardo Ortíz most aptly describes the contradictions articulated in the construction of such a deviant, non-totalizing, non-lineal genealogy, “It is largely on the borders between these divided spaces of experience that the emerging generation of Cuban-exile writers write, taking such paradoxical positions in their work that they often seem to build bridges between generations and ideologies and with the same gesture mark their divisions so powerfully as to suggest their irreconcilability” (188). What would a canon based on such irreconcilability look like? Is it possible (or even worth-while) to create illegitimate or spurious literatures and canons? Spurious in the literal sense, meaning counterfeit or false or a simulation. A canon that is purposely false because it maintains that there can be no such thing as a truth when it 34 comes to Latina/os – an always already fictive, manufactured concept/thesis. How can we foster connections (and disconnections) across history, form, genre, politics, and national affiliations? On the absolute irreconcilability of Latina/o literatures Flores writes, “Standing at opposing extremes, Spidertown and The Mambo Kings illustrate the range of what is labeled as 'Latino literature.' Though written in the same years, in English, and by second-generation male authors, they portray diametrically contrasting realities and exemplify incompatible views of literature and its relation to society” (181). What would it mean for a literary canon to consist of “diametrically contrasting realities” and “incompatible views of literature and its relation to society”? Is it possible for Flores to teach alongside the “ghetto lit” of Piri Thomas's Down These Means Streets, Ernestro Quinonez's Bodega Dreams, and Abraham Rodriguez's Spidertown the depictions of New York Latinidad in Hijuelos's The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love or Cristina García's Dreaming in Cuban all still under the rubric of Latina/o literature? What happens if we expand the possibilities of what we call “Latino/a literature” rather than limit, contract, and confine? If we attempt to include rather than exclude? In this way, while I agree with Flores about the political implications of multiculturalist criticism I also wish to embrace and affirm their spirited attempts to focus on the productive potentials of this grouping. How far can we stretch the rubric/parameters of Latino/a literature before it breaks? And what happens, in fact, if and when it does break? Flores interestingly places this category of writing in quotations, ostensibly calling into question the validity or authenticity of the term (when used to join such 35 disparate authors). What does such a questioning of validity even mean when the grouping “Latino” has always been a term in flux, in quotations, a label that manufactures and/or imagines a community? xv Instead I offer that perhaps this is the very potential of the Latina/o (literary canon) – to be composed of such heterogeneity to the point where the ties that bind are exhausted in the effort to relate, to associate, to read together, to articulate the historical formations of what we call Latina/os. As a tenuous, vulnerable, precarious, always- about-to-fall-apart grouping, Latina/o literature defies logical explanations for its cohesion. It exists only because we make it exist. Each time that we teach courses on, write dissertations on, construct syllabi of, compile anthologies of Latina/o literatures we are in fact instantiating (conjuring in the way that Columbus did) not only the object of our study but also the rigidity or flexibility of its borders. We create a grouping that is so imagined, inauthentic, irrational, and unlikely and, yet, at the same time is so powerful, full of potential, and even necessary. xvi What Flores then, ostensibly, offers as a critique of Hijuelos, Garcia, and Cuban American writing in general as ultimately lacking a literary history becomes a productive site of engagement through the trope of illegitimacy. So while it appears that Flores means to hold this deficiency against Cuban American writing, I wish to suggest that this imagined lack of a historical precedence can, instead, be positioned as a generative site. Or, rather, it is precisely this imagined lacking itself that proves productive. As a bastard creation (having no legitimate history) Cuban American writing complicates and/or co- opts what we read as Latina/o writing. If we take literature as unbeholden to a genealogy 36 or a canon (with the concomitant mandates on form, genre, politics, etc.) the resulting, new formulations can only create original thought. Thought that is productive not reproductive, that is cognizant of history but not constrained or indebted to it. This is an assessment that, paradoxically, Flores himself gestures toward in his directive for Puerto Rican writers, “the need is strong in the present generation to dispel the anxieties over canons, prizes, and other marketing conveniences…” (188). We must add to his list of anxieties, however, the imperative of reproduction and the determinism of ancestry – what can be called the filiopietistic principle. Illegitimacy as an Analytic The consolidation and solidification of the family as the social unit par excellence articulated the decline of feudalism and the advent of centralized capitalist structures of political and economic state power. The nuclear patriarchal family emerged hand in hand with the rise of the modern industrializing nation-state. As Ala A. Alryyes notes, What had been previously a real threat to political order was thus neatly transformed into a formidable buttress to it.' 'Magistrates and ministers... perpetuated a patriarchal fiction in which the family was presented as a “little commonwealth”... or a “little” and “lesser church”.’ The Fifth Commandment that enjoins one to ‘obey thy father and thy mother,’ was used to justify the dominance of father and king... ‘All kings were fathers and all fathers ruled.’ (48) The nuclear family unit has particular utility not only for the political order of the nation, constituting and managing little commonwealths that all cohere under a larger – but no less imagined or abstract – collectivity. The family as unit is also mutually constitutive of the economic system of capitalism, maintaining the development and exchange of private property, supporting the necessary conditions for the laborer to reproduce her capacity to 37 sell her labor, and naturalizing or socializing the division of labor. xvii What Benedict Anderson calls the “imagined community” of the modern nation- state is intertwined with the ideological underpinnings of the imagined family. The kinship system in the United States as embodied by the nuclear family, according to David M. Schneider, is structured as “relationships of diffuse, enduring solidarity” (67) xviii . This logic also undergirds the ideological structure of the nation. xix Like the family, which is organized by the imagined social concepts of the order of nature (family by birth) and the order of law (family by marriage or adoption/fosterage), membership to the nation occurs either by nature (citizen by birth) or by law (citizen by naturalization). Within the matrix of the family, the child is the central figure linked to the nation's future. Just as the child represents the future of the family (through biological reproduction the bloodline, the family name, memory, and even property are passed on), so too does the child embody the future of the nation. The well-being and growth of the nation is predicated on the existence and thriving of citizen subjects. The nation is always concerned with its future perpetuation, propagating and fostering hegemony (in the Gramscian sense) to reproduce itself ad infinitum (if even in new manifestations or guises the nation survives at the core – a reproduction of the social order). Therefore children represent integral figures for the nation because they are positioned as the future citizen- subjects of the (future manifestation of the) nation. The maintenance of the (nuclear) family is paramount then, as parents are figured as the guardians of the nation's future. This is why, in what can be seen as the logical limit of such a political-ideological system, for Lauren Berlant “a familial politics of the national future came to define the 38 urgencies of the present... a nation made for adult citizens has been replaced by one imagined for fetuses and children” (1). According to the logics of the configuration of the modern nation, children have to be educated and disciplined into being good citizen-subjects that will inherit and propagate the nation – reproducing it anew. The Child is positioned as a critical subject through, what Lee Edelman calls, the notion of “reproductive futurism” wherein, “Historically constructed... to serve as the repository of variously sentimentalized cultural identifications, the Child has come to embody for us the telos of the social order and come to be seen as the one for whom that order is held in perpetual trust” (10-11). This prioritization of the Child's future, as Berlant explains, is not only a remote fantasy or abstract ideal but also directly shapes the contemporary nation, “the fetal/ infantile person is a stand-in for a complicated and contradictory set of anxieties and desires about national identity... [W]hat gets consolidated now as the future modal citizen provides an alibi or an inspiration for the moralized political rhetorics of the present and for reactionary legislative and juridical practice” (6). Literature occupies an important cultural and ideological arena for the working out of these social contradictions. Writing and criticism from within the nation is always already imbricated in its particular social formation; whether deliberately or merely by the means of its production, writing does not exist outside of the advancement of the nation. xx Historically, the genre of the novel bore out the discourses of nationalism, as Alryyes states, “Like the two strands of a double helix, the novel and national narratives intertwine” (205). The technological advances and increasing prevalence and 39 proliferation of print culture, says Anderson, provided, “two forms of imagining which first flowered in Europe in the eighteenth century: the novel and the newspaper. For these forms provided the technical means for 're-presenting' the kind of imagined community that is the nation” (24-25, italics in original). Thus it is only logical that the link between the child/subject (or “Berlant's “infantile citizen”) and the family/nation is clearly expressed through literature, and specifically in the development of the novel as a literary form. The novel, for Alryyes, takes on the child as protagonist because of the popular conception of the innocence or inexperience that marks this phase of life, “That childhood is an absence imagined and regulated, idealized and spoken for, is an enduring paradigm of Western representation. It is precisely this Lockean absence, this legal and subjective gap, that the nascent novel makes its original subject. Fathers in the novel often want to impose their will on their children; and that absent figure resists” (125). It is this moment of resistance that then provides the plot for the novel, with the focus of the child leaving home and family to enter the unknown and unknowable, “Children encounter obstacles to their freedom and independence, obstacles that create necessary struggles, and hence, narratable stories. That is why the novel—Pamela, Clarissa, Robinson Crusoe—opens with the hero leaving his/her father’s house, for in that house experience is circumscribed; the child can neither own nor interpret her own experiences” (132). xxi This journey of self-discovery that occupies the driving force of these narratives is also an allegory for the development of the nascent national subject, “It is the children in the novel whose resistance in the domestic realm mirrors that of bourgeois men and 40 fathers in the public political sphere. That resistance is also a tacit national allegory” (128). In narrating the stories of these children resisting the established order (of the patriarchal family) in order to chart out or explore a life of their own making, the novel engages in an active imagining of the community to come (or the inchoate political-social formation of the nation). An imagining that could not have happened before (capitalist expansion) because of the significance of family and lineage for the transference of property, title/ station, and even trade/ craft. This narrative arc can also be seen in the two U.S. Cuban exile stories we are examining here. The protagonists of these two narratives both set out into the unknown, leaving their (known) family and nation and returning to Cuba in order to recover a proscribed national history. It is worth noting, however, that although they are leaving their families in order to develop a relationship and identity to Cuba, I argue that it is because they are bastards that this attempt ultimately manifests as a search for (another) family (specifically their fathers). Illegitimate children are then particularly significant figures in literature (and specifically the novel) because they are situated at the nexus of multiple vulnerabilities of unbelonging and represent an active working-out of the nation and (its) future. If the Child in literature represents the (national) future, the illegitimate child or bastard is the embodiment of an errant future – the dangerous mistakes of our past that threaten the rightful future subject. Lisa Zunshine, in her impressive study Bastards and Foundlings: Illegitimacy in Eighteenth-Century England, aptly summarizes the metaphorical utility of bastards in (national) literatures, 41 Bastards figured largely in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century literature, mostly as villains associated with treachery, promiscuity, atheism, disintegration of community, and death (e.g., Shakespeare’s Edmund, Caliban, and Don John; John Kirke’s Suckabus; Gervase Markham and William Sampson’s Antipater), or—in rare cases—as benevolent if zany aliens, often endowed with a poetic or prophetic gift (e.g., Springlove from Richard Brome’s 1641 A Jovial Crew). (18) Bastards were metaphorical threats to the sanctity and cohesion of the family/ nation – their characters were obstacles in the plot that had to be overcome by either their excision from the narrative or, more rarely, their absorption into the family. This depiction of bastardy also reinforces the ideological necessity of the family/nation. Without family/nation children are lost to society, it is precisely because they are excluded from these fictions that these characters are dastardly and scheming. In sixteenth- and seventeenth-century society illegitimate children posed very real threats as the legal transference of land, property, and title were clearly bound to notions of biological kinship. Furthermore, family inheritance (especially amongst the middle- class and bourgeoisie) delimited one's life prospects, losing one's inheritance to an unforeseen heir jeopardized the possibilities for comfort and the capacity to reproduce the conditions of life. Thus, bastards in literature became metonyms for larger anxieties about the economic structures/strictures in place. These literary representations were also gendered in very distinct and interesting ways that correlated to the mutually constituted systems of property ownership and patriarchy. xxii The notion of property becomes a very complex site for exiles and other stateless peoples dispossessed not only of their homes and belongings, but of their national identities and their citizenship. Exiles (and other particular diasporic subjects), as the 42 metaphoric bastards of the nation-state, not only represent anxieties about heritable property xxiii but also heritable national belonging. What is diasporic inheritance in relation to the nation? Do diasporic subjects belong to the nation? Are they any longer the belongings of the nation? In the U.S. Cuban context, some would argue that those who left the island took with them a very particular configuration of the Cuban nation- state and virtually recreated that nation in exile, while the current government on the island represents an entirely different nation-state. Where then does the Cuban nation reside? On the island, in the diaspora, both places? No longer legitimate citizen-subjects of the state, are exiles also then illegitimate national subjects? With the expansion of capitalism and its concomitant changes, the literary depiction of bastards undergoes revealing and dynamic shifts. As Zunshine aptly synthesizes: The relationship between the socioeconomic history of England and the cultural view of bastards could be thus described as follows: The further along we are in the ‘long, slow, cumulative process culminating in the industrial revolution,’ the more ambiguous the fictional representations of bastards seem to become. The reason for this representational adjustment is the slowly developing awareness on the part of the middle-class population (i.e., the population most sensitive to the economic threat represented by bastardy) that, at least up to a point, inheritance did not define in absolute terms the person’s financial destiny, and that the loss of some part of one’s heritable property to an illegitimate sibling could in principle be recouped by future economic entrepreneurship. To put it starkly, the Enlightenment could in principle afford a slightly more enlightened attitude toward ‘sons of nobody’ because their legitimate brothers felt increasingly empowered by the economic possibilities of venture capitalism. (18-19) We see in this reading the articulation of changing societal notions of bastardy and family, with economic development, national consciousness, and literary theme and 43 form. While bastards are no longer the nefarious creatures trying to destroy the family and the nation – they still embody sites of contradiction that must be dealt with to maintain the integrity and synchrony of national and familial fictions. They are the errant threads in the fabric of the national family that must either be plucked or mended, lest the delicate weave come undone. This preoccupation with the illegitimate persists in the literature according to Zunshine, “The excision of the vile bastard as nearly ubiquitous literary type is accompanied by the introduction of the similarly ubiquitous virtuous foundling... most of the eighteenth-century supposed bastards (particularly the females) turn out to be legally born foundlings who wind up reintegrated into the social order” (19). That the protagonists in these two U.S Cuban novels are illegitimate women seeking family and nation invokes the metaphor of the virtuous foundling on a “quest... for moral excellence and true identity” (Zunshine 7). Thus, the trope of the exilic bastard returning to claim his rightful property is avoided in order to focus on the attempted reconciliation of national and familial sanctity. And as we shall see, one protagonist is in fact reintegrated into the national (and biological) family while the other's inability to find her mother and verify the identity of her father leaves her unresolved and afloat (without a national or familial history and arguably still a threat to the future). We have seen how the Child and the nation are linked specifically through the notion of futurity and how this link is then articulated in the literary form of the novel (which is also entwined in the project of the nation and family). We have also explored 44 how the depiction of illegitimate familial members relates to the development of the nation and citizen-subjects. Finally I have proffered that the figure of the bastard illuminates our understandings of the diasporic subjectivity vis-à-vis the nation. Illegitimacy then is a revelatory analytic for discussing these works as they relate to the conditions of exile and national/familial belonging. In focusing on illegitimacy we are able to tease out the convergence of multiple contradictions (literary form, the politics of the family, national ideology, notions of futurity, and the diasporic condition). This is not, however, to propose an overarching or universal reading of the metaphor of bastardy today or in relation to all diasporas. We are merely attempting to read how the centrality of illegitimacy to these particular U.S. Cuban novels offers us insight into the relationship between the diaspora and the nation. Novel Readings Loving Che, published in 2003, is Ana Menéndez’s first novel following her critically acclaimed collection of short stories. Loving Che is the story of a young, unnamed woman born in Cuba but raised in Miami by her grandfather who seeks out the story of her vanished mother. Upon the death of her grandfather, the narrator takes to Cuba with only the poem her mother pinned to her infant clothes and the sparse words that her grandfather divulged about her origins. The bulk of the narrative is occupied by the recountings of a woman named Teresa whom we are told is the narrator’s mother after a mysterious package of old letters and photographs arrives on her doorstep. Following the clues culled from Teresa’s writings about her life, marriage, career as an artist, and affair with the revolutionary icon Che, the narrator attempts to find this mother whom she 45 believes is still alive and solve the mystery of her father’s identity. Loving Che then is a novel about a woman struggling to understand her origins and her identity through a hunt for her parents. Lisa Wixon’s 2005 novel, Dirty Blonde and Half-Cuban, is the story of Alysia Briggs, born in Cuba but raised by her white U.S. diplomat parents around the world, who, as an adult, returns to her country of birth to find the biological father she never knew existed. Upon her mother’s deathbed, Alysia is told that John Briggs, the WASPy diplomat who raised her, is not her biological father. She then abandons her life plan (of becoming a diplomat) to seek out the Cuban translator named José Antonio whom her mother had an affair with all those years ago. Various circumstances trap Alysia in Cuba with no money and no family, and the rest of the narrative follows her excursions into the world of jineteras (or extended-engagement sex workers) while she investigates her father’s whereabouts. The story then witnesses the protagonist’s transition from Alysia Briggs to Alysia Vilar, as she wrestles with trying to discover what it means to be Dirty Blonde and Half-Cuban by finding her biological ties on and to the island. Unlike their predecessors, and even some of their contemporaries, Menéndez and Wixon offer an intervention into or make a shift within U.S Cuban literature through their focus on contemporary Cuba. The narratives of both novels center on the protagonist’s return trip to their lost homeland. The work of previous U.S. Cuban writers has almost exclusively focused on the construction of Cuba in terms of a temporal binary, oscillating between la cuba de ayer (yesterday’s Cuba) and the potentiality of el año que viene (or next year’s Cuba). Inevitably in this construction el ano que viene is really just the 46 reproduction of la cuba de ayer. Reckoning with the present in this writing usually occurs only as an adjustment to a life in the exilic receiving country, and even then this present oftentimes merely serves as the conditional temporal and geographic setting through which the preoccupation with yesterday’s and/or next year’s Cuba can be enacted. In this way I would argue that the telos of most post-1959 U.S. Cuban literature is the return to the island, a Reconstruction period to follow a civil war that has lasted more than half a century, the metaphoric and literal completion of (the circle that is) the Cuban Revolution. xxiv The fixations on pre-Revolutionary Cuba, the shock of exile, the process of adapting to a new country and way of life, and the unabashed opposition to Fidel and Cuba’s current political landscape that typify previous writings do not advance the plots of either of these two newer novels. Wixon's and Menéndez's writing attempts to circumvent this teleological circuit by narrating the return (of the individual, not the community) in the contemporary moment. As we shall see, such a narrative technique can lead to varied outcomes and yet simultaneously reinscribes the articulation of family and nation through literature. An examination of the structure of Menéndez’s previous work clearly emblematizes this dynamic. The characters in her 2001 collection of short stories, In Cuba I was a German Shepherd, model this literary transition in the two stories that serve as bookends to the text. The collection opens with its title story in which we witness Máximo and Raul, two elderly Cuban men, dealing with the constant adaptation to their new lives and the inability to leave behind their old ones. The narrative progression of 47 the story hinges upon a succession of domino games being played in a Miami park at which Máximo repeatedly subjects his fellow players to a series of jokes. The setting and time of the story shift between these present-day domino games of Máximo, Raul and their two Dominican friends in Miami and flashbacks to his life in Havana. The Cuban characters’ inability to conceptualize or accept their new lives and abandon their melancholic fixation on memories is drawn to the foreground with the telling of Máximo’s final joke. In this encapsulating moment he tells the story about a newly- arrived Cuban dog whose sexual advances are rebuffed by an American poodle that sees him only as a lowly mutt. In response to the poodle’s disgust and rejection, Juanito the Cuban dog, invokes the text’s title stating, “Here in America, I may be a short, insignificant mutt, but in Cuba I was a German shepherd” (28). The dog, like the old Cubans, displays a distorted self-view that is structured around past notions of identity linked to conceptions of the nation or national origin, which neither of them are able to relinquish. The final story of the collection, entitled “Her Mother’s House,” follows the character Lisette’s journey to Cuba. While there on assignment as a reporter, she also takes it upon herself to investigate her mother’s mythic Cuban home. Built up in her imagination by countless retellings of it grandiosity, the house is symbolic of the sacrifices made by Lisette’s family in their migration. Born in Miami two years after the revolution, Lisette’s understanding of Cuba and her identity itself are second-hand refashionings that only become obvious for their falsity when the actual squat, disheveled house that she comes across in Cuba does not mirror her mother’s burdensome re- 48 imaginings. In this way, Menéndez’s collection, taken as a whole, enacts this progression away from writing exclusively preoccupied with yesterday’s Cuba toward a newer conception of identity and nation that concerns the present-day realities of the island. Within the same narrative arc we can read the presentation and breakdown of old myths. Bringing the focus away from the nostalgic old male characters and towards a second generation female narrative voice marks a transition not only in theme and content but also in politics. In Cuba I was a German Shepherd then actively works to breakdown outdated established modes within the literature of the Cuban exile experience through a critical engagement with the very tenets and myths that typically characterize this writing. The collection transitions the reader away from the beginning story of old Cuban men telling nostalgic jokes to the final story’s protagonist confronting not only the disillusionment of these nostalgic folktales but also the reality of Cuban society today and the possibilities for her own connection to the island. Within this writing we can then read a self-reflexivity through the conscious adaptation of the established literary paradigms and tendencies of U.S. Cuban writing and the subsequent refashioning of these generic tools in the service of divergent and varied ends. Caminero-Santangelo, in characterizing these same complex relationships to the past in other U.S. Cuban authors, writes, “Literature by these authors is often strongly backward looking, even though it is also about ‘biculturalism and cultural transformation’ – that is, it willfully and self-consciously occupies the expected position of ‘nostalgia’ in order to say something about the way that nostalgia has been constructed 49 in previous texts, both literary and critical” (511). Her point also echoes Ricardo Ortíz's reading earlier in this chapter about the “irreconcilability” of U.S. Cuban literary generations. This literary dynamic is evidenced in Menéndez's short story collection – simultaneously presenting and disestablishing nostalgia as narrative technique. The utility of nostalgia as exemplified here, according to Dalleo and Machado Saez, is precisely what eludes and ironically pervades the anticolonial critic, “These critics [Juan Flores and Lisa Sánchez González] thus dismiss nostalgia as politically suspect, even while displaying a longing of their own for a lost time when politics were purer and Latino/a literature oppositional” (28). In keeping with this move, Loving Che and Dirty Blonde and Half-Cuban, feature characters who are disinvested in the primacy of nostalgia and futurity but, instead, are interested in understanding how contemporary Cuba might fit into their own personal narratives or psychic make-up. The disinvestment evidenced here is no way a disregard for Cuban history or future itself, but rather with outdated paradigms for understanding one’s connection to these factors, paradigms that all too often demand (or in the least facilitate) a disengagement with the present. In their focus on today’s Cuba, these texts mark a critical break with the heternormative model of reproduction inherent in literary genealogies in that they refuse to ventriloquize the literary mandates that precede them. We can thus read the illegitimacy of U.S. Cuban literature into the work of these two authors – simultaneously related to this particular literary grouping but also the bastard, deviant, disowned, and disavowing product of it. We see throughout these two texts how the safe terrain of conventional literary techniques and paradigms are inverted to deny 50 any sense of filial duty on the part of the authors to a literary genealogy, just as Menéndez’s protagonist in Loving Che explains of her identity, “Of my origins, I know little” (3). The telos of the return is then employed here to play on a tenet of the Cuban literary tradition. This underlying desire is utilized not to fantasize about a future version of the island post-Castro but instead allows a narrative engagement with Cuba as it is today, a position that is voiced by one of the protagonist's fathers, “I love my country and I can’t—I won’t—wait until it’s perfect to live here” (Wixon 231). Lauren Berlant's analysis of several stories that she names “pilgrimage-to- Washington narratives” proves useful to understanding these two novels. Within these stories she explains, “Someone, either a child or an innocent adult identified with children, goes to the capital. The crisis of her/ his innocence/ illiteracy emerges from an ambivalent encounter between America as a theoretical ideality and America as a site of practical politics, mapped onto Washington itself” (28). While Berlant's theories are specific to the United States and not to Cuba (or Cuban America), I propose that her work migrates well to other national formations and ideologies and proves particularly useful to this case. The two novels center on a similar pilgrimage narrative, both protagonists embarking on journeys to Havana in order to learn something about their families as well as their identities vis-à-vis the nation. The crisis here, however, is not produced from the disjuncture between the nation as “theoretical ideality” and the “practical politics” of its capital. Rather, as the children of exiles, these narrators must reconcile the practical 51 reality of contemporary Cuba with the exilic re-imagining of Havana as dystopia (mutually constituted, of course, by the nostalgic myths of the utopic Havana de ayer). For these characters, Cuba is a supposed fallen island of decay and proscription, their journeys then to the capital city are symbolically saturated narratives of the convergence of multiple crises. In returning, these characters must confront the tensions between history and the present: reckoning with the depictions of contemporary Havana as dystopia, revising myths of 1950s Havana as Eden, and simultaneously reconfiguring their own relation to the island, the nation, and their families. These stories not only challenge the myths of the Cuban exilic community but also symbolically threaten the fiction of the Cuban nation – as the Child's (here bastard's) pilgrimage brings about what Berlant names as a crisis in national narratives, “Confronting the tension between utopia and history, the infantile citizen’s stubborn naïveté gives her/ him enormous power to unsettle, expose, and reframe the machinery of national life” (29). This recalls our earlier discussion of the blank figure of the child, untainted by life, and whose experience has been circumscribed in their family homes. The return in these novels represents the stepping away from the known (family and nation) towards the unknown. However, as bastards, their pilgrimages are also fraught with the potential to expose and threaten the fiction of the national family. Finally, these stories also only oddly fit in with other Latina/o literature precisely because they focus on return and hardly involve the United States at all. For anticolonial critics, this position would almost certainly exclude them from Latina/o literary 52 groupings – and yet such a narrative move is necessary not only to more closely articulate the Cuban exilic condition but also to bespeak the nature of diasporic belonging. In narrating the Cuban exile's confrontation with both the theoretical concept and actual reality of the homeland these novels also allow us to theorize how Cubans (and arguably other diasporas) configure or conceptualize their relationship to the nation generally, and to the United States specifically. Writing on the poetry of Pablo Medina in relation to the trajectory of Cuban American literature, Ricardo Ortiz describes the poet’s longing for “the quality of security that familiality and a construction of nationality based on familial notions seem to guarantee most and that seem to leave exiles from such nations… in such a profoundly orphaned state in this America” (199). The two protagonists’ search for the family is also, clearly, a search for the nation. This is underlined by the fact that both protagonists only embark on their journeys for identity after the death of the family members that had heretofore structured their sense of self. Alysia Brigg’s mother dies, leaving her with a longing for the biological and cultural ties that she cannot find in her American father. Loving Che’s unnamed central character can only return to Cuba in search of her mother after the death of her grandfather, her only relative and guardian in the States. Alysia's already strained connection to her American father is further broken after her mother's death and the revelation of her biological father, “He had lost more than his wife, and I more than my mother. We’d lost our interpreter”(14). Their separation is figured as an inability to communicate or express themselves without a medium, they seem to speak different languages that are unintelligible to one another now that the 53 fiction of a familial bond has disintegrated. This fissure between Alysia and her sense of family opens up her willingness to travel to Cuba once again, a pilgrimage that by story's end redefines her, “The girl who stood here one year ago is gone forever” (235). Picking up on the language of hyphenated identities, Wixon's protagonist explains, “The hyphen is the fulcrum, the teeter-totter that swings up and down. Some days I’m more heavily Cuban. On others, I weigh in more American” (4). And yet this language of balance is deceptive because each side of the equation is not equal, as we see when, propositioned by a tourist, Alysia, “realized that the teeter-totter had landed with a thud. At that moment, I was only Cuban” (5). The Cuban in her language is associated with only poverty, prostitution, and service to American tourists. This vision of Cuba as simultaneously desirable and yet decaying dominates Alysia's first impressions, “Havana, a European-style capital long forgotten, is magnificent and gray. A baroness at the end of her long life, numbed by a destitution not foreseen” (22). These perceptions slowly develop into a critique of the nation, “I wonder how many years this ridiculous system can continue. Its degradations. Its pride-for-dollars economy” (49). A critique that emerges, however, not as a judgement from a fleeting tourist but from the perspective of an insider. Her position is now of someone who has confronted the practical reality of living and surviving in contemporary Havana (rather than a judgement based on handed down dystopic myths), “If these were my people, and I no longer doubted they were, they’d have to teach me exactly how to survive. And survive I would” (34). Alysia's desire to connect to her Cubanidad, at first just a mild curiosity, overwhelms her on her first trip to the island: 54 What came over me, slowly and imperceptibly, as I drank in the spectacle, was a burning desire to find José Antonio. At first, I’d just wanted to see the island where I was born, but soon the possibilities of finding him and his family captured my imagination. In the context of all this beauty, in this culture of Cuba, this cubanidad, I realized that I’d be inheriting much more than a Spanish last name. I’d be gaining a heritage. And so it was this way that my mother’s wish finally became mine, and the promise I’d made to her to find José Antonio became the promise to myself, to discover this secret link into my past. (23) Unmoored by the death of her mother, the loss of her biological tie with her American father, and now presented with the lure of security provided by a Spanish last name, symbolic of not only family but also heritable national belonging, Alysia's pilgrimage upends her life's established plan as she now moves, “Toward my future and my family and the unknown” (205). Though her journey to the capital is tumultuous at first as she is left without family, without nation (unable to leave Cuba on her student visa), and without property (her money stolen and her American father unwilling to assist her) – from this evacuated position she forges a new subjectivity amidst her newfound people, “My sympathies, I realize, are no longer confused. My father is Cuban and my mother loved him, and here —in this treacherous place, this innocent place, this Babylon—I stand proudly on mi patria, with my Cuba. With my Cubans” (62). She constructs an identity as Cuban out of her experiences on the island making ends meet as a jinetera. Readjusting her views on sex as well as learning to dance and otherwise get in touch with her body and sensuality, she slowly gains respect and admiration for these people who live by any means necessary or “a lo cubano” (127). And yet, although Alysia is able to reconfigure her own psychic relationship to Cuba, we see that her attempts are often contested, 55 “'Extranjera.' Foreigner. I sigh. No matter how Cuban I’ve become, no matter how much I share the struggle with my kinfolk, I’m rarely granted the permission to sympathize” (91). The bastard's return threatens the sanctity of the national narrative and is therefore unsettling. Without the authentication of biological family and limited experience on the island her Cubanidad is vulnerable to challenges, illegitimacy continues to mark her unbelonging. Her precarious new identity is also furthered by and vulnerable to her romantic relationship with a jinetero Rafael. An affair that echoes her own mother's relationship with José Antonio and Cuba, “'Don't know if your momma loved the man or the island,' said Aunt June. 'Can't say I ever would've left'” (23). Her romance with Rafael is also a romance with the island. xxv As much as she is connected to the island now and has refashioned herself as Cuban, it becomes crucial to her integration into the national fiction that this be reflected in the opinions of those around her as well, “Extranjero versus native. It’s a distinction crucial to all cubanos, and I wonder how, in his private mind, Rafael sees me” (164). Ultimately, she and Rafael are connected not only through their shared experiences with jineterismo but also (and relatedly) as children of the Revolution, “Thinking about his father and his life of jineterismo, I press close to his heart, as if to compress the wound...Rafael’s arms engulf me... and it’s this way that we find ourselves hour later, stealing some peace, the sun blessing us anew, a son and a daughter left alone with the ghosts of their fathers” (164). xxvi After finally meeting her Cuban family and discovering that José Antonio has been in the United States all this time keeping close to her, Alysia (though happy) is still 56 unsettled, “Rather than being a blissful denouement, meeting my father has churned up more confusion about my family and my past. Not to mention my future” (233). Having returned to Cuba, José Antonio will not be allowed to leave the island again, limiting Alysia's long-term ability to engage with and know him (because she is legally only allowed one visit every three years). Family and nation are thus again made inseparable – in order to know and become a part of her family Alysia would also have to be a part of the nation. With her one year student visa (which had previously forced her to unwillingly stay on the island) about the expire, she is now being forced to leave Cuba or commit to yet another entire year living a lo cubano. Deciding to leave, Alysia rides in a cab to the airport with her father, the two of them staring at her map unfolded across their laps. She narrates particular places on this map that she used in her search to her father, reflecting on lessons learned and memories formed along the way. Maps, we have learned throughout the text xxvii , are central to her cognitive world, “While we are waiting for our luggage, the habit of childhood travel prompts me to study a map of Cuba. I trace an index finger along the page in my guidebook. I like looking at maps, and I can’t help thinking it’s the same perspective my mother shares, one from above, looking down on it all” (21). When she first arrived on the island Alysia turned to maps as a familiar way of understanding the world around her. However, in her initial lost state, unsure of her identity, she could no longer easily orient herself, “Although maps are central to my personal history, to understanding my family and their life as diplomatic tramps, the map of Havana tells me only one thing. How very lost I am” (25). At this point, without family history to guide her, all that she is able to 57 recognize is that she does not belong in Cuba. Approaching the airport Alysia reaches an epiphany through the map, telling the driver to turn back, “'I know the terminal is to the left,' I say. 'But I’m reading the map, and it says to turn to the right'” (243). Finally legible to her, the map plots out her need to stay in Cuba, to continue to write herself into the national familial fiction. Alysia Vilar enacts the trope of the foundling. Her family reunification enables and necessitates her reintegration into the nation. Ultimately Dirty Blonde and Half- Cuban completes the telos of return. Her pilgrimage, though at first potentially confounding and disruptive, ends up feeding directly back into the fictions of familial and national belonging. A process of reconciliation and Reconstruction that the protagonist then imagines as the hope for all those still afloat, insecure, and orphaned in/as the diaspora, “And while the nations wrestle, while they teeter-totter on my hyphen, on the fulcrum of my Cuban-American identity, I can only pray for a quick resolution, so that my people who’ve been scattered around the world may again claim their homeland, and together we may heal” (246). While both novels play with the tropes of romance novels and sexual intrigue in order to capture the reader's attention and imagination, Loving Che's central romance is not that of the protagonist but rather is told in flashback through a series of letters from her supposed mother. The bulk of the novel is comprised of nostalgic memories of an alleged affair, “small shards of remembrances written on banners of wind” (49). In this way the novel challenges the reader to see not only how exile affected the protagonist and Cubans in the United States, but also to relate to the experiences of those left behind, “I 58 was reminded that nostalgia is not the exclusive province of exiles; or perhaps that one can be an exile without ever having left, can be an exile, so to speak, from time” (200). As another character in the story says, having lived in Cuba his whole life, “Sometimes I think this exile has been little more than a brief passage through a mirror” (167). Cubans in the diaspora and on the island have both equally had to make sense of life after the Revolution. This complication of nostalgia, memory, and history dominates the narrative. Growing up under the guardianship of her maternal grandfather, the narrator knew very little about her mother and nothing about her father. Though she lived with her grandfather the two of them never spoke of his daughter/ her mother who chose to stay in Cuba instead of leaving with her child, “Perhaps I sensed already that she had been part of some great disappointment, that she was one of the many things of the past that it was best not to speak about” (4). We see here again the circumscription of knowledge in the home that will eventually compel the (bastard) protagonist to resist and journey into the unknown. This then becomes the work of the novel, to speak about the things that it is “best not to speak about.” Perhaps her grandfather hopes to spare the protagonist the pain of nostalgia that surrounds her, “Disillusioned, I abandoned my plans and came to interpret this fetish for the past as another of the destructive traits of the Cuban... This endless pining for the past seemed to me a kind of madness; everyone living in an asylum, exiled from the living, and no one daring to say it plainly” (2). And yet the alternative available to her, not knowing anything about her mother and father and the island she came from, is just as if not more painful, “I wonder now if this backward looking of the exile—the Cuban one in 59 particular, so hysterical and easy to caricature—could be an antidote to a new and more terrible kind of madness” (2). This is the madness of the diaspora, of recognizing one's illegitimacy, one's unbelonging, national subjects now lacking the feeling of security that the nation provides – it is living in an orphaned state. Unable to cope with this emptiness, the protagonist inquires about her family history, “The time came, however, when my grandfather's silence about my mother no longer satisfied me. As a girl I had already begun to sense a void behind me, and as I grew older I became more and more preoccupied with the blank space where my mother should have been” (4). Confronted by these questions, her grandfather begins telling the narrator about her mother, her past, and Cuba. These bits of history trigger an immediate change for her, “For some years, I had been aware in myself of a strange detachment, an aimlessness. I could sit for hours and do nothing, feel nothing. Now I heard every small rustle in the grass, every labored ant-step” (7). And yet these answers only lead to more questions; though she knows more about her mother she still has no real felt connection to her or to her past (and) homeland. So she remains an exile, a nomad, a wanderer, “As the months and then years passed, I traveled farther and wider, my desire to keep moving always outpacing my small terror of planes, my fear of leaving. I was in India when I got word that my grandfather had died... The house was filled with a new silence that seemed to muffle even my attempt to mourn... Shortly after, I made my first trip to Cuba” (9-10). Always a place overwhelmed by silence and the unspeakable, her grandfather's house grows even quieter now that she has no family at all. It is here, propelled by the need to escape this silence, that the narrator begins her pilgrimage back 60 to Cuba – in search of a family and a nation to fill this deafening void. Making several trips to Cuba over years the narrator searches for anyone who recognizes her mother's name (Teresa de la Landre). Unsuccessful and exhausted with these trips she eventually forgoes returning any longer, “I traveled by myself and returned home lone and after a while decided that the unease that had settled over me would fade with time” (11). Her failure to find her mother (and hence anchor herself to the nation) exacerbates the loneliness and ennui of exile. She continues on in this condition until one day a package of letters arrives at her door, these letters claim to come from her mother and are fragments of a complete narrative of her mother's life, her affair with Che, and the narrator's beginnings. These “shards of remembrances” comprise the second (and largest) section of the book. Reading them over and over the narrator cannot make sense out of the disorder of someone else's memories and yet feels another change within her, “But on each rereading I found myself drawn deeper and deeper, until I feared I might lose myself among the pages, might drown in a drop of my own blood” (12). These letters represent, to the protagonist, the narrativization of her familial and national belonging (invoked by the reference to blood). Yet as we read the letters what becomes apparent is the absolute indeterminate and even spurious nature of memory (and history). Teresa herself practically warns the protagonist against the lure of memory's faulty construction, “Be vigilant, my daughter; memory is the first storyteller” (47). This inability to make history and memory provide the protagonist with explanations or causality or narrative, plagues the letter writer, “Forgive me, my daughter, I have labored to construct a good history for you, to put 61 down the details of your life smoothly; to connect events one to another. But my first efforts seemed false. And I am left with only these small shards of remembrances written on banners of wind” (49). Teresa wishes to impart a sense of solace through these letters, to explain away the past so that her daughter can have the illusion of a cohesive narrative, when in fact she knows this to be a futile exercise: I had hoped life would unfold like a book where each detail built on the one before it, all of it racing to a satisfying conclusion. But life is not a tidy narrative... We learn this late. These scraps of memory that become untethered from the rest, flapping disconsolately in the wind, these memories are the most important of all. Memories like these remind us that life is also loose ends, small events that have no bearing on the story we come to write of ourselves. (48) It is also possible that the letters are also meant to provide Teresa with the satisfaction of distilling a plot from the events of her life. And through this narration she does begin to make sense out of the disorder of her life, to explain the decisions she made to herself, “The more I write, the more I remember, as if the words moving across the page were a wind blowing away the dust of years. There were many sleepless nights when I lay in bed absolving myself ahead of my sins, arranging my memories so they might assist in the deception” (92). Narrative, if constructed properly, can wash away or dull the painful memories that haunt her life. In this way Teresa admits defeat. The letters can never fulfill her daughter's desires (for family or for nation), and yet they are the only thing that she has to offer, her last attempt to mend the wound she opened all those years before, to fill the void of history and memory, “You and I are past forgiveness or understanding. I took a history from you and you returned carrying his memory in your dark eyes... To you 62 I leave these small words, these images stilled with a spirit that belongs to you” (155). The letters end up only feeding further into the protagonist's longing for answers. Trying to piece together clues from the writing about where her mother could possibly be, she even enlists the help of one of her old professors who is an expert on Cuba before making another trip to the island. Dr. Caraballo provides no such assistance, only throwing the veracity of the letters further into question, “There are some errors in the dates, she said. Omissions. Maybe this isn't important to a love story. I don't know... I 'm not here to dash whatever hopes you had. I don't know anything about you” (174). Such flippancy is easy for the professor to have, secure in her own identity. She explains that she too came to the United States by herself and lived in Indiana before reuniting with her family and moving to Miami, “But I think I can understand that feeling of vastness at your back that you describe in your letter. I can understand how in the absence of a past, one might be tempted to invent history” (173). Had her own narrative been different, remained unsubstantiated by the security of family like the protagonist, she too may have turned to the past for answers, creating something like the letters, “an impossible reinvention of history, a beautiful fraud” (175). Despite the warnings of Dr. Caraballo and the lack of adequate clues from the letters, the protagonist returns again to Cuba. This time she successfully tracks down a servant mentioned in the letters only to find out from this woman that Teresa never met Che and in fact there are many things in the letters that are untrue. Demanding to know where her mother is now, she finds out that after laboring for a year to write the letters to her daughter, Teresa committed suicide by throwing herself off her building. Falling into 63 a deep depression after she returns from another failed trip, the protagonist mourns what she has lost all over again (her mother and her nation), “I simply lay, as I imagine an animal or an insect might, wanting nothing, dreaming nothing, not content or discontent, just caught in a sort of waiting” (219). Eventually she plans another trip to Cuba, hoping to attempt to substantiate her identity through more “official”circuits, “I would try to look up my birth certificate. Maybe talk to people in the government” (220). Yet she ultimately cannot get herself to return again to face the possibility of another failure, another trip that would only further prove her unbelonging, “Each time I thought of pursuing the truth of the story, I felt a bit of the creeping exhaustion that I had only just escaped” (220). The novel closes with her traveling more around the world, mired by a lack of belonging, seeing the fictional family and nationality that, in Teresa's stories about Che, both seduced and still eludes her, “I found as the weeks passed that I could not escape his face... [I] met his eyes in an advertisement... follow[ed] a man in a red convertible that I was sure was him... found myself staring one day at a little boy in the mall who looked so much like the small Che” (228). Loving Che enacts a shift in the literature of nostalgia by using both the telos of return and the genre of romance to engage in the very possibility of its title, writing about Che Guevara outside of the dogmatic political sphere instead literally inviting the revolutionary leader into the Cuban American house by making him part of the (imagined) family. Loving Che then employs the story of return towards different ends. The protagonist is left afloat in the diaspora, a stateless wanderer without nation and 64 without family. It is precisely the death of her family that disables her from connecting to the nation (unlike Alysia whose family enables her to stay). Scattering around the world she can only find a sense of nation/ family in an imaginary sense, through images of an icon, “a beautiful stranger who, in a different dream, might have been the father of my heart” (228). Conclusion: Cuban America or the Broken Homeland of Diaspora In this shift toward dealing with the Cuba of today the authors re-conceptualize the centrality of nationality to constructions of the self. Menendez's and Wixon's work articulate not only the possibilities of U.S. Cuban literature but simultaneously enable a theorization of nationalism for Cuban exiles. The trope of illegitimacy, as played out in these texts, invokes and questions how the family serves as the conceptual scaffolding for constructions of the nation-state. The plots of both texts advance according to a search for the protagonist’s father, bringing into stark relief the interconnections between the family, cultural identity, and national belonging. Returning to Cuba is seen by these two characters as intrinsic to understanding who they are, yet even once on the island they are consistently made aware of their otherness and their unbelonging – their veritable and inescapable illegitimacy. The works of these authors allow us to look at the configuration of the nation- state in a way that problematize such an easy coupling by exposing a form of nationalism (or a conception of one's relation to the nation) that exceeds (and possibly then) creates the state. In this way it becomes possible to theorize diasporic communities as their own 65 illegitimate states, a grouping of peoples based along the lines of fictive affiliations to multiple nation-states. The illegitimacy of this fictive body or nationalized grouping of Cuban America then points to the inadequacy of the nation-state (and even family) as the basis for conceptions of the self or of the group. These Cuban Americans are neither legitimately Cuban nor would I say that they are legitimately of the United States. And yet, thinking of Cuban America as some sort of hybridized borderland also seems inadequate because while borderlands are highly contested and regulated interstitial sites, they are always already claimed by the nation. In fact it is the multiple claims of two or more nations made on these spaces that define their complexity. But the case of Cuban America or the diaspora I would argue involves multiple disavowals as opposed to multiple claims. It is the irreconcilable nature of Cuban America with its two defining national components (that paramount hyphen) that characterizes its condition. Instead then, employing the trope of illegitimacy to draw out the connections to and between formations of the nation/family, identity, and literature complicate our understandings of the contemporary state of Cuban America and diaspora in necessary ways. 66 i For allusive accounts of the range and scope of this writing see Poyo 1989 and Lazo 2005. ii For information on the presence of Cubans in Tampa and Ybor City see Greenbaum 2002, Dequesada Jr. 1999, and Hospital and Cantera 1996. For literary references on Cubans in Tampa and Ybor City see Yglesias 1998, Grillo 2000, and Cruz 2003. iii Following the Cuban War for Independence (alternately called the Spanish American War), the United States imposed direct colonial rule over the island from 1898 through 1912. The Cuban Constitution was re-written to include the Platt Amendment which stated: (see insert reference for more on the War for Independence and the Platt Amendment). iv Dalleo and Machado Saez offer an insightful analysis of the bifurcation and interplay of these particular critical strands in their book The Latino/a Canon and the Emergence of Post-Sixties Literature. See their chapters “Movin’ On Up and Out: Lowercase Latino/a Realism in the Works of Junot Díaz and Angie Cruz” for an examination of Flores and the anticolonial critical trend and “Latino/a Identity and Consumer Citizenship in Cristina Garcia’s Dreaming in Cuban” for an in-depth discussion of Pérez Firmat, Ilan Stavans, and the multiculturalist critical trend. v Dalleo and Machado Saez further explain Flores's critical position, “We have already noted that anticolonialist intellectuals view immigrant Latino/a writing as politically suspect in terms of its relationship to the Sixties tradition. Juan Flores, in the chapter ‘Life Off the Hyphen’ from his theoretical study, From Bomba to Hip-Hop (2000), provides the most detailed articulation of the anticolonial critic’s discomfort with what is perceived to be a trend in immigrant writing. Flores argues that immigrant Latino/a authors have a different relationship to ‘infrastructures of production and consumption’ as opposed to their resident Latino/a brethren (177). More specifically, their position as immigrants and therefore ‘overseas representatives’ provides them with access to a social framework of consulates and government-sponsored events that nurtures and in effect guarantees their literary success (177). This type of cultural capital gives them an advantage that the resident Latino/as—Chicano/as and Puerto Ricans—do not have, resulting in the immigrant writers’ easy ‘accommodation’ into the book market (177). Flores specifically mentions ‘English-language authors like Dominicans Julia Alvarez and Junot Díaz, [who] in addition to their access to major U.S. publishing opportunities, gained rapid recognition in the Dominican Republic and among Dominican writers, which included the translation and publication of their work’ (177). While apparently enviable, the cultural capital that Flores sees the Dominican-American authors as enjoying also seems to dilute their capacity to be oppositional, enabling the creation of a Latino/a ‘literary community in New York and nationally, an umbrella of legitimation’ for the market category of Latino/a literature as a whole (177-78)” (74). vi A point that Dalleo and Sanchez support, “On the one hand, the anticolonial Latino/a critics who define left politics as central to Latino/a production explicitly exclude the Cuban-American community from being potential producers of such literature. On the other hand, the Miami establishment identifies the true Cuban writer as politically conservative. As a result, neither side leaves a space for a progressive Cuban-American writerly voice. If you are a progressive writer, then the Miami establishment will designate you as non-Cuban; and if you are Cuban, the anticolonial critics will define you as intrinsically non-progressive” (162). vii A practice that Flores overwhelmingly exercises, “What is ‘new’ about the recent Latino writing, and goes to inform it as a marketing category, is that it seeks to be apolitical... With all his disclaimers and fanciful notions of ‘implosion,’ Stavans is talking about crossing over, making it into the mainstream, assimilation. The ‘explosion of Latino arts’ which is ‘overwhelming the country,’ and which involves a strange gallery of examples, from William Carlos Williams and Joan Baez to Anthony Quinn and Oscar Lewis (!), means above all a move into the heart of American mass culture” (174). viiiI thank David Román for his ideas on the inherent “heteronormative” and “reproductive” logic of 67 genealogies. Any bastardization of his thoughts or words are at the fault of the author. ix See Berlant, “My thinking about abjection differs from these in a few ways, which have to do with tracking the political specificity of abjection’s double process: as a kind of social identity and as a kind of effect some people have on others. Kristeva actually talks about abjection as a structure of desubjectification – in which ‘ordinary’ subjects lose a sense of their rationality or legitimacy as subjects in everyday and national life in response to negatively invested social phenomena. She calls these abjected people ‘dejects’: faced with a substance or phenomenon that unsettles the constitutive rules of order in their horizon of life expectation, dejects become shaken, aversive, incompetent to subjectivity. They feel a traumatic loss – of themselves” (286; italics in original). x Although I would argue that this literature is often nationalistic – it is not to the Cuban nation-state that this writing contributes but rather to a nation-in-exile, the diaspora, the imagined ahistorical Cuba (created out of the best memories of the past and the brightest hopes for the future). xi Dalleo and Machado Saez also explore the vexing position from which Cubans in the United States write, “Cuban-American cultural production enters a public sphere defined by a double-bind dynamic. This double bind results from the very different definitions of authentic cultural production of the two main canons in which Cuban-American writing seeks membership: the Latino/a tradition and that of the Miami political establishment. Facing competing definitions of politics and culture, Cuban- American authors take on the challenges of speaking to two audiences without alienating either, and consequently run the risk of being labeled sellouts by both. Cuban-American writers are often counted out of the Civil Rights legacy by progressive Latino/a theorists for what appear to be their demographic characteristics but are in actuality politicized notions of authentic Latino/a production. As we note in earlier chapters, oppositionality and political resistance are often cited as defining facets of authentic Latino/a writing by anitcolonial critics. The stereotype of the Cuban-American community in the United States as fleeing the 1959 revolution, predominantly white, politically conservative, and solidly middle-class is often invoked as the rationale for not categorizing Cuban Americans as U.S. Latino/as. Eliana Rivero’s ‘Hispanic Literature in the United States: Self-Image and Conflict’ is explicit about why Cuban Americans cannot fit: ‘If we define ethnic minority art and literature in the United States as a form of cultural resistance and/or protest, then the works by Cuban immigrants can never be considered’ (187). Cuban-American writers are accordingly not political in the ‘right way.’ The objection that Rivera has to Cuban-American writing being classified as U.S. ethnic literature is not simply a matter of pure politics, namely that Cuban exiles ‘oppose the socialist revolutionary process taking place in their homeland.’ She also criticizes the community specifically for its embrace of ‘selfish, materialistic middle-class values’ (25). Cuban Americans as a group are depicted as too open to the market, too accepting of the values of capitalistic materialism, and it is their middle-class economic status that enables them to participate too fully in the market. Our project has sought to complicate such notions of the ‘correct’ method for Latino/a expression of the political stance it should embody, including any terms of exclusion predicated on the relationship between the Cuban-American community’s politics and the influence of the U.S. market” (160). xii As Ann Louise Bardach writes, “One prism through which I have chosen to view this forty-four-year- old quagmire is that of the broken family. The Cuban Revolution has ravaged the Cuban family much as the Civil War in the United States ravaged American families, with cousins, aunts and uncles often facing off against brothers, sisters and parents. The trope of the shattered family has infused the Cuban conflict with an emotionality that is the stuff of Greek drama...” (Cuba Confidential xvii). xiiiSee Misri, Deepti. Reading Violence: Gender, Violence, and Representation in India and Pakistan (1947--present). Diss. University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 2008; Zamindar, Vazira Fazila- Yacoobali. The Long Partition and the Making of Modern South Asia: Refugees, Boundaries, Histories. New York: Columbia University Press, 2007; Stokes, Katherine May. Sexual Violence and the Authority to Speak: The Representation of Rape in Three Contemporary Novels. Diss. McGill University 68 (Canada), 2009; Skinner, Amy McGuff.. Intimate Terror: Gender, Domesticity, and Violence in Irish and Indian Novels of Partition. Diss. The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 2007; and Muirhead, Lisa Dawn. Re-membering Women's Bodies: The Problems of Voice and Representation in Two Partition Narratives. Diss. The University of Manitoba (Canada), 2002. xiv It might be helpful here to propose a provisional hermeneutic binary between the metaphors of bastards and foundlings. As shall be explained further later, both bastards and foundlings in literature have traditionally represented anxieties around the sanctity of the family and nation. How these characters effect the family/nation serve as the dramatic tension and plots of stories. However, by the conclusion of most novels foundlings are revealed to actually (read biologically) belong to the family in question, whereas bastards remain positioned outside the family/nation. In this way metaphorically we can view all Cuban American writing as illegitimate to the nation, yet within this group there is 1. (the bastards) writing that self-reflexively understands and critiques the conditions of its production and 2. (the foundlings) writing which is illegitimate by circumstance but ultimately seeks to be incorporated back into the Cuban national(ist) literary family. xv On the production of the sign “Latina/o” see Suzanne Oboler. Ethnic Labels, Latino Lives: Identity and the Politics of (Re)Presentation in the United States. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1995. xvi I am reminded here of the article, “Theses on the Latino Bloc: A Critical Perspective,” by Rosaura Sánchez and Beatrice Pita in which they argue for the political necessity and provisionality of “a collectivity-in-difference, a bloc” (28). They further explain, “'Latino' cannot operate as a simple ethnic designation because we cannot claim one national origin. Our origin is multinational and multi- racial. Our Latina/o identity is trans-American, linked to the continent of the Americas and more specifically to Latin America. In this sense we are a transcontinental and transnational population, deeply divided by class, national origin, race, language, residence, and political orientation. Issues of gender and sexual orientation further divide us. We are not a nation but a conglomeration, a social construction, what Hall might call 'a politically and culturally constructed' grouping that is continually reconfiguring itself (1996, 443). We are a composite, made up of multiple positionings—that is, of concrete social locations —and assuming multiple ideological perspectives and identities. We are U.S. citizens and noncitizens, documented and undocumented” (30). xviiOn the logics of exploitation within the family under capitalism, wherein we see the emergence of the State as arbiter not only of class divisions but of the inherent intrusions of contradiction into the family unit, see Marx Capital Volume I, “However terrible and disgusting the dissolution of the old family ties within the capitalist system may appear, large-scale industry, by assigning an important part in socially organized processes of production, outside the sphere of the domestic economy, to women, young persons and children of both sexes, does nevertheless create a new economic foundation for a higher form of the family and of relations between the sexes. It is of course as absurd to regard the Christian- Germanic form of the family as absolute and final as it would have been in the case of the ancient Roman, the ancient Greek or the Oriental forms, which, moreover, form a series in historical development” (620-621). On this particular historical development of the modern family unit in relation to both privatization of communal property and rising State capacity see Engels Origins of the Family, Private Property, and the State – particularly the final chapter “Barbarism and Civilization” wherein he argues, “The form of the family corresponding to civilization [by which he means a particular historical moment in the spread of capitalism over a particular social formation] and becoming its pronounced custom is monogamy, the supremacy of man over woman, and the monogamous family as the economic unit of society” (214). xviiiSimilarly to the quotation above from Alryyes, Schneider also shows the links between the units of the family nation and church. See David M. Schneider. “Kinship, Nationality, and Religion in American Culture: Toward a Definition of Kinship,” in Symbolic Anthropology: A Reader in the Study of Symbols and Meanings. Eds. Janet L. Dolgin, David S. Kemnitzer, and David M. Schneider. New York: Columbia University Press, 1977. 63-71. On the similarities between the family and nation Anderson writes, “While it is true that in the past two decades the idea of the family-as-articulated-power- structure has been much written about, such a conception is certainly foreign to the overwhelming bulk 69 of mankind. Rather, the family has traditionally been conceived as the domain of disinterested love and solidarity. So too, if historians, diplomats, politicians, and social scientists are quite at ease with the idea of 'national interest,' for most ordinary people of whatever class the whole point of the nation is that it is interestless. Just for that reason, it can ask for sacrifices.” (143-44) xix “What is the role of a national? To love his country, his father- or mother-land. Loyalty and support for his nation and all those who belong to it. Patriotism in the extreme of 'My Country Right or Wrong' is one statement of it. But even where it does not take that particular form, loyalty to and love for one's country is the most generalized expression of diffuse, enduring solidarity” (Schneider 68). xx As Edward Said proffers, “For if the body of objects we study -the corpus formed by works of literature- belongs to, gains coherence from, and in a sense emanates out of and reconfirms the concepts of nation, nationality and even of race, there is very little in contemporary critical discourse making these actualities possible as subjects of analysis or discussion. I do not by any means intend to advocate a kind of reductive critical language whose bottom-line rationale is the endlessly asseverated thesis that "it's all political," whatever in that context one means by all or political. Rather what I have in mind is the kind of analytic pluralism proposed by Gramsci for dealing with historical-cultural blocks, for seeing culture and art as belonging not to some free-floating ether nor to some rigidly governed domain of iron determinism, but to some large intellectual endeavor -what he calls systems and currents of thought- connected in numerous very complex ways to doing things, to accomplishing certain things, to force, to diffusing ideas, values, and world-pictures” (22). xxi Alryyes points out the near universality of this narrative arc in the history of the genre, “Almost without exception, all of the novels associated with the ‘rise of the novel’ in the eighteenth century narrate the life of a child leaving his/her family” (147). xxiiZunshine explains the bifurcation between the bastard (often figured as male) and foundlings (most often female), “Though structurally similar to the real-life bastard as an outsider forcefully inserting herself into the family and social order, the fictional foundling differed in important ways from her money- and status-hungry illegitimate counterpart. Her quest was for moral excellence and true identity, and if the revelation of that identity was accompanied by a shower of tears, titles, and estates, this bounty was bestowed by the parent who frequently did not have any other children and was therefore delighted with the reappearance of the long-lost legitimate offspring” (7). To explain this, Zunshine cites Alison Findlay's study of bastards in Renaissance drama, “‘legal illegitimacy affected one’s rights to inheritance, succession, and the exercise of authority, advantages usually enjoyed by men. [As] under patriarchal law, women were normally excluded from the inheritance of estate, position, or power… bastardy merely reinforced their already marginal status’” (12; quoting, Alison Findlay, Illegitimate Power: Bastards in Renaissance Drama. Machester: Manchester University Press, 1995. pg 5). xxiiiCuban exiles pose real threats to national notions of property, as many fear that a post-Castro Cuba would mean the return of exiles who would then attempt to reclaim land and other properties lost or taken upon their departure. For a dramatization of this scenario see Eduardo Machado's play The Cook (New York: Samuel French, 2004). xxivDavid L. Eng criticizes such a fixation with narratives of return as not only an impossibility that would produced further fracture but also as heteronormative, “In transnational adoption's crossing of sexuality and diaspora, we are presented with both the desire to return to the 'real' mother and the desire to return to the place of origins. These intersecting discourses of return underwrite a personal narrative of self- realization, completion, and closure that, as First Person Plural illustrates, is not only an impossible task to accomplish but also creates fragmentation and further displacement rather than wholeness. In returning to Korea for her 'reunion,' Borshay Liem is forced to acknowledge the fact that confronting the past is always double-edged, challenging any sense of recoupable stability. On the social level, these discourses of return resist notions of authenticity and belonging that support conservative notions of diaspora. Configuring diaspora in terms of heterosexuality, filiation, and ethnic purity, discourses of return as 'completion' and 'recuperation' deny issues of queerness, affiliation, and social contingency that define contemporary formations of new global families and flexible kinship underwriting queer 70 diasporas” (28-29). xxvConversely, the United States also plays the part of lover through the slippages and historical sedimentations in language, as Alysia explains towards the beginning of the novel, “A yuma. A foreign boyfriend... La yuma, I'd later learn, was originally slang for the United States, and una yuma identified a norteamericano... Today, yuma means any foreigner, from any country. And it's especially used to indicate a naïve tourist who assists—unwittingly or not—a Cuban in his daily quest for dollars” (41). By the end of the novel when Alysia's visa is about to expire and she is set to leave Cuba to return to the United States, her newfound grandmother, “can't believe her granddaughter is yet again leaving pa' la Yuma” (241). Alysia's romance with the island of Cuba is threatened by the possibility of her leaving for the United States (figured as both nation and foreign boyfriend). xxvi Aptly describing the lasting reverberations that historical events (like the Cuban Revolution) create, Berlant writes, “In this mode of national narrative, stories of mass trauma like war or slavery are encoded in plots of familial inheritance, wherein citizens of the posttraumatic present are figured in a daughter's or a son's coming to public terms with a generational past that defines her/him and yet does not feel fully personal.” (32) xxvii Maps abound in the text, see the references on pages 25, 39, 242, and 243. 71 Chapter Two Rebel Daughters: Gender, Political Patrimony, and Revolutionary Subjectivities in the Cuban Diaspora Here I disclaim all my paternal care, Propinquity, and property of blood, And as a stranger to my heart and me Hold thee from this for ever. The barbarous Scythian Or he that makes his generation messes To gorge his appetite, shall to my bosom Be as well neighbour'd, pitied, and relieved, As thou my sometime daughter. -William Shakespeare, King Lear (King Lear, Act I Scene I) Turning away from literal bastards, this chapter looks to the figure of the daughter to examine how the Revolution and the diaspora illegitimate the transference of political identity and national subjectivity between parents and their offspring, thus creating new and unanticipated subjectivities. i While the father-daughter relationship was central to the two novels in the previous chapter, we now turn to the autobiographical narrations by non-fictional women on their Cubanidad as circuited through the figures of their revolutionary fathers. This chapter juxtaposes the work of four distinct U.S. Cuban artists in order to examine the functions of gender, political patrimony, and revolutionary subjectivities in narratives of Cuban diasporic identity. Through an analysis of the cultural productions of Alina Fernández, Marissa Chibás, Vivien Lesnik Weisman, and Jeanine Cornillot we will begin to work through exilic understandings of national belonging and identity vis-à-vis patrimonial forms of politics. Working across different mediums (writing, performance, film, and radio) and across different political ideologies (conservative, liberal, left-wing, and apolitical) these women address similar concepts of identity, family, and national 72 belonging. Despite these apparent political and creative differences, all four artists evoke the figure of the father in order to construct both their own identities and a diasporic relationship to the Cuban nation. While on one level, the work of these artists provides a view into their individual and idiosyncratic circumstances and identities, it also simultaneously narrates a shared practice of political patrimony modeled on a diasporic relationship to the idea of a homeland. As autobiographical narratives of self-discovery, these accounts offer a sense of Cubanidad as circuited through the family and particularly through a focus on their patrilineal descent. The use and primacy of political patrimony in these texts – the reliance upon the father-figure (overdetermined by notions of patriarchy, biology, homeland, and the nation-state) as the mediator of a cultural, economic, and political heritage to produce a particular type of Cuban identity – seems at first to be a conservative practice on the parts of these artists. However, I will argue that the works of Fernández, Chibás, Lesnik Weisman, and Cornillot complicate the paradigm of political patrimony to bespeak the condition of diasporic subjectivities. Treating these narratives and the relationships between these daughters and fathers as individual or merely symptomatic of a privatized generational conflict dismisses their significance as one daughter's inability to get along with her father or one daughter's need to follow in her father's footsteps. Instead, we must see these singular examples as indicative of larger diasporic processes affecting and affected by new social formations. As rebel daughters, these artists counter the dichotomy that positions women as passive repositories of cultural memory and continuity versus men as revolutionaries and 73 arbiters of change. Instead, these women are the rebels, they are the active agents in determining their identities, their politics, and their relationship to Cuba. Their stories are not just the stories of great men, but rather they reveal both personal narratives of identity formation as well as contribute toward a diasporic and national history. In this way the work of these women offer us a feminist, diasporic revision of Cuban history and model an unanticipated Revolutionary subjectivity. After successfully overthrowing the Batista regime, Che Guevara and Fidel Castro sought to transform all aspects of Cuban society in the creation of a sustainable revolutionary movement. They addressed not only the political, economic, and legal structures but also the cultural and social orientation of the island and its people. Stemming from his economic reforms and a desire to shift people's focus away from monetary and material goods and towards service and self-satisfaction to promote a sense of national pride, Che Guevara conceived the ideal subject of the Cuban revolutionary society as el hombre nuevo or “the new man.” First described in a 1965 letter to Carlos Quijano, editor of the magazine Marcha, el hombre nuevo was the natural product of the revolution – a resultant change in the character of the people through the elimination of social classes and the seizure of the means of production for the society (Guevara 10). A Cuban counterpart to both the new “Soviet Man” and “Mao's good soldiers,” el hombre nuevo prioritized selflessness, patriotism, and commitment to the revolution over all else (Cheng 1). This inchoate national subjectivity was to supplant the colonized image of Cubans by fostering discipline, rigor, and moral character, “It is not a question of how many 74 kilograms of meat are eaten or how many times a year someone may go on holiday to the sea shore or how many pretty imported things can be bought with present wages. It is rather that the individual knows that the glorious period in which it has fallen to him to live is one of sacrifice; he is familiar with sacrifice” (Guevara 15). The impoverished conditions that would follow the Revolution (particularly in the Special Period) then became character building and any criticism would be seen not only as an affront to national pride but also as evidence of moral turpitude. The piety of the ideal subject of the Cuban Revolution would enable the new men to weather the good and bad times both out of a sense of nationalism and, more importantly, self esteem. The new man, therefore, represented not just a national subject position but an attempt to model a new way of being in the world, one that wholly defines the person not merely as a political or national entity but as a human, [A] calculated and systematic cultivation of ideas and perceptions, consciousness and subconsciousness, personal character, psychology, and even physical constitution. The new man was created not just to ensure that new ideas would replace old ones and that the party's tasks would be carried out, thus avoiding becoming merely a topic in political history, but also to stand up as an alternative human model that dwarfed all prior or contemporary types of human being. (Cheng 3) El hombre nuevo then embodied the ideal subjectivity of the Revolution. One that all Cubans were meant to aspire to become. In opposition to this ideal subject simultaneously emerged an entire class of people who, because of their inability or unwillingness to fit into this mold, were de- subjectified. Guevara refers to these people in his writing on the new man only in passing, describing them as, “la fracción minoritaria de los que no participan, por una 75 razón u otra, en la construcción del socialismo” and “la clase derrotada” (9). ii These “defeated” people were the bourgeois class but also anyone who did not agree with the Revolution or concede to the model of the new man. If el hombre nuevo was the subject of the Revolution, exiles were the deject of the Revolution. Lauren Berlant's interpretation of Kristeva's discussion of abjection proves useful to this process and the emergence of subjects borne in opposition to what she calls dejects, Kristeva actually talks about abjection as a structure of desubjectification – in which ‘ordinary’ subjects lose a sense of their rationality or legitimacy as subjects in everyday and national life in response to negatively invested social phenomena. She calls these abjected people ‘dejects’: faced with a substance or phenomenon that unsettles the constitutive rules of order in their horizon of life expectation, dejects become shaken, aversive, incompetent to subjectivity. They feel a traumatic loss – of themselves. (286) A people shaken, aversive, and incompetent to subjectivity, this is no more clearer than in the language employed by the Revolution around exiles. Their abjection became apparent in the labels used to identify exiles: in the 1960s they were called gusanos (worms), in the post-Mariel 1980s they returned to the language of filth as escoria (scum), only to finally emerge in the 1990s as anti-Cubans. iii Kristeva, herself, also draws the connection between abjection and exile. In a section entitled, “An Exile Who Asks, 'Where?'” she defines the characteristics of these de-subjectified people, “The one by whom the abject exists is thus a deject who places (himself), separates (himself), situates (himself), and therefore strays instead of getting his bearings, desiring, belonging, or refusing” (8; italics in original). This notion of the straying exile emerges often within the cultural work of Cuban artists. No longer 76 intelligible as a national subject, the exile is unmoored and wanders, searching for the sanctity and integrity provided by national (and familial) identifications. Kristeva also brings out the ideas that we have been working through here about the mutual failures of national and familial belonging that exile represents, “abjection is elaborated through a failure to recognize its kin; nothing is familiar, not even the shadow of a memory. I imagine a child who has swallowed up his parents too soon...” (5-6). With the Revolution and in exile, these subjects (familial and national) underwent an official process of abjection; as citizens they were de-nationalized and as relatives they were disowned. El hombre nuevo and los gusanos then form the binary of Cuban subjectivities that emerge from within the official language of the Revolution. The subjectivities that could not be anticipated, contained, or produced by the Revolution, however, are those forged in the diaspora and in the generations that would come. In this chapter, I posit the rebel daughter as one such unanticipated subjectivity that emerged in excess of the Revolution. iv They do not represent the failure of the revolution (or the failed subjectivity of the revolution) because that would be those who left the island or chose not to participate in the Revolution. That choice is removed for these women by a generation (while Alina Fernández may have eventually actively chosen exile for herself, she did so as an adult – removed from the immediacy of the Revolutionary moment). The failed subjectivity of the revolution would be those who Che names as “the defeated class” and those abjected by Castro as “worms.” Rather, these women represent the subjectivities that could not have been anticipated, the excess of the revolutionary movement. These women's narratives, I argue, represent a feminist, diasporic reimagining of 77 the revolutionary subjectivity, and of the Cuban diasporic identity. They are the metaphorical rebel daughters of the revolution. Through their narratives they not only bespeak their own subjectivities into existence (not only work through their own identities as Cubans, diasporans, women, daughters, artists) but also represent what Adriana Méndez Rodenas calls the “underside of the nation” and the Revolution, “ Recent Cuban American fiction reveals, then, the 'underside' of the nation, the antiheroic (and mostly silent and silenced) story of mothers and daughters, who, at every stage of Cuban history, have been present, yet as continued and symbolic absence” (Méndez Rodenas 57, italics in original). They are redefining Cubanidad through and yet beyond the masculinist notions of Revolutionary heroism. Their confrontations with the figures of their fathers are also a reckoning with the history of the Revolution and with the possibilities for a future politics of the Cuban nation and diaspora. Towards the end of his essay on the new man Guevara outlines some of the sacrifices made by these vanguard revolutionaries in the name of the movement. Amongst these, out of love for his country, the new man is alienated from the family, Los dirigentes de la revolución tienen hijos que en sus primeros balbuceos no aprenden a nombrar al padre; mujeres que deben ser part del sacrificio general de su vida para llevar a la revolución a su destino; el marco de los amigos responde estrictamente al marco de los compañeros de revolución. No hay vida fuera de ella. (15) v These rebel daughters, children of the Revolution, no longer falter in their words. They fail not at naming their fathers nor at re-envisioning Cuba and its peoples. Alina Fernández If the subjectivity ushered in the front door by the Revolution was Fidel and Che's 78 New Man, Alina Fernández represents the ideal embodiment of the unanticipated consequence or frankly the unwanted illegitimate offspring of the Revolution, the New Man's bastard child or, according to Fernández, la hija rebelde (the rebel daughter). Born in 1956, Alina Fernández is possibly the most well-known Cuban illegitimate daughter of Fidel Castro. Her mother, Natalia Revuelta, as a fervent supporter of the anti-Bautista movement came to know the revolutionary leader through her activism in several party initiatives. Their relationship grew deeper through their exchange of letters during Fidel's imprisonment. Upon his release and just before entering exile in Mexico where he would foment the first attacks that lead to the overthrow of the Cuban government, Fidel and Natalia allegedly conceived Alina. vi First published in Spain as Alina: Memorias de la hija rebelde de Fidel Castro (Alina: The Memoirs of Fidel Castro’ s Rebel Daughter) and later translated into the English-version Castro’s Daughter: An Exile’s Memoir of Cuba, the book chronicles Fernández’s life from her childhood in Havana, which is depicted in harsh and unflattering tones, through her escape from the island in her forties. The book details the ways in which she and her family felt alienated by Fidel and his other families, including Alina’s half-siblings. Fernández’s experiences outside of the island on assignment with her mother; her disillusionment with Fidel as both father and politician; and her disdain for the social and economic conditions brought about by the Revolution lead her to make public statements against the government and against Castro that subsequently positioned her as a known public dissident. Marked as such, her various attempts to leave the island nation are thus forbidden by the state. Throughout the rest of the memoir we see Alina 79 becoming increasingly opposed to Fidel’s government and increasingly ostracized in the social body. She is married several times and gives birth to and raises a daughter all in the nation with which she no longer identifies and in the presence of the family (narrative) that has continuously abandoned her. The reader witnesses Fernandez’s eventual escape from the island in an anti-climatic and sudden ending to her memoir. Within the rendering of a narrative of alienation from her father, Fernández simultaneously documents her own identity formation and constructs a historical account of Cuban society after the Revolution. Castro’ s Daughter is therefore both a personal testimony and a national record. In her memoir, it is Fernández who is the rebel in contrast to Fidel. While still claiming her identity as Castro’s daughter, Fernández nonetheless subverts the political patrimony to which she belongs, refusing to take Castro’s name and bolstering opposition to the leader both on and off the island. Fernández has further parlayed her opposition to Castro’s politics and the situation in Cuba into a Miami-based radioshow, “Simplemente Alina,” continuing the constant negotiation of her personal identity, historical documentation, political advocacy, and national character. Though the title of Fernandez's memoir firmly establishes the centrality of the patriarch, the introductory chapter concerns itself with both sides of her “Genealogical Tree.” In this chapter she outlines the history of her forefathers' arrival in Cuba, the birth of her parents, and the conditions that brought them together to conceive her. As she describes of her ancestors, “It did not take long for the Clews, Castro. Ruz, and Revuelta families to cross paths. Fate is promiscuous” (2). From the beginning then, Alina's own 80 family history becomes a representation of the historical admixture that is Cuba. The body of the next chapter, entitled “Alina,” begins with thick description of her mother, “My mother was a sprite. You must know some. Sprites are very distant and mysterious. When they disappear, the miracles leave with them. They are capricious. My sprite decided to fall in love with the wrong person. To those living in the fifties within Cuban society, that was unforgivable and unredeemable” (20). Natalia “Naty” Revuelta is described as a sprite, a creature from another world. Through this characterization of Naty as otherworldly we read her as both intriguing and unique and yet also unrealistic and flighty – not grounded in this reality, characteristics that Alina, as a daughter, does not need from her mother. This spriteliness at times emerges as a kind of naiveté or blind, misguided allegiance when it comes to Naty's commitment to the Revolution and Fidel. Her otherworldliness is also a source of blame for Alina's abandonment, “I compensated for my mother's absences by tearing at the lacy inserts of my linen gowns and sucking wildly at my pacifier. When she came close to me she was more essence than presence” (20). Simultaneously, these characteristics also lead Alina to reverse roles and infantilize her mother as a precious creature in need of protection from those who would take advantage of her naiveté, “If she couldn't go or wasn't invited somewhere, I wouldn't go either. In a small way, I acted as her mother, because Grandma Natica was terrible, always criticizing her. She treated Mom as if she were mentally incompetent, and prevented her from bringing any friends home for lunch by making fun of them with her cutting, unerringly targeted remarks” (100 ). Lala Natica, Alina's grandmother, 81 emerges throughout the text as a strict and almost Victorian character who is behind the times. She is clearly marked as part of the bourgeois class that is accustomed to the Old World social mores and completely opposed to the Revolution. Here we see her mother figured as the beautiful but distant sprite and her grandmother as the cold and aristocratic grande dame of the house, both failed models of maternity. Alina desperately seeks a sense of familiality that is constantly absent from her home life. Her friends' families inspire her jealousy and provide surrogates to her needs, “Her mother was as beautiful as the Sprite, but she was a homemaker and was always there. So I moved my headquarters over there and was able to enjoy family weekends with a father, a mother, grandparents, a dog, and even an older sister” (41). To Alina, Naty constantly places the needs of Fidel and her political support of the Revolution ahead of her family life and her daughter. We see several concrete examples throughout the memoir: when Naty refuses to leave Cuba and lets her husband and eldest daughter leave, “Natalie's eyes grew bigger and bigger because her mommy was breaking Daddy Orlando's heart” (25); when Naty sends her daughter and mother immediately back to Cuba from France where she is doing work because rumors about her possible defection call her revolutionary honor into question, “She could not tolerate being compared, even in thought, with the traitors” (58); whenever Alina mentions needing to see her mother, “To talk to the Sprite, I had to go visit her at work” (57); when Naty refuses to help Alina get excused from her mandatory time at a labor camp, “She left me in that state of desperation and abandonment that only children are capable of experiencing” (88); and when Naty refuses a therapist's suggestion to remove Alina from Cuba, “'you will have to 82 take her out of the country because socially, she will always have problems of maladjustment here in Cuba'” (78). The consistent impression that Alina portrays in her memoir is one of alienation from her family and mother at the fault of national politics. In an interview Alina makes this position clear, “‘I was born,’ Alina has often said, ‘just to improve my mother’s position with Fidel. And because of me, she has received privileges that might not otherwise have been hers. That’s all’” (Gimbel 165). Alina's interactions with Fidel during this chapter waver in terms of frequency and tenor. From the beginning he is figured as an interesting curiosity, “The Sprite put me on the floor in the midst of a cloud of cigar smoke, and there, his head lost in a bluish stinking cloud, was the top hairy man, the most pointy monkey. He bent down the way Daddy Orlando used to do to be at my height, and inspected me” (23). While Alina at this point does not know that Fidel is her father, we as readers can see her sense of removal or distance from him and his visits as further evidence of the familial alienation that has characterized her youth thus far, “I liked Fidel a lot, but I found the meek very annoying. The truth is that if he didn't come, I didn't miss him, because he was always on television, speaking nonstop to a bunch of meek people” (29). Here, “the meek” are figured as rivals to Alina for Fidel's attention. Throughout the text Alina separates herself out from these meek subjects of the Revolution, a separation that she feels from most subjectivities that emerge in her memoir. Her feelings of difference emerge both as a source of intense inadequacy and also as a source of pride. She is too different from the people around her and therefore finds it hard to make the types of emotional connections she longs for, “the humiliating feeling 83 that I was different from other children began to acquire the color of tragedy” (39). Her difference only further reinforces the alienation that her family has provided for her, “Even when I was not attempting to be different, I looked absolutely ridiculous. That thing of being different did not improve” (42). Try as she may it is always difficult for her to form deep connections to the people around her, to her family, and to her nation, “It's bad for a child not to be like the others” (56). And, yet, at the same time, Alina's difference is also read as a mark of distinction, “Because for some unknown reason, privilege seemed to show more on me” (87). Her difference while isolating is also elevating, making her better than those around her. This sense of being better in her isolation comes across several times when discussing contradictions in her family, “To be eating boiled lentils without salt, but brought in by a maid, in silver bowls and hand-painted fine china, while my grandmother taught me how to serve myself à la russe or à la française—was the most bizarre thing in the world. I would rather have died than invite home any of my friends” (33). The objects and goods that she is occasionally privy to further separate her from those she goes to school with and those who live around her, “I couldn't mention my record player, because the school would then be constantly asking to use it, nor could I ride the new Chinese bicycle that the Three Wise Men had left with Uncle Pepe Abrantes for me. It had to remain hidden in the garage” (41). Her relative advantages set her apart as special, which is further enforced by her view of other people as patsies of the revolution, ”The most fun was when the meek people got dressed in militia uniforms and had to march with wooden rifles in hand, singing military marches, and do night watches” (42). Her ability to 84 critique the Revolutionary rhetoric and ideology will further separate her later as an adult living in Cuba. By the end of the second chapter Naty tells her daughter that Fidel is her father, “When the Sprite finished her fairy tale. I had to pick up my lower jaw, which had dropped, and the upper one too, because they had both become disjointed at once. How was I going to punish her for hiding things from me when, with her magic wand, she had made me into a princess? I bet nobody else has received such a gift on her tenth birthday!” (72) Revuelta often employs the language of fantasy throughout her memoir. We see this in her descriptions of her mother as a sprite, the revolutionaries as bearded monkeys, and herself and eventually her daughter as an elf; the people around her become characters in the fable of her life. The very beginning of the memoir starts with the words “Once upon a time” and describes her forefathers as fairytale heroes, “For various reasons, these real machos all decided to venture into a faraway world. They were all adventurers who did not care much about their roots. They cared about power” (1). Likening her life to a fairytale allows her to make a subtle critique of the situations that she finds herself in. In doing this, Alina constantly points to the disjuncture between the possibility of her story as a real life would-be princess and the reality of her everyday life as a bastard dissident in an authoritative impoverished regime. She further uses this play with fantastical language to make more explicit criticisms of the rhetoric of the Revolutionary regime. Alina takes the language of the Revolution literally when she recounts a story about fearing for her exiled family, Oh, my God! I couldn't bear even to imagine it! The shock almost killed me. Fidel kept repeating over and over on the radio and television: “Those who leave the country are nothing but lowly worms.” Everybody, everybody who left the country, I was convinced, would turn into a worm right on the plane. I was completely sure of that, whether they were kids or old people. My Doctor Daddy 85 and Natalie turning into something so repulsive! (36) As a child Alina does not understand the use of metaphor by Fidel and so she interprets his remarks as a literal occurrence. Her choice to include this adolescent confusion in the memoir allows for the adult Alina to point to the irrationality of the Revolutionary regime's rhetoric, placing Fidel in the role of a fairytale King who magically transforms the exiles into worms. Yet it also points to the de-subjectification process brought about by the Revolution. Former subjects of the Cuban nation are now turned into the abject that the new nation must reject and expel in order to be born anew. The ideal subjects of the Revolution, the New Men, are literally created in opposition to these de-subjectified former citizens, these dejects. Alina also mixes the literal with the fantastical when she glibly refers to the New Man as a mutant, making the ideal subject of the Revolutionary rhetoric yet another character in her story, “Packed into prehistoric school buses, we mutants, en route to becoming a Vanguard species, were sent to bring to fruition the fertile oneiric musings of our beloved Apostle Martí and our Apostle the Guerrilla Warrior” (85-86). Through her literalization of the rhetoric of the New Man as a new species of human she derides the new subjectivity and the Revolution; the result of this movement will not be a heralded pinnacle of human evolution but rather merely a genetic oddity. Alina's mild intrigue with Fidel intensifies quickly into emotions of neglect and desire once she learns that he is her biological father. Previously she did not expect anything from him, viewing Fidel as a benevolent interlocutor whom she had a fondness for, “one could feel his presence like a warm mantle protecting our home” (40). In the 86 third chapter, “El Comandante,” we see Fidel now marked as the neglectful father. After she learns that Fidel is her father, Alina immediately wants to write a letter to him and we see the beginnings of a new identification forming, one where Alina is not just a girl or daughter wishing to establish a connection with her father but also as Castro's daughter someone who can influence and shape national politics, “I had a ton of things to tell him. I wanted him to find a solution to all the shortages: of clothes and things like that; of meat, so it could be distributed again through the ration books. I also wanted to ask him to give our Christmas back. And to come live with us. I wanted to let him know how much we really needed him” (72). Within these few lines we see the notions of national politics and familial longing beginning to mix, a combination that will result in Alina's identification with a public role that Wendy Gimbel has labeled “Castro's daughter.” Sadly, for Alina, her newfound father quickly fails to meet her expectations, “But from Fidel, not even a little thank you note. I kept writing him letters from a sweet and well-behaved child, from a girl who was a Vanguard student at school, a brave but sad girl. Letters resembling those of a secret, spurned lover, heavily protected with paper clips” (73). Alina tries to play different characters in order to get Fidel's attention, looking for the role that will allow her to please the father she never knew she had. Her need to please her new father even outweighs her loyalty to her old father. She agrees when Fidel tries to tell her what career path she should follow, 'But you're going to study industrial chemistry. Remember that!' I did not like that idea at all, but I would rather have died than annoy him” (53-54). Though Alina had formerly expressed interest in a medical career like Orlando Fernández, Fidel and his Revolution need more chemists and 87 so to please him Alina shapes herself in his image of an ideal daughter and citizen. Being Fidel's daughter leaves Alina as lonely as she ever felt, and further does not even offer her access to a larger extended family. At the time of his affair with Naty, Fidel was married to his first wife Myrta Díaz-Balart with whom he had a son, Fidelito. He had also fathered another son, Jorge Ángel, with a third woman, María Laborde, to whom he was not married. vii Alina has only previously met a very select few members of the Castro clan and she does not meet these two half-siblings until after she learns that Fidel is her biological father. Even then, she only meets Fidelito by accident while visiting their uncle Raúl. Fidelito tells her about her other brother, Jorge Ángel, before he leaves on a trip to the Soviet Union. Though at first she is excited to have siblings, even these relationships sour and only leave her further alienated. While on his trip, Fidelito and Alina write letters to get to know each other, leading to an eventual rift, “We did experience an epistolary disagreement when he was still in the Soviet Union: I had referred to our Old Man as 'an S.O.B. who does not take care of his children,' and Fidelito responded with an angry exegesis” (98). Upon his return to Cuba he snubs Alina and her mother, “'Mommy sends you all her love. She can't wait to give you a kiss for all those nice things you said about her when you wrote to me. And she wants you to know that her home is your home. Come visit us anytime,' I said to Fidelito. 'Tell your mother than there is nothing for me in her home'” (99). Alina speculates that a short visit with his own jilted mother in exile before returning to Cuba set Fidelito against Naty. Even Jorge Ángel, whom Alina casts as the unassuming and neglected bastard brother desperate for a modicum of his brother's attention and 88 position, abandons Alina and takes Fidelito's side by refusing Naty's help with his pending nuptials. Frustrated, Alina curses her sibling, “'Stupid bastard!' I blurted out. Some brothers God had given me! One was a Fouché in diapers, and the other, the greatest opportunistic idiot on earth” (100). Exasperated by the constant feelings of inadequacy and alienation at the hands of her siblings and their families, Alina gives up on proving herself and defending her mother, “The Castro family, as their expressive faces proved, had treated my mother better while she was the Bearded One's whore than when she became the Comandante's ex-mistress” (101). These feelings of alienation eventually grow and build into modes of resistance and dissidence. Fed up with the lack of attention given to her by Fidel, Alina's rebellious side errupts, “'I don't want to see him. I'm not interested,' I told my mom” (96). The latter half of her memoir sees the emergence of the rebel daughter, her trips to Spain, her marriages, and her dissident protests that all culminate in her eventual escape from the island. As we see Alina's relationship to Fidel change, we also see her relationship to her own identity as Castro's daughter change. At first she is only mildly interested in Fidel until she finds out he is her father and wants a deeper connection that she eventually never actually gets. Because of this continuously ambivalent relationship that she cannot make sense of for herself, she is also obviously ill-equipped to make sense of it for others as well. Without a solid sense of a private relationship with her father she has no idea how to engage a public performance of her identity as Castro's daughter. It was clear to Alina even as a little girl that Fidel as the country's leader was 89 responsible for the conditions that she and the people she knew lived in. And as someone with the chance to talk to him she made every effort to ensure the well-being of those around her, “'Who is putting those thoughts into this girl's head?' Fidel asked the Sprite a few days later, when I begged him very politely to put Tata [her nanny] and Chucha [the cook] at the top of the list of the people who were going to be not rich, but not poor anymore” (27). Although these requests were often simply ignored because they were impractical and misguided, sometimes they also had unanticipated consequences, “I asked Fidel to get Panchito's family out of that jail place, and I don't know what happened, because one morning Panchito was nowhere to be found” (46). Thus Alina does not understand what to do at first when people around her ask her to speak to Fidel on their behalf: People waited until I came out to the garden to play and, one by one, in rigorous order they would come to me. 'Little girl, please, give this letter to Fidel.' 'And this one.' 'And this one.' I delivered a couple of missives, which he pocketed. Then he began to leave them on the side table next to the recliner he had installed in the Sprite's sitting room. She finally told me to stop annoying him, that the poor man could not solve all problems, being so busy as he was. (46) She then begins to hide the letters in her bedroom since she can no longer pass them to Fidel and yet also does not know how to say no when people request that she use her access to contact him on their behalf. The emergent role of Castro's daughter is at first only a burden to the young Alina and yet one that she cannot resist or ignore, “I would take out those last gasps of hope and read them until I collapsed under the weight of other people's miseries” (47). She casts herself in the role of a martyr who must take on the 90 sufferings of those around her in order to try to help them, “And I have kept reading compulsively my entire life, always searching for something good that would make people feel better, all to no avail” (47). This desire to help that she writes about foreshadows her own career in publishing and her radio talk show, both jobs that position her as a conduit for others to express their creativity and/or strife. As an adult Alina continues to act out and remains an outsider on the inside of what is left of an elite in Havana. In expressing her opposition to some of Castro's ideas Alina finds herself in the familiar position of being different amongst the followers and the meek, “I remembered the reactions I got: I just seemed like a Martian to them” (128). She begins a career as a model and has a string of failed marriages, both expressions of an underlying maladjustment to life in Cuba. Anna Louise Bardach aptly describes the disjunctures of Alina's presence in Cuba, “Prior to her defection, Fernández had endured a position in Cuba not unlike Billy Carter's during his brother's presidency. In a country at war with glitz and glamour, she had chosen to be a fashion model and had a series of sensational quickie marriages” (Bardach 64). Wendy Gimbel adds, “In the seasons of her marriages, Alina had perfected her role as the rebel daughter” (Gimbel 168). These acts of rebellion were frequently fodder for the media coverage of Castro's daughter and Alina's character emerged on both the national and international scenes. Increasing expressing her disdain for Castro's policies and critiquing the contradictions of Communist Cuba at any chance she got, Alina is branded as a dissident, “With Alina’s impudence—nobody else in Cuba called Fidel an assassin publicly—her sense of irony, her self-deprecating humor, she had turned her ambiguous position into a 91 profession of sorts” (Gimbel 188). Being Castro's daughter became a career for Alina, international and national press would turn to her for sound bite critiques of the Revolution. Publicly distancing herself from Castro offered Alina her first reprieve from the burden of being her father's daughter, “For the first time in my life, I was not living in his shadow. Nobody was exacerbating my guilt by telling me about executions, expropriations, jail buses, and visas denied, or asking me for houses, shoes, hospital admittance, or exit permits to leave the country” (95-96). The burden of her birthright even influenced her decision not to accept the Castro name as her own. Throughout the memoir the question of her last name emerges again and again, Castro always blaming government red tape for his inability to impart his name on an illegitimate daughter. When the necessary changes are finally written into the law Alina declines to accept the legal change of her name saying, “It was going to deprive me of my favorite excuse: 'No, no. I cannot do anything for you. I swear to you I am not his daughter. No way. Nothing. Not even a letter'” (97). Through enacting the character of Castro's daughter, Alina simultaneously is publicly legitimated as his daughter and gets the attention she has longed for. However, playing this public role is also limited in terms of its real effects on her life. Gimbel aptly describes the competing elements at play in the separation between Alina and her public performance as Castro's daughter: But Alina was the ruler’s illegitimate child: Fidel never even introduced her to his family; the island kingdom was a wasteland, and the legacy was an ambiguous identity. Fidel Castro’s daughter was a fiction the media had created and occasionally revived. She existed only when the cameras were on her and the lights were flashing. Alina wasn’t the character, ‘Fidel Castro’s daughter,’ at all, but a lonely, frightened young woman in search of a self that ever eluded her. 92 (Gimbel 158-159) Although to the media she was Castro's daughter, in effect the only connection that she had to him was through this public performance, “This drama was the tie to her father. Over and over again, she turned to him in her thoughts, sometimes holding imaginary conversations with him. Whenever we talked, I could see how much she longed for a more ordinary connection with him. She could never let go of that fantasy” (Gimbel 198). Beyond the comments that she could get in print, Alina scarcely had any other way to interact with Fidel. Eventually unable to withstand the stifling environment any longer, Alina leaves Cuba with a fake passport in 1993 and explodes onto the international scene. Press conferences are held to announce the defection of Castro's daughter, used by many as yet another sign of what seemed to be the Communist island nation's steady decline after the collapse of the Soviet Union, “In that moment, Alina became fully realized as ‘Fidel Castro’s daughter’: a commodity, a celebrity, an abstraction” (Gimbel 181). A few days later Alina's daughter, Mumin, was given permission by Castro to follow her mother. After a while, however, the news of Castro's daughter's defection grew old and she could no longer command the attention of the media as she once was able to do on the island, “With her mother’s protection, Alina had lived on her own terms: she flirted with the press when she wanted to, ignored it when it inconvenienced her. At home, she could make a full-time profession of being Castro’s daughter,” in exile though “the role of Fidel’s daughter was no more than a bit part” (197). This is perhaps why she now lives and works in Miami, a city where her message has the most appeal. She has in fact 93 parlayed the performance of this identity into a fairly successful career as a dissident. She landed a publishing deal for her memoir when in Spain that was then translated into an English version; she has hosted a talk radio program in Miami since 2002 that focuses both on general cultural topics on Tuesdays and Thursdays and tackles Cuban politics on Wednesdays; she has various speaking engagements around the country; and her memoir is now being turned into a film. Alina inhabited this construction of "Castro's daughter" for a long time because it made her important and it gave her a political identity (or a politics). In this way, her inheritance was actually just a rejection of her father's politics. For a long time this rejection became the defining part of her career and life. Now, however, it seems as though she is trying to move away from a politics that is strictly patrimonial. Her radio show is called “Simplemente Alina” (Simply Alina) as if to say that her first name is all you need to know her by. This is both a rejection of her father and at the same time a distinct expression of independence, the patrilineal surname is no longer a necessary or relevant or wanted part of her political and public identity. Furthermore, Alina has published a second book (Una Hoja de Lechuga: Anorexia, una enfermedad del alma) about her struggles with anorexia. This book focuses more on her own personal and individual struggles rather than those related to her country and revolutionary parentage. viii And yet in addressing the evolution of Alina and the character of Castro's daughter I do not mean to imply a simple teleology wherein Alina is now a fully self- actualized, integrated subject having left behind Castro's daughter as a dependent carrion. 94 Rather, I would say that all of these subjectivities and personae (and others as well) are constantly being negotiated and inhabited towards various ends. The narrative of Castro's exiled illegitimate daughter and its appeal to the media and public is still very much an active part of Alina's life and career, as is evidenced by the current development of her memoir into a motion picture. The film, Castro's Daughter, is currently in development with a screenplay by Academy Award winner Robert Moresco and Pulitzer Prize winner Nilo Cruz. Its release will surely occasion at least a moderate revival of public interest and Alina's own investment in the performance of herself as Castro's daughter. Castro's Daughter transitions from its focus in the beginning chapters on the alienation that Alina experiences from her family and on the difference that defines her to the ending chapters when these feelings grow into calculated modes of resistance and dissidence. The reader sees her rejection of a patrimonial politics in her countering of both national and familial narratives and politics. We also see Alina moving beyond a simple stance as adversary to her father in the glimmers a role independent from her identity as Castro's daughter. Throughout her memoir Alina's story is the story of Cuba: one of disaffection and alienation, separation and exile. At the end of Gimbel's book on the Revuelta family she says, “It’s probable that the real legacy of the Cuban Revolution is little more than estrangement, brutality, self-delusion, and the pain of exile” (Gimbel 212). Alina's story documents these legacies that the Revolution has created for many Cubans on the island and in the diaspora. The subjectivity that emerges in this picture is one beyond the scope of the Revolution's rhetoric. Alina is neither a New Man nor a gusano but rather offers us a more complicated, feminist, diasporic revision of the 95 multiple modes of being Cuban that are possible. Marissa Chibás The daughter of a different Cuban revolutionary, Marissa Chibás examines the historical legacies of her famous uncle Eddie Chibás alongside the roles of her father and mother within Cuba, the revolution, and now exile. Her one-woman show, “Daughter of a Cuban Revolutionary,” directed by Mira Kingsley, premiered in January 2007 at REDCAT (Roy and Edna Disney/ Cal Arts Theater) in Los Angeles and had its New York City premiere at INTAR (at the DR2 Theatre) in May 2007. Dressed in army green pants and a buttoned-up navy blue army jacket with a red scarf tucked neatly into her collar, Chibás emerges onto a raked stage covered with sand. Her pants and jacket evoke the uniform of a soldier and the kerchief is reminiscent of those worn by the Young Pioneers in Cuba; her embodiment of the Revolutionary is apparent from outset. A video of undulating water projects onto a series of boards that are rigged together and suspended over the stage to form a banner-like screen. With each step the artist takes, the waves spread beyond the projection screen across the entire performance space. Caught amidst the swirling waters, Chibás begins her performance, reenacting her near-death experience of drowning while vacationing in the Venezuelan Amazon. During this moment of connection between life and death, and set in the liminal space of the undertow, she begins to hear a voice calling out to her, commanding, “Recuerdate/ Remember!” This retelling thus opens the performance to a literal flood of memories constituting a family history through the Chibás lineage, a family of political leaders whose history intermingles with the Cuban national history. What follows are various 96 stories of both personal and national significance with Chibás embodying several roles including her uncle, Eddy Chibás, the frontrunner for the Cuban presidency in 1951; her father, Raúl Chibás, who co-wrote the Manifesto of the Sierra Maestra for the Cuban Revolution with Fidel Castro; and her mother, Dalia Chibás, the runner-up for Miss Cuba in 1959. Through the various scenes the audience learns how Chibás’s mother and father met, engaged in an uncanny courtship, and eventually married when Raúl cornered Dalia in a room with a judge. The audience is also privy to Marissa’s and her sister's dance lessons as a young girl during family parties at her exile home in New York. These moments of family lore are juxtaposed alongside recountings of Raúl Chibás’s near execution at the hands of Batista’s forces, and Eddy Chibás’s rise and subsequent fall in politics, culminating with his on-air suicide during his weekly national radio program. Eduardo René Chibás y Ribas was born in Santiago de Cuba on August 26, 1907 ix . He protested the dictatorship of Gerardo Machado and corruption in Cuban governments, particularly amongst the Presidencies of Ramón Grau and Carlos Prío Socarrás. He also warned against the impending coup of Fulgencio Batista (which would take place less than a year after his suicide). For his political work he was imprisoned twice and also fled the country to exile in New York City where he fomented opposition through newspaper publications and various exile organizations. Upon returning to Cuba he began a widely-celebrated weekly radio broadcast, he served as a congressman and senator, and left the Partido Revolucionario Cubano (Cuban Revolutionary Party) to start his own political party, Partido del Pueblo Cubano (Cuban People's Party, commonly known as the Orthodox Party). A constant muckraker, Eduardo Chibás called out the 97 corruption of government officials and politicians. Though he ran for and lost the Presidential election in 1948, many believed that because of his radio popularity he was the front-runner for the 1952 election. On August 5, 1951 he shot and fatally wounded himself while on air because he failed to produce the evidence he promised of an education minister's alleged embezzlements. Eduardo died in the hospital on August 16, 1951, his funeral was one of the largest national gatherings to take place and his importance to the politics of Cuba is well cited. Many attribute much of Fidel's initial success to his alliance with the popular and trusted Chibás and his political party. x Fidel had even run for congress under the Orthodox Party ticket in the 1948 election, leaving many to wonder what Eddy's survival would have meant for Cuban politics and history. Raúl Antonio Chibás y Ribas was born in Santiago de Cuba on April 25, 1916. xi His political career began when, at the age of fifteen, he was arrested for striking with his fellow students. As an adult he protested corruption and worked with his brother and the Orthodox Party. After Eddy Chibás's death, Raúl took over leadership of the party before eventually leaving it to join Castro's movement. He, Castro, and Felipe Pazos wrote out the ideological position of the rebel forces in a document that is known as the Manifesto of the Sierra Maestra. This Manifesto helped to unite the disparate anti-Batista groups as well as to lend credibility to Castro's position, according to Marissa Chibás, “'El nombre de mi padre en el manifesto hizo que Castro obtuviera más apoyo, porque el apellido Chibás gozaba de mucho respeto'” xii (Burstein 3B). Arrested and almost executed for his collusion with Castro, Raúl served time in prison before being released and going into exile in January 1958 first in Costa Rica and then in the United States where he gathered 98 funds and support for the Revolutionary cause. He returned to Cuba later that year in August 1958 and rejoined the rebel forces before their victory on January 1, 1959. Alongside his politics he pursued a life of education, completing a Masters at the University of Havana in Philosophy and some graduate work at Columbia University in Political Science. A lifetime educator, Raúl founded an elite private school, the Havana Military Academy, and in exile taught at Bronx Community College and Herrick Junior High school, “'Teaching was his big thing. He loved passing knowledge to the young and always wanted to be a teacher. He said that's what makes civilization'” (De Valle 4B). After the Revolution, Raúl grew discontent with the ideological and political changes he saw happening, leading him to leave the island in August 1960 to, yet again, enter exile in the United States. He died in Miami on August 15, 2002. What little biographical data that we get about Dalia Chibás (née Viñals) is that she was born in Matanzas, Cuba on November 15 th , 1931. She studied at the Graduate School of Teachers, traveled to Los Angeles in an attempt to become an actress, and competed in the Miss Cuba pageant where she placed second. Dalia left Cuba with Raúl in 1960 and moved to Miami before ending up in New York City and having two daughters, Marissa and Diana. After the near-drowning incident, the performance flash-forwards to the performer’s own return to Cuba. This trip and her retelling of it mark a transition in her piece. No longer is she merely recalling memories but is now actively creating new ones. Shuffling around the stage, Chibás unearths various photographs that are buried in the sand. Standing them upright like tombstones, she constructs a web of familial relations 99 that includes both islanders with whom she is intimately familiar and those she is unable to even name. These are the familial connections that have been buried by time and exile that Chibás is figuratively resurrecting on her trip and now through her performance. The most pivotal character Chibás meets and then embodies is Arturín, an old man who knew her family well. Reenacting their meeting in Arturín’s home, which she describes as filled from wall to wall with old broken radios, stacks of newspapers, and countless other items of historical detritus, she recounts the old man’s nonchalance as he answers her inquiries about her father and uncle. His demeanor is in stark contrast to her own excitement when he hands her a worn recording of Eddy Chibás’s infamous final radio broadcast. As collector, archivist, and historian, Arturín represents a point of identification for the exile Chibás who hungers for answers and connections. She implores him to understand the significance of his life and his actions, exclaiming, “Don’t you understand? You were part of Cuban history.” It is evident that she, in part, is stating this to herself as much as to Arturín; her desire for Arturín to recognize his part in the legacy of Cuban history is the expression of her own desire to be able to so easily connect her own story in the same way. Through her reenactment of these revolutionary figures, Chibás asserts her own position in this history and lineage. Constantly reviving the scream of “recuerdate/ remember,” she now implores the audience to recognize the primacy of memory, history, and narration to the exile condition. Ultimately Chibás positions herself as the historian, the one who tells the story, like Arturín, the archivist, the biographer, the collector. She is the one to document the Cuban revolutionary tradition through her embodiment of the legacy of both her father 100 and uncle, representing the link to this biological revolutionary heritage. The climax of the piece then comes when Chibás herself mounts an upturned speaker, transforming it into a dais upon which she re-enacts, alongside the unearthed recording, her uncle’s final, suicidal speech, punctuated by a deafening succession of gunshots. “Daughter of a Cuban Revolutionary” was generally well-received, garnering a favorable review from the Los Angeles Times, a mostly appreciative review from the New York Post, as well as complimentary write-ups in La Opinión, El Diario La Prensa, and Mural. Two critics, however, wanted more from the work, if not the performer. Jason Zinoman's New York Times review lamented the limited outcome of the project, “On a sandy set, she portrays both men, and her mother, a former Miss Cuba, with a nimbleness of voice. But only a one-dimensional picture emerges, a gauzy image that doesn't reveal much more than an encyclopedia entry” (Zinoman E4). Though David Lefkowitz finds Chibás's skills as an actress impressive, he too finds fault with the writing when he comments, “But there's still a disjointedness to all these aspects of the play. At first, the piece seems to be about the actress trying to understand her parents' years in Cuba and their adjustment to life in New York and then Miami. Then Daughter shifts gears to her uncle because Chibas is so haunted by his story.” (Lefkowitz). Lefkowitz's sense of the piece as disjointed is most likely a result of the play being a combination of two other unrealized original projects, the first a documentary film Eddy's Conscience and the second a play “Chasing Cuban Tales” (Burstein 1B). And Zinoman's appraisal of the work as a one-dimensional encyclopedia entry is likely the result of Chibás's attempts to make narrative sense out of the messy lives of several 101 people. The “gauzy image” that emerges of her family members, and in particular her father, is the work of the feminist diasporic subject. Much is left out from both the text of “Daughter of a Cuban Revolutionary” and from the playbill which (at the REDCAT performance) featured a two-page spread about the Chibás family, with biographies of Eddy, Raúl, and Dalia Chibás just before the regular actor/production biographies. The biographical sketches that we get portray a simplified version of events and peoples. In researching Raúl Chibás, I found it interesting to discover that he had another wife and two other children before marrying Dalia and having Marissa and Diana (his two daughters that appear in the play). Raúl Chibás was married to María Rosa Rovira with whom he had a son, Eduardo, and a daughter Gloria. The play makes no mention of any of this. He left the island in 1958 and reunited with his wife and children in exile in New York City before returning to the island and meeting Dalia. It was then, in his second exile that Marissa and her sister were conceived. Furthermore, though he died in Miami, according to his obituary in the New York Times, “After defecting, he lived for two decades in the United States... Then he spent a decade in Caracas, where two of his children lived” (Pace 9). Which means that for a large part of Marissa's adult life he was abroad. His surviving widow is also a woman by the name of Maria Luisa Bonafonte de Chibás, meaning that he and Dalia divorced at some point and he re-married at least once more. This is not the picture that we see in “Daughter of a Cuban Revolutionary” of a family united in exile trying to make a new life together. 102 I mention all this not to reinvest in notions of familial and national sanctity or integrity. I also do not wish to pass judgment against Raúl or imply that the Chibás family was anything less than perfect or to invest in ethical debate or moralism or even to claim that Marissa misrepresented her family in some way. Rather, I merely mean to point out that the performance is just that – a performance, a constructed narrative that involved the editing out of details and the highlighting of a narrative arc. And it is in this very construction that Marissa Chibás, the rebel daughter, the performer, the writer emerges. It is in this performance that we see the work and the burden of the diasporic subject to stitch together and assert not only a national subjectivity but also a familial identity out of the fragmentation of exile. The diasporan's burden is to make sense and subjectivity out of the confusion of displacement, out of familial and national un-belonging, to counter official histories, and to reconcile competing narratives, as Marissa says in the play, "I am a radio. I am a radio for various and sometimes contradictory voices.” This is where Marissa Chibás, rebel daughter enters. She offers a revision of Cuban history, one that is recuperative of her father's role that has been excised from the official Revolutionary narrative, is celebratory of her uncle's moral integrity and his democratic politics, and is also inclusive of her mother's own role amongst the rebels of her time. Chibás's admiration for her father is clear and in this work we see her effort to counter his exclusion from the Revolution, “I wanted to find a way to claim his space in Cuban history” (Redcat Interview, 3:28). This is something that would clearly have pleased him as he himself sought to rectify the Chibás family history for posterity 103 through a website published just months before his death, “En esta etapa de mi vida, a los 85 años, he querido publicar esta página en Internet para puntualizar datos históricos de mi familia: de mi padre, de mi hermano y míos propios. Es nuestro interés esclarecer, para las generaciones presentes y futuras, la confusión creada por Fidel Castro al falsificar en su casi totalidad la historia de Cuba – desde sus inicios hasta este año 2002” (www.chibas.org). xiii Her comments on her uncle often focus on his democratic principles and she highlights the fact that his political work came about in one of the only democratic periods in the island's history. It is clear that Eddy's liberal politics are a point of identification for Marissa, political ideals that she sees silenced in the exile community, “I feel like extremist voices on the right and the left have sort of dominated the conversation about Cuba. And partly I am claiming another kind of space for the discussion” (Redcat Interview, 11:25). Her feminist and diasporic interventions into the history that is told about Cuba not only challenges state-sanctioned narratives but also those who have dominated the exile political scene. Finally, Chibás's inclusion of her mother as a central character in this performance offers us a feminist revision of what national narratives should include. Marissa claims her mother to be just as much of a rebel as her uncle and father, “She also is the lighter side of the story. And in her own right was a rebel because she was raised in a very kind of strict Cuban lifestyle... Her process of leaving Cuba and finding herself in the United States and finding herself as a cosmopolitan woman is part of the story as well” (Redcat Interview, 3:58). Dalia Chibás provides a lot of levity and humor for the play: of her 104 runner-up status she claims, “Everyone said I should have won.” And yet, her presence also makes the show more than just an encyclopedia entry about great men. Or rather expands what we view as revolutionary. Again, this is the work that Marissa as the second-generation diasporan/ American-born Cuban does. She remembers that which is not her own memory. She remembers the memories of others – those who demand of her, “recuerdate/ remember.” Chibás is aware of this odd position of the diasporan in relation to the homeland, “I was the first in my family to go back to Cuba. Now, of course, I was never born there so I was going back to someplace I'd never been” (Redcat Interview, 16:05). In this sense the burden of the diasporan to make narrative sense out of a constellation of disparate and contradictory memories and stories is what Marianne Hirsch has named postmemory, “Postmemory characterizes the experience of those who grow up dominated by narratives that preceded their birth, whose own belated stories are evacuated by the stories of the previous generation shaped by traumatic events that can be neither understood nor recreated” (Hirsch 22). Lauren Berlant, similarly comments on this paradigm and draws an explicit link between this work and burden of national memories to familial inheritance, “In this mode of national narrative, stories of mass trauma like war or slavery are encoded in plots of familial inheritance, wherein citizens of the posttraumatic present are figured in a daughter’s or a son’s coming to public terms with a generational past the defines her/ him and yet does not feel fully personal” (Berlant 32). This familial inheritance of the trauma of the Cuban Revolution is what I have been calling here political patrimony. And these rebel daughters offer us feminist/diasporic revisions of 105 this legacy in ways that could not have been anticipated by the Revolution. Zinoman and Lefkowitz, in a way, deride this rebel work when they miss the point of the performance piece. Zinoman clearly wants the show's focus to remain on the historical great men, “Instead of analyzing this incredible move [Raúl's defection], Ms. Chibas shifts her gaze towards her navel: 'Raul will never see Cuba again. Did I inherit his inability to land, his need for flight, his tortured soul?' With all due respect: who cares? Every time the narrative changes from the exploits of these revolutionaries to the vague self-discovery of this writer and performer, it's a letdown” (Zinoman E4). Similarly, Lefkowtiz finds the shift to be, “the solo's least interesting aspect - how everything affected her” (Lefkowitz). Yet, for me, the moments of self-discovery that Zinoman derides as a “letdown” are in fact what is most compelling about this performance. Because we see the revelation of the diasporan's burden in the piece as a whole through these moments. The realization comes in the construction of a cohesive narrative in the first place, the very (im)possibility of the performance to exist. For Marissa to be able to make narrative sense and subjectivity out of the swirling confusion of memory and history is applaudable. For her to do so and to discovery a sense of self is rebellious. The self that is being realized is not the self of Marissa Chibás but rather is the self that is the performance of the daughter of a Cuban revolutionary. What Zinoman seems to want is for Marissa to focus on the story of heroic men, but the power of the performance is that they are not the center, rather the center as the title says is the Daughter. In this sense, he misses the entire point of the piece, the piece is the 106 performative utterance of the feminist diasporic subject, she is calling this subject position of the Daughter into being. What these two critics fail to remember is that the Marissa Chibás we see on the stage is just as much a character as Eddy, Raúl, and Dalia. She is a performance that is being constructed just like the narratives of her family and her nation's history. Marissa Chibás the person, has always existed, the trauma of the near death experience does not change that. What it brings about then is this new role, this daughter that remembers memories that are not her own; this daughter that makes new memories. What is new is the discovery of the self that is the performer, the author, the historian. A history of Eddy, Raúl, and Dalia Chibás that simultaneously defines Marissa as well as the political context of Cuba, “Daughter of a Cuban Revolutionary” transforms the function and possibility of political patrimony. Vivien Lesnik Weisman The Man of Two Havanas premiered at the 2007 Tribeca Film Festival in New York. Narrated, written, produced, and directed by Vivien Lesnik Weisman, the documentary is an historical accounting of her father, Max Lesnik, and his revolutionary life. Lesnik Weisman frames the film in terms of her initial resentment toward Cuba as the obstacle to her happiness and the cause of her family’s trouble. She explains: Okay, here’s the situation. I was born in Havana. That makes me Cuban. But, I was raised in little Havana, which makes me Cuban-American. However, since I don’t see Castro as the root of all evil in the universe, nor would I strangle him with my bare hands given the opportunity, I am a little out of step with my tribe. I always have been. And I really don’t care. My dad, on the other hand, does care. He cared a great deal. Back in Havana he was a revolutionary and fought alongside Castro for the 107 freedom of the Cuban people. Then he had a falling out with his old friend and it was Miami, here we come. But his animosity toward Castro did not last and he soon wanted dialogue with the Cuban government. Perhaps, to live in peace. That’s when the shit hit the fan. Bombings, death threats and drive by shooting were a daily occurrence in our home. In the 1970s and 1980s, there was a reign of terror in Miami. Any my family was at the epicenter. Bombs away. (Lesnik Weisman, press packet) Lesnik Weisman cunningly dons a flippant and cheeky voice that allows the viewer to witness her transition from an attention-needing and uninformed spectator who resented her father’s obsession with Cuban politics to an eloquent, active, and genuinely interested expert in exile politics over the course of the film. Setting herself in this narrative position allows Lesnik Weisman to go through the very education that she means her audience to experience through her film. A gradual and logical sympathy with Cuba and opposition to hard-Right exile politics develops with the film's narrative progression. The opening scene of the film shows Max Lesnik at a protest being interviewed by a television news reporter to whom he explains, “We are here protesting against the new rules of the Bush administration that divide the Cuban family” (Lesnik Weisman). These new policies severely limited the abilities of Cuban Americans to visit the island, even in times of familial illness or duress. Vivien's voice over to this scene of her father's latest protest expresses her frustration with him and with Cuba, “By the time I was twelve years old I had had just about enough of Cuba... I've spent my whole life watching him lose and I just don't get it.” Thus in order to better understand him and the choices that have driven his life and affected the lives of his family, Vivien sets out to make a documentary about her father and her relationship with him. 108 As the film sequence switches from Max and Vivien at other speaking events around Miami to Vivien alone in a cab in Cuba she narrates, “As I follow my dad around he introduces me as his daughter who's making a documentary about the U.S. embargo and its devastating effect on the Cuban people. But really that's his movie. My quest is much more selfish.” Once in Cuba she asks a cab driver if he knows her father (he doesn't) and explains to him that she's making a film about his life in order to better understand him. Looking around her she wonders what it is about Cuba that has inspired such passion and strife for so long, both in her father but also in many others as well. In the beginning of the film Cuba represents a rival in Vivien's mind. She explains that unlike many other Cuban Americans she does not hate Castro or resent having grown up in the United States, “No, Cuba, Cuba was my enemy. Cuba and everyone of those 11, 340, 670 Cubans. They stole my father's attention and they wasted his life and I hated them for it.” The film then moves into a brief introduction of the history of Cuba and U.S.-Cuba relations all as context to the historical moment in which Max Lesnik was born. This ends the introduction to the film and begins the first of seven titled chapters, “Birth of a Revolutionary.” We learn from interviews with Max and his mother (Maria Teresa) about his upbringing and the beginnings of his political life. Maria Teresa explains that Max always wanted to help those around him, claiming that if you ever needed to find Max you should look for him in the poorest neighborhoods rather than at society events. Max himself claims to have been a revolutionary from the start, explaining that at the age of three his uncle put him in jail for three hours for being a 109 revolutionary. Lesnik was active throughout school in politics and in university as a student leader with the Orthodox Cuban People's Party, where he met Fidel Castro at the age of eighteen. Max's wife Miriam explains how they met and married despite her mother telling her that “No woman could be happy with a revolutionary.” Before meeting Max she had come from an apolitical bourgeois family. Vivien's resentment of this history comes across when her mother makes a joke about Max's honeymoon being with Fidel Castro and politics rather than with her, “Even though my mother laughed I really didn't find it very amusing, he had essentially chosen an idea over her. What would drive a person to do that? How did my father go from student leader to revolutionary and why?” This question ends the first chapter and in an attempt to find an answer leads into “A Call to Arms.” Contextualizing 1950s Cuba, Vivien describes it as an international play land under the control of foreign money interests and mob rule that served as mostly just a destination for Americans to enjoy the nightlife, drugs, tourism, prostitution, and even to have fast and convenient abortions. From within this corrupt and dependent state and in opposition to a long line of dictators who fought each other to seize power and money emerged an honest politician seeking reform. Eddy Chibás inspired a generation to fight for self-determination and democratic principles according to Max. In a very odd, but not unexpected, moment in the context of this chapter Vivien interviews Natalia “Naty” Revuelta (Alina's mother) about the rise and fall of Eddy Chibás (Marissa's uncle) and his impact on the political landscape of Cuba. Vivien introduces Naty as a revolutionary and 110 member of the Orthodox Party who had an affair with Castro xiv . Chibás's politics and suicide are narrated. Eddy was so beloved and popular, Naty explains, that over a million people showed up to his funeral. Pictures of Max as a pallbearer carrying the casket in the procession are shown along with other archival images of thousands and thousands of people at the Chibás funeral. His death marked the change for a lot of revolutionary activity. Naty says that the tenor of the activist community consolidated after Chibás's death. While Vivien laments the toll that Chibás's death wrought on her own life, “The youthful student leader working to build a new world one vote at a time [her father] died that day as well,” Max instead takes the larger context into account, “If Chibas was elected President, the Cuban Revolution maybe was different. It was not necessary to take power through the arms.” The Revolution did however occur and Max played a central role. The Batista forces frequently sought him out for his activities, and he and Castro grew closer when a mutual friend (Alfredo Guevara) asked Max and his family to hide Castro in their home. During the armed fighting Max was in charge of the underground propaganda and frequently traveled between the rebel base in the mountains and Havana to broadcast the revolutionary message on the radio. Once the Revolutionary movement triumphed Max returned to Havana where Vivien's older sister Miriam was born. By the time Vivien was born though the mood had changed. Particular policies, such as the executions of former Batistianos, ideologically upset Max who left the island in January 1961 after the new government turned to the Soviet camp. Max went underground again after broadcasting his opposition to such a diplomatic relationship on the radio saying that he was neither a 111 Communist nor an imperialist. He had fought for an independent Cuba, not one dependent upon the Soviet Union nor the United States. The third chapter of the film, “Exiles within Exile,” takes up with Max in the United States. Miriam and his two daughters joined him a month later in this new exile. Miami during this time, Max explains, was controlled by former Batistianos whom had just recently fled the island (because of the Revolution that Max had helped create), leaving the Lesniks outcasts even amongst these outcasts. Lesnik's opposition to the Bay of Pigs invasion, which he called an attack by Cuban mercenaries hired by the U.S. government, furthered his ostracism and led many to label him as a Communist sympathizer or, worse, a Castro spy. Vivien succinctly describes Max's vexed position in their new community, “He had taken a third position that was unacceptable.” In order to continue to spread his opinions Max started Replica! magazine in 1968. It was one of the only publications available in Spanish and covered cultural news as well as political topics. It quickly gained a massive following and became very successful. Although Max tried to incorporate all political views into the magazine, even publishing an interview with the hard Right terrorist Orlando Bosch, he immediately met resistance for his publication of his own pro-Cuba opinions. “Patriot Games,” the fourth chapter, provides a critical history of the climate of violence and intimidation that occurred in Miami in the 1970s and 1980s. Ann Louise Bardach, who is interviewed by Lesnik Weisman, explains, “In the 1970s a lot of people don't know that it was basically a reign of terror in Miami. At one point there was as many as seven bombings in one day. And people are murdered, and law enforcement, the 112 justice department, the FBI just turned a blind eye.” xv The Replica! offices were first bombed in 1974 and would continue to suffer eleven bombings in total from 1974 through 1994. A close family friend of the Lesnik's was murdered days after an interview in which he expressed a pro-dialogue opinion was published in the magazine. One of the worst tragedies of this episode of violence and terrorism committed by CIA-trained Cuban exiles was the bombing of Cubana Airlines Flight 455 in October 1976. Traveling from Barbados to Jamaica the plane went down very early in its trip after two bombs exploded on board. All seventy-three passengers and five crew members died in the crash, which Bardach points out was, “The first act of airline terrorism in our hemisphere.” Lesnik immediately galvanized around the issue calling for the arrest of the terrorist bombers. Four men were arrested and charged in connection with the bombing, two Venezuelans, Orlando Bosch, and Luis Posada Carriles. The latter two men were well-known, CIA-trained exile terrorists who both had extensive histories of violent attacks (including bombings of the island and of pro-Cuba Miami-area businesses, shooting at freighters, and assassinations of pro-Cuba or pro-dialogue Cuban exiles). Vivien remembers the time as a young girl and how even though she was saddened by the violence her main focus was her father's never-ending obsession with all matter Cuban, including this latest battle, “I began to slowly understand that there would always be a 'Barbados' in our lives.” As an adult, however, at a memorial in Cuba for the victims of Cubana Flight 455 she is moved in such a way that takes into account more than just her own feelings, “Despite the bombings and the death threats I realized now I had somehow managed to block out the true nature of Cuban exile hatred. But now as I 113 stand here a Cuban American at the funeral of Cubans killed by fellow Cubans, I'm angry.” This moment represents a turning point in the narrative arc of the documentary film as Vivien starts to envision her own connection to Cuba, “A crazy thought flashed through my head and for the first time in my life I wish we had stayed. I'm embarrassed and ashamed to have lived in a community where anyone thought this was okay. That somehow this would be a good thing for our homeland. For the first time in my life the American that I am begins to love the Cuban that I am becoming.” This inchoate connection foreshadows the end of the documentary where we will see Vivien come to an even further realization about her relationship to Cuba and its people. The fifth chapter, “A Flash in the Darkness,” is about the hopeful period of the Carter administration which saw El Diálogo or The Dialogue, wherein seventy-five Cuban exiles met with Cuban officials in 1977 and 1978 under the auspices of President Carter. Because of this nongovernmental diplomatic efforts Castro released 3,600 political prisoners. Because of his support of these initiatives, Max's offices were bombed continuously again by extremist Cuban exiles who took a non-cooperative stance on all diplomacy with Castro, Bardach comments on his luck in surviving these repeated attempts on his life, “I don't know how he's alive frankly. I mean like my FBI source says he doesn't know how he's alive. Human Rights Watch sent down a team to look at exile violence in Miami and they issued an extremely damning report and talked about the grave erosion of civil rights and liberties in Miami.” Eventually the attacks on Replica! and its supporters, advertisers, and distributors became too much and the magazine was shutdown. 114 The hopeful atmosphere of the Carter administration is only a flash however and the next chapter, “Insanity According to Einstein,” uses the ludicrous notion of doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results to discuss the irrationality and ineffectiveness of the U.S. embargo against Cuba. This section makes a convincing argument about the transitions amongst the hard Right exiles, showing the connections between the outright violence and terrorism of the 1970s and 1980s to the political intimidation and lobbying of the 1980s and 1990s, as Lesnik Weisman says, “The tactics have changed but the end goal remained the same. After all, who needs bombs when you have congressmen? And the White House?.” The consolidation of political power on the Right, under the Reagan administration, resulted in anti-Cuba policies and the support of former terrorists who were re-branded as freedom fighters by the four Cuban exile politicians Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, Licoln and Mario Díaz-Balart, and Mel Martinez. Orlando Bosch, one of the men responsible for the bombing of Cubana Flight 455 and countless other terrorist acts, became a lightning rod for the exercise of Cuban exile political force as Ileana Ros-Lehtinen played advocate, convincing her campaign manager, Jeb Bush, to have his father President Bush order his release. Archival footage of a fund raiser and telethon for Bosch are shown including many images of his daughter who played a very public role calling for his successful release. xvi Lesnik offers an insightful critique of both the conservative Cuban exile politicians and the embargo when he says, “This criminal embargo exists because the Montagues hate the Capulets. Because the Díaz-Balarts hate the Castros.” The Díaz- Balart family and the Castro family are intertwined because Fidel Castro's first wife and 115 mother of his first child is Myrta Díaz-Balart. The Díaz-Balarts have political power in large part according to Bardach because of their former political power under the Batista regime. The interplay between national politics and familial ties is also pointed out by Lesnik in Bardach's work, “'What's happening today with Rafael and Lincoln and Fidel is a family quarrel,' observed Lesnik. 'It has less to do with ideology than opportunism. It is a nasty family quarrel in a divided family'” (Bardach 2002, 50). The negative effects of the embargo are further elucidated by Lesnik Weisman's interview with her friend Margarita Alarcón. The daughter of Ricardo Alarcón, who served as the Cuban Ambassador to the UN for thirty years and is currently President of the National Assembly of People's Power, Margarita Alarcón grew up in Manhattan in the 1970s. Of this close friend, Vivien describes, “Visiting her is like looking into a strange mirror. She is the me if I had never left.” xvii We see the differences between the resources available to these two women as proof of, what Alarcón dubs, the “strangling” effects of an embargo put into place by those whose “eternal carnival was taken away by a social revolution.” When Vivien is alone in Havana she too reflects on the separations wrought by exile and the embargo, “This division more than anything else has been my overwhelming observation here. Back home we talk about broken families as the result of divorce. Here everyone is broken. Mothers, fathers, sons, nephews, sisters, grandparents, everyone is missing someone. There's a sense of incompleteness that permeates everything.” As she interviews more and more children she realizes that everyone has some family member living in exile. In the context of the fall of the Soviet Union and the continued dominance of 116 conservative politics in the United States, Lesnik reconnects with Cuba in the final section of the film, “With God on the Left and the Devil on the Right.” With the Soviet presence no longer an issue for Max he sought to return to Cuba in order to seek reconciliation and reunification between Cubans on the island and those abroad. He began visiting with Castro and reestablished a relationship with the island. One of his efforts helped to broker a renewed Vatican presence in Cuba culminating with a visit from Pope John Paul II in 1998. The narrative flow of the documentary is then interrupted when Vivien and her father had to stop filming because of a new political development, “On May 17, 2005 as we were filming this documentary Luis Posada Carriles, Cubana Airlines bomber and wanted international fugitive surfaced to give a press conference to ask for political asylum and U.S. residency.” With this new cause Max cuts the trip short in order to return to the United States and organize against Posada Carriles (as he did with Orlando Bosch). xviii Vivien, alone in Havana, returns to her reflecting on the original question that brought her to the island, “So here I was in my homeland wondering what the hell was so great about it?” as we view shots of her in the rain, at a market buying flowers, playing dominoes, at a sporting event, and talking to children. The second to final scene offers the revelation of the documentary. Vivien is back in Florida, filming her father during one of his radio broadcasts as he fields several hostile callers. In voice over she says, “For as long as I can remember my father has fought for the Cuban people. And for as long as I can remember things haven't gone his way. I've spent my whole life watching him lose.” When she asks him about how it 117 makes him feel to receive all those negative callers and he replies that he has no illusions of winning any popularity contests, the film pauses and Vivien tells us, “And it was right there in that moment that I suddenly understood my father. He didn't have to win, as long as he kept fighting Cuba would never lose. And on the heels of this revelation came another, I felt the same way.” The very next shot returns us to the opening scenes of the film, at the same protest rally that began the documentary. However, this time the camera focuses in on a reporter interviewing various members of the crowd who then turns to Vivien and asks why she is there to which she replies, “I'm protesting against the new laws against the Cuban people – the Cuban family.” The seasoned veteran at this type of political banter or sound bite politics, Max Lesnik, is surprised and elated by his daughter's acumen in fielding the reporter's questions with eloquence and savvy. His reaction of pleasure is caught on camera and he smiles self-satisfied and proud. Lesnik Weisman's voice over of this image of her beaming father provides the film with narrative closure to the tension introduced from the outset, “As I walked back to my dad I realized I'd been wrong from the start. Cuba was not the enemy. My father did not pick Cuba over me. My father is Cuba and I am his daughter. It turned out my dad was right from the very beginning. I was making his movie after all.” Using archival news footage, first person interviews, and audio recordings, The Man of Two Havanas contextualizes the atmosphere of 1970s/1980s Miami that was rife with fear, intimidation, and forced silence. The film uses the history of Max Lesnik’s activism and the violence he encountered because of his political choices in order to document the hundreds of bombings, murders, and acts of vandalism that were routine 118 occurrences during this time. It also successfully argues against the U.S. embargo, showing its deleterious effects and its questionable political origins. Therefore Lesnik Weisman tells a particular revisionist diasporic history through her own personal family’s experiences. Towards the end of her film we see that Lesnik Weisman has seamlessley transitioned into a self-aware and historically grounded U.S. Cuban political activist. In the final moments then she comes to the realization of her own political viewpoint and her own connection to the Cuban people which she encodes, like her father does, in the language of the family. Cuba is not her enemy but her family that she continues to fight for. The written postscript to the film furthers the connection drawn between national and familial belonging, “My father continues to fight for his [Posada Carriles's] expulsion from the country. To honor his efforts I dedicate this film to him and to the rest of my family. All 11,340,670 of them.” Within this we see Lesnik Weisman's acceptance of her cubanidad as well as the entirety of the Cuban population as part of and within the language of her patriline. Jeanine Cornillot Jeanine Cornillot offers a good counterpoint to the pattern of artists that I have been discussing thus far. Her radio documentary, “Family Sentence,” released on Transom.org in 2004, serves as the basis for the work that then turned into a memoir, Family Sentence: The Search for My Cuban-Revolutionary, Prison-Yard, Mythic-Hero, Deadbeat Dad, published in 2009. While the radio documentary is a 29-minute interview between Jeanine and Hector that is edited and narrated by Jeanine, the book uses the 119 interview as the conclusion to a longer story about Jeanine, her family, and life as the daughter of an imprisoned Cuban revolutionary. Both provide a record of Hector Cornillot as a revolutionary, but also bespeak the toll that such a life has wrought on those around him. Family Sentence is a memoir of loss, about a relationship with her father that never was and that she always wanted. It is also about the alienation that she felt growing up from family and nation and about the connections she tries to forge. Cornillot disrupts the neat definition of a revolutionary that this chapter has established and perhaps even calls into question the assumptions made here about the definition of a revolutionary. Hector Cornillot, Jeanine's father, is not the same as the other revolutionaries we have discussed thus far. Unlike Castro, Chibás, and Lesnik, Cornillot did not fight in the Cuban Revolution with Castro and he was never involved with the Orthodox Party. Instead, Cornillot was a member of the Partido Auténtico and while he did fight against the Batista regime he only briefly supported Castro when he came to power before entering exile. xix His revolutionary activities continued in exile through his actions taken against the Cuban government both on his own and with the militant exile group Poder Cubano (Cuban Power). Though others have labeled Cornillot a terrorist, he and his daughter identify him as a revolutionary throughout “Family Sentence.” Hector Cornillot y Llano Jr. was born October 27, 1938. His father, whom he is named after, was active in the Partido Auténtico (the political party founded by former Cuban President Prio) which led Hector down the path of revolutionaries. At the age of fifteen he and his father were arrested for his father's revolutionary activities which 120 would seal his own fate, “Soon after they were released they escaped Cuba. He became his father's soldier in the Cuban revolution, and they spent the next years trying to overthrow Batista together” (Cornillot 2009, 185). In 1958 the two Cornillots were detained by the U.S. border patrol with several other revolutionaries after they launched an armed attack in a yacht from Miami on their way toward Cuba. Around this time Hector met Jeanine's mother Joan in Miami. Originally from an Irish American family that lived in Philadelphia, Joan moved to Miami after school. After meeting Hector she moved to Cuba and they married but by 1960 she returned to Miami, pregnant with their first son. After Castro's victory Cornillot fled to Mexico and entered the United States seeking asylum, “He ran up the road to America an anti-Castro militant, cleansed of his old quest to overthrow Batista. No longer enslaved as his father's foot soldier but his own man” (Cornillot 48). Soon after he began training with the CIA, eventually taking these lessons and striking out on his own with a group of militants known as Poder Cubano, bombing several businesses in the United States that did business with Cuba. Hector and Joan were married for eight years and they had four children, Jeanine being the last of these. During this time they lived in various places including Cuba, Miami, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania. Always barely making ends meet with Hector distracted by his anti- Castro activities. Eventually Joan left him once and for all when Jeanine was two years old, returning to her family outside of Philadelphia. By 1968 Cornillot, responsible for orchestrating and executing multiple bombings throughout Los Angeles and Miami, was imprisoned in Los Angeles and served time there before eventually being transferred to 121 Miami where he was convicted in 1972 and received a thirty-year sentence for his involvement in the bombing of an Air Canada office. xx After briefly escaping prison in 1976, Cornillot's trial was appealed and eventually according to Jeanine, “He was released in the 1980's, and returned to Philadelphia and asked my mom to marry him again. She said no. He then drifted for awhile and re-emerged involved with the contras – traveling to Nicaragua and training guerrilla fighters. He started peddling cocaine to fund the cause. He became an addict himself, and was arrested on drug charges, and re-entered prison soon after” (Transom Comment 13). In August 2000 Cornillot completed a twelve-year sentence for drug charges but upon his release from prison he was placed in indefinite detention by the Immigration and Naturalization Service. Because of his felony conviction as an immigrant he would have been deported, however because of the political stalemate with Cuba this was not possible and therefore Cornillot and other Cubans in similar situations were held indefinitely as undeportable aliens. However, on June 19, 2001 Cornillot was released from INS detention. Upon his release Hector emailed Jeanine that he was home. She decided to visit him in person and to tape record their conversation. “I wanted to capture something of my father that was tangible. A keepsake. A portrait of the real Hector to hold on to if he disappeared again, died, or went back to prison” (206). From the seven hours caught on tape she created the 29-minute radio documentary, “I wanted to understand the decisions he made as a man, father, and husband. But instead of finding a snapshot of him, I found a picture of us emerging, a father and daughter who didn't exist until this conversation, 122 this night' (206-207). The radio documentary is very short and thus feels like an abrupt conversation that is unfinished. It offers the listening audience just a glimpse into this relationship – a very real and honest glimpse but what we get is an incomplete picture of this relationship or a picture of the incomplete nature of this relationship, “I think the question I had to ask myself was, is this the story about my dad's journey in life? Or is this the story of our journey in life together? Sometimes it was hard to distinguish where his story stopped, and mine began” (Transom 21). From there the book spreads out and offers a counter-narrative to the radio documentary. In the recordings the interviewer and interviewee are both present and heard, even if Jeanine is editing and narrating and therefore in more control of the context. In the memoir though, it is completely Jeanine's story about growing up the child of an imprisoned revolutionary. Whereas the original idea for the project began as a documentary about her father, Family Sentence, the final product, ends up being a memoir about how Cornillot's revolutionary activities came to structure not only her own life but also that of her family. Within the memoir the reader gets a very real sense of Jeanine's resultant alienation both from any sense of a familial or national identity. Whereas the radio documentary placed a lot of emphasis from the beginning on Jeanine's myths about her father, the memoir opens instead with a focus on family, nationality, and belonging as structured through the prison yard. At the age of two Jeanine and her family left Miami and resettled in Philadelphia with her mother's side of the family. She and the youngest of her brothers were placed in foster care because her mother was out of work and living 123 with her sister's family, “The Guardian Angel was a facility that housed orphaned or abandoned children ages two to twelve years old and was run by Catholic nuns” (22). Institutional separation plays a key role in Jeanine's life. At the age of six she meets her father for the first time that she can remember when she is sent to visit with her Miami relatives whom she does not recognize as family, “When the flight attendant asked if they were my relatives I said no. Sure, they seemed to be excited to see me. But they didn't act like my mom, grandmother, aunt, or brothers up north. Our family moved quietly through the world, unseen. Not like this group” (4-5). Right away we see Jeanine's alienation from any sense of a Cuban identity or familial belonging to this side of her relatives, even despite any proof to the contrary, “There were family photographs on the walls. I was surprised to find a recent portrait of myself hanging among them” (5). This vexed position of having both Cuban and American parents and not fitting into either dominates Jeanine's discussions of her own identity early in the memoir. Once in the prison yard she stares into the faces of the men surrounding her, unsure of which could be her father, “I was anybody's daughter” (9). She recognizes that her father is Cuban, “Although I was a white child and I didn't speak Spanish, I searched for Latinos” (9-10). However, she cannot make the connection to see herself as Cuban, “It was the first time I understood that I was white. Although my Cuban family had white skin, they weren't white in the prison. The white families were the minority in the yard. When I saw their children, I thought I belonged in that section. But I was relieved not to be standing with them. There were so few, and they looked lost and unsure” (10). Although Jeanine does not see herself necessarily as Cuban like her father, she 124 does, as a child, think of herself as destined to be a revolutionary like him, “I prepared myself to be a revolutionary, often on the lookout for worthy causes in my Catholic school and suburban neighborhood. I thought I was not like the children in my class who were paying attention to the nun's lessons. I had more important issues to think about like prison, revolution, and martyrdom” (101). Though her father's imprisonment leaves her alienated from Cuban family and nation, it also marks her as special in her difference, “I quietly hoped the nun would notice my thoughtful expressions and pinpoint me as some sort of child revolutionary and prophet” (101). This, of course, does not ever actually occur. In fact, more often than not she is not recognized as Cuban at all by others, “I felt recognized for the Cuban no one ever saw in me” (99). Even her father counters this narrative of her specialness when he describes her growing up without a father as a deficiency, “'It's a handicap for your development as a human being and a citizen'” (213). Her father even reinforces this lacking within her as an adult. In the interview this becomes clear to Jeanine when he begins to espouse his political views and reasons for fighting, “'For the freedom of my people of Cuba. You people don't see it because you live in a free country here. But my people don't live in a free country, and we need to gain that freedom. All my waking moments are invested in seeing how to gain it,' he says, voice softening” (213). It is evident in his language that he sees Jeanine and her family as lumped in with all other Americans, she remarks on this by pointing out his distinction in his language between his people and others, “The only difference is that in my childhood myth we were his people. In his version we had been sacrificed for Cuba 125 long ago” (213). During the interview, which Jeanine describes as “a comedy of errors. A series of missed connections between my dad and me – that end in a train wreck of a reunion,” Jeanine's constant attempts to forge connections with her father and bond over his experiences in prison and their familial relationship all fail to register with Hector who expresses no remorse for not being there for her and no real desire even to be in her life as a father figure now (Transom 68). One such attempt comes when she asks him about the first time that they met in that prison yard when she was six. She says to Hector seeking validation of both their familial connection/love and her Cuban identity, “What I am trying to say to my father is that I was afraid I did not look Cuban enough. I understood that he loved everything Cuban. Not only did I not speak Spanish, but I also looked and acted Anglo. I was afraid he would be disappointed when he saw me for the first time. Not recognize me as his daughter” (210). Her identities both as daughter and as Cuban are always insecure for Jeanine, and throughout her life and in this interview Hector constantly fails to recognize or fulfill this need for validation. In an unsatisfying response to her plea for some sort of connection he responds, “'...It's a blood thing. You are my daughter. I am your father and that's it'” (210). To him national and familial identities are biological and natural, but Jeanine's need for validation shows us the socially constructed nature of these components. In order to understand herself as Cuban or as his daughter she needs affirmation from him, her Cuban father. This sense of alienation is also constantly reinforced by the secrecy around her father and his imprisonment throughout her life. Creating the radio documentary made 126 her open up about this relationship in a way that she never had, “I realized even as an adult I didn't know how to articulate to outsiders about our father. My mom, brothers and I had our own language about him. A private language. There was love, but he never existed in the present tense. He lived in the past.” (Transom website). In the memoir the secrecy of her father's imprisonment is often mentioned even though she also catalogs the many children that she knew whose fathers were also in prison. She forms imaginative connections with these other children of prisoners, but never reveals the political nature of her father's crimes. She even mentions this imaginative connection in her acknowledgements, “To the multitudes of children who ran alongside us in the prison yards... I am grateful to you for your beautiful spirits and for the sacred journey inside that we all share” (220). And another of these connections is highlighted in the Transom page discussion boards when a commenter identified as Daniella says “I, too, am the daughter of a Latin American man who chose the revolution over the warmth, intimacy and stability of a home with family and child (me).” Jeanine's response identifies a “we” that I have been deploying in this chapter, titling the comment “Daughter of The Revolution,” she says, “I think we are a little known population” (Transom 64). Despite his failings Jeanine excuses her father throughout, “In my mind, everything he did was justified. The bombs didn't kill anyone, just destroyed property. He didn't want to abandon the family – he had to. He was a political prisoner” (Transom 7). When a commenter on the discussion board questions her about whether her father is a revolutionary or counterrevolutionary she says, “I don't know if, at any point, he or my father would have labeled themselves 'counterrevolutionaries.' They were all for 127 revolution. They fought to overthrow Batista's dictatorship and spent time together in jail under his government” (Transom 17). Her insistence on label him as a revolutionary comes out of a need to maintain that coveted identity for her father. As she reads a letter he wrote from prison while on a hunger strike we see this same sympathy, “I never realized he saw himself as dust in prison, forgotten and lost to the Cuban community he loved so much. It seemed all he wanted was to be their devoted patriot. I could relate” (135-136). xxi Her willingness to believe in her father comes at the cost of her engagement however with his politics, “I never felt the need to connect with my father via politics – it was always personal for me. I've always been more interested in the human stories behind a person's politics – what life experiences and myths shape who they are and their road in life” (Transom 17). There is a willful ignorance involved here when it comes to excusing her father's activities as just endemic to a particular time, place, and type of people, “My father. Like many Cuban exiles involved in these movements, was expertly trained by the CIA not only in how to make bombs but in how to execute such bombings. He was found guilty decades ago, and served his sentence. At this point, I'm more concerned about if and how he survived prison” (Transom 70). Politics then are not something that Jeanine has inherited from her father. More than any of the other three rebel daughters here, Family Sentence takes on an apolitical position in relation to Cuba. This comes across also in how she speaks of her father's own political patrimony, “So due to my family history, and their involvement in different revolutionary movements in Cuba, I just always considered my father to be the son of a revolutionary, 128 born and raised as a revolutionary” (Transom 17). Perhaps because Jeanine was not raised by her father she no longer sees herself as part of this political line, as she once imagined herself, “She told me that bred meant what you were born to do with the best of what your parents gave you. I wasn't sure what I was bred to do but be a revolutionary and a workingwoman” (109). This lack of a political inheritance is yet another way we see Jeanine as alienated from her father and from Cuba. She even expresses jealousy towards her eldest brother because of his connection to this political legacy, My father named my oldest brother, Hector, after himself and our grandfather. That gave Hector a coveted place in the world. He belonged to some mysterious revolutionary club in Cuba where the secret password was Hector Cornillot. I believed it meant his future was set in motion in some important way. He was born to soldier. He was tied to those two men forever, and I yearned to be part of the club. (63) Her brother, nicknamed Tory, appears on the Transom discussion board to congratulate Jeanine's success but also to provide his own read on their father saying, “He was just a boy raised by a patriot, in a rush to fight in a revolution. And one lesson was left out of his training, no one taught our father what a patriot is!” Like his little sister, he also sees his father as misguided by his revolutionary father. Interestingly he also identifies himself as a member of the United States Marine Corps, in keeping with Jeanine's view of his legacy as a soldier. What then, if anything, is her inheritance? In the final chapter of the memoir (which recounts the interview that was “Family Sentence”) we get a sense of Jeanine as a wanderer, someone divorced from location and from people, “I was not present at the deaths of the women [her aunt and both grandmothers], and it seemed that while the people in my family were holding on to each other over the years, devoted to one another, 129 I had cut myself loose, drifting through the world” (207). xxii In her last visit with her father while he was in prison she recounts her various travels, When we sat back down in our seats, he asked me what I'd been doing over the years. I told him I had gone to college, dropped out, gone back, dropped out, and graduated. I fell in love and moved to Flagstaff, Arizona... I lived and worked in London, mostly scraping by working under the radar without papers... I traveled around Europe with a different love. Drove around France with a new one. I never learned Italian, I told him. Wordlessness had settled comfortably in my mouth. I was now working as a waitress and auditing a couple of graduate classes in Philadelphia. He was quiet. (202) It seems that her greatest inheritance could possibly be this sense of being unmoored and the need to travel and be free (in opposition to the imprisoned life of her father). We do not get the impression of Jeanine as connected to the island of Cuba at all. Rather, the overall picture that emerges from Family Sentence is of someone cut off from these modes of identity, much like she wished for when she was a small girl, “I didn't want to belong to my Cuban family or to my American one. It felt beautiful to be unclaimed” (60). Jeanine Cornillot's work for me is very exciting, particularly in the context I have placed it in. She is easily dismissed by a more essentialist project that would discount her for not speaking Spanish; for being born to a white American mother; for not having much connection to her father and to Cuba; for not expressing a political opinion that easily fits within the binary pro/anti Castro's Cuba conversation; and for focusing instead almost exclusively on her family rather than her country. And yet, this story could not have been told by anyone besides a rebel daughter. With her projects Cornillot accomplished her goal of documenting her family and her father, “It has become an 130 official family record, a marking of time. A concrete memory to pass onto the next generation, along with the photo albums, and letters” (Transom 29). She also simultaneously contributes to the feminist, revisionary diasporic history of Cuba that this chapter has been outlining. Family Sentence lays bear another version of Cuban history that could only come from the position of the diaspora; her recordings and writings mark the legacies the Revolution has wrought not only on Cuba but also on the generations that have followed. Conclusion Within the stories of these women’s lives linger larger, unavoidable questions concerning gender and generationality. What does one do with familial bonds and national ties? How does one negotiate notions of family, nation, belonging, and identity in exile? What is inherited and what are one’s ethical responsibilities and political possibilities of such a heritage? Within the narratives of these four revolutionary daughters we find variegated approaches towards understanding the precarious state of exile. Fernandez, Chibás, Lesnik Weisman, and Cornillot undermine the conservative nature of political patrimony – their stories are not just the stories of great men anymore but rather their work reveals both personal narratives of identity formation as well as contributions toward a diasporic and national history. Rather than turn away from the metaphor of the family, these women’s stories use it in order to map out their distinct and resilient connections to their patria. Ultimately, these women's stories are representative of all diasporic and second generation Cubans. I analyze their works not to offer some sort of modernist composite 131 here that when added together would be exhaustive or would provide a reconfigured image of a complete, whole, integrated subject position, diaspora, or nation. I use the figure of the rebel daughter as a metaphor for the changes that subjects have undergone in exile. The diaspora is the bastard child of the Cuban Revolution, the complex of unanticipated subjectivities that have had to understand anew their Cubanidad as circuited through their families and national identities. These narratives by the daughters of revolutionaries render that connection explicit because of their proximity to the political movements. However, inevitably all Cubans in exile and on the island have had to (and will continue to) reckon with the trauma of the Revolutionary moment and the multiple resultant forms that un-belonging has taken. That these four different women, across different mediums and different political ideologies, are all thinking through the figure of the father or the patrimonial in order to understand their Cubanidad is remarkable at least and revolutionary at best. 132 i Through this argument I do not mean to imply that within the nation there exists a seamless transference of politics between generations that is then disrupted in the process or space of exile, but rather to say that exile or diaspora (in the case of these specific women) disrupts the transference of political patrimony in ways that are distinct from the disruptions that normally occur within the fiction of the integrated nation. I make caveats like this to underscore that it is not my intent to imbue the conditions of exile and diaspora with anymore abjection than they may already contain. That is to say that, for me, exiles/ diasporans are, at most, merely differently abject (not more abject). ii “The minority fraction of those who do not participate, for one reason or another, in the building of socialism;” “the defeated class.” (Translation mine) iii See Maria de los Angeles Torres 36-37. iv I do not mean to imply that these daughters all rebelled against or resisted their fathers, rather I am playing on the fact that they are daughters of revolutionaries that are metaphorically rebellious in terms of traditional notions of political and national patrimony. In a more exhaustive study on the children of revolutionaries the writings of Irene Vilar, whose grandmother Lolita Lebrón was a Puerto Rican independence activist, would offer another compelling and provocative voice. Her memoir A Message from God in the Atomic Age (later re-titled The Ladies' Gallery: A Memoir of Family Secrets) was published in 1996. v “The leaders of the revolution have children who do not learn to call their father with their first faltering words; they have wives who must be part of the general sacrifice of their lives to carry the revolution to its destination; their friends are strictly limited to their comrades in revolution. There is not life outside the revolution.” (translation mine) vi Some speculate that Alina Fernández is in fact not the biological daughter of Fidel Castro, “She [Juanita Castro, Fidel's sister] even questions whether they share a bloodline. 'Alina is not a good person. If you have a chance, ask Fidel if he is her father,' she says, 'because he tells people that he is not.' It is true that Castro has never said that she was his daughter, but the special treatment she received in Cuba belies the fact that he thinks otherwise” (Bardach, Cuba Confidential 64). vii Fidel has many more children besides these three. He has five sons with his second wife, Dalia Soto del Valle and at least two other illegitimate children. For more on these children and the shroud of mystery surrounding Fidel's families and offspring see Ann Louise Bardach's chapter, “The Family” in Without Fidel (31-56). viiiInterestingly, this parallels Irene Vilar's writing trajectory as well, her controversial second memoir (Impossible Motherhood: Testimony of an Abortion Addict) moved away from the topic of her life as the descendant of revolutionaries to tackle her experiences with abortion and motherhood. ix All biographical data compiled from Bardach, www.chibas.org, and Daughter of a Cuban Revolutionary playbill. x Ann Louise Bardach has addressed this connection in both of her works, “[Castro] allied himself with Eddy Chibás, the charismatic founder of the Orthodox Party, who was regarded as the great white hope for democracy in Cuba. But some of their mutual friends say that Chibás was wary of the ambitious student leader from Oriente. 'I remember a rally and Fidel tried to talk to Chibás,' recalled Lew. 'Chibás said to me, “I don't want gangsters here.”' Nevertheless, after Chibás shot himself on live radio following a scandal that discredited him, Castro played a central role at his media-saturated funeral. Rafael Díaz-Balart claims that Castro suggested using Chibás's death as a means to oust President Carlos Prío, whose popularity was plummeting. 'When Chibás died, he proposed that we take the body to the presidential palace, kill Prío and take power,' he said” (Bardach 2002, 241). “It was at Chibás's funeral that a twenty-five-year-old Castro made his name, by leaping upon the grave and delivering a fiery denunciation of the Batista regime. Castro owed much to Chibas--most notably, his own emergence as a political star to fill the void left by Chibas's death” (Bardach 2009, 55). Also see Lesnik 133 Weisman's documentary in which Max Lesnik comments, “If Chibás was elected President, the Cuban revolution maybe was different, it was not necessary to take power through the arms” (19:36). xi All biographical data compiled from Baradach, www.chibas.org, Daughter of a Cuban Revolutionary playbill, and obituaries. xii “'My father's name on the Manifesto made it so that Castro obtained more support, because the surname Chibás garnered much respect.'” (Translation mine) xiii“At this stage in my life, at the age of 85, I wanted to publish this website to point out historical data of my family: my father, my brother and myself. Our interest is to clear up, for present and future generations, the confusion created by Fidel Castro to falsify in almost its entirety the history of Cuba – from its beginning to the year 2002.” (translation my own) xiv Vivien mistakenly identifies Alina as Fidel's first child. xv Ann Louise Bardach has reported extensively on this subject. On the terrorist political climate of 1970s and 1980s Miami see her chapter, “Calle Ocho Politics,” and on Bosch, Posada Carriles, and other assassins and terrorists see, “An Assassin's Tale in Three Acts,” both in Cuba Confidential (New York: Vintage Books, 2002). xvi Although Bosch has himself published a memoir (Los años que he vivido), none of his six children have, to my knowledge, published or produced any work about their father and therefore do not offer a comparative counterpoint to Lesnik Weisman's perspective. Orlando Bosch died in Miami on April 27, 2011. xviiMargarita Alarcón, also a daughter of a revolutionary, blogs regularly for The Huffington Post, sometimes discussing her father. <http://www.huffingtonpost.com/margaritta-alarcon> xviiiLuis Posada Carriles has two children that do not appear in the film at all. He, too, has published a memoir Los caminos del guerrero (1994). xix Jeanine Cornillot mistakenly explains, “Basically there were three different revolutionary groups that were attempting to overthrow Batista for years in Cuba. Fidel Castro was the leader of one group. My grandfather and father belonged to another one called Prio's Organizacion Autentico” (Transom 43). For more information on the multitude of groups working to combat the Batista dictatorship see María de los Angeles Torres 46-47. xx Ann Louise Bardach explains Cornillot's attacks in her work, “In 1968, Orlando Bosch, a pediatrician turned terrorist, fired a bazooka from Miami's MacArthur Causeway into a Polish freighter that had traveled to Cuba. Around the same time, a close associate of Bosch's, Hector Cornillot, staged attacks against Cuba-friendly firms in Los Angeles and Miami, blowing up Mexican tourism offices, a Shell Oil office and three airline offices—Air France, Japan Airlines and Air Canada. In one two-hour period in July 1968, he set off five bombs. It would be another five years before Cornillot was finally convicted of a crime—bombing an Air Canada office in Miami Beach” (Bardach 2002, 114). xxi This reading of Hector Cornillot as someone forgotten by the Cuban exile community surfaces often. In a series of articles for the Miami Herald in 2001 during and after Cornillot's successful attempts to be released from indefinite detention reporter Liz Balmaseda also feeds into this perception, “His is not one the 'patriot' names flung about on Spanish-language radio in attempts to raise funds for extremist causes. He has no sterling collection of political advocates, no list of politicians, radio announcers or prominent militant brothers. He has not been canonized. Unlike the unrepentant exile terrorists still serving prison terms for their crimes, Cornillot, who now calls terrorist acts 'stupid' and 'backward,' had no direct line to people of political influence. But he ha a devoted wife, Teresita, who had visited him at a half-dozen corrections facilities in 13 years and had canvassed the grass roots, collecting about 300 supportive letters from relatives, friends and potential employers. And, apparently, that made a 134 difference” (Balmaseda “Exile”). Yet, according to Ann Louise Bardach, Cornillot's release was in fact politically backed, “Lincoln Díaz-Balart and Ileana Ros-Lehtinen urged George W. Bush to release both [Valentín] Hernández [one of the two men that killed Luciano Nieves] and Cornillot. The new President obliged in one case and allowed Cornillot out of prison” (Bardach 115). It is also interesting to note that in these series of articles Cornillot comes across as repentant and having moved beyond his revolutionary fervor, “Cornillot believes he'll have no problems complying. He says he doesn't feel the urge to even engage in Cuban politics... He believes the embargo is a waste of time. But Cornillot doesn't plan to spread the word anytime soon” (Balmaseda “Exile”). Yet, today, Cornillot maintains a very active online presence with five blogs and a Twitter account all about Cuban politics (see <http://www.blogger.com/profile/14941229975743454081> for an index of his blogs and <http://twitter.com/cornillot> for his Twitter account feed. xxiiThere is an interesting parallel between this language and the narrator in Loving Che and also with Alina Fernández who describes herself, “Being the way I am, a wandering soul...” (Fernández 16). 135 Chapter Three Exile Acts: Exceptionalism and Familialism in the Cuban Diaspora Fairest Cordelia, that art most rich being poor, Most choice forsaken, and most loved despised! Thee and thy virtues here I seize upon, Be it lawful I take up what's cast away. Gods, gods! 'Tis strange that from their cold'st neglect My love should kindle to inflamed respect. -William Shakespeare, King Lear (The King of France, Act I Scene I) The dissolution of the Cuban family is perhaps the most lamented loss of the post- Revolutionary period. Families broken apart by politics and distance have become the norm amongst Cubans on the island and in the diaspora. Despite this predominant fact, however, many in the diaspora cling to traditional notions of familial belonging. Indeed I have argued throughout this dissertation that traditional ideologies of national and familial belonging persist throughout the diaspora despite all evidence to the contrary that marks Cuban America as illegitimate on both scales. In this chapter I am interested in further exploring familialism, or the continuous and conservative appeal of/to the universalist heteropatriarchal nuclear family as the social unit par excellence. Throughout the post-1959 history of immigration to the United States, Cubans have been afforded special treatments or exceptionalist statuses. However, this exceptionalism has marked Cubans in the United States as Others, exiles from their home country and oddities in their host country belonging to neither fully. Over time, while certain baseline privileges towards accessing citizenship have remained constant, the legal codification of the Cuban in the United States has shifted, as scholars have noted, “from [being] welcomed exiles to illegal immigrants.” i My argument is that 136 familialism acts as both a legal mandate of U.S. immigration law as well as a recuperative technique for the Cuban diaspora. On the one hand, the structure of U.S. immigration law demands that diasporic subjects make themselves intelligible and categorizable as family units. Throughout the history of post-Revolutionary Cuban immigration to the United States preference has been given to those immigrants with immediate family members already residing in the country. Although other criteria for preferential admittance have fluctuated over the years, family reunification has remained the number one priority of legal immigration policies. However, on the other hand, aside from this legal need to be classifiable according to a coherent narrative of the heteropatriarchal nuclear family, Cubans in the diaspora have also turned to the familiarity of family in order to make sense of their divided community. Familialism, then, provides a sense of comfort to those whose nationalism/ nationality has been drawn into question. U.S. Cubans cling to the heteropatriarchal family unit in an attempt to appeal to notions of respectability when their community is under attack in the media and law. Examining the texts The Perez Family and The Cuban American Family Album, we see evidence of this turn towards familialism and the possibilities such a move forecloses. This chapter takes its title from and is, at least in part, inspired by Lisa Lowe's seminal text, Immigrants Acts: On Asian American Cultural Politics. The title of her book invokes the history of legal acts that framed Asian immigration to the United States (particularly the Asian exclusion acts, their repeal acts, and then the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965), “to observe that the life conditions, choices, and expressions of 137 Asian Americans have been significantly determined by the U.S. state through the apparatus of immigration laws and policies, through the enfranchisements denied or extended to immigrant individuals and communities, and through the process of naturalization and citizenship” (7). In a parallel way, I will show throughout this chapter how the legal acts of immigration policy have historically shaped the reception of and prospects for Cubans as exiles. Historically, Cuban refugees have been privy to exceptionalist immigration policies. However, this exceptionalism expressed the legal, political, and social contradiction of their welcome as temporary exiles who were expected to one day return to their homeland, regardless of their eventual legal designations as “permanent residents” or “citizens.” These historical practices are similar in nature, but not necessarily quality, to the experiences outlined by Lowe for the contradictions of Asian immigration which, “have placed Asians 'within' the U.S. nation-state, its workplaces, and its markets, yet linguistically, culturally, and racially marked Asians as 'foreign' and 'outside' the national polity” (8). In response to the contradictions of these structuring legal acts, Lowe additionally argues that her title draws attention to, “the agency of Asian immigrants and Asian Americans; the acts of labor, resistance, memory, and survival, as well as the politicized cultural work that emerges from dislocation and disidentification” (9; italics in original). Throughout my chapter, I address the push and pull involved in Cuban immigration to the United States and end with an examination of the role that familialism as a stabilizing mechanism plays for the diasporan seeking to suture family, community, and nation. 138 Dissolution of the Cuban Family Diaspora as a process illegitimates notions of belonging: it bastardizes families and de-subjectifies citizens. While all immigrant families may experience a rupture by losing a relative, the dissolution of the post-Revolutionary Cuban family achieved a near- systemic level or proportion. The myriad of texts that we have examined in previous chapters have time and again pointed to this recurrent theme of broken families. Addressing the statistical evidence of this process on the island Ann Louise Bardach writes, “Nevertheless, the Cuban family has seen a dramatic breakdown since the Revolution. More than half of all couples divorce, many never marry, and infidelity is the national sport” (57). She continues on to agree with Castro's critics whom, “contend that the peculiar personal lifestyle of Fidel Castro has had deleterious consequences for the formerly cherished institution of the Cuban family” (57). Although Castro argues that he does not publicize his family life in order to avoid building a cult of personality around them, Bardach still holds up the resultant negative effects of such a policy, “But having no family model has had undeniable costs for the Cuban people. The coup de grâce of this familial disaster has been the one million Cubans who have fled. It is the rare Cuban family that has emerged intact—on either side of the Florida Strait” (57). The diaspora therefore represents the pinnacle of the dissolution of the Cuban family/nation. The most evident and infamous example of this would be the Castro and Diaz- Balart families. The two family lines have intermarried and yet are now separated by ideology and geography. Fidel Castro's first wife Mirta Diaz-Balart (who is also the 139 mother of his firstborn son) now lives in the United States. Furthermore, her nephews Lincoln and Mario Diaz-Balart are two of the most vociferous anti-Castro exile politicians in the United States. Even within the Castro family alone, Fidel has several sisters (and daughters) who have left the island. And, as seen through the texts of previous chapters, these stories of divided families abound. Not only have families broken apart on an individual basis but there has also been formal processes that have contributed to this rupturing on a national scale. The systematic dissolution of the Cuban family is readily evidenced by such initiatives as Operation Pedro Pan. ii Between 1960 and 1962 a coordinated effort between the U.S. State Department and the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Miami brought over 14,000 unattended Cuban children to the United States. While the program started off as a means of facilitating the escape of children of anti-Castro activist Cubans, it quickly expanded to include as many children as possible. Unable to secure exit visas on their own many parents viewed the prospect of sending their children ahead of them as their best option available. Rumors that the Cuban government planned to revoke parental rights (or patria potestas) and send Cuban children to be indoctrinated at Soviet work camps pushed families towards the program. Many have claimed that the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency manufactured the false rumors of Castro's intent to exercise parens patriae (or state sovereignty over children) in order to fuel the exodus. Though the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis ended all travel out of Cuba, the Operation managed to clandestinely airlift over 14,000 children in roughly 22 months. While some children had relatives or family friends they were meeting and staying with until their 140 parents would arrive, many did not. This imposed separation deeply affected these children, Little was said, however, about the dramatic, and in most cases traumatic, situation the children faced: separation from their parents, arrival in a strange land, a language barrier, and adaptation to a new culture and environment. These emotional transformations went largely unnoticed by the media, as the children were quickly scattered in more than a hundred communities from Miami, Florida, to Yakima, Washington. Most children who participated in the Cuban children's program were told by their parents that their separation would last only a few weeks or months. But events in Cuba (the Bay of Pigs fiasco in April 1961 and the missile crisis of October 1962) extended the separation for longer than anyone anticipated. Many of the 14,048 children who came to the United States during the program waited up to twenty years for family reunification. (Masud-Piloto 41) However, this episode is also emblematic of shifts in the larger context of Cuban familial relations brought about the Revolution and the advent of diaspora. The children of Operation Pedro Pan provide a clear and institutionalized example of the impact the Revolution had on normative familial relations. Many families simply did not survive the separation of exile because they were apart for so long or in some cases were never reunited again. More and more families forever lost their relatives in the later years of exile history when Cuban rafters braved the Florida Straits attempting, many times unsuccessfully, to reach U.S. soil. The most publicized instance of this particular form of family dissolution is the case of Elian Gonzalez, a Cuban boy who lost his mother to the ocean on their journey aboard a raft. Yet, to be sure, even those families that remained intact through the process of migration have also had to contend with the political fissures prevalent in Cuba and in the diaspora that separate kin from kin because of political ideology. In Cuba the 141 Committees for the Defense of the Revolution is a network of local neighborhood groups charged with monitoring activities and people within their areas. Many times these Committees provide the authorities with information on individuals who participate in counter-revolutionary activities, whether that be actively organizing against the government, engaging in illegal behavior, or simply not taking part in Communist events. These Committees build distrust and resentment in neighborhoods and even between kin. In the diaspora, the fissures within the exile community are often overlooked. However, as we have seen in previous chapters, there is a great range of political thought that is often and violently suppressed by the hardliner Right wing. These political divisions occur within the family unit as well. Given these divisions that exist within the Cuban family as a result of the Revolution, why then does the family as a unit continue to persist? I do not take the family as a given or inevitable truth. Nor do I think of the family, and particularly the heteropatriarchal nuclear family, as a natural phenomenon. The family, just like the nation, is a socially constructed or imagined scale of belonging built upon and supported by notions of biological and reproductive determinism. The heteropatriarchal nuclear family is not a preordained unit but is a product of the long histories of capitalism and imperialism. iii I do not mean to imply that I am invested in the notion of a integrated, whole family or nation. Or that such a thing even exists. However, what I am interested in is the fictions of integrity and wholeness that surround notions of the ideal family and ideal nation and how diasporans and diasporas relate to, reinvigorate, reinvent, and/or rewrite these fictions. 142 U.S. Immigration Law and the Cuban Exception In order to understand the case of post-Revolutionary Cuban immigration to the United States we must first examine the legal, political, and historical context in which these policies emerged. Cuban exiles did not enter the United States in a historical vacuum. Rather, a long history of migrations of people and flows of capital and goods in both directions preceded the advent of the 1959 Revolution. The same can be said for the legal context into which Cubans seeking entrance to the United States stepped. The two parts relevant here are both general U.S. immigration laws and policies as well as those specific to the admittance of refugees. As historian Mae M. Ngai points out, “Before the 1920s immigration into the United states was numerically unrestricted, reflecting a tradition of laissez-faire labor mobility that dated to the colonial period” (Ngai 17). Allowing the laboring classes freedom of mobility provided the United States the resources necessary for its economic and political expansion and development. This open door policy of immigration remained intact through the 19 th century, Chinese exclusion being the notable exception. We can think of the 19 th century as the era of U.S. expansion including the acquisition of the Oregon territory and the Southwest as justified by the ideology of Manifest Destiny and ending with the Cuban War of Independence (also known as the Spanish-American War) which resulted in the acquisition of the Philippines, Guam, and Puerto Rico and the temporary wardship of Cuba. The 20 th century, on the other hand, marks the end of territorial expansion and became a time of border consolidation. Immigration policy therefore was largely piecemeal and uncoordinated 143 until the 1920s, after the First World War. Immigration laws, which had been comprised mostly of restrictive measures that came about individually, were bolstered by the Johnson-Reed Immigration Act of 1924, “The law placed numerical limits on immigration and established a quota system that classified the world's population according to nationality and race, ranking them in a hierarchy of desirability for admission into the United States” (17). iv This quota system introduced a regime of immigration restriction (characterized by racist ideology) that would remain in effect for the first half of the 20 th century. The Johnson-Reed Act promulgated notions about the desired demographics of the American public that had long been seen in policies such as the exclusion acts and historical legal denial of citizenship to non-white residents. Just seven years before the Cuban Revolution, U.S. immigration policies were finally solidified and codified under the McCarren-Walter Act of 1952. Otherwise known as the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1952, this legislation for the first time clearly defined the positions and procedures of U.S. immigration. While the Act got rid, in name, of many of the racial restrictions already put in place by the Johnson-Reed Act, it still maintained a national origins quota system that gave preference to Northern and Western Europeans. Many politicians at the time spoke out against the legislation (including President Truman who vetoed it), however the restrictive measures put in place by the Act were not successfully revised and/or eliminated from policy until the Hart-Cellar Act of 1965. The McCarran-Walter Act is important for many different reasons for our 144 discussion here of Cuban immigration to the United States. Not only did it represent the solidification of disparate U.S. immigration policies, but it also introduced several new factors that would define debates over immigration for generations. As Ngai explains of its lasting importance, “The McCarran-Walter Act replaced the Immigration Act of 1917 as the nation's foundational immigration law (and it remains so today, as amended)” (237). Ngai outlines several key developments in immigration policy brought about by the McCarran-Walter Act. First, and chief to its proponent and author Senator Pat McCarran, is the utility of immigration law “as a tool in the United States' urgent battle against Communism” (236). Closing U.S. borders to subversives who would seek to spread Communism was a primary motivation for unifying immigration policy. The fear of Communism and the desire to stop its spread would become an important justification for the open door admittance of Cuban exiles in the first years after the Revolution. Each Cuban that fled the island was viewed as a vote for Democracy. So serious were the anti- Communist motivations behind the legislation that, relatedly, the expulsion of those immigrants already in the country who would support Communist efforts is another feature outlined by Ngai, “Finally, the McCarran-Walter Act stiffened the requirements for naturalized citizenship, and provided for the denaturalization of naturalized citizens if within ten years of naturalization one was cited for contempt for refusing to testify about subversive activity” (239). A third element of the Act highlighted by Ngai is the continued presence of racial restrictions despite the formal removal of that language, “the retention of the national origins quotas reflected that logic which cast the native-born as the most loyal Americans, 145 especially whites of British and north European descent, and the foreign-born as subversive, especially Jews, who were imagined as Bolsheviks, and Italians, who were viewed as anarchists” (236). Within this language we see the continued persistence of the fear of subversiveness as the language of race articulates deviance and political dissension. These racial restrictions could also be seen in the limit imposed in the Caribbean, “While also preserving nonquota immigration from countries of the Western Hemisphere, it imposed quotas on the former British colonies in the Caribbeans, a move that was designed to limit the migration of black people into the United States” (238). The racial logics we see at play here in the 1952 Act, what Ngai calls “updating the law's index of racial desirability,” in giving preference to white immigrants seeking entrance, can also be seen at play across the history of post-Revolutionary Cuban immigration to the United States (238). Changes in the racial composition of the average Cuban entrant from white to Black have paralleled the changes in policy from welcoming exiles to restricting immigrants. Preference has been given by default to white Cubans because the elite classes, those with the most to lose to a Communist reorientation of society and who fled Cuba first, were comprised predominantly by white Cubans. Therefore the initial waves of immigrants were overwhelmingly white and since immigration law prioritizes those with close relatives already in the United States, this trend persisted. The Mariel exodus was the first time a large percentage of the refugees were Black Cubans. v The exodus is also seen as a turning point in U.S. immigration's open door policy towards Cubans. Another key feature of immigration policy introduced by the Immigration and 146 Nationality Act of 1952 was, “a new concept of occupational 'preferences' designed to further narrow and refine the immigrant stream. The law required at least one-half of each country's quota to go to persons with specialized skills deemed in short supply in the United States. The second and third preferences were for parents of adult U.S. Citizens (30 percent) and spouses and children of permanent resident aliens (20 percent), respectively” (238). This becomes relevant to our conversation here about Cuban immigration and illegitimacy because it brings about the logics of familialism as seen in the law. The adherence to the normative logics of the heteropatriarchal nuclear family, then, are written into immigration law for the first time with this Act. Clearly this is meant to bolster the racialized preferences already discussed; white Europeans have a higher probability of being those with family members already present in the United States because of the racial quota system of past laws. Therefore while those quotas are eliminated for future immigrants, white Europeans would continue to be grandfathered in by this family preference. This component of immigration law, however, also now characterizes for us a major preoccupation of the diasporic subject: the necessity to both make ones self intelligible as family and to thereby legitimize the diasporic community. In addition to, amongst other variables, the racial codifications present in the legislation that index legitimate subjects, “The policy thus established a new set of norms of desirability based on educational level, skill, and familial ties to Americans” (238). The ideal immigrant subject then is not only white and northern European but also educated, highly skilled, and familial. A final effect of the McCarran-Walter Act outlined by Ngai is its elimination of 147 “the racial bar to citizenship, which finally ended Japanese and Korean exclusion and made policy consistent with the recent repeals of Chinese, Indian, and Filipino exclusion. It was arguably the most important reform of the McCarran-Walter Act, as it established, for the first time, the general principle of color-blind citizenship” (238). This would facilitate the naturalization process for Cubans in the future. Had citizenship been maintained outright as limited on the basis of race, it is possible that legislation that treated Cubans en masse would have had to address the issue of race specifically before allowing for their admission and their access to citizenship. The next major reform of American immigration policy would come after the Cuban Revolution. The Immigration Act of 1965 (otherwise known as the Hart-Cellar Act) eliminated the old system of quotas which favored northern Europe and replaced them with a new quota system evenly distributed across all countries. According to Ngai, the “signal achievement was that it ended the policy of admitting immigrants according to a hierarchy of raial desirability nd established the principle of formal equality in immigration” (227). Under the new Act 290,000 immigrants would be admitted annually, 170,000 from the Eastern Hemisphere with a maximum of 20,000 per country and 120,000 from the Western Hemisphere with no specific maximums based on country. vi The Immigration Act of 1965 is seen by many as a watershed piece of legislation that would thoroughly change the face of immigration in the United States. On October 3, 1965 President Johnson would signed the Immigration Act into law in a ceremony on Liberty Island in New York calling it, “a revolutionary bill” (Johnson 1037). Johnson's remarks at Liberty Island are important for many reasons but the two 148 that I wish to highlight for our purposes here are, first, the permanent linkage he makes between immigration law and family reunification and, second, the specific and exceptionalist attention he gives to Cuban immigrants. This coupling of the ideas of national belonging and family would persist throughout his speech. He reflected on the new standard that immigration policy would adopt, “from this day forth those wishing to immigrate to America shall be admitted on the basis of their skills and their close relationship to those already here” (1037). He played up the importance of changing the law away from past restrictions that were racially motivated by criticizing, “the harsh injustice of the national origins quota system. Under that system the ability of new immigrants to come to America depended upon the country of their birth. Only 3 countries were allowed to supply 70 percent of all the immigrants” (1038). This injustice would be rectified by the new law and he lamented that, “Families were kept apart because a husband or a wife or a child had been born in the wrong place” (1038). Here we see the emergence of the idea of family reunification that, I argue, has come to dominate contemporary immigration policy. Family is naturalized in the language of the reforms of the Immigration Act of 1965. In Johnson's remarks preference given to family members is not problematized, “those who do come will come because of what they are, and not because of the land from which they sprung” (1038). However, the 170,000 Eastern Hemispheric immigrants that would be admitted to the United States were subject, “according to a hierarchy of preferences for family members (80 percent) and occupations (20 percent)” (Ngai 258). No such skill-based or familial preferences would be applied to those from the Western 149 Hemisphere in an attempt to foster open relations. Although the 20,000 country-specific maximum would eliminate the grandfathering effect that I mentioned earlier, preference for family members would still mean that within each country a specific ideal version of the immigrant subject would persist. An immigrant's legibility within the narrative of the heteropatriarchal nuclear family becomes paramount. In the second half of his speech after espousing the merits of the Immigration Act of 1965, President Johnson would turn his attention toward Cuba, “So it is in that spirit that I declare this afternoon to the people of Cuba that those who seek refuge here in America will find it. The dedication of America to our traditions as an asylum for the oppressed is going to be upheld” (Johnson 1039). Given the historical context, these remarks do not come out of the blue; 1965 witnessed what is known as the second wave of Cuban exiles. The first wave of golden exiles, which occurred from 1959-1962, was ended by the increasing conflict between the United States and Cuba starting with the failed Bay of Pigs Invasion of 1961 and culminating in the stalemate of the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962. Five years later Fidel Castro announced that he would open the port of Camarioca in September 1965 to those Cubans who sought to leave the island. This exodus would turn into the highly coordinated effort known as the Freedom Flights which would last from 1965 to 1973 and would bring in more than 260,000 new Cubans (Henken 396). President Johnson's comments came just as the first of those refugees began to arrive. Two things stand out here about this second half of President Johnson's speech. First, the longstanding fear and persecution of Communism is reaffirmed in Johnson's 150 words, “Once again, it stamps the mark of failure on a regime when many of its citizens voluntarily choose to leave the land of their birth for a more hopeful home in America. The future holds little hope for any government where the present holds no hope for the people” (1039). As noted before, curtailing Communism became a primary preoccupation of many immigration legislators. In the face of the Cuban Revolution, open door immigration policy became one of many tools employed by the U.S. government to discredit and disrupt the new Communist regime's hold across the island. Even today this tactic still persists as many have criticized the current wet foot, dry foot policy of encouraging Cubans to illegally and dangerously cross the Florida Straits in an attempt to reach U.S. soil. The anti-Communist motivations of the U.S. immigration policies with respect to Cuban entrants cannot be underestimated. The fluctuations in immigration policy over the years have been in constant parallel with Cold War developments. The second glaring part of President Johnson's speech is the reassertion given to the new shift in immigration policy towards the centrality or primacy of the family unit, “Our first concern will be with those Cubans who have been separated from their children and their parents and their husbands and their wives and that are now in this country. Our next concern is with those who are imprisoned for political reasons” (1039). Family reunification now even supersedes political concerns. Given the particular situation of Operation Pedro Pan, wherein thousands of unaccompanied Cuban children were brought into the country, it is understandable that reunification of these children with their parents would be stressed in Johnson's words. However, family reunification as a policy would 151 go beyond merely rectifying a specific situation and instead would be the primary means for assessing the desirability of all Cuban subjects. While there is a historical context for his remarks, the juxtaposition of President Johnson's open door welcome to Cubans with the new Immigration Act that he praises for abolishing a “system [that] violated the basic principle of American democracy—the principle that values and rewards each man on the basis of his merit as a man” are contradictory to say the least (1038). It is from within this contradiction, I argue, that the legal codification of Cuban immigrant exceptionalism emerges. At the same moment that immigration law is being revitalized as merit-based and lacking prejudice, a series of historical events create the conditions for an exception to these very new rules. President Johnson's speech then emblematizes the convergence of all these issues into one; a nexus is created here out of the reforms of the Immigration Act of 1965, the fear of Communism, the introduction of familialism into immigration policy, and the unanticipated (and illegitimate) immigrant subject. The precarious and fluctuating position of Cuban entrants to the United States in relation to immigration law is best evidenced here when towards the end of his remarks Johnson says, “And so we Americans will welcome these Cuban people. For the tides of history run strong, and in another day they can return to their homeland to find it cleansed of terror and free from fear” (1039). The idea that the Cuban diasporic subject's return to her homeland was an impending inevitability would typify the handling of Cubans within immigration policy. The Cuban exception in President Johnson's remarks offer us a transition into an 152 examination of U.S. immigration law concerning refugees broadly and Cubans specifically. Concern for refugees grew directly in response to the end of the Second World War and the emergence of Cold War policy. Accepting its position on the global stage, the United States sought to recuperate what many saw as its failure to address the plight of refugees. However, refugees, by definition, did not meet the ideal standard for immigrant desirability we have discussed. Instead, as Ngai notes, “conservative forces... [were] suspicious that refugees were Communists, job-takers, and other undesirables” (236). The first such piece of legislation aimed at recognizing this potential immigrant subject came about in the form of the Displaced Persons Act of 1948. The Act allowed for the entrance of 202,000 European displaced persons over a two year period, but so severely limited the scope of these specific people as to, in effect, exclude Jewish refugees and, instead, favor those refugees fleeing Communism. vii Legal Scholar Katherine Tonnas notes the importance of the Displaced Persons Act in establishing the practice of using immigration policy to combat Communism, Subsequent amendments to the Act in 1950 exposed Congress' intent to use refugee law as a vehicle for the fostering of cold war policies. In furtherance of its political objectives, Congress permitted anti-communist refugees living within the People's Republic of China and the Soviet Union or its satellites to obtain visas. Overall, the underlying goals of the Displaced Persons Act were consistent with U.S. foreign policy objectives. Admitting Eastern European refugees into the United States satisfied the dual aims of relieving Western European allies' economic burdens and publicizing discontent among citizens of communist countries. (Tonnas 302) The Displaced Persons Act would be amended to include more peoples and then in 1953 Congress would pass the Refugee Relief Act to further facilitate the admission of 153 refugees fleeing Communist countries. The importance of this development in immigration policy is drawn out by Tonnas, “Passage of this Act heralded a major change in US. Refuge policy, marking the first time that U.S. law explicitly recognized the existence of refugees” (302). The Refugee Relief Act would address some of the concerns brought about two year earlier in 1951 by the United Nations Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees which sought to protect European refugees fleeing the aftermath of World War II. To do this, a global political standard for assessing the definition of a refugee was established. At first it would be limited to the protection of only European refugees but would later in 1967 expand to include others persecuted on the basis of race, religion, political opinion, nationality, or social group. While the Convention was signed into effect by the United Nations in 1951, it was not actively ratified into U.S. immigration law until the 1980 Refugee Act. At this point in U.S. immigration law, in the early 1950s, the scope of the term refugee has been limited to those peoples displaced by World War II and the spread of Communism. While discussion of refugees admittance was left out viii of the aforementioned McCarran-Walter Act, according to Tonnas, “Other amendments to the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1952 continued this policy by expanding the definition of 'refugee escapee' to include people in flight from communist/communist dominated countries, the first ideological congressional act of its kind” (303). Here we see one of the conditions for the production of the exceptionalism of Cuban refugees emerge within the legal and political landscapes of immigration policy at the advent of the Cold War. Another condition would develop in practical terms from the experience of 154 managing a previous refugee crisis. Clearly, Cubans were not the first group fleeing Communism to seek refuge in the United States. Just three years earlier in 1956 the Hungarian Revolution and take over by Soviet forces sent a wave of immigrants to the United States and offered, “The first crisis to test the new [Refugee Relief] Act” (305). This crisis would produce a longstanding legal practice for the admission of Communist refugees en masse under the President's executive power of parole granted to him by the new immigration legislation of 1952. This practice would later be used in the case of Cuban refugees in the 1960s as well as with Southeast Asian refugees in the 1970s ix . Because there was yet no standardized practice to address these emergency situations, these cases became the testing grounds for refugee legislation. The federal response to the Hungarian refugee situation also represented the first time that the government would subsidize resettlement efforts, previous refugee groups were under the strict legislation of the Refugee Relief Act which made eligibility for admission dependent on sponsorship by a private citizen or organization. The funding of Hungarian refugee resettlement would set the precedent for the government's expenditure of millions in the administration, support, and resettlement of Cuban refugees. In fact, the head of President Eisenhower's Committee on Hungarian Refugees, Tracy S. Voorhees, is the same person who outlined the program to address Cuban refugees x . President Eisenhower established the Cuban Refugee Emergency Center in Miami towards the end of his term in December 1960 to address the management of the refugee crisis. President Kennedy then mandated the Secretary of 155 Health, Education, and Welfare to set up the Cuban Refugee Program. xi The initial allocation of $1 million by Eisenhower in 1960 and $4 million by Kennedy in 1961 would grow exponentially over the next few years. The Migration and Refugee Assistance Act of 1962 specifically funded the establishment of the Cuban Refugee Program. xii From 1960 through 1967 the Cuban Refugee Emergency Center and then the Cuban Refugee Program would spent over $260 million towards administrative purposes, welfare assistance, resettlement programs, education, and health services. xiii This program would become the largest refugee assistance effort in the history of the country, costing over $2 billion over the course of its existence from 1961 to 1979. xiv Anti-Communism motivated and justified the expense for the Cuban Refugee Program from its very inception. In his remarks on the creation of the program, Kennedy himself mentions, “the resolve of this nation to help those in need who stand with the United States for personal freedom and against Communist penetration of the Western Hemisphere” (310). The exorbitant measure that this program represented was also thought to be a short-term cost that would yield maximum benefits, “The operation would pay for itself by anti-Communist propaganda effects alone and would be limited to only a few hundred thousand refugees who would return to Cuba as soon as Castro was overthrown, presumably within a few months or years” (Masud-Piloto 48). However, the convergence of these multiple contradictions would create unforeseen effects for immigration policy generally and for Cubans in the United States specifically, “For example, mixing Cold War ideology with humanitarian refugee concerns would lead to future problems with refugees from non-Communist nations allied to the United States” 156 (148). These contradictions compounded Cuban immigration at each step, even from the standpoint of their legal designation. Cubans entering the United States after the Revolution sought refugee status because they claimed they were fleeing for fear of political persecution. This exposed a vacuum in refugee policy, “Until the Cuban exodus of the 1960's, the United States had never before been a country of first asylum for refugees” (Tonnas 315). However, although Cubans were welcomed and given refuge, they were never legally designated as refugees by the government. Rather, Cubans entered the country as parolees under the authority already granted to the Attorney General by immigration law. xv Under then immigration law Cubans could enter the United States freely because there were no country-specific limits placed on Western Hemispheric immigrants, after which they were paroled into the country en masse by the Attorney General. As parolees they could stay in the United States beyond the temporary period allowed by visas. This exercise of parole power, again, was brought into precedent in the Hungarian refugee crisis during which “the Attorney General had paroled more than 30,000 Hungarian refugees into the United States in 1957” (Fullerton 550). In parole power we find yet another historical and legal condition necessary for the exception made out of Cubans. This particular use of the power of parole became a point of contention between Congress and the Executive branch of the government. In Congressional hearings on proposed legislation for the permanent Adjustment of Status For Cuban Refugees, Congressman Arch A. Moore, Jr. questions then Attorney General Nicholas De B. Katzenbach on the use of parole which, “was designed for emergency and individual and 157 isolated situations; not for immigration of classes or groups, and it would appear that in this particular area you have taken wide latitude with the specific congressional intent of the parole sections of the law” (34). In his response, Katzenbach touches upon the exceptional conditions created out of the historical events of the Cuban Revolution and a gap in immigration law, “There are the refugee provisions which don't apply within this hemisphere. If we had refugee provisions, then probably those would be the provisions we would be using here rather than parole... These people are in a very real sense refugees from the Castro government” (35). At this point in the hearing we also see the pervasiveness with which the language of family reunification has already taken over discussions of immigration when Representative Moore points out that the Attorney General has also released a statement planning to, “use parole to take care of those Cuban refugees in Spain or Mexico. You have used it in those instances as a basis—you say in your statement—of reuniting families. Well, no one can quarrel with reuniting families but, again, here you have taken a wide view of what we intend the uses of parole to be” (36). Katzenbach's response reinforces this idea about the new primacy of family in the law, “I think the Congress took a very strong position in the law last year as to reuniting families” (36). Moore replies to this, “We didn't take it via the parole route” (36). This line becomes relevant later with the passage of the Cuban Adjustment Act which does include within it the language of granting status adjustments to families. Representative Moore goes on to continue to challenge the Attorney General, saying, “I feel you are going to use parole whenever you see fit and you are not going to 158 pay much attention to congressional intent” (36). It is worth noting that this same law in its current iteration includes a clause that says the Attorney General may parole people “only on a case-by-case basis.” There is also now a second part to this section of the law about parole that specifically precludes refugees, “The Attorney General may not parole in the United States an alien who is a refugee unless the Attorney General determines that compelling reasons in the public interest with respect to that particular alien require that the alien be paroled into the United States rather than be admitted as a refugee under section 1157 of this title” 8 USC Sec. 1182(d)(5)(B). I focus here on the use of parole because despite the constant references to Cubans as refugees by lawmakers even within these Congressional hearings, from a legal standpoint, this designation is never actually put to use. Many point out that had they been labelled as such, the privileges afforded to Cubans as a group would have been severely limited by the standard practices regarding refugees, “The text of the parole provision makes no reference to refugees, persecution, or asylum. Therefore, unlike other groups seeking refuge in the United States, those admitted via the parole process do not have to prove that they have a well-founded fear of persecution based on political, religious, racial, or similar grounds” (Fullerton 550). In this way, parole exploited a loophole to get around the limits of refugee policy in order to combat Communism, “Accordingly, the Cubans allowed to enter the United States as 'parolees' were, and continue to be, privileged in comparison with all others seeking shelter in America” (Fullerton 550-551). Refugees up until this point were limited by definition to Europeans fleeing Communism. However with amendments to the Immigration Act of 1965 the 159 definition was expanded to those who “because of persecution or fear of persecution based on race, religion, or political opinion... have fled any Communist or Communist- dominated country or area or from any country within the general area of the Middle East...” (554) This definition would not change again until the Refugee Act of 1980 which would finally ratify within U.S. law the 1967 Protocol adjustments to the UN Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees which would remove the language of Communism and references to specific regions from the definition. It was hoped that some of these contradictory elements between legal designations, immigration law, administrative power, and political motivations would be resolved by the Cuban Adjustment Act (CAA) of 1966. However, this legislation just further entrenched the exceptionalist status of Cubans already in practice. It is perhaps the single most important legal policy for the history of Cuban immigration. Indeed contemporary legal scholars of Cuban immigration almost exclusively focus on the Cuban Adjustment Act and argue either for or against its continued utility. Originally part of the Immigration Act of 1965, this part of the legislation was taken out in the final stages of its passage, “With minor changes, the conferees also agreed to the remaining Senate provision, deleting, however, the provision which would have permitted Cuban refugees the opportunity for adjustment of status to permanent resident. This urgent matter, unfortunately, was referred to the Select Committee for study and recommendation” (Kennedy 148). Passed in 1966 as a separate piece of legislation on its own, the Cuban Adjustment Act grants the Attorney General the authority to adjust the status of a Cuban who has been paroled into the United States and 160 has remained in the country for two years (reduced to one year in 1976) to that of a permanent resident. This new status as permanent resident is the first step for Cubans toward applying for U.S. citizenship. As parolees, Cubans were subject to the possibility of revocation of their permission to stay in the United States at the discretion of the Attorney General. As permanent residents this no longer applicable. It does not guarantee citizenship, and it must be implemented by the Attorney General's discretion. Every Attorney General has historically in fact implemented the CAA, but legally the Attorney General is in no way compelled to grant the status of permanent residency to a Cuban or group of Cuban parolees. For our interests here it is also worth noting that within the Act adjustment of status is also extended to family members (including spouses and children) of Cuban parolees, regardless of their citizenship status or place of birth. Several factors, both ideological and practical, motivated and justified the passage of the CAA. A legal note on the CAA outlines the arguments xvi that justified its passage in order to then question whether these remain useful or obsolete in the contemporary moment, Four predominant reasons motivated Congress to enact the CAA: Congress sought to advance Cold War objectives by destabilizing a Communist dictatorship that posed a threat to American national security; to create a safe haven in the United States, with as few administrative hurdles as possible, for Cuban refugees fleeing the island for political reasons; to prevent Cuban refugees in the United States from having to leave the country to apply for permanent residency; and to create an expeditious method for Cuban refugees to join the American workforce. (Harvard Law Review 908) Within the records of the Congressional hearings about the legislation these motivations 161 become evident. Anti-Castro and anti-Communist rhetoric is used throughout both by Congressional Representatives and witnesses giving testimony. There is an explanation of the logistical red tape that would be involved in making Cubans who were already in the country follow the normal route towards petitioning for permanent residency, “The refugee's only recourse to a change in immigration status is to pick up his family and move them out of the country for an indefinite period of time, at great financial expense, in order to reenter as a resident. Most of the refugees are not financially able to make this move” (53). Passage of the CAA would eliminate the necessity for these refugees to leave to a third-party country to adjust their status. Finally, many of the witnesses testify to the need for the adjustment in status so that Cubans could begin to enter the workforce, “Unemployment is not the parolee's problem; it is underemployment that plagues the Cuban parolee in this country... Without doubt the Cuban professional, paroled into the United States, is the most seriously affected by this situation” (52). Cuban professionals include those with specific skills and in careers like doctors, nurses, lawyers, and teachers. In order to practice many of these professions certification, part of which is determined by citizenship status, is required. To be sure, many were not in favor of the special treatment already being provided to Cuban refugees and were wary of any further allowances. President Johnson's speech at Liberty Island the year before was met with public criticism and the implementation of the Freedom Flights brought further outcry, “Two flights a day arrived from Varadero. But these refugees, much like earlier waves, were not uniformly welcomed. Petitions and letters of protest poured into the Johnson White House” (Torres 162 1999, 80). People not only believed that allowing refugees into the country could be either dangerous or ineffective at stopping Castro but there was also significant disapproval of the amount of support being given to Cubans while local communities (particularly African Americans in south Florida) suffered harsh economic and social conditions. Additionally, critics wondered about the precedent being set with Cubans and if this would apply to other groups. The comparative exceptionalism of Cubans xvii from other refugees would surface as a problem again with the advent of the next wave of Cubans in the Mariel boatlift of 1980. Representative Rodino expressed this concern to the Under Secretary of State in the hearings,”[Y]ou feel confident that the other countries of the world would understand that this kind of special help that we propose to extend to the Cuban refugee is done because it is necessary, because it is practical” (Adjustment 17)? We see here the exceptionalism, the special treatment, of Cubans being both recognized but then disavowed through rationalization. Rodino also voices a fear for how this might appear within the international arena, “It would not have that kind of an effect which might disappoint these other nations and cause them to feel that we are giving special treatment and preference over others” (17)? What becomes evident is the preoccupation with justifying the measures brought about through the CAA as practically necessary and only temporary in nature. Several witnesses are questioned about the likelihood of Cuban refugees returning to the island and whether granting them residency would effect that decision. xviii The assumption that the Revolution would fail rings throughout the contradictory treatment of the Cuban refugee crises. We saw it in President Johnson's 163 remarks and here in the rationale for the CAA. It is safe to say that no one assumes this blanket return of all Cubans anymore, however, the Cuban Adjustment Act has never been repealed and remains in use to this very day. Representative Cahill articulates how much the change in policy from the Hungarian crisis hinges upon this assumption, “I don't think there was any thought on the part of the U.S. Government that the Hungarian refugee would return, whereas... the approach to the Cuban refugee was a humanitarian answer to an immediate problem that would resolve itself later. Now it seems we are adopting a permanent policy” (19). He goes on to make a prescient remark about the potential problems that would emerge from the codification of this exceptional policy, We are really closing our eyes to reality if we expect that these people will return to the conditions from which they have come after enjoying the conditions which they enjoy in the United States. It does seem to me that the policy is a humanitarian one and most desirable in aid of people who are oppressed. A great deal of thought, however, should be given to it because we are indeed, in my judgment, setting a precedent which will have far-reaching effects in the future. (19) Those effects could be seen fourteen years later in the crisis that resulted from the next wave of Cuban refugees. Those Cubans entering the United States as part of the Mariel boatlift experienced an altered set of legal, political, and social conditions than did previous waves. A year earlier, in 1979 the Cuban Refugee Program underwent an accelerated phase down. xix On April 1, 1980 the Refugee Act, which implemented the 1967 changes to the international definition of refugees, came into effect in the United State. That same day six Cubans crashed a bus through the gates to the Peruvian embassy and sought political asylum. Within days more than 10,000 people joined the asylum seekers in the embassy (Masud- 164 Piloto 79). In response to the massive numbers, Castro announced that any Cuban wishing to leave the island would be allowed to do so beginning April 15 th through the port of Mariel. The number of new refugees was so massive that the legal yearly quota placed on legal Cuban refugees just established by the 1980 Refugee Act became obsolete, “Between April 20 th and May 20 th alone, 65,000 Cubans departed and during the next four months 65,000 more Cubans followed. In less than six months, more than one percent of the Cuban population left the country” (Fullerton 560-561). Instead of adhering to the Refugee Act President Carter invoked the power of parole to admit these new Cubans. Unlike the other waves of exiles, this large group of Cubans were processed through the use of refugee camps and proved generally unfavorable in the public eye. The longstanding policy of exception was also put to the test as Haitians refugees fleeing the second Duvalier regime were being turned away by the United States. This was temporarily addressed through the creation of a new status, “Cuban/Haitian entrant— status pending.” Despite the outcries that the preferential treatment shown to Cubans in comparison to Haitians over the years was racist xx , the end effect was the same for Cubans as they were paroled into the country and then, under the Cuban Adjustment Act, were eligible for permanent residency and eventually citizenship. xxi In the long history of Cuban immigration to the United States the Mariel boatlift represented a shift in public sentiment, political motivation, and legal policy that would become evident during the next great wave. In the early 1990s more and more Cubans began taking extreme measures to reach 165 the United States including the highjacking of planes and boats and the use of makeshift rafts to cross the Florida Straits. The number of these balseros (rafters) increased steadily until they reached a critical mass in 1994, “From January to July, 1994, the USCG rescued 4,731 rafters. The US willingness to accept all comers and the increasingly explosive atmosphere in Havana led a frustrated Castro to call Washington's bluff by opening Cuba's harbors in early August allowing thousands more rafters to flee to Florida. As a result, the number of rafters surged to 21,300 rescued in the month of August alone” (Henken 398). Because of this new refugee crisis President Clinton ordered for the first time ever the immediate repatriation of all Cubans coming to the United States. Eventually many of these refugees were in fact allowed into the United States, however, a new agreement was made with the Cuban government. In a series of joint accords reached in 1994 and 1995 both Cuba and the United States expressed “their common interest in preventing unsafe departures from Cuba.” xxii In exchange for Cuban cooperation with future repatriation, the United States agreed to allow 20,000 entry visas to Cubans annually. Furthermore, any Cuban intercepted at sea would have to lawfully prove a well-founded fear of persecution in order to qualify under refugee law for entrance or otherwise be repatriated. This shift in exceptionalist policy emerged out of a new historical and political climate, “when the Soviet Union fell, sentiments concerning the Cubans preferential treatment began to change. Consequently, in response to public outcry, immigration law for the first time took an unfavorable turn for Cuban emigrants” (Pérez 455). Combined with the political end of the Cold War was a change in the social climate about the influx 166 of immigrants coming all around the world including Haitians and Central Americans as well as exhaustion from the histories of the Southeast Asian refugee crises and past Cuban refugee crises. All this led to an increasing fatigue in U.S. sympathies for the plight of refugees and an increasing consolidation of border control. However, because of the specific wording of the 1995 agreement, which says “Cuban migrants intercepted at sea by the United States and attempting to enter the United States will be taken to Cuba,” a new loophole known as the “Wet Foot/ Dry Foot” policy was created. Because the language only specifies those who are intercepted at sea must be returned, those Cubans who reach dry soil are not considered subject to the new application of refugee law, “Those with dry feet need not show persecution, only Cuban origin. Cuban exceptionalism still reigns in the United States, but it has been drastically limited” (Fullerton 567). This loophole in the migration accords combined with the passage of the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act (IIRIRA) of 1996 created great confusion about those Cubans who made it to the United States, “The INS determined that Cubans who arrived at a port other than a designated port of entry could no longer adjust to permanent resident status under the CAA. Immigration advocates considered that the INS interpretation of IIRIRA resulted in de facto repeal of the Cuban Adjustment Act” (Talamo 718). However, INS Commissioner Doris Meissner, in light of a Board of Immigration Appeals precedent, “determined that to deny Cubans the ability to become eligible for CAA adjustment on the grounds of their illegal entry would frustrate the purpose of the CAA” (Hughes and Alum 208). The exception of the Wet Foot/ Dry Foot policy, of paroling those Cubans who reach dry soil while 167 repatriating Cubans caught at sea, remains in effect today. Many scholars and activists have criticized this current incarnation of Cuban exceptionalism because it epitomizes the contradiction of U.S.-Cuban policy. Alongside the Migration Accords, the 1990s saw the passage of two legal measures aimed at furthering the economic embargo against Cuba. Both the Cuban Democracy Act of 1992 ( also known as the Torricelli Act) and the Cuban Liberty and Democratic Solidarity Act of 1996 (also known as the Helms-Burton Act) increased the severity of the economic embargo through the prohibition of remittances, restriction of travel, and the penalization of foreign companies doing business with Cuba. These acts and the embargo generally work to apply extreme economic pressure on Cuba. However, activists and scholars alike argue that the Cuban citizen, not the government, is the most punished by economic hardships, thus creating unlivable conditions which work to force or push Cubans out of the island. Simultaneously, exceptions like the Cuban Adjustment Act and the Wet Foot/ Dry Foot loophole to the Migration Accords encourage Cubans to risk their lives, pulling them towards the economic prospects in the United States. In his article, “Balseros, Boteros, and El Bombo: Post-1994 Cuban Immigration to the United States and the Persistence of Special Treatment,” Ted Henken calls into question several misconceptions about Cuban immigration. He points out that the scholarly literature that emphasizes the abrupt end of Cuban exceptionalism are mistaken, both because signs of the transitions in political and legal arena were evident with the treatment of the Marielitos and because Cuban exceptionalism, though changed, still exists, “The now well-known shift in US immigration policy toward Cuba taking place 168 between 1994 and 1995 was neither as sudden nor as complete as many have made it out to be” (Henken 407). The main thrust of his argument, however, comes in his finding that compared both to the now-illegal crossings of Cubans and to the already-illegal crossings by other Caribbeans xxiii , legal immigration by Cubans still evidences their exceptionalism, Simply put, while dramatic landings and contested repatriations of Cuban rafters have drawn media attention, a more significant result of the 1994- 1995 accords has been the number of legal Cuban immigrants admitted to the US through family reunification, as refugees, and as winners of “el bombo,” the visa lottery. Together legal Cuban entries exceed 200,000 in the past decade dwarfing the 10,000 illegal maritime entries. (394; italics in original) While Henken wants to turn attention away from the sensationalism of the balsero crisis and towards the exceptionalism of legal immigration, I would further focus in on the fact that most legal immigration is now completed through policy that privileges familialism. Thereby making it necessary to adhere to logics of the heteropatriarchal nuclear family to be intelligible as a legitimate immigrant subject. According to the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services there are currently three programs that facilitate the issuance of the 20,000 annual minimum visas agreed upon in the Migration Accords, “family-based immigrant visas, refugee resettlement, and parole under the Special Cuban Migration Program, also referred to as the Cuban Lottery” (“Questions and Answer”). Refugee resettlement is the smallest numbered group as they must prove fear of persecution; family-based visas are the second largest group and are given to direct relatives of U.S. citizens which comes out of the family reunification criteria of general immigration law; and the Special Cuban Migration 169 Program (known as “el bombo” in Cuba) is the third and largest group, “the SCMP is held biannually and open only to applicants between 18 and 55 years old who must satisfy two of the following three conditions: (1) have a high-school diploma or the equivalent, (2) have three years job experience, or (3) have relatives in the US” (Henken 402). Two of these program are based on the idea of privileging family through immigration law. Both the family-based visas and, in effect, the lottery require that legal Cuban immigrants be recognizable as familial. This practice of privileging the family was furthered in 2007 by the creation of the Cuban Family Reunification Parole Program. This program was created in response to two factors that were limiting the ability of the USCIS to honor the migration accords, “First, with the exception of 'immediate relatives' (e.g., spouse, unmarried child) of U.S. citizens, the number of family-based immigrant visas that are available in any given year is limited by statute” (“Questions and Answers”). Therefore, allowing Cubans relatives to come in through another program would serve a practical function by addressing a gap in the restrictions of the family-based program. A second factor inhibiting the success of the Migration Accord programs is that, “the United States has not been permitted to hold a new registration period for the Cuban Lottery Program since 1998 due to constraints placed on the program by the Cuban Government” (“Questions and Answers”). Without new registrants for the lottery, the USCIS had been forced to return to applicants from previous lotteries to meet the minimum of visas. What the Cuban Family Reunification Parole Program does is allow for those relatives who have applied and been approved under the family-based visa program (but who are still waiting to actually receive a visa) 170 to come to the United States immediately instead of waiting in Cuba. Based on this situation it is now nearly impossible for those Cubans not recognizable as familial to enter the United States through legal immigration procedures. Therefore, even the special treatment that Henken points to in the form of 20,000 visas hinges upon familialism, making it more likely that the relatively small number of balseros are also those without recourse to the privileges of familialism. Cuban Deviance and the Turn to Familialism Throughout this dissertation I have argued for reckoning with the idea of diaspora as deviance, and with the metaphors of diaspora as the bastard of the nation-state. But in a very real and legal way as this chapter traces, over the years, the Cuban diaspora has, in fact, experienced the markings of deviance. While most legal and academic scholars have focused on the privileges and exceptions afforded to Cubans I have argued throughout that Cuban refugees in the United States were always already legally, politically, and socially Othered because their entry (and thereby their acceptance in this country) was predicated on its temporary and provisional nature given the assumption that once the Communist regime in Cuba failed these refugees would return. Additionally, there is another side to this history that gets excluded by the dominance of a focus on Cuban exceptionalism. While the Cuban diaspora as a whole has certainly been privy to exceptionalist statuses and policies historically, not all Cubans have had equal access to these privileges and some have even been socially and economically negatively effected by these, “the 'success story' has been 'dysfunctional' for the characterization of 171 Cuban communities, especially for those among them who do not quite live up to the prevailing image” (Pérez-Stable and Uriarte 141). This is at its most obvious in the case of the Marielitos who bore out the transitions in the political and legal climate of Cuban refugee reception from being welcomed with relatively open arms to being treated as deviants, “Although most of the Cuban emigrants who arrived in 1980 did not present problems, the Mariel crisis created, for the first time, a negative public image of the unfettered Cuban migration to the United States” (Fullerton 561). This negative image would have social, political, and economic impacts on not only these refugees, but future Cuban refugees as well. Sociologists have focused on the social construction of Mariel entrants as deviants. Through articles like “Cuban Mass Migration and the Social Construction of Deviants” and “From Freedom Flotilla to America's Burden: The Social Construction of the Mariel Immigrations” these scholars have outlined what many have come to understand about the falsity of the image of deviance and criminality that was attached to Marielitos in the 1980s. When Marielitos first began arriving they were seen as yet another incarnation of the Cuban refugee. However, as time progressed, a negative image of the Marielito as deviant or criminal emerged and dominated their public reception. Several factors including rumors spread by the Castro government, the small percentage of criminals actually released into the Mariel population, and the reality of criminal activity in the haphazardly-funded and hastily-operated refugee camps and detention centers, “engendered, created and amplified Marielitos' deviance in Cuba. It also supported and facilitated the creation of their collective deviant identity in the USA. 172 This identity in short order metamorphosed into 'Scarface' movies and Cuban mafia” (Aguirre 168). Castro, angered by the events at the Peruvian Embassy, labelled these new refugees “escoria” (“scum”) in order to save face amongst the rest of the Cuban population. This stigmatization, according to Aguirre, followed the refugees to the United States and entered the national imaginary (166-169). The public image would not only socially tarnish the refugees name but ultimately also effect their economic and legal prospects for settlement in the United States. xxiv Through a quantitative content analysis of media coverage, Hufker and Cavender, show how, “The media's shift from a positive to a negative frame in the Mariel story redefined the immigrants as a deviant and undesirable population and, ultimately, hindered the resettlement effort” (Hufker and Cavender 322). The government handling of the Marielitos only further exacerbated the public perception of these refugees. The confusion about their legal categorization as “refugees,” or “parolees,” or “entrants” contributed to the growing ill-informed opinion. Combining rumor with reality to create sensationalism, the media also confused their audiences about the exact composition of the Mariel population, “deviance became undifferentiated in the media: the Mariels were criminal, mentally ill, homosexual, diseased, and even physically impaired” (Hufker and Cavender 332). In order to withstand and combat this label as deviants and as undesirables, diasporans, I argue, suture their national identity through the reunification of the family; the heteropatriarchal nuclear family unit is used as a stabilizing mechanism in the face of (media and legal) abjection. Familialism, or the continuous privileging of the narrative of the heteropatriarchal 173 nuclear family, is a pervasive ideology. Through its modes of narrating integrity and belonging, familialism is seductive to the fractured subject seeking completion. The heteropatriarchal nuclear family in particular has been naturalized in our contemporary period as the social unit par excellence. This is why the family is so central to the political landscape in the United States since the mid-20 th century. The definitional limits of the family are constantly in flux and as such are always the subject of both conservative and liberal political claims. In her study of kinship structures, Kath Weston honed in on the emergent discourse of “families we choose” amongst lesbians and gay men in the San Francisco area in the mid-1980s (Weston xiv). Within this community, she found that gays and lesbians began to refashion the language of family around other types of social relationships. With the increase in the number of gays and lesbians coming out and having to confront the possibility of abandonment by their biological kin, Weston argues that, “Kinship began to seem more like an effort and a choice than a permanent, unshakable bond or a birthright. The mute substances of genes, blood, and bone had to be transformed into something more” (xv). In this way Weston's work, while focusing on gay and lesbian ideas of family, also points to the level of choice or construction in the normative kinship structure of the heteropatriarchal nuclear family, “families should not be confounded with genealogically defined relationships” (2). Instead, new social relationships emerged. However, it is also clear to Weston that these emergent forms of familial relationships were still defined in relation to the nuclear family, “discourse on gay kinship 174 defined gay families vis-à-vis another type of family known as 'straight,' biological,' or 'blood'—terms that many gay people applied to their families of origin” (3). As such, Weston's intent is not to focus on the practical realities or definitions of particular family units but instead to understand the ideological work that these “families we choose” were accomplishing in these communities, “Here I am interested in family not so much as an institution, but as a contested concept, implicated in the relations of power that permeate societies” (3). She examines how gays and lesbians particularly were constructed as subjects in opposition to the language of family, as “exiles from kinship” (21). Such a bifurcation represents these subjects not only just as outside traditional notions of familial belonging but as antagonistic to the very idea of familial belonging, “It is but a short step from positioning lesbians and gay men somewhere beyond 'the family'—unencumbered by relations of kinship, responsibility, or affection—to portraying them as a menace to family and society” (23). In this way, Weston's work is intriguing for my own work on the primacy of the family and how those excluded from it still continue to fall into its gravitational sway. Weston, and her subjects, are careful not to label these, “families we choose as imitations or derivatives of family ties created elsewhere in their society, many lesbian and gay men alluded to the difficulty and excitement of constructing kinship in the absence of what they called 'models'” (116; italics in original). However, she is also cognizant to point out that while these new types of families are not necessarily modeled on old types of families, the ideological normativity of the nuclear family has not been challenged by these either, “In the United States the nuclear family clearly represents a 175 privileged construct, rather than one among a number of family forms accorded equivalent status” (6). My point in introducing Weston's work here is to draw attention not to the act of choice involved in both biological and fictive or affiliative or gay families, but to point to the compulsion of family itself. Why choose a family at all? By which I mean, why continue to use the language of kinship (or specifically family) in order to structure, name, and define personal relationships and social ties? While the gay and lesbian subjects of Weston's work focus on their autonomy in reconstructing a sense of belonging, they fail to question the very primacy of familialism itself. Similarly, Cuban diasporic subjects continuously attempt to cling to the familiar modes of belonging that the family represents. In his work on queer diasporas in The Feeling of Kinship, David L. Eng, also addresses how familialism has come to typify the contemporary political landscape, “Paradoxically, prior historical efforts to defy state oppression and provide a radical critique of family and kinship have given way to a desire for state legitimacy and for the recognition of same-sex marriage, adoption, custody, inheritance, and service in the military” (3). As such, through his theorization of queer diasporas he, “draws attention to other forms of family and kinship, to other accounts of subjects and subjectivities, and to other relations of affect and desire dissonant to traditional conceptions of diaspora, theories of the nation-state, and the practices and policies of neoliberal capitalism” (14). My own work differs from this perspective slightly as I focus instead on the persistence of traditional notions within the diaspora. To be clear, I accept the conservativism inherent in what Eng calls traditional conceptions of diaspora which are, “firmly attached 176 to genealogical notions of racial descent, filiation, and biological traceability. Configuring diaspora as displacement from a lost homeland or exile from an exalted origin can thus underwrite regnant ideologies of nationalism, while upholding virulent notions of racial purity and its structuring heteronormative logics of gender and sexuality” (13). However, my interest is precisely to point out the continuities and endurance of nationalism and filiation in the diaspora. While I am intrigued by Eng's theoretical approach and analyses, I am less convinced generally that investigations into “other forms of family and kinship” will necessarily yield more progressive or productive results, as they still adopt and perpetuate the very language of kinship. I am reminded here of Edward Said's analysis of humanist thought by Eng's focus on queer diasporas, “not through a conventional focus on racial descent, filiation, and biological traceability, but through the lens of queerness, affiliation, and social contingency” (13). In Said's articular, “Secular Criticism,” he posits the development of a binary of thought from filiative to affiliative, “What I am describing is the transition from a failed idea or possibility of filiation to a kind of compensatory order that, whether it is a party, an institution, a culture, a set of beliefs, or even a world-vision, provides men and women with a new form of relationships, which I have been calling affiliation but which is also a new system” (19). Both of these ideas, however, continue an investment in family: filiation is legal family by blood or birth, whereas affiliation connotes legal family by adoption. Either way privileges familialism. Said warns against investing in affiliations as a prima facie fix to the problematics of filiation, “It should go without saying that this new affiliative structure and its systems of thought more or less directly 177 reproduce the skeleton of family authority supposedly left behind when the family was left behind” (22). Neither inherently offers a more radical critique. As such I am invested in studying the ways in which the normative logics of the family and nation continue to structure diasporic modes of belonging. And how such a structuring forecloses some of the possibilities that Eng sees in queer diasporas and, particularly, in the ways in which they “fall out of normative Oedipal arrangements precisely by carving out other psychic pathways of displacement and affiliation, by demarcating alternative material structures and psychic formations that demand a new language for family and kinship” (16). xxv Such a reading is not possible for me here as I argue that nationalist and familialist modes of belonging persist instead of new formations. My work differs in a similar way to Lisa Lowe's work which frames this chapter for me. Her study focuses on the agency of Asian immigrant and Asian American cultural politics, “Because culture is the contemporary repository of memory, of history, it is through culture, rather than government, that alternative forms of subjectivity, collectivity, and public life are imagined” (22). While the two cultural texts that I examine now may imagine anew the Cuban American family, these imaginings ultimately give way to or are at their core invested in the conservative impulse to repair or suture the metaphorical broken homelands of Cuban America. The Cuban American Family Album The utilization of the narrative of family as suture to the fractious reality of the Cuban diaspora is plainly visible in Dorothy and Thomas Hoobler's The Cuban American 178 Family Album. To be clear, this text is not itself produced by Cubans but it still offers us a clear example of the work that the unifying fiction of the family does to ameliorate the ruptures of exile. It also makes an authenticating attempt by featuring an introduction by Cuban American author Oscar Hijuelos. Family, for the Hooblers, makes narrative sense out of the historical realities of division and displacement that have followed the Cuban Revolution. Family is employed here by the Hooblers to collapse the specificity of the Cuban experience into the myriad of ethnic immigrant experiences that make up the United States family. Marianne Hirsch's work proves instructive here as she studies postmemory and narratives of the family as seen in photography and especially the family album, “I examine the idea of 'family' in contemporary discourse and its power to negotiate and mediate some of the traumatic shifts that have shaped postmodern mentalities, and to serve as an alibi for their violence. I am not alone in seeing the family in the postmodern moment as fractured and subject to conflicting historical and ideological scripts” (13). Family albums are particularly adept at perpetuating the narratives created about and through family. Her project is informed by her own attempts at using photography to make narrative sense out of Jewish displacement, “This album [a gift for her parents' anniversary] erases the ruptures of emigration and exile, of death and loss, of divorce, conflict and dislocation” (192). The technology of the family album produces what Hirsch calls the familial gaze, an interpellative set of looks in family photography that, “imposes and perpetuates certain conventional images of the familial and which 'frames' the family in both senses of the term” (11). All of this present in the family album fosters 179 “a mythology of the family as stable and united, static and monolithic” (51). Such a mythology becomes important in the process of recuperating a sense of self and community in the wake of trauma like exile. The Cuban American Family Album is a collection of photographs (both professional and amateur), interviews, diary entries, letters, newspaper articles, and profiles of famous Cubans, that are all introduced and framed by narrative text. This book is one in a series called The American Family Albums. Other American Families are presented in volumes on Jewish Americans, Irish Americans, Chinese Americans, Italian Americans, Japanese Americans, Mexican Americans, German Americans, Scandinavian Americans, and African Americans. Indeed, you can purchase all the books in a 10-volume set, a complete mosaic of the immigrant American family. In this way, the specifics of the Cuban exile get subsumed under the larger banner of the American immigrant family experience. The Cuban American Family Album depicts a historically chronological that adheres to melting pot multiculturalism, narrativizing the history of Cubans in the United states as a progressive assimilative teleology moving from exiles to immigrants. All of the Family Albums by the Hooblers follow a progression, “Each book is a pictorial and written record of the 'old country' left behind, the journey to America, the life that the newcomers made for themselves in their adopted country, and the group's contributions to the brilliant diversity of these United States.” xxvi The Cuban American Family Album follows the same pattern with the chapter order being “The Old Country,” “Coming to the United States,” “Ports of Entry,” “A New Life,” “Putting Down Roots,” “Part of the 180 United States.” The final chapter even includes a section called “From Exiles to Immigrants” (108). Becoming “part of the United States,” represents the loss of the qualifier of the temporary nature of the Cuban exile's residency in the United States which parallels the loss, if even in name only, of their exceptionality. Thereby, Cubans are just another one of the myriad immigrant groups in the American family (we see this in the film version of The Pérez Family as well). Family, then, becomes a representable and identifiable embodiment of a particular type of belonging resonant across the multicultural American populace. This, for me, returns to the loss of a potential for radical change in the ways the diasporic subject mediates belonging. Adherence to this narrative forecloses possibilities to think anew being and belonging beyond the bounds of nation and family. The Cuban American Family Album produces, on a communal level, a sense of integrity and completion to the Cuban exile through the assimilative narrative of the American immigrant family, In addition, the photograph, especially a family photograph which depicts the subject interpellated by the familial gaze, embedded in relation and ensconced in institution, reinforces for the subject an imaginary sense of coherence and plenitude. The still picture freezes one moment and enshrines it as a timeless icon with determinative definitional power. Thus, the single still photo can be seen as a form of suture through which the subject closes herself off from the symbolic and the unconscious, from contradiction and lack. (197) This persistent utilization of family evidences the telos of Cuban American cultural production as a need and desire for familial reunification and national reconciliation, a continual imaginative returning to the island. The Cuban American Family Album not only works to “mediate the losses of 181 cultural displacement” for the Cuban refugee but is also instructive for the generations of Cuban Americans, born in this country and conditioned by postmemory (222). Postmemory is Hirsch's term for the series of rememberings that the children of exiles are exposed to from their youth. Memories of places lost and cultures forgotten that are not their own memories, but which shape their view of the world, “The aesthetics of postmemory, I would like to suggest, is a diasporic aesthetics of temporal and spatial exile that needs simultaneously to (re)build and to mourn” (245). In this way, the photographs and narrative that make up The Cuban American Family Album are powerful tools of postmemory in that they allow and encourage the Cuban American subject to see and to mourn their history all within a progressive narrative of their Americanization, the transition from exile to immigrant, and their Cuban American family to an American family. The Pérez Family Written in 1990 by Christine Bell, The Pérez Family, directly addresses the intersection of family and law in the Cuban refugee experience that we have been discussing. The novel follows the story of Juan Raúl Pérez and Dorita “Dottie” Pérez, two individual Marielitos that construct a provisional alliance, as they travel from Cuba to the United States as part of the Mariel boatlift and attempt to establish themselves in their new country. Bell cleverly uses immigration policy loopholes to create a new story about the theme of family. xxvii Juan Raúl , questioned by immigration official about family in the United States replies with a traditional Cuban quip, “'Yes, of course,' Juan 182 Raúl Pérez answered. 'The Pérezes. If you ever need anything done in this life, ask a Pérez, there are so many of us'” (27) . However, though the novel plays with the possibilities of family or kinship as not inherently tethered to biological relations, in the end the traditional heteropatriarchal nuclear family is reaffirmed. Juan Raúl, who sent his wife Carmela and daughter Teresa to live in the United States while he waited by his father's deathbed, had been imprisoned for the last twenty years as an enemy of the Revolution for his work at a pro-Batista newspaper. He meets Dorita a shapely ex-prostitute who has long wished to go to the United States on the boat that they have both been placed on as part of the Mariel boatlift. Their scene of arrival foreshadows the Wet Foot/ Dry foot policy that would emerge after the book's publication, Dottie's sunset entrance at the Truman Annex Harbor surprised her; she hadn't planned on doing anything except walking into freedom. But as soon as she landed in the clear sweet water, she knew it was better to swim to freedom: to arrive, at least symbolically, on her own. She dog-paddled the twenty feet to the inclined boat ramp, triumphantly emerged from the water, knelt down on the concrete, and kissed the ground. (23) Once in the United States they two are assumed to be married by an immigration official because of their last names. At the makeshift processing center constructed in the Orange Bowl, Dottie comes up with the idea to continue pretending that they are a married couple to expedite their processing, “Officials by then were suspicious of singles, especially men, who formed the majority on the boatlift exodus, as suspect criminals, homosexuals, and madmen emptied from Castro's jails. Families and couples were given preferential treatment” (29). Juan Raúl, who is still recovering both from his prison confinement and now exile, goes along with the plan because Dottie, who has been taking 183 care of him, is convincing in the kindness. All the while, Carmel and Teresa have been waiting for the return of Juan Raúl for twenty years, but have also conceded to the possibility that he may never come back to them. Angel Díaz, Carmela's brother and Teresa's uncle, also plays a major part in the story as the Cuban American exile who has prospered economically in the United States and now despises the latest wave of exiles. He constantly berates Carmela about the lack of security in her home, “'Don't you understand? Don't you read the newspapers? How many times have I fucking warned you about the sleazy Mariel criminals wandering around out there? Don't you understand? Castro flushed his toilets on us—he emptied his prisons here'” (50). The makeshift Pérez family continues to grow as Dottie first finds a mute elderly man named Cesar Armando “Papa” Pérez to be Juan Raúl's new father, “'People get nervous taking strangers into their homes—but a husband and wife and grandfather? That's not strangers anymore. That's a family'” (97). Dottie's plotting becomes too much for Juan Raúl when she brings home Felipe Pérez, a teenage son for the family, “'Señora, how big is this family going to get'” (140)? However, Dottie's insistence reinforces the importance that family politics played in immigration policy, 'We are seventh on the list for sponsors at this very moment. I've already told social services that we found our son. We are seventh on the list now because we have a child and because they have moved so many people out of here already. Yesterday there was over a hundred before us on that list. Could you at least cooperate? They are closing the Orange Bowl in the next few days, and I'd like to be out of here before that happens.' (140) Dottie's plan works and the Pérez family is sponsored by a local Catholic church. Eventually, in the second part of the novel, the plot twists begin to unravel as Juan Raúl 184 shows up on Carmela's doorstep only to scare her in his disheveled condition. He then reaches out to Angel to find out if Carmela has remarried. Angel does not believe the Marielito in front of him is the real Juan Raúl and hires an investigator who reports back that the man who showed up at his store lives with his wife, father, and child in the monastery at a local sponsoring church. When Felipe, who had a history of criminal troubles, dies Dottie decides to reunite Juan Raúl with his wife. With the help of Angel's girlfriend, the two arrange it so that both Juan Raúl and Carmela will be at an outdoor festival in the dramatic climax of the novel. While dancing with Dottie whom he has now fallen in love with, Juan Raúl spots Carmela and approaches her. Fearful of the Marielito that her brother has convinced her tried to break into her house, Carmela pulls out the gun Angel gave her. Shots are fired but not by Carmela. The private investigator shot and killed Papa who had himself pulled a gun and aimed at Carmela whom he thought was trying to kill Juan Raúl. The story ends with Carmela and Juan Raúl recognizing that too much has gone on in their lives for them to reunite. While the novel toys with the idea of alternative family structures, ultimately the constructed Pérez family built upon affiliation and out of necessity can only be seen as a temporary reprieve from the heteropatriarchal nuclear family. As part of her process of Americanization, Dorita continuously insists on being called Dottie when she introduces herself and when immigration officials ask, “'My name is Dottie Pérez. I don't like Evita either.' Dottie had left the past behind. She wasn't going to carry her old names, 'Little- Dora' or 'Little-Eva,' with her into her new life” (26). This name follows her throughout the entire story and in her new life. However, by the end of the narrative, once Felipe has 185 died she returns to her old identity, “Dottie paused. 'Dorita,' she said. 'My name is Dorita'” (239). The entirety of the novel then can be seen as this in-between period, wherein the space of exile and mandates of law have created a moment of exception. The death of Felipe, for Dottie, marks the closing of that exceptional period. As such, she readies herself to relinquish Juan Raúl back to Carmela, who is supposedly his real wife. Throughout the body of the text the Pérez family, which starts out as a means to the end of getting a sponsorship, becomes more and more real to her. The novel plays with the idea of what a real family is, particularly in the diaspora, and how familiality and familial relations are a series of constructions, “Dottie liked Luz Paz, not that she reminded Dottie of her own grandmother but of a grandmother, and any hint of family in a strange land comforts” (77). By the end of the first part of the book, this provisional family has taken hold of Dottie. While out on a date she hears news of a riot at the Orange Bowl camp, she runs back to see if the other Pérezes are all right, feeling guilty for ostensibly violating the sanctity of her family, “She stayed awake most of the night to guard her family. She wasn't letting any of her chances for freedom slip away” (152). The equation here of her family with freedom registers on two levels: first, they represent her ticket out of the camps through family sponsorships, but they secondly have also begun to take on an unanticipated emotional importance for Dottie. Juan Raúl plays the straight man to Dottie's emotional promiscuity. Throughout, we see that he only begrudgingly goes along with these schemes. His skepticism culminates after Felipe's death, 'Señora, I think it is time we came to an agreement. We were acting as a family to get out of the Orange Bowl. We're out now and Felipe is dead. I 186 will stay with you until I'm sure the church won't ask us to leave, and if they do, I'll wait until you and Papa have another place to live. And I will stay in case the police contact the immigration officials and find out we have lied to them about being a family.' (217) The death of Felipe, the fake son, then represents the death of the future of this fake family for both Juan Raúl and Dottie. With him gone, Juan Raúl can no longer convince himself to stay away from Carmela and to maintain this alternative Pérez family, “It was as if Felipe's death had pointed out to him the difference between dreams and reality” (218). For Dottie, Felipe represented the tie that bound Juan Raúl to her, “Her family as she had create it was dissolving before her eyes” (245). Neither of the two are ready to fully believe in their union as constitutive of a real family. The logic of the heteropatriarchal nuclear family then necessitates that the fake and the real family work against each other. Papa tries to shoot Carmela who is trying to shoot Juan Raúl in a collision of past and present families. Ultimately, what is produced from this reckoning is the disillusion of a sense of alternative kinships. When they finally meet and talk face to face it is clear to both Juan Raúl and Carmela that their old version of the Pérez family no longer makes sense either. Carmela, who at the beginning of the novel had long been pining for her husband's return, realizes, “she didn't want him back because he was an intruder from another time and another place. She hadn't just been waiting all this time, she had been working to build a life, and she had done a good job. She liked her life the way it was” (253). While Juan Raúl, confronted with the physical reality of his wife which does not match the image that got him through prison all those years, concedes, “'I guess we are strangers'” (254). The reader is left to assume that Juan Raúl ends up with Dorita whom he had finally embraced and that Carmela moves on to 187 finally date an FBI agent that she flirted with constantly in a subplot. The alternative Pérez family, created under the duress of diaspora and immigration law, died with Felipe and Papa. Juan Raúl and Dorita will create a new Pérez family, however, this one will no longer be fictive or affiliative but will adhere to heteronormative notions of biological family. In 1995, a film version of The Perez Family, directed by Mira Nair and starring Marisa Tomei, Alfred Molina, and Anjelica Huston was released. Unlike the novel, the film version was met with poor reviews and was criticized for not casting Cuban actors in any of the lead roles. The images of Miami that flavored the novel's pages were read as pastiche on film; the subtle humor of the text becomes melodramatic in the hands of the over-accented actors. With its colorblind casting and its multicultural politics, the film (like The American Family Albums) turns the specificity of the Cuban exile story into an ethnic immigrant narrative. Non-Cuban characters pepper the cast in ways that were not present in the novel. Within this construct, the use of the legal loopholes by the Pérezes reads as any other immigrant using whatever means are possible to gain entry to the United States. While narratively the film is fairly faithful to the text it differs in one important way. At the end Papa throws himself in front of Juan Raúl but does not himself have a gun, and is therefore not shot and killed. Instead, Angel is comedically shot in (his already injured) hand. This gives the conclusion a heightened sense of narrative tension as the audience wonders which Pérez family Juan Raúl will choose, a new life with Dottie or a return to his old life with Carmela. The reality that they are all one extended 188 Pérez family is highlighted by Carmela. Juan Raúl chooses to be with Dottie, however, because their love has become real. Yet, the film cannot necessarily be said to endorse alternative kinship structures. Instead, this ending further serves the generic conventions of the romantic comedy. Also, whereas Felipe's death served as a necessary plot advancement (and reiterated that some Marielitos were in fact criminals), Papa's death would have changed the tone. Instead, Papa is allowed to live because he is not a threat to real, biological family. He represents a banal or harmless part of their new lives that tethers them to the past. The final scene ends with the camera panning away from an embracing Dorita and Juan, up a palm tree where we find Papa (a reoccurring humorous visual in the film) looking off into the sunset . Dorita and Juan Raúl laugh as he says, “Always he's looking for Cuba.” In the immigrant narrative of the film The Perez Family, the past is allowed to survive because it does not threaten the future. Conclusion The Cuban diasporic family unit continues to persist despite the multiple logics operating against it. U.S. immigration law attempts to regulate the diasporic subject through the scale of the family and Cubans try to repair their community through images of the family. All this occurs despite the obvious fact that the Cuban family has been torn asunder in, most likely, irreparable ways. A moment of opportunity to think notions of belonging anew (to think of connections between people away from the language of filiation) is lost by the continuous diasporic impulse to repair what is broken, to mend what has ripped. This, again, feeds into the telos of most Cuban diasporic cultural 189 production, this constant desire to reconcile and to return, that shapes the diaspora and the nation one and the same. The Revolution and subsequent exile produces a series of ruptures that decoupled nation and family, opening up a moment of possibility to articulate anew modes of being and belonging, to recognize connections to others not based on notions of kinship or nationality. However, what gets re-codified in law and culture is the familialism of the traditional heteropatriarchal family unit. 190 i See Felix Masud-Piloto, From Welcomed Exiles to Illegal Immigrants: Cuban Migration to the U.S., 1959-1995 (New York: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 1996) as well as David Reiff', “From Exiles to Immigrants” Foreign Affairs 74 (July/ August 1995). ii For more information on Operation Pedro Pan see Monsignor Bryan O. Walsh, “Cuban Refugee Children” Journal of Interamerican Studies and World Affairs 13.3-4 (July – October 1971); Maria de los Angeles Torres, The Lost Apple: Operation Pedro Pan, Cuban Children in the U.S., and the Promise of a Better Future (New York: Beacon Press, 2004); Yvonne M. Conde, Operation Pedro Pan: The Untold Exodus of 14,048 Cuban Children (New York: Routledge, 1999); and Victor Andres Triay, Fleeing Castro: Operation Pedro Pan and the Cuban Children's Program (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1999). Also for a reading of the effects of Operation Pedro Pan and cultural production see Flora M. González Mandri's “Operation Pedro Pan: A Tale of Trauma and Remembrance” Latino Studies 6 (2008). iii On the origins and expansions of the family unit as articulated with capital and the State see Frederick Engels, The Origins of the Family, Private Property, and the State (Chicago: Charles H. Kerr & Company, 1902) and Amy Kaplan, “Manifest Domesticity” in The Anarchy of Empire in the Making of U.S. Culture (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2002). iv For more on the Johnson-Reed Act see Ngai's first chapter “The Johnson-Reed Act of 1924 and the Reconstruction of Race in Immigration Law.” v For more on the racial composition of Cuban immigrant waves see B.E. Aguirre, “Differential Migration of Cuban Social Races” Latin American Research Review 12 (1976): 103-124 and S. Pedraza, “Cuba's Refugees: Manifold Migrations” in S. Pedraza and R. Rumbaut, eds. Origins and Destinies: Immigration, Race, and Ethnicity in America. Belmont, CA: Wadsworth Publishing, 1996. vi For more specifics see Ngai 258. vii For more on the specific restrictions of the Displace Persons Act and its emergence in the postwar period see Ngai: The act defined a 'displaced person' as a person who entered Germany, Austria, or Italy on or before December 22, 1945, a provision that critics charged was a deliberate attempt to render ineligible 100,000 Jews who entered the displace persons camps in 1946 and early 1947. Moreover, the law required that 30 percent of the refugees comprise agricultural workers (which also disadvantaged Jews, who were not farmers) and that second preference should be given to professional or highly skilled persons. This was an important move that introduced into immigration policy the idea that American economic preferences should determine the selection of immigrants—an idea that seems in retrospect ungenerous when applied to people rendered homeless and stateless by war but which idea quickly became naturalized as an assumption of immigration policy. Truman signed the Displaced Persons Act “with very great reluctance,” noting that it “flagrantly” discriminated against Jews and Catholics and that he believed refugees should be admitted on a nonquota basis. (236) viiiSee Ngai 237. ix See Tonnas, “In the years that followed, the President became an important force in U.S. refugee policy through the use of the parole provisions. In response to the Cuban Revolution of 1959, President Kennedy paroled approximately 60,000 Cubans into the U.S. Likewise, after the fall of Saigon President Carter and others paroled an estimated 400,000 Indochinese into the country in ten separate parole programs from 1975-1979. Both the Nixon and Ford administrations used parole authority” (305). x Interestingly, the practices used and experienced gained from managing the Cuban refugee crisis would then go on to be employed in the United State's dealing with Southeast Asian refugees. John Thomas, the Director of the Cuban Refugee Program would assist in the implementation of the efforts in Vietnam (Adjustment of the Status For Cuban Refugees 60). 191 xi See Department of State Bulletin for President Kennedy's intent for the program. xii See Thomas 48. xiiiSee Thomas 49 for a graph about the expenditures of the Cuban Refugee Program. Also see Hearing, Adjustment of Status For Cuban Refugees in which Dr. Ellen Winston, the Commissioner of Welfare, and John F. Thomas, the Director of the Cuban Refugee Program, offer testimony as to the use of these moneys (51). xiv See Masud-Piloto 149. xv “The Attorney General may in his discretion parole into the United States temporarily under such conditions as he may prescribe for emergent reasons or for reasons deemed strictly in the public interest any alien applying for admission to the United States, but such parole of such alien shall not be regarded as an admission of the alien and when the purposes of such parole shall, in the opinion of the Attorney General, have been served the alien shall forthwith return or be returned to the custody from which he was paroled and thereafter his case shall continue to be dealt with in the same manner as that of any other applicant for admission to the United States.” 8 USC Sec. 1182(d)(5). xvi For further writing on the reasoning behind the Cuban Adjustment Act see also Estevez 1276 and Hughes and Alum 196. xvii Another interesting way in which we see Cuba as exceptional in the records of the Congressional hearings comes when Representative probes Undersecretary of State George Ball as to why Cubans continue to come predominately to the United States instead of seeking refuge in other Latin American countries. Ball explains that Cuba and the United States share a long history of both social and economic interaction and so many Cubans are used to the United States, “Mr. Donohue. In other words, you say that people in Central and South American have less in common with the Cuban people than we do? Mr. Ball. I think this is true in some cases; yes” (25). xviii Representative Cahill asks Under Secretary of State George Ball, “Don't you think the efforts that will pave the way for eventual American citizenship will be a deterrent rather than an incentive for them to return to Cuba?” (18); Representative Gilbert asks John F. Thomas for his opinion on the matter, “We would like to know the number of Cubans who might return to Cuba in the event democracy were restored in Cuba” (66); and Representative Cahill also speaking to John F. Thomas wants to be reassured that citizenship is seen as a practical matter and not a permanent solution to Cuban refugees, “In other words, you feel that basically they are interested only in obtaining the prerequisites to the utilization of their individual skills and they really do not want American citizenship?” (69). xix See Jacobs 1. xx See Masud-Piloto 119 as well as testimony in Cuban/Haitian Adjustment. Also refer to Estevez who makes an argument for equally special treatment rather than none at all, “In the case of Haiti, the preferential treatment provided under the CAA is obvious, but in accomplishing equal treatment, it is imperative to fight for the legislative equivalent to the CAA for Haitians and not equally through the retraction of it” (Estevez 1294). xxi “Haitian refugees suffered an equally damaging defeat in November 1984 when the Immigration and Naturalization Service announced that the 125,000 Cubans who had entered the United States during the Mariel boatlift were eligible for legal status and U.S. citizenship under the Cuban Adjustment Act of 1966. The law, which had been specially designed for Cubans who came to the United States during the Camarioca boatlift of 1965, did not apply to the 30,000 Haitians granted entrant status in 1980” (Masud-Piloto 119). xxiiSee “U.S.-Cuba Joint Communique on Migration” and “U.S.-Cuba Joint Statement on Migration.” xxiii“However, the desperation and hopelessness that lead many Cubans to embark on dangerous sea voyages, while originating from a unique combination of political and economic factors specific to Cuba, are not found only in Cuba. Haitians, Dominicans, Chinese, Ecuadorians, Mexicans, and many 192 others share this desperation and hopelessness. My point is to question Cuban 'exceptionalism' by comparing the well-publicized Cuban migration flow in a regional perspective, where other, larger flows are rarely reported on or discussed” (Henken 405). Berta Esperanza Hernández-Truyol's legal note, “On Becoming the Other: Cubans, Castro, and Elian – A LatCrticial Analysis,” also situates the ramifications of the Elian Gonzalez case within a growing public Othering of Cubans. xxivFor more information on the negative treatment of Marielitos see Mark S. Hamm, The Abandoned Ones: The Imprisonment and Uprising of the Mariel Boat People (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1995). xxvFor more on the links between the family and Oedipus complex see their chapter, “Psychoanalysis and Familialism: The Holy Family” in Gilles Deleuze's and Félix Guattari's Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983). xxviThis quotation is on the back of each of the Albums. xxviiThe Pérez Family is not the first cultural production to play with the theme of immigration policy loopholes for comedic effect. The premise of the story evokes the 1969 film Popi starring Alan Arkin as a Puerto Rican widower who devises a scheme to send his two young sons adrift at sea off the coast of Florida in the hopes that upon their rescue they will be mistaken for Cuban and treated to the privileges afforded refugees. See Hiller. 193 Conclusion Diasporic Strangers and the Inheritance of Loss The wheel is come full circle, I am here. -William Shakespeare, King Lear (Edmund, Act 5 Scene 3) Throughout Bastard Diasporas I have argued for an understanding of the nation and family as mutually articulated scales of belonging. I have employed the trope of illegitimacy to draw out the connections to and between these formations and cultural productions to complicate our understandings of belonging and diaspora through the example of Cuban America. The family and nation each adheres to a fictional narrative that promises and privileges integrity and wholeness. Diasporas, I claim, are alienated from and illegitimated within these heteronormative and reproductive logics. Marked by unbelonging, the diaspora is akin to the bastard whose origins, while known, fail to register legitimacy. I have examined: narratives of the bastard/diasporic return to the homeland and the connection between a loss of familial belonging and a loss of national belonging; the transference of politics and patrimony as evidenced in cultural productions by four daughters of Cuban revolutionaries; and the legal and cultural reconfigurations of the diasporic family unit and the exceptionalist Cuban refugee. How do subjects with contentious or precarious relationships to notions of the homeland create a sense of belonging and self? Once the structuring fictions of nation and family are complicated by displacement or disavowal, how do subject continue to make ideological, political, and affective sense of everyday realities, personal and communal identities, and historical formations? These are the animating questions that this project has endeavored to address. I have studied the ways in which, rather than 194 turning away from these organizing fictions, the diaspora is, in fact, structured by nationalism and familialism in similar, though not identical, ways to the nation-state. I have tried to adequately address the historical conditions of the continued emergence of these paradigms so as to avoid what James Clifford warns, “contemporary diasporic practices cannot be reduced to epiphenomena of the nation-state or of global capitalism” (302). I have employed the language of diaspora not to ignore the concepts of globalization, transnationalism, and hybridity, but to examine the continued utility of the nation and family, “To affirm that diaspora are the exemplary communities of the transnational moment is not to write the premature obituary of the nation-state, which remains a privileged form of polity” (Tölölyan “The Nation-State” 5). These fictions of belonging prove to be powerful and organizing imaginative forces to the displaced subject. Further study of the illegitimacy of the diasporic subject would have to reckon with cultural productions both from other non-U.S. diasporic subjects as well as with on- island Cubans in order to more fully understand the utility of this theorization. The current political situation of Cuba is still contentious to the diaspora. As such, an engagement with the notion of return on a diasporic level either on a permanent or temporary basis is forestalled. Resolution, reunification, and return are processes that will never be complete. However, they will likely continue to hold their allure as long as the narratives of family and nation promise the integrity and incorporation that is specifically the loss faced by diaspora. I have endeavored to attend to the specificity of the Cuban diasporic condition 195 while trying not to lose sight of the possibility for overarching theories. In this way I do not mean to exceptionalize the case of Cubans in the diaspora but merely present the particularity of their historical conditions as a means to work through larger processes of migration, displacement, nation-making, and cultural production that can be abstracted out and thought against other diasporic peoples. One such project that can be read as parallel, but not in the sense of equivalence, is found in the model of the African diaspora. In his article, “The Uses of Diaspora,” Brent Hayes Edwards outlines the utility of the framework of diaspora to articulate the conditions of African displacement: In Shepperson's usage, in other words, the term is quite flexible: he suggests that the concept of diaspora 'can be considerably extended, both in time and space,' and part of the use of the concept is precisely in its extensions. The 'African diaspora' here adheres to many of the elements considered to be common to the three 'classic' diasporas (the Jewish, the Greek, and the Armenian): in particular, an origin in the scattering and uprooting of communities, a history of 'traumatic and forced departure,' and also the sense of a real or imagined relationship to a 'homeland,' mediated through the dynamics of collective memory and the politics of 'return.' As a frame for knowledge production, the 'African diaspora' likewise inaugurates an ambitious and radically decentered analysis of transnational circuits of culture and politics that are resistant or exorbitant to the frames of nations and continents. (52) What Edwards highlights here is the not only the applicability of diaspora as a concept to think through the global phenomenon of African dispersal resulting from the slave trade, but also how in fact the work of translation opens up possibilities back onto the field of diaspora itself. In this way I would like to briefly examine the themes of kinship, inheritance, and loss in the treatment of the African diaspora as seen in Saidiya Hartman's Lose Your Mother: A Journey Along the Atlantic Slave Route. Published in 2007, Lose Your Mother 196 is an account of scholar Saidiya Hartman's experience tracing the Atlantic slave trade through a route in Ghana. Part history, part memoir, part travel narrative, the text is also the story of the diasporic subject's return to the lost homeland. As we learn from the very beginning of the text, such a return is impossible. The text opens with a prologue entitled, “The Path of Strangers,” and with a scene of Hartman being called “Obruni. A stranger. A foreigner from across the sea” (3). Hartman's figure of the stranger or Obruni mirrors a complicated relationship to the past, to genealogy, to homeland, and to nation that I have argued exists in the bastard, “The most universal definition of the slave is a stranger. Torn from kin and community, exiled from one's country, dishonored and isolated, the slave defines the position of the outsider. She is the perpetual outcast, the coerced migrant, the foreigner, the shamefaced child in the lineage” (5). i Hartman's labeling as a stranger not only forces upon her the reality of her Americanness but also resurrects the very reason for her ancestor's displacement as, “Contrary to popular belief, Africans did not sell their brothers and sisters into slavery. They sold strangers: those outside the web of kin and clan relationships, nonmembers of the polity, foreigners and barbarians at the outskirts of their country, and lawbreakers expelled from society” (5). Hartman seeks to recover a history that she well knows is lost, “in search of people who left behind no traces,” (15) and an identification with a people that cannot be named, “I am the progeny of the captives. I am the vestige of the dead” (15). At every moment she is meant with her inescapable Otherness, “After all, I was a stranger” (57), defined by a history of forced displacement “Diaspora was really just a euphemism for stranger” (215). 197 Within the forced enslavement of Africans, Hartman elucidates ties similar to those I have outlined throughout this work between family and nation, “It was the tribe of those stolen from their natal land, stripped of their 'country marks' and severed from their kin. Slavery made your mother into a myth, banished your father's name, and exiled your siblings to the far corners of the earth. The slave was as an orphan... even when he knew his kin” (103). To be sure I would shy away from any comparison that would equate the history of chattel slavery and its attendant dispersal of African peoples to the conditions of the post-1959 Cuban exile. While particular familial and generational ties were broken in the Cuban diaspora, cultural and social continuities were maintained either fictively or practice. Unlike, of course, the case of African slaves who experienced a complete loss through their natal alienation, “In every slave society, slave owners attempted to eradicate the slave's memory, that is, to erase all the evidence of an existence before slavery. This was as true in Africa as in the Americas. A slave without a past had no life to avenge” (155). ii However, I merely mean to point out the similarities in which diaspora and the rupture with homelands is described both in terms of loss of “country marks” and kin. The title of Hartmans's work emerges from this coupling family and nation in belonging as well. Upon reaching Elmina Castle, a hub of the slave trade in West Africa, Hartman is handed letters from a group of local boys on the beach that each in turn implore her to recognize herself as part of the greater African family and to write to them. Her supposed inability to recognize such a connection to these boys is explained to her as symptomatic of all strangers, “'Because of the slave trade you lose your mother, if you know your history, you know where you come from.' To lose your mother was to be 198 denied your kin, country, and identity. To lose your mother was to forget your past. The letters distilled the history of the transatlantic slave trade to this: I was an orphan” (85). This usage of the language of kinship ties to draw the diaspora into the homeland became advantageous, according to Hartman, for African countries, “If in the era of the trade the enslaved had been forced to forget mother, now their descendants were being encouraged to do the impossible and reclaim her. In the 1990s, Ghana discovered that remembering the suffering of slaves might not be such a bad thing after all, if for no other reason than it was profitable” (162; italics in original). In this way, diasporic family and memory are useful technologies only insofar as they can be mobilized in service of the nation, “Door of No Return rituals, reenactments of captivity, certificates of pilgrimage, and African naming ceremonies framed slavery primarily as an American issue and as one of Africa's relation to her 'lost children'” (163). Yet, Hartman does not see these paradigms as useful for her. Unlike emigres of previous generation that “had faith that the breach of the Middle Passage could be mended and orphaned children returned to their rightful homes” (39), Hartman did not desire “to reclaim [her] African patrimony” (42). Rather, she identifies herself with a “generation [that] was the first that came here with the dungeon as our prime destination... For me, the rupture was the story. Whatever bridges I might build were as much the reminder of my separation as my connection” (41-41). Through her focus on patrimony and inheritance, Hartman reconnects the diasporic back to notions of property as passed down through family and nation that we have discussed in previous chapters, “I had longed for a country in which my inheritance would amount to more than 199 dispossession and in which I would no longer feel like a problem” (56-57). The only actual positivist inheritance that she speaks of throughout the work though is of her family name which, “according to my father, was our anchor in the world. It was our sole inheritance; we possessed no wealth but it” (82). Yet, Hartman does in fact name a way for rethinking the possibility of inheritance using the language of lack rather than surplus. Loss is a central theme of the diasporic. Nostalgia is seen as the inability of the diasporic subject to properly mourn the loss of homeland. According to Clifford this is what separates them from immigrants who may experience nostalgia within the progressive narrative of assimilation, “Peoples who sense of identity is centrally defined by collective histories of displacement and violent loss cannot be 'cured' by merging into a new national community” (307). Hartman connects this directly to the African diasporic condition when she writes, “The only sure inheritance passed from one generation to the next was this loss [of kin and country], and it defined the tribe. A philosopher once described it as an identity produced by negation” (103). In Loss: The Politics of Mourning editors David L. Eng and David Kazanjian reread Freud in order to advocate for the potentials of de-pathologizing melancholia. It is their hope that such a project would productively work towards an understanding of history and identity based on attachments to lost objects as well as that which remains after loss, “Melancholia’s persistent struggle with its lost objects [is] not simply a ‘grasping’ and ‘holding’ on to a fixed notion of the past but rather a continuous engagement with loss and its remains. This engagement generates sites for memory and history, for the rewriting of the past as 200 well as the reimagining of the future” (4). This is instructive for our work here in viewing the melancholic attachments of the diaspora not as a pathological but as a culturally generative re-turn to the homeland and the history of displacement. This is a sentiment that Hartman echoes for the diasporic subject, “Every generation confronts the task of choosing its past. Inheritances are chosen as much as they are passed on” (100). 201 i She also references bastards metaphorically for the condition of the African diaspora at several points in the text: “What bastard had not desired the family name or, better yet, longed for a new naming of things?” (39); “Bastaard was what the Dutch called their mixed-race brood; the term implied an illegitimate child as well as a mongrel” (78); and “Fictive kinship was too close to the heart of slavery's violence for my comfort. Perhaps this was the bastard's view, disloyal to both blood and house” (199). ii For more on the natal alienation in slavery see Orlando Patterson, “Not only was the slave denied all claims on, and obligation to, his parents and living blood relations but, by extension, all such claims and obligations on his more remote ancestors and on his descendants. He was truly a genealogical isolate. 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Abstract (if available)

Abstract Bastard Diasporas: Illegitimacy, Exile, and U.S. Cuban Cultural Politics mines a broad range of cultural productions for insights into how U.S. Cubans conceptualize and relate to the nation-state. Analyzing contemporary literature, film, radio, performance art, and law from the mid-1990s to the present, my project evidences the variegated ways that U.S. Cuban cultural productions allow us to theorize the diaspora, family, nation, and illegitimacy. Diasporas, I argue, are the bastards of the nation-state. Foregrounding the articulations of family and nation, my project shows how diasporic communities are figured as the illegitimate kin of the proper citizen subject

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Asset Metadata

Creator Hernández, Jesús J. (author)

Core Title Bastard diasporas: illegitimacy, exile, and U.S. Cuban cultural politics

School College of Letters, Arts and Sciences

Degree Doctor of Philosophy

Degree Program American Studies and Ethnicity

Publication Date 07/31/2014

Defense Date 05/16/2012

Publisher University of Southern California (original), University of Southern California. Libraries (digital)

Tag bastardy,Cuba,diaspora,exile,illegitimacy,OAI-PMH Harvest

Language English

Contributor Electronically uploaded by the author (provenance)

Advisor Roman, David (committee chair), Kondo, Dorinne (committee member), Meyer, Richard Evan (committee member), Rowe, John Carlos (committee member)

Creator Email jesusjhe@usc.edu

Permanent Link (DOI) https://doi.org/10.25549/usctheses-c3-81186

Unique identifier UC11288337

Identifier usctheses-c3-81186 (legacy record id)

Legacy Identifier etd-HernndezJe-1099.pdf

Dmrecord 81186

Document Type Dissertation

Rights Hernández, Jesús J.

Type texts

Source University of Southern California (contributing entity), University of Southern California Dissertations and Theses (collection)

Access Conditions The author retains rights to his/her dissertation, thesis or other graduate work according to U.S. copyright law. Electronic access is being provided by the USC Libraries in agreement with the a...

Repository Name University of Southern California Digital Library

Repository Location USC Digital Library, University of Southern California, University Park Campus MC 2810, 3434 South Grand Avenue, 2nd Floor, Los Angeles, California 90089-2810, USA