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.