In Life on the Hyphen (1996), the book with which he rose to fame, Gustavo Pérez-Firmat interpreted the experience of having been socialized as a Cuban during his childhood on the island and having finished growing up and being educated in the United States.
Unlike the second-generation immigrants, who only have the memories and images of Cuba those of their parents, but are Americans in every other way, those who were born here carry with them their memories, including those of the trauma of departure and acculturation. That experience of living “on a hyphen,” the one that unites the two terms of Cuban American, highlighted the strangeness of belonging to two cultures, emerging leaving one and entering the other. As the Argentine Facundo Cabral had stated a quarter of a century earlier, in more celebratory terms, “I’m not from here, and I’m not from there” (1970).
Of the 2.4 million Cubans residing in the United States in 2021, the majority (1.3 million) were born in Cuba; the figure is well above other Latin Americans, among whom only a third were born in their countries of origin. As is known, these 2.4 million have a higher average income and educational level, and compared to the rest of the Latinos, those who vote usually do so for Republican candidates, a distinction that responds to historical causes, detailed by sociologist Susan Eckstein. in her research Cuban Privilege: the Making of Immigrant Inequality in America (2022).
When talking about Cubans, their social status, and political attitudes, they are usually divided into three groups: “historical” exile (1959-62) or “golden” exile (1959-73), those of the Mariel-1990s, and “the recent wave.” Of the 1.3 million born in Cuba who reside there, 871,000 are U.S. citizens, or 67%. In other words, there are 430,000 Cubans from Cuba who are not able to vote, as well as ineligible to hold public office, because they remain only residents, without adopting citizenship, even though among them more than half of those born on the island have been in the United States for over twenty years.
Considering that 81% of the Latinos have become citizens, it would be worth investigating the causes of low Cuban naturalization, a topic as little investigated as the racial issue in studies on the Cuban community.
At least since 1978-79 it has been recognized in Cuba that the Cuban community in the United States is not a bloc. Studies on social structure have revealed this, both there and here. The curious thing is that neither those who analyze Miami politics nor those who make decisions in Cuba seem to have drawn the lessons that derive from these differences.
Paradoxically, for those for whom Cuba is the land of their parents or grandparents, Cuban Americans (without a hyphen) constitute a less studied group, although they represent 46% of the total. All of these natural-born Americans, 1.1 million, can vote as soon as they turn 18, as well as be elected as candidates. Their probability of being university graduates (over 25 years old) is 43%, in contrast to those who were born in Cuba, whose probability is 24%. Of them, only 12% are poor, compared to 16% of those born on the island.
As surveys have consistently revealed, these Cuban Americans by birth have maintained an attitude toward relations with Cuba that is very contrasting with that of historical exile. And it remains that way.
In the latest 2022 FIU Cuba poll, the results on this large segment are revealing, especially when compared with all those of Cuban origin.
| Subjects | Cuban origin total % | Born in the U.S. % |
| Blockade: against | 34 | 57 |
| Blockade: ineffective | 68 | 77 |
| Selling food to Cuba | 64 | 72 |
| Selling medicines to Cuba | 66 | 81 |
| Cuba threatens U.S. | 55 | 48 |
| Regime change policy | 74 | 68 |
| Economic wellbeing policy people | 42 | 58 |
| Maintaining diplomatic relations | 53 | 71 |
| Immigrant visas | 82 | 79 |
| Family reunification | 76 | 60 |
| Trips by Americans | 47 | 59 |
| Relatives or friends in Cuba | 67 | 93 |
| Plans to claim them | 58 | 39 |
| Sending of remittances | 47 | 30 |
| Frequent trips to Cuba | 20 | 10 |
| Biden Cuba policy | 28 | 49 |
| Biden as president | 32 | 37 |
| Will vote in 2024 | 85 | 79 |
| Rep/Dem vote | 52/21 | 37/37 |
| Rubio/Demmings vote | 64/10 | 43/34 |
Table Drawn up by author. Source: FIU (2022).
Cuban Americans born there, although they have built perceptions about Cuba based more on their family legacy than on their visits, say they have many more relatives and friends on the island (although they do not plan to claim them); they recognize the ineffectiveness of the blockade and disagree (or strongly disagree) with its maintenance; they tend to send fewer remittances to Cuba, but the average amount of money they send is 63% higher than the average remittances of all Cubans (their income is probably higher); most of them support policies that benefit the people of Cuba, the visits of all Americans to the island, overwhelmingly favor the maintenance of diplomatic relations, the sale of food and medicine; they are more sympathetic to Biden’s Cuba policy, and even declare symmetrical alignment between Republicans and Democrats. Although they supported Marco Rubio more than his Democratic opponent, they did so by a much smaller margin; they do not share his vision of Cuba as a threat to the United States and, although they favor the policy of Cuba regime change, they do so to a much lesser extent than the whole.
I wonder how these indicators would move if those born in the United States visited Cuba more often. If they came to see it with their own eyes, would spend weeks here, would travel from one end to the other, would meet more than on WhatsApp with those relatives and close friends they say they have, would walk through the streets of their ancestors, would listen and dance music in the middle of a Cuban crowd, attended courses about Cuba that they never had in their schools, wrote class papers in Spanish (even if it was imperfect), shared in parks and boardwalks with friends and new acquaintances, saw for themselves that there is nothing like Varadero, would compare the caves and valleys of Pinar del Río with those of Escambray and Mayarí Arriba, would meet that almost quarter of Cubans of all ages who live in the countryside and do not want to move to the cities, and would form an opinion of all that on their own.
Before you call me a romantic or worse, the paragraph above is based on my experience with U.S. students, including Cuban Americans, who have been my students for entire semesters, for more than thirty years, including precisely these fateful years for bilateral relations under Trump and Biden.
I want to end the article with a gloss on the final work of one of them, which he titled “Letter from a Cuban American who returned to Cuba,” and which we had the opportunity to discuss in class, along with those of others dedicated to proposing alternative scenarios for relations, which would not be limited to the policies of the two governments but would encompass the encounter between the two societies. I invited everyone to write them later, beyond the classroom, to share ideas and experiences.
With the author of the “Letter…,” or rather of the outline that he constructed to write it later, we agreed to accompany it with a kind of making of its writing, in the form of an interview, including particular topics that he did not address in its original presentation or perhaps in the final letter itself. As I hope for this text, I don’t want to let the cat out of the bag but just sharing some headlines of his valuable ideas. As you will see, this is an exercise in cultural, not ideological, dialogue.
A descendant of the Guantánamo people, Nico took advantage of every day of his return to Cuba, reading everything he could about emigration, interviewing emigrants who returned to Cuba after twenty years, and Cuban Americans who had never come. But above all, he wandered through the spaces I described above and even visited his great-uncle and great-aunt in the town of Guaso. (I asked his permission to illustrate these notes with a couple of images of that ineffable encounter, which say more than a thousand words.)
Here is the outline of his road map to return to Cuba, aimed at Cuban Americans his age, which reveals a singular anthropological intuition, rather rare in those who write about Cuba and Cuban Americans, there and here.
“A proposal to turn young Cuban Americans into researchers of their families and Cuban roots. The project can last a week or several months. Here are my suggestions as a “family consultant”:
- Look for physical evidence of your family or community (photos, houses, restaurants they frequented, etc.)
- Track down living evidence, that is, people who are part of or knew your family, or who are still neighbors of the community where they lived.
- Talk to young Cubans about their experiences.
- Use their connections as a guide to enter local or “intimate” spaces.
- Strive to observe, rather than impose your own American binary categories (communist/capitalist, democracy/authoritarianism, black/white).”
Finally, I leave you with the first paragraph of his draft Letter, a preamble to that road map:
“Dear Cuban American: The first thing you should keep in mind is that you are returning to a place you have never been. You have heard many stories about that street, that building, that wall that defends the city against the sea. But from your eyes, one Cuban, one American, what you are going to see is not real. The noise of a car is not the humming of your grandfather nor the mist of the ocean is the touch of your ancestors.”
As the serial comics of my childhood said: to be continued.
