Personal Narrative: The Cuban In Miami

Miami, FL is a place that has to be felt rather than seen or heard—and by that I mean observed beyond all senses, with mind, body, heart, and soul. I’ve been entrenched in it my whole life, a little Cuban princesita not so different from all the rest, but it’s only as I’ve gotten older that I’ve fully felt like a part of a community, a culture. I feel it when I talk, casually, to the elderly cashier at my neighborhood grocery store, a familiar combination of Spanish, English, and what many call cubanismos, phrases with meanings that simply will not tolerate literal translations, spilling forth. I feel it while seated at a table of no fewer than four relatives on any given evening, judging the quality of a restaurant on the quality of their flan de caramelo or their café. I feel it, too, in the colorful songs of Ernesto Lecuona and the ardent verses of José Marti, but most of all in the anecdotes of my grandparents and great aunt, the nostalgia of long-settled immigrants, echoes of sorrow, shared over dominoes and rice and beans and coladas of espresso.
Besides favorable immigration policies and my being an American citizen from birth, I belong and my belonging has never been in question. However, my culture is far from perfect and inclusive: it is not inherently beautiful or remotely superior to anyone else’s, it tends to disappoint me when it touches on things I am passionate about, and it has surrounded me so completely for my whole life that I can scarcely imagine what life is like without it, a scary prospect considering the precipitous place between one life and the next that I now