Impossible Returns: Narratives of the Cuban Diaspora

IMPOSSIBLE RETURNS

UNIVERSITY PRESS OF FLORIDA

Florida A&M University, Tallahassee

Florida Atlantic University, Boca Raton

Florida Gulf Coast University, Ft. Myers

Florida International University, Miami

Florida State University, Tallahassee

New College of Florida, Sarasota

University of Central Florida, Orlando

University of Florida, Gainesville

University of North Florida, Jacksonville

University of South Florida, Tampa

University of West Florida, Pensacola

IMPOSSIBLE

RETURNS

Narratives of the Cuban Diaspora

Iraida H. López

University Press of Florida

Gainesville · Tallahassee · Tampa · Boca Raton

Pensacola · Orlando · Miami · Jacksonville · Ft. Myers · Sarasota

Copyright 2015 by Iraida H. López

All rights reserved

Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper

This book may be available in an electronic edition.

First cloth printing, 2015

First paperback printing, 2018

23 22 21 20 19 18 6 5 4 3 2 1

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

López, Iraida H., author.

Impossible returns : narratives of the Cuban diaspora / Iraida H. López.

pages cm

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Summary: This book examines the growing body of cultural works from Cuban exiles and Cuban Americans addressing the topic of return migration.

ISBN 978-0-8130-6103-0 (cloth)

ISBN 978-0-8130-6466-6 (pbk.)

1. Repatriation—Cuba. 2. United States—Emigration and immigration. 3. Cuba—History. 4. Cuba—Emigration and immigration. I. Title.

F1788.L577 2015

972.91—dc23

2015008378

The University Press of Florida is the scholarly publishing agency for the State University System of Florida, comprising Florida A&M University, Florida Atlantic University, Florida Gulf Coast University, Florida International University, Florida State University, New College of Florida, University of Central Florida, University of Florida, University of North Florida, University of South Florida, and University of West Florida.

Ithaka

As you set out for Ithaka

hope the voyage is a long one,

full of adventure, full of discovery.

Laistrygonians and Cyclops,

angry Poseidon—don’t be afraid of them:

you’ll never find things like that on your way

as long as you keep your thoughts raised high,

as long as a rare excitement

stirs your spirit and your body.

Laistrygonians and Cyclops,

wild Poseidon—you won’t encounter them

unless you bring them along inside your soul,

unless your soul sets them up in front of you.

Hope the voyage is a long one.

May there be many a summer morning when

with what pleasure, what joy,

you come into harbors seen for the first time;

may you stop at Phoenician trading stations

to buy fine things,

mother of pearl and coral, amber and ebony,

sensual perfume of every kind—

as many sensual perfumes as you can;

and may you visit many Egyptian cities

to gather stores of knowledge from their scholars.

Keep Ithaka always in your mind.

Arriving there is what you are destined for.

But do not hurry the journey at all.

Better if it lasts for years,

so you are old by the time you reach the island,

wealthy with all you have gained along the way,

not expecting Ithaka to make you rich.

Ithaka gave you the marvelous journey.

Without her you would not have set out.

She has nothing left to give you now.

And if you find her poor, Ithaka won’t have fooled you.

Wise as you will have become, so full of experience,

you will have understood by then what these Ithakas mean.

—Constantine P. Cavafy, Collected Poems

Contents

List of Illustrations

Preface

Introduction: The Poetics of Return

1.  An Uphill Battle: The Contentious Politics of Return

2.  Daring to Go Back: In Search of Traces

3.  Ana Mendieta: Chiseling (in) Cuba

4.  Cuban Childhood Redux

5.  Vicarious Returns and a Usable Past in The Agüero Sisters, Days of Awe, and Loving Che

6.  Toward a Boomerang Aesthetic: The View from the Island

Epilogue

Notes

Works Cited

Index

Illustrations

2.1.  Jaime Gans Grin, from Ruth Behar’s An Island Called Home

2.2.  Cars in Havana, from Tony Mendoza’s Cuba: Going Back

2.3.  Boys in Old Havana, from Tony Mendoza’s Cuba: Going Back

3.1.  Mendieta family in Cuba

3.2.  Mazapán de Matanzas

3.3.  Rubén Torres Llorca, Nosotros, los de entonces, ya no somos los mismos (1987)

3.4.  Maroya, located at the same cave as Bacayú, as it appeared when the author and Cuarta Pragmática visited the site in 2011

3.5.  Cuarta Pragmática students and the author at one of the caves in Jaruco

3.6.  A local man helping to locate Mendieta’s sculptures in Jaruco

3.7.  Ana Mendieta performing Death of a Chicken (1972)

3.8.  Tania Bruguera performing El peso de la culpa (1997–99)

4.1.  Ernesto Pujol, Los zapatos de Amparito (1993)

4.2.  Ernesto Pujol, Tendedera (1995)

4.3.  María Brito, El patio de mi casa (1991)

4.4.  María Brito, Feed (2001)

6.1.  Abel Barroso, Teoría de tránsito del arte cubano (1995)

Preface

One afternoon, while my daughter and I were driving around the south side of Williamsburg, Brooklyn, we came to a street conspicuously called, in perfect Spanglish, El Regreso Way. As it turns out, it is a sandwiched street that, running between Bedford and Driggs Avenues along Third S. Street, stretches for just one block. Because it fleetingly evokes a homecoming without leading to any one route flowing into return, El Regreso Way fails to deliver drivers and pedestrians alike to any Promised Land. Appropriately enough, given widespread assumptions about the mythical nature of return, it remains within the realm of illusion.

For steering those captivated with the act of reminiscing fully into the sprawling field of returns, one need look no further than a number of narratives written from cities like New York, Michigan, Chicago, Miami, and London. These are narratives that have slowly but surely been placing not-so-subtle signposts pointing, perhaps unexpectedly due to the surge in the opposite direction, to Cuba as a destination. Such narratives are the cornerstones of my book. Impossible Returns attempts to recognize the robust quest for a home and homeland cultivated in one’s imagination through stories of physical and metaphorical return. It represents an effort to understand Cuba’s sway across borders, a sway made all the more startling given the personal circumstances of the writers and artists who penned the stories. Most left Cuba as children after the 1959 revolution, and some have since refrained from setting foot on the island. Through a critical reading of their work, this book highlights the affective ties as well as the tensions underlying the relationship between the authors and their native country decades after taking flight.

* * *

Though academic, the subject matter is personally close to me. I have dreamed about going back to Cuba. I have also traveled to Cuba more times than I can count since my parents, displeased with the turn of events on the socialist island, decided to flee more than four decades ago. A teenager at the time, I was devastated by their decision for purely personal and existential reasons. It would take me years to comprehend their well-founded apprehensions of a messianic undertaking whose shock waves are felt even today.

As soon as I could, but not earlier than eleven years after departure due to the travel prohibition, I went back to Cuba for the first time, and I have since returned under disparate guises: as an academic; as the head of a full-fledged City University of New York scholarly exchange program; as a member of organizations founded by progressive Cubans in the United States at a time when the desire to relate to one’s homeland was dubbed a dishonorable act of betrayal; as an ordinary citizen to visit family; as a young feminist to attend regional meetings leading to the Third World Conference on Women; and as an affiliate in a delegation to donate medical supplies. And even at times when I was not physically present, Cuba prevailed in my life, as my academic research has paid particular attention to Cuba or, with more precision, Cuban America, la América cubana.

Yet in the literature on Cuban studies I found little that spoke to my experience and that of many others who underwent a similar process. To be sure, there is a hefty bibliography on post-1959 Cuba as well as Cuban migration. Less common, though, are critical works that bridge one and the other or view the diaspora as central to Cuba. To a degree, that silence led me to envision a study on the numerous narratives of return that have piled up through the years. In spite of my familiarity with the subject, I have made every effort to keep my distance and prevent my personal experience from clouding my judgment of other, different ideologies and economies of return. Being an insider is a double-edged sword that I have striven to use prudently.

All of the projects with which I have been involved sought to build bridges over what seemed at times like a colossal, intractable chasm between Cubans on the island and exiled Cubans. Given that background, I have friends and colleagues on both sides of the Florida Straits and beyond that answered my calls for support and feedback on the manuscript and whom I heartily thank. To begin, I am indebted to Jorge Duany and Andrea O’Reilly Herrera for meticulously reading the entire manuscript for the University Press of Florida and offering expert advice. They urged me to finesse some of the arguments and tighten others with the help of additional sources. Moreover, Duany helped me navigate the dense universe of census and survey data. Thanks to him, I came out of this venture with renewed respect for social scientists.

Just as dependable as well as knowledgeable and admired colleagues agreed to read one or more of the book chapters. Rina Benmayor, Michael J. Bustamante, Karen S. Christian, Adriana López-Labourdette, Yolanda Prieto, Eliana Rivero, Raúl Rosales Herrera, and Miren Uriarte made insightful comments and proffered encouragement at different stages of the project. I am obliged also to Antonio Aja Díaz. My heartfelt gratitude goes to Monika Giacoppe, Paula Straile-Costa, and Lysandra Pérez-Strumolo, all three at my home institution, Ramapo College of New Jersey, who volunteered productive feedback on even rough drafts. Due to the generosity and intelligence of all of the above colleagues, the book is an enhanced version of the original manuscript. Additionally, I acknowledge the skilled help received from my gifted former students Francesca Baratta and Keysi Castillo.

Vitalina Alfonso knew which books, essays, and films on the Cuban side were critical for my research before I even imagined they had been published or released. She supported me throughout the past few years with exemplary dedication and friendship. Since details are crucial, I am indebted also to those friends and colleagues who lent a hand at some point or other in response to my smoke signals: Tony Mendieta, Rebeca Chávez, Senel Paz, José Hernández, Humberto Mayol, and Víctor Casaus, you can count on me, too.

My thanks go out to the following individuals on and off the island who agreed to be interviewed informally or who corresponded with me via e-mail: José Bedia, Joaquín Borges-Triana, María Brito, José Manuel Fors, Nereyda García Ferraz, Flavio Garciandía, Mariana Gastón, Rogelio López Marín, Raquelín and Tony Mendieta, Ernesto Pujol, René Francisco Rodríguez, Ricardo Rodríguez Brey, Leandro Soto, and José Veigas. Their knowledge and lived experience, shared freely, made a contribution to my study. The editors of the South Atlantic Review gave their permission to reprint "The Notion of Volver in Cuban-American Memoirs: Gustavo Pérez Firmat’s Next Year in Cuba as a Case of Mistaken Coordinates," which appeared in issue 77.3–4 (2015). The essay is a slightly different version of the section devoted to this memoir in chapter 4. An earlier draft of chapter 3 appeared in the May/June 2012 issue of La Gaceta de Cuba under the title Ana Mendieta, treinta años después: Al rescate de la memoria.

The Ramapo College Foundation extended several travel grants for on-site research. I am thankful to the Salameno School of Humanities and Global Studies for its ongoing encouragement and to the Provost Office at Ramapo College for supporting a sabbatical leave that allowed me to work full-time on the manuscript for a semester. During several fruitful months over the spring of 2012, I was a scholar-in-residence at New York University, made possible by the Faculty Resource Network (FRN), which sponsored another stint there in the summer of 2013. Deborah Szybinski and Anne Ward, of the FRN, went beyond the call of duty to give me unfettered access to the institution’s plentiful resources.

A final, though no less expressive word goes to members of my family. Alejandra and Diego Íñiguez-López and Gabriela García joined me in the unforgettable pilgrimage to Jaruco and Varadero following Ana Mendieta’s footprints and gracefully tolerated my long-term commitment to this absorbing project. Although second-generation Cuban Americans, the three have gone back to Cuba seduced by family stories. The late Yolanda Díaz, mi querida tía, and Jorge Urquiaga, mi servicial hermanito, were always ready to roll out the red carpet, unconditionally opening their home and hearts to me in Havana’s Municipio Playa. The same applies to those located in my gateway to Havana, Miami: Iraida Rosa and María del Carmen López, and Amanda García, as well as Ofelia Costa and Ana Leyva. I extend my gratitude to all of the above. It takes a village to write a book.

I wish to dedicate Impossible Returns to all those intent on looking back without wallowing in nostalgia, in an off-modern mode nudging one to explore the meandering pathways of longing and memory. The off-modern mode dwells on back alleys rather than the straight road of progress (Boym xvi). Such a means of recasting nostalgia, devoid of sorrowfulness, blends in with the vision of a homecoming that is not quite out of reach if one believes in the power of narrative to make it happen. El Regreso Way may not take one far down the road, but good old return narratives, as old as storytelling itself, show an alternative way. This type of story originating in the Cuban diaspora measures up to other files in that rich, engrossing archive.

Introduction

The Poetics of Return

es tarde para

conocer ahora el nombre del árbol que

siempre creció en el traspatio o el

nombre musical de alguna fruta natural

del país; yo les señalo el camino de

los nombres

[it is late

for learning the name of the tree that

always grew in the backyard or the

musical name of some autochthonous fruit;

I point to the way of

the names]

José Kozer, Retrato sideral de mi casa

Years after fleeing Cuba in the wake of the 1959 revolution, when many had lost hope they would ever set their eyes again on the beloved island, Cuban émigrés were finally allowed to reenter their homeland. Not every returnee has shared in writing his or her understanding of what must have been anything but a dull and uneventful sojourn. Were they able to rekindle personal relationships after such a long hiatus? How had the island fared all these years? How did the reencounter with their native city or hometown unfold? Were they successful in reconciling memories and reality? Did the trip bring about healing, disappointment, or both? And at a more abstract level, is return truly feasible? How is it represented? What is its lexicon and its syntax? Is there a typology of return?

These questions would remain virtually unanswered were it not for noteworthy accounts, written in particular by members of the one-and-a-half generation in exile, which indulge the age-old topic of return. The label applies to those who left Cuba as children or adolescents and reached adulthood in the United States. Since the first generation of exiles rarely tackled the representation of return trips for a confluence of reasons, the task has fallen upon the shoulders of the following cohort of Cuban Americans, especially, but also beyond, which have pursued the multifaceted notion of returning with increasing vehemence.

Notwithstanding the common ground shared by all return narratives, there are certain markers that distinguish the homecoming depicted by the one-and-a-half generation.¹ Many of the narratives include a family scene foregrounding the pronounced difference in attitudes toward going back across generations. In the typical scene, the older relatives are distraught at the behavior of their children whose desire to go back to the land of their ancestors is viewed as a betrayal. If the elders are not shocked by the intention, they are at least puzzled by it. After all—the script goes—if they sacrificed everything they had and ventured into the unknown in order to save their families from a life of repression and destitution under socialism, why would their offspring want to return to the cursed island, even to visit? What would they be looking for in that forsaken place? A tremendous amount of tension underlies such incidents, reflecting deep disagreements between the interlocutors. It is one thing to have personally made the decision to leave the country for political disaffection reasons and quite another to have been taken out of it.

Ingrained in the recurrent scene is an exile mind-set that erects insurmountable barriers for dialogue and interaction among those on opposite sides of the ideological divide, barriers that were raised in the aftermath of the Cuban revolution in 1959. Half a century later, that confrontational stance, though considerably softened, is still found among a segment of Cuban émigrés. The Cuban-American population has evolved over the years and now encompasses groups of migrants from various generations, social backgrounds, racial and gender composition, and dates of arrival. Yet, like in other exile communities, there are those who recoil at the mere thought of returning. Palestinian critic Edward Said claims to speak for all exiles when he states: The pathos of exile is in the loss of contact with the solidity and the satisfaction of earth: homecoming is out of the question (179). Said’s statement has indeed been heeded by a sector of the Cuban-American community.

In her book The Immigrant Divide: How Cuban Americans Changed the U.S. and Their Homeland (2009), Susan E. Eckstein notes that exiles consider it unethical to step foot on the island, perpetually postponing their return to a Cuba without the Castros (141). Being faithful to their exile ethos, many of the early émigrés have remained adamant in their determination not to go back. On the opposite end, more recent arrivals lean toward maintaining their family ties and, by extension, support travel and the culture reinforcing it (142). Having fled in the recent past, many due to economic reasons or to a subtle combination of economic and political motives, they are reluctant to let go, persevering in their attempts to nurture, at all costs, a close relationship with relatives and friends left behind.

Eckstein singles out Cuban-American singer Willy Chirino’s Nuestro día (ya viene llegando) as a song that captures the new immigrant sentiment about Cubans returning to their native land (142). Born in 1947, the singer came to the United States in 1960 through the Operation Pedro Pan. A teenager at the time of departure, Chirino is a member of the one-and-a-half generation. In the song, he feels nostalgic for the motherland and yearns to return to a new Cuba that would have at last rejoined the free world—in addition to Nicaragua, Hungary, and East Germany, all three countries once espousing a socialist political agenda. Yet Chirino’s lyrics are not the best example of a post-exile sentiment given their underlying ambition to reenact the Cuba of yesteryear, overlooking the processes accountable for the current Cuba. Repeated references to competing worldviews underscore the political nature of the subtext.

By contrast, Raúl Paz’s En casa, a song from Paz’s homonymous album released in 2006, conveys the singer’s desire to return home to see his loved ones again, even if for a short while. Born in 1969, Paz represents a younger generation whose interests lie beyond exile politics. The singer left Cuba in the late 1990s, settling in Paris, and years later returned to resume his musical career on the island. In 2011, he joined forces with other well-liked returnee singers such as Descemer Bueno and Kelvis Ochoa to hold a momentous concert in Havana. One of Paz’s most popular songs, En casa, keeps at arm’s length political quarrels, replacing them for the most part with intimate memories. Paz’s lyrics are a better instance of the feelings shared by possibly a majority of post–Cold War Cuban émigrés. For them, matters of the heart (and opportunities) take precedence over ideological fault lines. While Chirino has spent a lifetime outside Cuba, Paz did not have to wait long before he, unencumbered by the stress of frayed memories, went back to his old haunts. Attuned to the rise of discourses less saliently nationalistic in the post-Soviet era, Paz is able to shift the center of attention toward other domains.

Setting aside the contrast between the two songs, Eckstein is correct in her assessment of a more permissive culture of return. Nowadays, in the 2010s, Cubans in Miami and elsewhere routinely exchange information in social media or through personal contact about the latest restrictions and requirements for travel, and many of the charter flights that make the trip back and forth are sold out. The eagerness to visit signals a promising future for travel to a controversial island only forty-five minutes away by airplane from Miami. If one considers that slightly over 50 percent of Cuban émigrés arrived in the United States after 1990, then surely there is a large sector of the Cuban-American population deeply invested in returning.² In spite of spirited talk about escaping from the island, there is a thriving culture of returning among Cuban émigrés. As Anders H. Stefansson writes, homecoming can be compelling for those in diaspora even if carried out under rather bleak, distressing conditions (2). Globalization and cosmopolitanism may have become major forces in the world, but home, homeland, and homecoming have not entirely surrendered their starring role.

Neither Hardliners nor Newcomers

While exiles and recent émigrés represent the two ends of the spectrum, there is a middle ground composed of the children of exiles that has received much less scrutiny in the secondary literature on migration and return. This diverse middle cohort, known by the moniker of the one-and-a-half generation, is this book’s main though not exclusive subject. The term was concocted by sociologist Rubén G. Rumbaut and popularized by Gustavo Pérez Firmat, who put the group in the spotlight to offer his take on Cuban-American culture in his influential book, Life on the Hyphen: The Cuban-American Way (1994, 2012). Pérez Firmat’s book grapples with the cultural hybridity of the generation with which the critic identifies through its manifestation in popular culture and literature, contrasting it with the cultural propensities of both the older and younger generations. A particular location straddling cultures provides the in-between generation with privileged insights into the nature of both Cuban and Anglo-Saxon traditions. It concurrently turns them into outsiders to each of the traditions.³

Yet what the members of the one-and-a-half generation have in common is not only their Janus-like duality, but also a certain sense of dislocation and dispossession that in the process of looking backward as part of examining several forms of homecoming comes fully into view. Mired in the passage between innocence and experience at the time of their departure from Cuba, many of its members’ memories had not yet congealed. Unlike the older exiles’ lives, theirs became truncated or bifurcated at an early age. Over fourteen thousand left their parents behind, following the U.S.-sponsored Operation Pedro Pan that brought them to unfamiliar places. Some in the one-and-a-half generation are still reeling from this unconscionable chapter in post-1959 Cuban history, an episode with the dubious merit of constituting the largest organized exodus of unaccompanied children in the Western Hemisphere.⁴ Even when they left with their parents, their family support system and social networks came undone. Ejected from their homes, a majority in the one-and-a-half generation had to part with their most cherished treasures, such as the storybooks that fired their gullible imagination, and often even their family photo albums registering their first steps. They were all deuteragonists in the drama of exile:

To the parent generation, as the protagonists (from the Greek protos and agonists, meaning first actors) in the decision to leave, going into exile is a crucial act of self definition.… But to the generation of their children, deuteragonists (from deuteros and agonists, second actors) in this drama, exile … represents a discontinuity with one’s origins, less a personal commitment than an inherited circumstance. (Rumbaut and Rumbaut 340)

Holding onto what should have been second nature to them is a challenge for these deuteragonists. Mastery of the Cuban dialect was made all the more difficult in exile, and expert knowledge of their native city or hometown was suddenly forestalled. If they lived in the capital, locating in a city map streets of Old Havana with such incantatory names as Peña Pobre, Dragones, Lamparilla, and Compostela, not to mention Amargura, Aguacate, Amistad, Ánimas, and Alambique is nothing short of inconceivable now. As Lourdes Casal wrote in a poem about her recollections of Havana, what remains ten years after fleeing are jirones, or shreds, of that urban landscape in one’s memory (Palabras juntan revolución 50). Fast-forward to their return decades later and they surely will be carrying upside-down maps.

They grew up fearing, most probably in a different language, that they would never be able to go back and try to mend what had been broken by the farewell. A unique background, deeply informed by lack, absence, or trace, affects their approach to representing return. This scenario explains why, for some, the past becomes a mild liability rather than a foundation. It also explains why, in Cuban Palimpsests, José Quiroga turns to paradox and chiasmus to grasp the sense of being Cuban, indelibly seared by interruption and traumatic absence, of the one-and-a-half generation (176). And why, in one of her essays on the subject Eliana Rivero resorts to a newly coined word, Cubangst, to capture the feeling of deterritorialization, displacement, disenchantment, and dispossession shared by Cubans of her generation (Two or More [Dis]places 198)—without the negativity that angst implies, I would append.

While one associates nostalgia as a sentimental, acute yearning for the past with classical exile, perhaps the Welsh word hiraeth, as untranslatable as the Portuguese saudade is said to be, best describes this subsequent generation’s version of homesickness. Even more pointed than saudade, a craving for a missing someone or something that might not return, hiraeth, as defined by Pamela Petro, is an unachievable longing for a place, a vague and constant desire for something that does not and probably cannot exist. It is a place attached to a home-seeking imagination, to a homing desire borne by members of this cohort.⁵ Like the Welsh who thus account for a homeland that was snatched away from them, if you will, by the British Empire, so too do these Cuban Americans pen stories about a native land that was off limits to them for what seems, from a young person’s perspective, an exceedingly long time.

Features such as those mentioned above are shared in various degrees by all the members of the one-and-a-half generation even though the term applies to a wide range of individuals who arrived in the host society at different life stages: in early childhood, middle childhood, and adolescence (Rumbaut 1167).⁶ When those who left Cuba as children or adolescents chose to return, breaking the rules of exile, the former homeland no longer felt quite like the home, providing a sense of belonging, nestled in their memory or imagination. Driven by an all-too-human homing desire nonetheless, their return narratives (both in textual and visual formulations) unveil elliptical forms that throw the fissures into sharp relief. This book is about the causes and consequences of those fissures and the largely unsuccessful attempts to close the attendant gaps. At the same time, the book is also about stubborn affection, a factor triggering the myriad forms in which Cuban-American writers and artists choose to go back. Among those considered are Ana Mendieta, Ruth Behar, María Brito, Cristina García, Carlos Eire, Achy Obejas, Ernesto Pujol, and Gustavo Pérez Firmat, all of them renowned artists, writers, and scholars.

Within the abovementioned cohort, some have defied their elders and gone back to the island multiple times. Others, however, have taken an uncompromising position and sworn not to return for political and emotional reasons or out of fear that Cuba will not live up to expectations hatched over decades.⁷ All have made their positions clear in the memoirs that they have crafted. Those who dared to go back bore the brunt of the community’s intransigence, sometimes translated into violent, even lethal actions, and thus laid the groundwork for later returns. They can be credited, indeed, with a pioneering role in the field of post-1959 returns, one that has not been sufficiently documented. Additional differences among worldviews just within the one-and-a-half generation will be taken up later in the book. Discerning between generations and waves of émigrés, as social scientists have been doing with regard to Cubans who settled in the United States, Puerto Rico, and Spain especially, yields critical information. Then again, acknowledging the intragenerational peculiarities of this and other cohorts makes the variegated character of a community that in the past has been portrayed as monolithic stand out. It is imperative not to lose sight of that diversity.

Many of the narratives included here are autobiographical in nature. Such type of subjective account constitutes a rich resource for the kind of inquiry I am proposing because, although fabricated like any other narrative, it draws from disparate personal and nontransferable vivencias—from very diverse experiences and political stances that, taken together, render a textured description. Tapping into a resource that has the feel of vérité, even if that vérité has been carefully airbrushed, as well as visual narratives and the fictionalized returns pictured in some novels, generates a number of possibilities about going back. In Spanish, these possibilities are subsumed in several terms derived from the verb volver rather than regresar or retornar.

Volver, Regresar, Retornar

All three words mean to return in Spanish, but the first, volver, besides being a synonym for regresar and retornar, going back to the place one left, also implies encircling or going around something, capturing key constitutive elements of the return imagination perused here. Some writers and artists portray return without setting foot on the island. This gesture of going back without literally returning is what social scientist Khachig Tölölyan partly alludes to in his essay Rethinking Diaspora(s). Tölölyan reminds us that 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, et cetera is a common trait among diasporic communities (14–15), Cubans included.

While Tölölyan mentions both abstract and concrete transnational practices that diasporic peoples conduct only to emphasize the latter as he gets deeper into his essay, my use of volver stresses the former, that is, the re-turn through memory and written and visual texts (Tölölyan, The Contemporary Discourse of Diaspora Studies 649). In Life on the Hyphen, Pérez Firmat claims that certain exiles no tienen regreso or will not partake of a return (19). And yet most exiles, including the often-quoted Cuban-American author himself, are willing to go back, in the sense of volver, to landmark events and recollections about their former lives in Cuba, or to discourses steeped in lo cubano. Volver gives free rein to the imagination, allowing writers to emotionally, spatially, and aesthetically shape Cuba to their advantage, according to present needs.

Moreover, volver, grammatically close to the reflexive verb volverse, to become, evokes, however vaguely, the gradual and complex process by which one acquires subjectivities other than the one delimited by a single nationality overlapping with an erstwhile, bounded geography. Therefore, the verb volver(se) reverberates with the subjectivity typical of those for whom exile and migration involve changes in self-perception. Stretching its connotations even further, the lexeme volver is contained in envolver, ‘to involve or influence someone,’ as Cuba does with its long-lived aura of exceptionality. With the prefix re, it becomes revolver, whose actual meaning is inquietar, enredar, that is, to trouble, entangle.

These riffs on volver address even those unwilling to go back, yet seem equally haunted by Cuba, upholding the claim about the iteration of the homeland by both concrete and figurative means. Cuba becomes, for some, a meta-homeland or floating signifier distant from the actual island, a transformation that interrogates the fixity of a homeland or the superimposition of home and homeland. Indeed, some of the more accomplished narratives explicitly or implicitly question the modern convergence of identity and national territory. Finally, the word revolución, like revolver, comprises the verb volver. It comes from the Latin revolvere, to turn, roll back, in the sense of an instance of abrupt change in public affairs. Revolución is, after all, the catalyst for fleeing and, therefore, everything else, including these remarks, flows from it.

On the other hand, missing from retornar and regresar—suitable to refer to actual returns, or to something that happens or is experienced again—is the connotation of encircling or going around something that volver optimally summons. Regresar, close to the English regress, has the added meaning of reverting to an earlier, especially a less developed, condition or state such as childhood, which may be the intention of some return narratives, but surely not all. For semantic reasons, then, volver is a more apt term, one that encompasses the variety of returns available to the fractured one-and-a-half generation.

The manifold implications of revisiting the past without actually traveling to the island or engaging with it include making a clear distinction between diaspora and transnationalism, two terms that are often wedded, somewhat randomly, in the literature on diaspora. The resilient exile worldview still reigning in certain circles, though waning, impels this author to separate the two. Exiles, who join in some form of volver but not the actual retornar, can be accommodated within diaspora, perhaps not comfortably—a number of critics would argue—because the move obscures the political conspicuousness of exile. But they cannot be similarly located within transnationalism, as many refrain from engaging in practices across borders. The return motif shapes the labeling of writers of the one-and-a-half generation. Are they a part of the Cuban diaspora, a transnational community, or the Cuban exile or ethnic population?

A Diasporic Community or a Trans-Nation for All?

Broadly defined, diaspora, from the Greek diasperien, from dia-, across, and -sperien, to sow or scatter seeds, has historically referred to displaced communities of people who have been dislocated from their native homeland through the movements of migration, immigration, or exile and subsequently relocated in one