For Harold in response to Culture, Identity and “Cubanness”
Another posting I like that could have give three independent posts. I’m Cuban but I don’t live under a rock, this is the century of globalization, it we look, the only thing political boundaries have brought is war. I like baseball, Cuban music, I’m a great dancer, adore coffee and pork, but I also live football, rock, American series, and Rioja. Does that make me less Cuban? Lezama knew Greco-Roman culture perfectly, he was a scholar in American poetry, it would seem an alien, but does anyone doubt his intense Cuban identity?
Leave the country does not erase the signs of identity, in many cases it reinforces them. It is not that Cubans live in ghettos clinging to a country that no longer exists except in memory, there is something inherent which manifests itself in certain foods, celebrations, customs. At the other extreme, a so-called “proletarian tradition” of putting the bride’s bouquet on a monument failed; a replica of the USSR where all the families suffered a death in the war, so that tribute was personal. And is it that identity is not decreed, it happens.
I suspect everyone who claims for himself total patriotism. Teaching the History of Cuba has contributed to a damaging confusion. Everything will be put in its place.
February 5 2012
