BRIDGES - TO/FROM - CUBA

Lifting the Emotional Embargo

Blog

It has seemed to us that, when discussing Cuba and Cubans, the more subtle and poetic voices of those who have been experiencing the island for a lifetime—loving, grieving, and dreaming in Cuban—tend to be shut out. Noticeably absent are the real lives and complex emotional histories of thousands of Cuban-Americans and Cubans across the globe, including those on the island.

In response to this absence, we have joined our minds and hearts to create this blog as a forum for sharing and cataloging those real-life stories across the spectrum of race, geography, generation, class, religion, ethnicity, and gender of Cubans everywhere. Engaging the power of storytelling, the blog’s purpose is to build bridges that connect Cubans everywhere and lift the emotional embargo among us all, as we move forward together with our apprehensions and hopes, questions and convictions, doubts and dreams, into a new era of US-Cuban relations and the Cuba of tomorrow.

Featuring a wide range of contributors, the blog provides a place for poets, authors, artists, and scholars to share stories that lay bare the laughter and sorrow of being Cuban. Stories conveyed through personal narratives, poems, photo essays, interviews, surveys, and analyses. Stories that aren’t afraid to speak from an emotional register that breaks the heart and tries to heal it too. Stories that sooth and illuminate, as well as provoke and challenge perceptions, gradually building to a crescendo of voices that speak with passion, urgency, and unforgettable presence.

Throughout our 25-year friendship, we have written obsessively about the search for home and longing to keep Cuban roots alive through memory, literature, and cultural heritage, while also engaging with the unfolding realities of the island. Back in the early 1990s, as a way of healing the psychic wounds brought about by ideological divisions between Cubans who stayed on the island and Cubans who left, Ruth conceived of the idea of Bridges to Cuba/Puentes a Cuba, an anthology of voices that remains a landmark publication to this day. Edited by Ruth, it brought together, for the first time in English, many voices of Cubans of the second generation, both on the island and in the diaspora. Bridges to Cuba/Puentes a Cuba, opened a window onto the meaning of nationality, transnationalism, and homeland at the time, and created a space for reconciliation, imaginative speculation, and renewal.

Now, almost thirty years later, this blog brings together Ruth’s notion of “bridges to Cuba” with Richard’s notion of the “emotional embargo.” For it is not simply a political and economic embargo that needs to be “lifted,” but also the weight of an emotional embargo that has kept Cubans collectively holding their breath for over sixty years. As poet and author, Richard has dedicated his life’s work to understanding that embargo, dealing with matters of the heart and spirit that policies and politics don’t really address. Namely, those stories sprung from a deep well of thought and feeling that need to be told in order to emotionally reconcile the diaspora of our various Cuban identities and claims as we move toward the post-embargo world of tomorrow.

From Cuba-Rican to Cuban American

From Cuba-Rican to Cuban American

As summer starts to fade away, we are delighted to feature an essay on our blog by the distinguished scholar Jorge Duany, who writes eloquently about the shift in his identity from Cuba-Rican to Cuban-American. After leaving Cuba as a child, Jorge grew up first in...

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Nana Cooks

Nana Cooks

On our blog this month of June, we thought we’d offer something a little different and share with you a video created by Gabriel Frye-Behar, honoring his abuelita’s cooking. Entitled “Nana Cooks,” this will be a series of teaching videos with Rebeca Behar showing her...

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Martirio

Martirio

For Cuban-Americans, visits to Cuba can be especially complex experiences. We’re elated by the company of family, yet feel clandestine. We feel at home, yet estranged at times. We’re natives, yet tourists. We want to enjoy every bit of music, food, and culture Cuba...

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Can’t Hear You

Can’t Hear You

This month we are thrilled to feature the writing of Ana Menéndez, who made her debut as a writer in 2002 with In Cuba I Was a German Shepherd, a collection of poignant stories of Cuban-American loss and longing. The title story from that book, filled with its sad...

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A Busking Dog, in Training: The New Cuba

A Busking Dog, in Training: The New Cuba

Observers of Cuba have noticed there’s a “new Cuba” rapidly taking form. In Havana, which is the primary destination of most American tourists, reservations are required at iconically chic restaurants like La Guarida, and American hipsters are omnipresent on the...

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Taking My Cousin’s Photo at the Statue of Liberty

Taking My Cousin’s Photo at the Statue of Liberty

The new year has begun with the struggle to support the rights of immigrants and refugees in the United States. At such a moment, we thought Richard's poem to his cousin, written when she recently arrived in the United States, would be good reading for all who seek to...

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The Atlas of My Memory

The Atlas of My Memory

Born in Havana into a Sephardic Jewish family and raised in the small town of Lakeland, Florida, Elisa Albo’s story is quite unique. In this month’s piece, she looks at the many layers and questions that shape individual identity. Tracing three generations, she...

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The Magic Realism of Memory

The Magic Realism of Memory

Since last month’s post we’ve witnessed the election of Donald Trump and the death of Fidel Castro. In contrast to these swaggering male figures, this month Margarita Engle shares with us her passion and motivation for writing about history's unsung heroes and...

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Amapola: una memoria cubana

Amapola: una memoria cubana

It is truly an honor to feature Eliana Rivero's piece as our October post as we move into autumn, a season of change. Eliana is an intellectual pioneer in the field of Cuban literature. Living in Arizona, far from the Miami exile enclave, she had to rethink what it...

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The Repeating Cuban

The Repeating Cuban

There are many different kinds of figurative “bridges” that connect us with Cuba. For some, going to Cuba means fully returning to a whole life they once lived on the island, a kind of time-travel. For those who perhaps lived only part of their childhood in Cuba and...

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Ruth Behar, author and creator of Bridges to Cuba
Richard Blanco, poet and creator of Bridges to Cuba
Macondo: A Homeland for Writers

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