The Quiet Trauma of the Uprooted: Confronting the Origin Myths of Cuban Refugee Families

Refugees and immigrants use new origin myths to fortify themselves in foreign lands. Flawed, inaccurate, and possibly delusional, the stories they tell themselves are indispensable survival tools.

But in our family, the stories we told ignored the pain of losing family, neighbors, culture, language, identity—our lives, in a sense. There would be a cost for those omissions, but we wouldn’t realize it until well into our Cuban American lives, when the past came calling and demanded a reckoning.

I grew up in a typical multigenerational refugee family. Ours was run by women who’d gotten us the hell out of postrevolutionary Cuba and knew how to spin stories like nobody’s business. Gracias a Dios for that, because the stories my mother, aunt, grandmother, father, and uncle—the viejos (elders)—spun in our early days as Cuban refugees in 1967 New Hampshire saved us.

Until they didn’t. But we wouldn’t know about the weak spots in our family’s new origin story for decades. Just when we thought we were nicely assimilated—and finally used to American food that tasted like it had been washed first—we’d realize that major chapters had been ripped out of our story.

The past had come to collect payment. A reckoning lay ahead for anyone honest enough to face it.

But, in those early years in the US, the viejos’ tales of becoming Cuban American gave us the foothold we needed to build new lives in a sometimes-unwelcoming America. We were Cuban working-class superheroes! Yes, we’d been duped by the 1959 revolution our family of forklift drivers and teachers had once supported. It had landed on our heads and punched us in the heart.

But look at us now! We’d escaped Castro and Castro-communism and landed on our feet, thigh-deep in the snowbanks of the Live Free or Die state. Who could have come up with such an apt state moniker? Another sign of our superhero destiny.

Proof of our luck piled up quickly. A kind landlord let us rent his rickety farmhouse with just a small deposit. He was a foreman at the rubber boot factory and offered the adults jobs on his assembly line. “Wait till you get your first paychecks. Then you can pay me rent,”

And we kids were killing it at the grammar school across the street. We were the only Latinos in sight, a novelty worth examining rather than ostracizing—for most students and teachers. My cousins and I made friends quickly, and the house started filling with them.

Somehow, we were getting good grades despite our English deficiencies. Someone gave us ice skates and, within hours, we were whisking around the rink across the street in our Salvation Army coats.

The viejos soon learned how central heating worked, what a furnace was, how to dress in layers. They kept telling us we’d won. True, we’d never again see our barrio or the four generations of family we’d left behind. That would be hard.

But we could send them care packages every few weeks. We had airmail, letters from the barrio we read so often they were soft as Kleenex in no time. If we saved carefully, we could afford monthly long-distance phone calls that brought us the voices we longed to hear.

The storytellers insisted that Castro wouldn’t last long, not with the mass discontent we’d seen, all those Cubans escaping on rafts, the counterrevolutionaries hiding in the hills, brave Cubans sabotaging what they could to topple the revolutionary government. Maybe our relatives would be able to get out. Maybe one day we’d be able to return, see our grandparents, great grandparents, all the old friends.

In the meantime, our scrappy refugee family could handle anything! The twisted new language full of consonants [that Americans spoke without opening their mouths]. A culture founded on values that Cubans considered suspicious: independence, privacy, minding your own business, speaking softly, dating without chaperones—even sleepovers.

All minor mysteries to consider later on, not now, as we created our Cuban American selves. Ánimo y adelante! Spirit and onward. Let’s go. No victims here!

In Cuba, we were gusanos, worms, the new government’s term for people like us who opposed the revolution. Gusanos couldn’t give away their possessions when they left Cuba. The day the guard had arrived unexpectedly with our exit visas—we’d waited three years by then, not knowing if or when the damned permiso would arrive—he kicked us out of our house and sealed the front door shut with a banner that read: Property of the Revolution.

So what? the myth-builders asked.  We didn’t have much anyway. We were in America now. The gusanos had turned to butterflies.

Our superhero myths fortified us when we faced racism or were shunned as outsiders. Mami, Tía, or Abuela held our hands and turned the bad guys into idiots. They are ignorant seborucos (blockheads). Focus on the good Americanos. There are plenty of them.

When you fell, you got up, the story spinners said. You made yourself brave. Ponte guapa was my mother’s battle cry. Make yourself brave. I still hear it on bad days. Sometimes it works. Because you can make yourself brave.

In our household full of cousins, siblings, visiting americanitos, dogs, cats, and canaries, I was the oldest girl, quite nosy, and skilled at pretending to be playing while the viejos told each other truer stories. My grandmother was the only elder who failed at pretending everything was fine. She wept often. The viejos consoled her, but the underlying message was, up and at ‘em, ponte guapa, let’s go!

I took to drawing maps of our beloved barrio for Abuela, which always made her smile. I would tell her stories about Pancha, the neighbor with a foul-mouthed parrot, as I drew her house. “You remember that?” Abuela would ask, marveling at how much a child could understand.

My stories could make our sad and tired abuela laugh. Rather than scolding me for mimicking Pancha’s swearing parrot, Abuela would just giggle. We were safe inside a Cuba story. As I drew the streets and the houses of our barrio, I’d name the families. When I was wrong, Abuela corrected me, wrote the right name in the right spot. So I’d remember.

Abuela wove her own stories about the barrio with mine. How Ofelia shared her potatoes with us, even when she had just a few.  How Antonio el bodeguero would pick me up when we got to the front of the food line and put me on one of the empty barrels in his bodega. How Nery washed her sons’ clothes in our alley sink, because we had a washboard and her boys’ clothes were always filthy.

The viejos’ stories resurrected the world we’d lost. They tore holes in the present so we could sneak back to the past. We could return home whenever we wanted. These weren’t just words, they were pearls passed from one mouth to another, gifts. I was hooked. Listening to the viejos’ stories was even better than watching the Flintstones.

As the years passed, new stories about who we were entered our house, uninvited. By 1980, during the Mariel Boatlift, Cubans fleeing the same military dictatorship we’d fled became “boat people” in the American media. More than 120,000 Cubans had rushed to the sea when Castro, for the second time since the revolution, announced he would waive exit visas for anyone who wanted to leave the island.

He did it again in 1994, triggering what became known as the Balsero (rafter) Crisis. I was writing about Cuba by then. I noticed that U.S. officials were referring to the fleeing Cubans as “migrants,” not refugees, as they had in the past.

I interviewed a contact at the State Department. How could he call the 35,000 Cubans who were fleeing the military dictatorship migrants, when they had no intention of “migrating” anywhere? They were begging for permanent shelter in the US, escaping one of the only governments in the world that denied citizens the right to emigrate.

“These people aren’t like you, like your parents,” he said, lowering his voice, as if telling me a secret.

“How do you know?” I asked. His reasons—his stories—didn’t convince me.

So who were we really? Cuba’s dictatorship hadn’t changed. Repression and hardship had intensified over the decades. Weren’t we freedom-loving refugees worthy of being sheltered, given a new chance in a free country?

We were refugee warriors, capable of working hard, buying a home within a few years, assimilating but honoring our past, contributing to our new communities, becoming teachers, police officers, office workers, chemists, writers. Had the U.S. forgotten that?

I had not. My personal life was solid, meaningful. I’d graduated from Smith College, started my software career, married my husband, and had two beautiful children. I was a refugee warrior. Capable of tackling anything. The viejos’ origin stories had taught me that.

But when my daughter turned five, a deep depression parked itself in my heart and wouldn’t leave. Natalia was the same age I’d been when we lost our Cuban lives. I worried about her starting kindergarten.

“Why?” a therapist asked me.

“Because life…the world…can be so hard.” I don’t cry easily, so the wave of sobs that burst out of me felt foreign.

When I finally looked up, the shrink handed me a tissue. She wondered if the trauma I’d experienced at Natalia’s age was behind my depression. “What trauma?” I asked her.

And so began the reckoning. The stories that had saved us had also ignored the fact that being uprooted from one world and crashing into another—within hours—is traumatic after all.

Terrifying, long-buried memories of our first years here slowly returned, demanding explanations. The nightmares. Terror that a fire would break out at night and leave us homeless again. Holding Abuela at night in bed as she sobbed. Finding Mami and Tía crying in their rooms, being told their backs hurt, or they had headaches.

How had all this sadness and pain been buried in our American origin stories? I thought we’d won, that we were invincible, but maybe I’d replaced too many truths with feel-good myths to understand the price we all paid. Now I didn’t know what was real and what was imagined.

I pieced events together, asking the viejos for details that helped me see the whole picture. We were both winners and losers. We had been both brave and terrified.

The new, more truthful stories taught me that refugee-dom never ends, even when you’ve scrubbed away your accent and learned to like mashed potatoes. Immigrants, and especially refugees, come to our new countries with nothing of material wealth.

We don’t get to pass along a grandmother’s tea set, an uncle’s war medal, a mother’s doll to our American children. We get to regale our children with the most powerful heirlooms of all. Our stories.

They teach us who we were, what we cherished, and remind us how we survived.

They are weightless and infinitely portable. They cost nothing but are priceless. And no revolution, no war, no political upheaval or natural disaster can ever take them from us. They are there for the finding. All it takes is time.

______________________________

Property of the Revolution by Ana Hebra Flaster is available via She Writes Press.