Back to Homing

“Cuba was a place that was within me before I ever stood inside her borders. Coming home includes all of this.”

Vanessa Garcia is a Telly-Award winning, Emmy-nominated writer who has written for Sesame Street, Caillou, and other shows. She's the author of White Light, a novel which won an International Latino Book Award and was on NPRs Best Books of the year when it came out. She's the author of What the Bread Says, a picture book for kids, and has written thought pieces, longform, and essays for The Guardian, The LA Times, The WashPo, Narrative.ly, ESPN, The Hill, Boston Globe, National Review, and many more. She holds a PhD from UCI. For more: www.vanessagarcia.org 

Why does this piece mean ‘homing’ to you? How does it resemble your relationship to place?

For me, homing is so many things. It’s not just returning to a brick-and-mortar location or opening a door with a key. Sometimes we don’t have that key anymore. Sometimes it’s been stolen from us. Sometimes we have to knock on the door, and that door is figurative and physical at the same time. Sometimes home is a place we’ve never been to, like my case was for a long time. Cuba was a place I hadn’t physically gone to but that I had been to in my imagination, heart and mind, many times. Cuba was a place that was within me before I ever stood inside her borders. Coming home includes all of this. It’s also something simpler—it’s my family. I think all of that is reflected in the nest of this piece.

What does calling yourself a place writer imply for your work?

Place is inevitable, and so if you’re a writer, reflecting and recording (recording and illuminating) the world around you, you necessarily write place. Just as you write character. I think place is central because it is what helps construct character, in a way. The world was created before the people, you know what I mean? People didn’t exist before the planet.

It’s been a while since you last visited Cuba. Where in Miami can you look to find home?

I visit Cuba every day. I write about Cuba every day. When I am writing about Venezuela, I’m also writing about Cuba; when I’m writing about my grandfather’s journey, escaping three tyrannies—Franco’s, Hitler’s, and Castro’s… I’m writing about Cuba there too. I’m not going to lie to you: I eat, live, and breathe Cuba, even when I can’t physically go. 

In Miami, you find Cuba everywhere. In the lilt of the Miami accent. In the coffee, in the soul of debate. It’s in the fierceness we approach freedom with, in the fun, in the music, in the food, in the roosters sometimes lining the streets, in the fact that there’s nowhere in the world like Miami, but that also the 305, like Pitbull, is a microcosm of the America to come—that’s why Mr. 305 became Mr. Worldwide. You know what I’m saying? We’re Martians… and I say that as a pun, because we come from Martí, Cuba’s patriot poet. Martianos. Martians. Miami is our biggest satellite.

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My Cuban Routes

Vanessa Garcia | Nonfiction, Homing

“You can never go home again, but the truth is you can never leave home, so it’s alright.” 

— Maya Angelou

All my life has been filled with her stories. This place that was a prison. Was a trap. Was a paradise. And a paradise lost. Was a lush, blanket of green. Was an island that looked like a crocodile. Was an island that looked like a lizard. Was an island. And I, at times, was the sea around her. But most of the time, because my roots began within her, I was the island, surrounded by her. Even when I’m far from her, I become her. Invisible her.      

In other words, I am an American Born Cuban. I was born in Miami, to parents who fled Fidel Castro’s Cuba. My grandfather was almost killed before managing his way out of the island through Venezuela. My grandmother and my mother and my aunt almost lost their lives a different way—in the ocean crossing, sailing away from the only home they’d ever known, toward Spain. Twenty-three days of that.

Let me put it simpler. My family is from Cuba, and when Fidel Castro came to power in 1959, he promised democracy, but he offered Communism and tyranny instead. Castro is often depicted as a proletariat hero, but what happened under his reign was a barrage of atrocities. He shut down freedom of speech and of the press and did so proudly. He bragged to Barbara Walters about it —about how Cuba wasn’t like other places, how, where he ruled, nobody could speak against socialism. He cut people off from their families, exiled those who didn’t agree with him. Killed off those who threatened to overpower him or sent them on odysseys to other countries, never to return. He took over property; he forced children to cut cane. He placed his enemies against a firing squad wall and pulled the trigger. These are not hyperbole or long folk tales told;      they are moments lived and testified. My stepdad’s father stood, his back to one of those paredón walls, and they shot bullets around him. They let him live, as his friends and colleagues dropped with thuds; bleeding sacks. He defecated as he heard bodies hitting ground, a priest calling out: Viva Cristo Rey. This was his torture, a torture they conducted again and again. Until fifteen years of his life disappeared before his eventual release.

My grandfather’s brother on my mother’s side, he too was imprisoned for wanting to live as a free man. He was given electroshocks in prison. He didn’t speak to anyone for a whole year after he was released from the near decade he spent locked away. How do you emerge from that with the right words?

Because of all this, I was born in Miami, which some say is Cuba’s closest satellite. My parents and grandparents escaped the island so that I could be free. So that our children and our children’s children could thrive. Close to a million Cubans, just like my family, live in Miami Dade County, my county, which my mother calls her country.

Because of all of this, my family could not return to Cuba. 

Because of all of this, my parents insisted I steer clear of the island. 

Because of all of this, I was pulled to her. 

Because of all this, she became the siren my ship could not resist. 

Also because of all of this, and because there were so many people for whom all of this was so foreign, so many that did not understand the island and my experiences—I began to try to explain her in my writing. My grandfather had told me stories upon stories, word of mouth, oral history. I had also read a multitude of other first-hand accounts. Every time I went to a coffee shop in Miami, the old men at her windows told me more. I gathered it all, I was a sponge. Knowing about Cuba was second nature in Miami, in my family, but when I went to college people seemed to know nothing about our island, though they pretended to. They wore berets and t-shirts of the very people that had tortured my family—of Che Guevara and Fidel Castro.  And so, I began to write. To literally set the record straight. To, at the very least, collect her complexity, scratch through the glossy surface and unmask the grittier truths others could not see.

For many years, I respected my family’s wishes and refrained from going to Cuba, but when I began to write about her deeply, I realized that I, personally, had to go to the island. I could imagine the island well, because my family was so detailed in their depictions of her; not going to the island didn’t make my “Cuban-ness” less valid. The fact that Tyranny had ousted us, which made it difficult for me to go, was even part of the story, of the very authenticity of my narrative. I didn’t have to go to Cuba to be Cuban, but I needed to in order to continue writing about this place, this place I was from, which I had never been to. My motherland. The land of my imagination had to become real, concrete.

When I was about thirty years old, I bought myself and my sister two chartered flight tickets to the island. I had only one parent to share the news with because my father had died, too young, never having been able to return to his beloved Cuba. When I showed my mother the tickets, however, she asked me if I wanted to kill her too. She turned so red, I thought she would burst. It wasn’t anger in her face; it was pure fear. A fear that only those who have lived in undemocratic societies can understand – the fear of a government that can do whatever it wants to her children. Though at the time I didn’t have children of my own, I tunneled forward to a moment where I might, and I understood my mother. Angrily, I succumbed. My anger was superficially at my mother—after all, I was an adult and she was not “allowing” me to go “home”—but the true anger was deeper, toward the Cuban regime who was still attempting to rule over my family. I ripped my tickets up, flushed them down the toilet, and closed the door to the island temporarily. Again. 

Until, finally, in my mid-thirties, when I was completing my PhD, I told my mother that I was going to Havana, with or without her blessing—something that was hard for me to do, but I was determined this time, and she could see I wasn’t bluffing. I couldn’t pretend to be a doctor of anything without crossing the threshold between past and present, the invisible wall between the United States and Cuba, between freedom and Communism. 

This time, my mother not only gave me her blessing, but she turned to me and said: “I’m going with you.” My process toward setting foot in Cuba had turned out to be “our” process. As a mother now, I realize her answer was a protective instinct. If something was going to happen to me while I was there, at least she’d be with me. Now at forty-six, with two children, I realize I would have done the same thing. 

This is how we ended up, my mother and I, on a chartered flight to Cuba in the fall of 2014, just weeks before President Obama was to open the communication paths between Cuba and the U.S., which would eventually allow commercial flights to the island from Miami for the first time in over fifty years. But that wasn’t yet the case. The flight we were on required a ton of paperwork and required that my mother renew her Cuban passport. What this meant, also, was that if the government decided to “take her in” on a whim, meaning take her prisoner, they’d try her as a Cuban citizen, which meant her American rights, the rights she had fought so hard to attain, would disappear. This petrified my mother. “They can do whatever they want, they do whatever they want, whenever they want, they can just change the laws on you and you end up in prison,” she told me. 

We were in the air for about an hour before the plane landed in Cuba. Everyone applauded and the Cuban-American woman behind us said: “What a short flight, for how long it took us to get here.” My mom and I looked at each other, clicking profoundly with that truth. It had been fifty years since she set foot on the island; the last time she was here, the regime had called her a worm, gusana, vermin, taking a page from Hitler’s playbook. This time, however, she wasn’t climbing the ladder of a ship toward Spain, but instead, she was descending the stairs on the tarmac of José Martí International Airport, toward the place of her birth. She walked slightly ahead of me, and right there in the path between the plane and the airport door, she broke down crying. Like a bird, she folded inward, her arms shielding her heart. That was the start. 

Once inside the airport, there was a moment where they separated us. It wasn’t like in other places, free places, where the passport check happens in clusters of family. No, the Cuban government was and is still very good at instilling fear. Still good at the Soviet-style checks that remind you where you are. We held our breath, we went through the process, and we reunited on the other side with great relief.

By the time we got to our hotel, I wanted to start the adventure right away, I wanted to explore, hit the streets, but my mom was still frightened. For her, this was removing the bandage from an open wound, which she’d been hiding in plain sight. This place could rip her wound wider or finally help to seal it; provide the scar tissue she needed to heal. We could see the Malecón, the seawall, from our hotel and I told her: let’s go touch it, stand in front of it. She nodded, and we walked, trepidatiously, toward the water. Salt is good for wounds, after all, even when it burns. The waves crashed against the seawall and bathed her in saline cascades. The smell of gasoline and ocean was everywhere. The smell of heat and grass and island. 

The next day, we searched for the last address my mom and grandparents and aunt had lived in before leaving Cuba. I had asked my grandmother for it the day before our trip; she recited it like she’d never left. As my mom and I walked there, I took in my surroundings, stitching together my grandparents’ stories with the steps I was taking, bridging the gap between memory and truth. We were now, my mother and I, walking toward the door that had changed everything—the door the regime’s officials had knocked on, asking for my grandfather, the officials my grandfather had escaped from. It could have gone differently, they could have snatched him, tortured him and killed him. But, instead, he escaped through a window.

My heart started beating quickly and the terror came flooding in as we stood in front of their old apartment building. But also, for my mother, the sense-memory of it all triggered joy too. How happy they’d all once been in this place: home. 

In the stairwell of the building my mother once lived in, she now stood and kept saying: “these are the stairs my parents walked on, up and down, over and over and over, every day, up and down.” The door to the apartment was as far as we got though because there was no one in the actual apartment to let us in, to let us peek into the portal of the past. Somehow, it was enough. Another bit of scar tissue edging over the wound.

On my end, however, it was just the opposite, while something inside my mother was closing, or seemed to be, something in me was splitting open. On one level, I was one degree away from everything, experiencing the world around me, yes, but also filtering it all through my mother’s experience. This remove is precisely what allowed and allows me to write, and what allows me to bridge the experience for others who are even further from it. But, in addition to this, and in contradiction to it, being on the ground in Cuba was also forming a new experience, not a wound, but an opening—an aperture. If the stories my family had always given me were a slow-release capsule, then this was an intravenous ride that had punctured the skin quickly, straight to the vein, connecting with my genetic code. Click.           

After the knock at the door of my mother’s apartment went unanswered, we decided to go in search of my mother’s friend’s house. Perhaps we’d have better luck there.

My mother’s friend had drawn us a picture of the house he too had left behind. He’d also drawn a map with instructions on how to get there. It was a huge house, it seemed, from the drawing – two columns out front, long vertical windows, iron railings. We had a taxi take us, using the map, but when we got there, we couldn’t find any house to match the drawing. There were some open empty lots, other lots with crumbling structures. Two buildings, we were told, crumble in Havana every day, due to neglect. Perhaps our friend’s house had suffered this fate. But we kept looking and soon, all the neighbors were helping us look too. We were going up and down the street, the neighbors asking us questions, all of us trying to figure out which house it was. Everyone, and I mean everyone, on the street got involved. One woman in hair rollers was particularly invested. But to no avail. We just couldn’t find our friend’s house. 

Later, while my mom and I were drinking a mojito at the hotel, I began to think about how our friend had described the house. Two columns out front and where it was exactly on the block, and it suddenly dawned on me: “Mom!” I said, pointing to a photo on my phone, “it’s this one!” It was the very house the taxi had parked closest to, the house we were standing right in front of the whole time.

Our friend’s drawing showed the house as huge, but our friend had left as a small boy, so it probably felt huge to him when he left it behind. The house was as he described it, except it was much smaller, which warped our perception, which is why we didn’t recognize it. Memory had created a different picture, but I had snapped a shot of it because I had wanted to photograph the neighbors searching for the house, looking at our map. Sure enough, when we showed it to our friend he said: “Yes, that’s it! That was my house…Funny, I remember it so much bigger.” 

And so it was that we continued to navigate the city. We went to where my mother was born, baptized, the streets of her Vedado neighborhood, her path to school. We saw the old restaurants my grandparents ate at, where they’d fallen in love, the places they’d bought ice cream for my mother, and the famous Coppelia. This was where they’d built a life, baked bread, learned songs that my grandmother sang to me throughout my childhood. Songs I now sing to my own children, lulling them to sleep in a perfect Cuban songbird Spanish, la pajara pinta.  Everywhere we went, our people welcomed us. It didn’t matter that fifty years had passed for my mother, and that I had never been to Cuba before that trip, this place was already swimming in our bloodstream. And yet, it was and was not home. 

If I had to say where home was on the map, I would have to say inside us, in the very canals of our veins, with us everywhere we went, the place that brought together Havana and Miami. I was both completely changed by that trip and not changed at all. I had known I had to make the pilgrimage, but I also knew that I was still an American Born Cuban, even if I had never gone to Cuba. 

After that trip, I would visit the island three more times. Each time, I scratched the surface of the regime’s façade a little more; each time I got a little closer to the place my mother feared, to the repression the Cuban people live under. There’s a picture the regime paints for tourists, and then there’s the way Cubans live – hungry and afraid. The more you go, the more you know, the more you see beyond the paint. 

The last time I went, I felt as though my life was threatened. I felt I was being shadowed and warned by people that were reporting to the government. I haven’t gone back since. That was 2019. 

I sometimes wonder if I’ll ever see her again. My children mention going because they’ve heard so many stories and my heart skips a beat. They ask me when we’ll go and I say not now, it’s too dangerous. I sound like my mother. Full circle. 

I wonder if the dictatorship will fall and we will all walk freely on her shores again. That feels like a dream, but one we’ve been building. One that my writing has been reaching toward, trying to create a bridge for. 

I am a writer because of Cuba. Cuba is alive for me because someone breathed life into her, told stories about her when a dictatorship had severed her from me. Like a root, you can cut it, but it can re-root with enough water and soil. Stories are the meandering routes that drive us straight to the root.

The closer I get to sharing Cuba’s truth with the world, the closer I get to home.