Spring 2014
A Cuban-American Primer by Chantel Acevedo
A is for Azabache
Azabaches are small pieces of jet, rounded, pierced with gold, strung on a chain and hung around the necks of Cuban babies and children, meant to ward off evil. They are made of compressed carbon, stones that date back to the Jurassic. They are dateless, hoary reminders of ancient powers. Azabaches always feel warm to the touch, even when they’ve been sitting in drawers for years. If you rub an azabache hard enough, it will give off a small electrical charge, and you will know that los santos are watching over your child.
Azabache used in a sentence:
You consider your baby’s tight grip on your thumb, and the way the azabache gives off a small, precious heat like your baby’s breath, and you think, perhaps this one will be spared the curses of the other Cubans you know.
Further definitions:
A is for azabache, and also for affliction and anathema. Curses abound. Cubans know this intimately1. For instance, we know that one should never gather dropped pennies. To hell with that old American rhyme about picking one up and having good luck. Cuban mothers know that those who feel cursed can trap their bad luck in the coins for some unsuspecting person to fix upon, and fuácata, the curse is transferred. We know that rocking chairs left rocking signify the death of a child. If a Cuban lets you in through the front door, you must leave through the same portal, else your bad luck will linger in the house. We know that full moons leave birthmarks on unborn children, and that beds should be arranged so that one’s feet do not point towards the front door, inviting death.
We seldom forget these things.
1My grandmother grew up in Matanzas, Cuba years before the heady and chaotic days of the revolution. There were stories about eating only powdered milk for a week, and of watching planes flying over the island during World War II, but for the most part, the Cuba she remembered, was a storybook. Her Cuba was pastel-colored, sharpened by the old, Castellano wisdom of her own parents and grandparents. It was a weaponless world, drained of blood, pasteurized. Pastoral.
That is, except for all the dead children.
My grandmother, Tita, seemed to know many dead children, and she never hid a single, gruesome story of each child’s demise from me. The stories came, always, at the most opportune time. There we’d be at the zoo in Miami, watching the lazy, bloated crocodiles in their cracked concrete canal. I’d stand up on the railings to get a good look at these giant creatures, and at once, Tita’s large hand would come down onto my back and yank me down.
“Ay, don’t you know that your head weighs more than the rest of your body? I knew a boy in Cuba who did exactly what you have done at a zoo like this one, and ¡fuácata! he fell over and the cocodrilos ate him up.” She’d go on to describe the blooms of red in the water, like floating hibiscus, and the chomping crocodiles. All they’d found later, she’d said, was a wooden top that had fallen out of the reckless, big-headed boy’s pocket.
On another family excursion to the fair, I felt that same, heavy hand pulling me out of line for the double-looper roller coaster. My hair hung halfway down my back then. My grandmother had taken a hold of all of it and tied it with a rubber band she kept in her purse.
“Mi’ja,” she’d said, “I knew a girl in Cuba who rode a montaña rusa just like that one in Havana with her hair loose. And what do you think happened? Her hair got tangled in the tracks, and ¡fuácata! Her head came clean off.”
Tita had the unfortunate distinction of personally knowing the girl who went swimming over a sand bank and lost her life when the sand gave way to a big wave, and the boy who sat so close to the television during an electrical storm that when the glass inevitably exploded, it sent a missile-like shard right into his temple, killing him instantly. That same storm took out a girl who stupidly talked on the phone while the lightning illuminated the sky. A bolt traveled through the phone line and into her ear, detonating her head, right there in her own living room.
None of these children, she claimed, wore their azabaches with any regularity.
It’s little wonder, then, that as a child I was afraid of roller coasters, bull sharks, racecars, rocking chairs, scissors left open on a counter, pressure cookers, and sewing needles. All of those things played a role in the death of an innocent, if not foolish, Cuban child, and I did not want to be one of them.
B is for Beaches
It is said that the most beautiful beaches in the world are in Cuba. Varadero is the most famous of them all. The sand is packed like brown sugar, and it is sweet to the taste. The waters are so clear that bull sharks can be seen from many yards away, giving bathers enough time to get back on shore. Unlike other Caribbean ports of call, cruise liners do not disturb the horizon. In their stead is a deep line of blue, where the sea meets the sky, designating the place where sailors once thought their mighty ships might drop off into nothingness.
Beaches in Miami lie ninety miles north of Varadero and her cerulean charms. The waters are murky most days. Bull sharks are cloaked in eddies of sand. Bathers may feel the light touch of something at their ankles when deep in Miami’s ocean. It may be a leaf caught in the undertow. Or a barracuda’s left fin. One never knows in that dark. In Miami, cruise ships sail by on the horizon, testing the theories of the ancients, disappearing like clouds on a windy day, over the very edge of blue.
Beaches used in a sentence:
In Cuba, Varadero Beach is for tourist’s only, and also, jineteras, or prostitutes earning their dollars and euros.
Further definitions:
Cuban grandmothers all know the same joke regarding beaches. It goes like this: “Where are you going?” the grandmother asks. “To the beach!” the children cry. Later, after a long day of sun and breaking surf and things hidden in the water, the grandmother asks again, “Where have you been?” “To the beach,” the children say, their voices drawn to whispers, their limbs lank, their bodies wave-tossed2, their small feet crusted over with tar from the bottom of the sea.
2Many Cubans never learn to swim. They are island people, yes, but they turn away from the water as if it hurts their eyes to look at it. My grandmother cannot swim, and so she scared me with stories of sharks and sand banks and undertows, trying desperately to get me to stay on the sand. My aunt cannot swim either, and my mother can only do a poor imitation of a back float, her hands fluttering beneath her, her long, white toes peeking out of the water, her neck straining with the attempt. My grandfather swam a little, and I liked watching his back arch, breaking the surface. He was a thin man, and his spine was a series of knots, not unlike the dorsal fin of some kinds of fish.
I learned to swim on my own, in a small, above-ground pool in our backyard in Hialeah, Florida. I was eleven. I would push off one end, the water sloshing out of the pool as I cut through it, then land safely at the other side, floating over most of the way. Thus, I learned to swim. Barely. I still pinch my nose when going under, and squeeze shut my eyes.
So many of us Cubans don’t know the first thing about swimming. It is as if the generations that came before thought Cuba so perfect that they could not imagine leaving her. And those that came after, families like my own, boarded airplanes to get out of Cuba, and see no reason to return. We turn our backs on the water as if it were an insult.
Here’s another story: Elián Gonzalez, the boy whose mother famously plopped onto a raft on the shores of Cardenas, Cuba, launching the shabby vessel into choppy waters with her son, boyfriend, and a few friends, could not swim either. His mother drowned. Some of the others were eaten by sharks. They all died, save Elián, who claims that dolphins buoyed him up in the middle of the ocean, saving him. He washed up on Miami Beach on Thanksgiving Day, in the year 2000. He has since grown into a handsome young man in Cuba. There are statues of him on the island. I don’t know if he has since learned to swim. Were I Elián, I would want nothing to do with the sea.
When I was small, and visiting the beach, my grandparents would hold my hands at the edge of the surf. They would point to the horizon, saying, “Mira, allá está Cuba,” and I would squint and see the island, a smudge, a ghost, a shadow. I would tell them that I saw it, and they would sigh, indulging me. Ninety miles is too far, of course, to see anything.
These days, beach goers in Miami sometimes spot Cuban rafters trying to get to shore. The tourists love it. They snap pictures, and post videos on the Internet. Someone always remembers that the Cubans are probably dehydrated, or sunburned, and so will offer Cokes and aloe for parched bodies. If the Coast Guard happens to be nearby, they sometimes intercept rafters, or balseros, keeping them from shore with powerful water hoses. Wet Feet/Dry Feet, that 90’s era law, says that Cubans whose feet touch the beach may stay. Those who do not make it, no matter how close they get, must return to the island.
For some Cubans, particularly those who can’t swim, jumping out of the raft and swimming for shore, ducking water cannons and picture-happy tourists is a particular challenge.
I imagine this exchange has happened at least once, to at least one Cuban balsero: “Where are you going?” the tourist asks. “To the beach,” the balsero answers. “Where did you come from?” the tourist asks. “Another beach,” comes the reply.
C is for Columbus
Christopher Columbus, a Genovese sailor born in 1451, is most famous for sailing three caravels to the Caribbean for the first time as far as anyone knew, landing in Cuba on Christmas morning in 1492. He confused the island for a peninsula, and ran aground one of the three ships, the Santa María. The vessel was abandoned, the hull left baking in the Cuban sun, the sails rolled up and used elsewhere. In Cuba, Columbus met the Cacique tribe. Later, he’d meet Taínos and Caribe and Arawaks scattered among the islands. These were the days when Puerto Rico was called Borikén, the Dominican Republic was called Quisqueya, and Haiti was named Ayiti. One hears those sonorous names still in salsa music and reggaeton, shouted out by musicians named Hector Lavoe and Marc Antony and Pit Bull, singing a roll call for the dead.
Cuba has always been called Cuba.
Columbus used in a sentence:
Columbus is coming. Hide the children.
Further definitions:
In the year 1515, Bartoloméo de las Casas, a priest who had travelled with Columbus, sought a meeting with King Ferdinand of Spain3. There, de las Casas described the death of 7,000 Taíno children in Cuba, slaughtered at the hands of Columbus’ men. Seven-thousand within three months. De las Casas spoke of infant skulls shattered against rocks, of babies drowned, of mother’s force-fed grass like cows, or men impaled on cane stalks. Upon hearing these things, Ferdinand shook his great head, heavy with crown, and asked, “What does this have to do with me?”
The Taíno were not without their defenses. Hatuey, the great Taíno Cacique, staged a rebellion against the Spaniards. He was caught, and tied to a stake. Before burning Hatuey alive, Columbus’ men asked whether Hatuey would accept Christ and thus, enter Heaven. “Do Christians go to heaven then?” Hatuey asked. De las Casas reports that when the chief was answered in the affirmative, his response was clear: “Well, then, I choose Hell.” Hatuey is Cuba’s first national hero. His profile–sharp-nose, be-feathered brow–can be seen on bottles of bitter Hatuey Beer, brewed by the Bacardí company, and drunk in great quantities at barbecues, baptisms, and birthday parties in Miami.
3Many Cubans claim Spanish descent. Unlike their Hispanic brothers and sisters in Central and South America, Cubans can find no trace of Columbus’ “Indians” in their bloodline. The Taínos were wiped out long before any of the Spaniards imagined sparing the women after raping them, preserving their European lineage among these dark, hairless people. That would come later in history. When the Taínos were all gone, King Ferdinand authorized the capture of Africans to be used as slaves, giving birth to the African slave trade with one firm press of his royal seal. Many Cubans claim African descent.
My grandmother says we come from the Canary Islands, las Canarias, and she says it with a little quiver of pride in her voice. We are hot-tempered, she says, because we are isleños, islanders, and she doesn’t mean Cuba, she means those other islands in the south of Spain. My great-grandmother was blond, tow-headed, and blue-eyed, as were most of her children. My great-great grandparents were born in Spain, and I have inherited that European color palette. My eyes are green, and freckles dot my nose and cheeks. I pass quite well for gringa. I have been a convenient diversity hire, here and there.
Once, when I was five, my mother went to Spain. She brought home a doll, a beautiful, blond baby boy, who would clap his vinyl hands and sing, “Pon, pon, pon el dedito en el pilón,” but I could not understand it’s tiny, Castilian accent.
Once, when I was twelve, and my mother had found it hard to keep a job, my grandmother arranged for a Santera, a pracitioner of that African/Catholic syncretic religion, to do a cleansing, un despojo, for my mother. I stayed in my room through it all, heard the Yoruban chanting rattling the house, making the gilded cross over my doorframe jiggle. I smelled the smoke from the Santera’s tobacco. A drum played softly, somewhere in my living room. Later, my mother got a job that stuck, met my stepfather and fell in love. African magic coursed through her veins.
I would not like to see the running of the bulls, nor feel the vibrations of a thousand hooves slamming on cobbled streets. But, when I see a curl of tobacco smoke, my mouth waters. Whenever I hear that great Cuban diva, Celia Cruz, singing “Quimbara, quimbara, quimbaba,” calling forth a language neither she nor I can speak because slavery stilled the tongues that knew the words, I feel a shiver in my hips.
Yet I know nothing of the Taínos. Not their music. Not their food. There are no graves to visit. And I do not like the taste of beer.
D is for Danzón
Danzón is the mother of all Cuban dances. The earliest danzóns were held by African slaves. Pairs cut figures in the rich, tropical dirt, sometimes trailing ribbons, like a New World version of a maypole dance. The rhythms caught on, and soon the sons and daughters of Columbus were doing the danzón, too, scandalizing their families. The danzón sprouted heads like a hydra soon thereafter, and out burst the mambo. Salsa. Rumba. Casino. Rueda. Encoded in the thrust and tug, push and twirl of these dances are the secrets of slaves.
The varieties of Cuban, or Afro-Cuban styles of dance are varied. To the untrained eye, they all seem quite similar, save for the Rueda, or wheel, a Cuban version of square-dancing, which requires several couples to accomplish. The differences are muted, best left to experts. It is the commonalities that Cuban children learn quite young. There is a shuffle of the feet, the pair in perfect reflection of one another. There are complex turns, lower halves that shimmy and twist seductively, while shoulders remain rounded and still. Arms bend at ninety-degree angles, in ninety-degree weather, while ninety miles separate dancers on the island from dancers in the U.S.
Salsa, and that Dominican import, merengue, are popular dances in Cuba and Miami. No one does the danzón anymore.
Danzón used in a sentence:
Oh my God, Yoslenys, my mother is making me do a stupid danzón for my quinceañera party.
Further definitions:
The word danzón comes from the French term, contredanse, a folk dance derived from English social dances made popular during the Renaissance and the reign of Elizabeth I, which spread across Europe to influence such forms as the quadrille. The Spanish brought the contredanse to Cuba, and the dance evolved, blending with African dance forms, becoming more rhythmic. English bodies, French bodies, Spanish bodies, African bodies, in syncopation through the ages. I like to imagine Elizabeth I, finding some measure of peace in the precise movements, an habanera rhythm dormant in her blood, waiting for the right earth in which to take root. Could she have imagined the inheritors of those musical capers, spinning cyclones with their feet in still unheard of places?4
4My mother left Cuba when she was only three. It was 1954 when she, my grandparents and my aunt immigrated to Los Angeles, where mom cultivated a deep and weird love for Roy Rogers and Gunsmoke. When the family returned to Havana for a visit in 1958, just a few months before the Cuban Revolution that would make the trip their last to the island, my nine-year old mother brought with her a pair of white-handled cap guns and her red Annie Oakley boots. Maybe she had seen early news footage of Fidel Castro and his Cuban rebels in the Sierra Maestra Mountains, looking rugged and worn. Perhaps she just really liked her musical westerns. No matter the reason, having no memory of the place of her birth, she imagined Cuba teeming with, of all things, cowboys.
The story comes to mind whenever I think about visiting Cuba, a place I’ve never been. I wonder whether I’ll be as confused as my mother was. In some respects, I’m like most Americans, whose mental images of Cuba are composed of vintage American cars, Cohiba cigars pressed between the lips of men and women alike, billboards of Fidel’s gargantuan face staring off into the blue sky, and Hemingway’s ghost chatting up the ladies at La Bodeguita del Medio, mojitoin his left hand, pen in his right. Coffee table books about Cuba seem like photographic evidence of time travel. Photographers love the old cars and their chrome hood ornaments, and those balconies in Old Havana with lines of drying clothes flapping above them. The lens zooms in on the crumbling cement so artistically. The balconies fall off every so often, crushing people on the sidewalks below. Most of them photographers trying to get the perfect shot, I imagine.
From the outside, it certainly looks as though things haven’t changed in half a century. On lazy days, when the writing turns sour and I go for the outdated tropes, my imaginary version of Cuba goes no further than this. It’s fed by cheesy movies like Dirty Dancing: Havana Nights, restaurants named Bongos and La Carreta, but most significantly, by my very traditional, very Cuban upbringing in South Florida.
If there were a definition in the dictionary for “American Cubanita, circa late 1980’s,” you’d see a picture of me, an azabache stone dangling from my necklace to ward off the evil eye. Back then, I had a sway in my hips I’ve since lost. I learned to dancefrom matronly Cuban women who choreographed the quinceañeraparties I attended. As teenagers, we rehearsed for these parties out on the neighborhood driveways in the early evening. Boys with baggy jeans riding low on their slender flanks watched the girls as we practiced complex turns with each another. During breaks in rehearsal, the old folks, who stood around keeping us under surveillance, lectured on “The things that never happened in Cuba,” listing a hundred sundry faults of American living. We danced to old time boleros and sons in complex choreographies; meanwhile cars crept up the street, slowing down to observe us.
At the quinceañera’s party, we’d dazzle the guests in our hoop dresses made of layers of peach organza, fake hibiscus flowers in our hair, tickling our ears. Clearly, the 19th century was all the rage. The birthday girl would emerge out of a conch shell on the stage, like Venus being born again, except with lots of eyeliner this time. We’d dance a danzón or two to raspy-sounding records of songs fifty years old or more, while out in the audience, our grandparents wiped their eyes, then took pictures. I dusted off the photographs the other day—I looked like a Hialeah version of a Southern belle, white gloves, petticoat, and huge hoop earrings. The term tacky really doesn’t do it justice.
Of late, I found myself in a club on South Beach for a bachelorette party. A young Cuban man, freshly arrived from the island, asked me to dance. He put one forceful hand on the small of my back, and, hunched over like a crab, moved his feet in ways I had never seen, hitting double beats where I would do only one. I stuck to my old quinceañera training, but it was no use. Five, six times, I stepped on his feet, scuffing his shoes. Each time I’d slip out of his grip, he’d ask, “Are you sure you’re Cuban?”
“What?” I shouted over the pounding music.
“Tú no eres cubana,” he declared finally, my ineptitude on the dance floor proof positive that I was merely an impersonator and not the real deal.
Humiliating doesn’t begin to explain how I felt. “Perdón,” I told him, stepping back into the shadows of the club. An epiphany dawned right there, amplified by the strobe lights and haze of smoke. Could I have been misled at those quincesrehearsals, deceived with every sip of Bustelo coffee, and every time I bought a paper cone filled with peanuts on the street from an old man in a straw hat? Had I been hoodwinked by tradition?
Out there, isolated in the Atlantic, Cubans were making up new steps to the dances, and here I was, shaking my butt to a very old tune. The Cuba I thought I knew had moved on before I was even born.
E is for Escuela
Cuban private escuelas, or schools, the ones that existed before 1959, were not the kind of institutions one sees on film. There were no rolling greens, or matins during which a cocky senior plays a moody acoustic guitar to an admiring school body; no mahogany-sided dining halls where the first years serve the fourth years, their small hands trembling under the weight of enormous trays of beef burgundy. There was no lacrosse or polo. The private schools in Cuba were of a different sort, though equally as elegant in their own Caribbean way. Some were quite old, founded through royal charters by the kings and queens of Spain over a hundred years before the Cuban Revolution. They were named after French saints, like Academia La Salle and Escuela Champagnat, while others bore curiously English names, like Academia Pitnam, Newton and Edison.
Fidel Alejandro Castro Ruz was a student at the most exclusive school of all, Colegio Belén, chartered by Queen Isabella II herself. Later, Fidel would oust the Jesuits that ran the school, and rename the place the Military Technical Institute. In one swift move, private schools all over the island closed, the crosses yanked from over doorjambs, the statues of la Virgen removed, the French and English names brushed out with a thick layer of paint. In their place went pictures of Ché Guevara, and of Fidel.
In Cuba today children are asked to rest their elbows on their desks, fold their hands, and pray to God for candy. When they open their eyes, their mouths watering, there are no sweets waiting for them. Now, the teacher says, close your eyes and ask Fidel for candy, and then, like magic, like a dove landing on Fidel’s shoulder during his first speech as Maximo Líder, the sugary jewels appear. You see, the teachers say, trust in Fidel. He will give you what you want.
It has been fifty years since nuns and priests shuffled from classroom to classroom, whacking knuckles with rulers when needed. The paint in the classrooms has faded. The marks where the crosses once hung are invisible.
Undeterred after the Cuban Revolution, the Jesuits reestablished Colegio Belén in Miami. Teachers and principals from the old Edison School, the old Champagnat, and a slew of other displaced institutions began again in South Florida, housing their students in old apartment buildings. Balconies once used to air wet laundry on clotheslines now dried art projects on the line. Kitchens became home economics centers. Cramped apartment patios became recess play yards.
Escuela used in a sentence:
You may not like wearing that Champagnat5 uniform, but at least you don’t have to go to an escuela al campo, me oyes?
Further definitions:
Escuelas al campo, or Field Schools, were a mandatory part of the Cuban child’s educational experience in the late 70’s through the 90’s. Starting in the seventh grade, Cuban boys and girls spent time in the island’s countryside, working as farmhands and cane cutters. Conditions in the camps were not pleasant. Latrines lacked roofs in many of the camps. Plain white fish and white rice was the daily meal. Boys and girls returned home thinner than they’d come, or scarred by the errant slice of a machete in the cane fields. Sometimes, due to lack of space, boys and girls bunked together, and, being teenagers, found each other in the night, under bright stars, unsupervised, hungry for food and other things, free and yet not free. Because of this last, and a spike in unwanted teen pregnancies, the escuelas al campo program was terminated in the late 1990s.
5I attended Champagnat Catholic School in Hialeah, Florida, from kindergarten through the eighth grade. The school was, in fact, built in a pre-existing apartment building. A Sedano’s Supermarket bumped up against the front of the building, so that shopping carts often made their way into our playground, and we raced in them. Behind the school was the Shrine to San Lázaro, a small, privately-run church, in which stood a life-size statue of Lázarus, his wounds leaking red lacquer, his gray shoulders cloaked in purple. Around him stood a hundred crutches or more, leaning against walls, proof of miracles.
Every morning, we gathered in the cafeteria, stood attention, placed our hands on our hearts and recited the Pledge of Allegiance. Then, we’d sing the Cuban National Anthem, La Bayamesa, our small voices a background to that of the teachers, belting out “¡Al combate, corrér, Bayameses!” a song about a battle in the town of Bayamo, during the War for Independence from Spain. The song, in English, goes like this:
Hasten to battle, men of Bayamo!
The motherland looks proudly to you;
Do not fear a glorious death,
because to die for the motherland is to live.
To live in chains is to live
in dishonour and ignominy.
Hear the clarion’s call;
Hasten, brave ones, to battle!
I remember whispering the part about dying for the motherland, because I did not want to, not for Cuba, or for the United States.
After the singing of the anthem, we’d sit for a lecture on faith, and Dr. Rodriguez, who taught French, and from whom I learned to pray my Hail Marys in that lilting language (“Je vous salue, Marie…” I remember it still, the only French I know), would tell us stories of the child martyrs. Most memorably was the parable of the girl who would not cease praying the rosary, and when the Romans took her beads, she counted her fingers; when they chopped those off, she counted her toes; at last, bereft of all digits, she cried out to our Lady, who took her to Heaven. How I cringed hearing that story! How my fingers ached at the thought! There was guilt, too, deep in my gut, knowing that I would give up all rosaries forever just to keep my hands and feet intact.
Dr. Rodriguez told us, too, about children who received the stigmata, or Christ’s wounds. The palms of their hands and the soles of their feet would bleed where the Romans had driven their nails in Christ’s feet. “That is faith,” Dr. Rodriguez would tell us. “Así es la fé.” I wanted nothing to do with it. I would sleep with my hands balled into fists, hidden under my pillow. Three layers of socks cloaked my feet. This would keep out miracles, I thought. And I would pray, “Blessed Lady, sweet Jesus, come not to me. Come not to me.”
We prayed for holy wounds and vowed to fight for a lost country each day in Champagnat Catholic School. Our school was a ghost of an old school that no longer existed. Our promises belonged to another era. Death was all around us.
When we earned straight A’s, the principal, an ex-Marist priest, would hang a heavy golden medal on our necks, with the symbol of the old Cuban school in relief. He would say to us in Spanish, “Bien hecho, niños,” and we would say, “Gracias, Señor Alonso,” and our parents and grandparents would watch us at graduation and applaud, teary, remembering this same school in another lifetime, on different soil.
G is for Gardens
Gardens have taken on a new identity in revolutionary Cuba. Markets are often bare, and the black market thrives on fruits and vegetables grown illegally in backyards. The prisons, meanwhile, are full of amateur farmers trying to make a buck.
My grandfather planted all sorts of trees in our backyard growing up—avocados, lemon, sour oranges, baby bananas, mango. And every day he was out there, running PVC pipes underground for the bananas, dragging the big, purple bunches into the house to ripen, picking rotting mangoes from the ground, touching the leaves just to feel them. He was a car painter by trade, and he had callouses the size of limes, but he loved those trees and treated them as tenderly as he could.
Find a story written by a Cuban that doesn’t have at least one tree lovingly referenced in it. I dare you.
What is this all about? Could it be some sort of traumatic response? Could the insane attachment to trees (Trees. Only the trees. The lawn itself can go to hell as long as the mangoes flower in season) have something to do with the loss of land, of place, of time and space?
Perhaps it’s that trees are rooted deep in the soil, and roots are what immigrants are always trying to reestablish, sending out tendrils in the earth, trying to find a comfortable place to stay put. Could it be all about recreating an environment? Turning places like Miami into a “Cuban biome”?
And now, I spend lots of time outside with my small daughter, naming the plants in our garden in Spanish if I can. Luckily, some don’t need translation. A hydrangea is a hydrangea, just pronounced differently. There are tomates y lilia, rosas, cebolla y pino. Other names are tricky. What’s a dogwood in Spanish? How about an eastern redbud? No matter. I give them other names. The dogwood is “el arbol de las flores blancas”, the tree with the white flowers, and the redbud is simply, “el arbol grande,” the big tree. Her swing hangs from an ancient pino, and she knows that when I suggest we go “echarle agua a las maticas,” that I mean to water the plants. So she picks up her pink watering can and runs after me.
When she and I are back there, I can’t help but think of helping my abuelo water the banana trees, or lifting broken aguacates off the ground, digging out the large seed, and helping him plant it. I remember how he taught me to tie up a papaya, which we called a frutabomba, a fruit-bomb tree, because “papaya” is slang for a woman’s genitals in Cuban Spanish. My abuelo and I spent a lot of time in the yard, and I learned how the soil works in español, learned, too, how to curse in español on the day he was stung by a bee.
Here’s a confession: I never dream in Spanish. But when I’m outdoors, my mind works in my grandfather’s language. Here’s another confession: whenever I see a royal palm slashing the sky, I know I’m home.
Garden used in a sentence:
I live in Alabama, and my garden goes dead in the winter.
Further definitions of Garden:
When I left Miami at the age of 25, my mother cried for weeks. She still cries whenever she visits me here in Alabama, her face scrunching up, making her beautiful face into a gargoyle of pain.
My husband and I bounced from place to place, he, the dutiful academic, I, the dutiful wife—Pittsburgh, New Haven, and now, at last, Auburn, Alabama, where, by some alignment of the stars, I became a dutiful academic, too.
My youngest daughter devours avocados like candy. Sometimes, people mispronounce my surname, call me “Avocado.” My eldest daughter is used to it. The youngest will soon become familiar with the error. For now, I tell her about the tree in the backyard of my childhood home, how, like a trimmed-up magnolia, the avocado tree’s branches are good for climbing, how it was unlucky to count the fruit, because then, they would rot right off of the tree, and how my grandfather grew that tree from a seed. She cradles avocado seeds in her palm, then, throws them across the room, where they knock into the walls and leave dents in the paneling. She is young, just turned two, and has not yet learned about seeds and what’s in them.
Inside, I want to tell her, are orchards of fruit. Inside, I want to say, is the potential to regrow an island, to start from scratch. Here, take this slippery mango seed. And these tiny guava seeds, and this frutabomba, and this palm nut. Add salt to the soil. Cry into the dirt. 6Cry some more. These, these, are the ingredients of an island I call home, the one I’ve never actually seen.
6Ay, this ridiculous nostalgia. It leaves me mute. It renders me illiterate. I forget my alphabet in the face of it and think in terms of blue, of salt, of percussion. In the dark, my body leans south.