My Time Among the Whites

by Jennine Capó Crucet

  The news reports surrounding Castro’s official final death showed you loud Cubans parading through the streets. It showed you shots of us hitting pots and pans and making much noise and yelling and crying and honking horns. It gave you familiar rehashed images of old men sipping café out of tiny cups outside Versailles. That was all part of it, yes, almost as if we’d rehearsed these predictable roles, the scripts all but handed to us. But the news didn’t show you the more prevalent scenes: the tearful conversations happening between generations around café con leche that first morning without Fidel, the sun setting on one populist tyrant while rising over the specter of another, this one in the country we now called home. It didn’t show you how, at a dinner with other Miami-based Latinx writers a couple of nights after the Miami Book Fair, we joked that Castro would never die because he is protected by powerful Santería. (The joke was also that reporters would take such a statement from us as fact because of our heritage.) It didn’t show you how we bemoaned the inaccuracies and misinformation perpetuated by American writers and reporters who see Cuba as “material,” how their vague efforts to bring attention to the island and its people are in actuality silencing them, because by telling their version of Cuba—a version white American audiences are receptive toward because the messenger often looks and sounds like them—they are replacing the island’s true voices with their own. Those conversations weren’t sexy and didn’t involve us banging on pots and pans. Those conversations didn’t make for good sound bites. Those conversations—like many of our current ones, which these days are more often than not triggered by our dictator-in-the-making’s deranged tweets, a form that literally limits character count and thus traffics in sound bites—are hard to have, and so they have an equally hard time finding their way into the immediate coverage of the aftermaths of events. Plus, it doesn’t sell papers, it doesn’t get clicks, and those of us who want to write these harder, thornier responses are told by those in charge that there isn’t room for nuance. From one night to the next, we learned that the dictator who’d served as a symbol of oppression our entire lives was finally gone. How do you sum up what this change might come to mean for a whole nation in a sound bite? The news cycle had long moved on by the time the new reality of this shift and all its complexities had sunk in.

  Many of us out on the streets the night Castro died and the morning after were there as symbols, too. We were there as witnesses, as bearers of memory. Many of us were out because we had family that couldn’t be there—mothers, abuelos, cousins who died at the hands of the Castro regime or who haven’t been allowed to leave. We were there to comfort each other and to honor the sacrifices these family members made. The morning after Castro died, in the house in Westchester, I awoke to stories I’d heard a thousand times being told with more verve and energy than they’d been told in a long while. We were calling each other around the city and the country and saying, “I am thinking of you.” I wondered what it would be like for my niece to grow up with Castro dead; she would only have his specter tugging at her sense of Cubanidad. She would never know him as a living, breathing force. What would she come to think of him, what would she be taught, and what would she ignore? When I look to history, it seems that whatever legacy Castro might hold for my niece will almost certainly be overshadowed by the inevitable legacy made by the man elected president the week before she was born an American.

  I cannot speak for every Cuban or Cuban American and have never embraced the chance to do so. I can only tell you my reaction when I heard the news about Castro. I was already asleep when my partner, who is also Cuban, woke me up and after he told me that Fidel Castro was dead, before I was even fully awake, my eyes still closed, the first thing I said was, “That’s impossible, he’ll never die.” My reaction came not from a place of rational thought, but instead was grounded in a trained complacency regarding the state of Cuban politics: The rhetoric in the United States surrounding the country of my parents’ birth was essentially always the same, and it had trained me from a young age to expect nothing, not even the most inevitable thing—Castro’s death—even as we hoped its occurrence could someday bring about real change in our relations with the island. I just didn’t believe, deep in my half-asleep heart, that he could die. Our collective half-asleep heart is the same place from which sprang the confidence many other Americans felt that Donald Trump would never be president. No need to worry, my friends living on the coasts told me before the primaries, he’s not a real threat. Even the weekend before the election, sitting in an Indianapolis hotel lounge eating free appetizers with a friend who works in New York publishing and who’d flown out for the same conference—even then, when I told him we should prepare for the worst, he insisted there was nothing to worry about, that I was being alarmist. He was phenomenally confident. He ordered another drink.

  We came in from the airport at different times, but we’d passed the same messages on the same billboards: THIS IS TRUMP COUNTRY!

  The message was huge and unmissable from the freeway. It was extremely red. It instantly reminded me of the propaganda all over Cuba that I’ve only seen in photos: murals of a dictator that were designed to convince citizens that the coming regime was an inevitability. Murals that still stand as proof of how the fabric of any nation can be disastrously altered.

  But it’s just a billboard, my friend seemed to be telling me, already ignoring its meaning. It’s not like it’s a sign.

  III.

  When it comes to ignoring legitimate warnings, no one is better at it than the born-and-raised residents of Miami-Dade County when faced with the threat of a hurricane—one of several natural disasters we’ll be seeing more and more of in the decades to come, whether we believe the signs or not.

  My personal litmus test for whether or not someone is a legit Miamian is based almost entirely on their response to a hurricane warning. If they evacuate any sooner than when the water is waist deep, Miami might be where they live, but it’s not where they’re from. Sincere and complete disbelief in a hurricane’s ability to hit your neighborhood is as Miami as getting your cafecito and croquetas from a ventanita: The former is a state of mind that can’t be appropriated the way the latter has, because we are raised not to take a storm’s threat seriously. I have fallen for and perpetuated the hype that when it comes to hurricanes, we are as invincible as Fidel once seemed. It’ll turn at the last minute, there’s no reason to cancel school, this is just a way for supermarkets to make money—all things I’ve heard and even said, waiting for hurricanes in Miami.

  We wait to put up the shutters until the last minute because it’s a pain to take them off later once the storm makes that last-minute turn away from us, so we don’t take them off—not all of them—and that means one room in the house will be dark for weeks, maybe months. We watch from our still-electrified homes as the storm instead devastates the countries our families are from and maybe still live in, our batteries and bottles of water all suddenly in the wrong place. We wonder how much warning they had, if somehow the condition of being warned—even when ignored—is in any way the key to avoiding disaster, as if the National Hurricane Center were casting protective spells instead of predicting possible storm paths. The bigger the warning, the more powerful the privileges behind it, the more powerful the forcefield, and so the more radical the inevitable turn the storm takes away from us. In our faulty memories, it happens that way every time.

  Hurricane Andrew did not turn. Our shutters went up at the last minute, my father putting them on only after having done the same at the houses of both sets of grandparents. None of us evacuated because no one told us we needed to evacuate. We wouldn’t have anyway. My parents’ pride in our home meant they would go down with it. They didn’t want to ride out the storm in the closest shelter—the local middle school—because really, how bad could it be? It’s just rain and wind. We had plastic jugs of water. We’d filled up the bathtub, put the freezer on the highest setting. We were extra prepared—my dad was an electrici
an and so we even had a portable generator.

  We spent the whole storm huddled in our bathroom, hearing branches and carports snap and tumble outside, hearing thunder but not seeing any lightning flashes because of the shutters. Rain so hard it didn’t sound like rain, but like someone continuously raking something metal—I imagined the bottom of a giant bucket—against the roof. I remember darkness and my mother trying to convince my father not to go outside to see what was happening. I don’t remember if he did or not. After, I remember the mess, the way every leaf and palm frond for miles plastered the streets and driveways. I remember how the cleaning and repairing felt impossible and like it would last forever. We didn’t know where to start, but it almost didn’t matter, as long as we started somewhere.

  We were north of the worst damage from that storm. Two weeks after the academic year was supposed to have started, I walked into middle school for the first time to find our classes overcrowded with kids from “down south,” as we said, kids from maybe fifteen miles away, their own schools completely destroyed so they’d been reassigned to ours for the whole year while theirs got rebuilt. These kids hated us and our teachers and our still-standing school buildings, so we hated them back. We were all too young to understand the magnitude of what had been lost, so we took it out on each other. We fought over who did or didn’t belong there instead of moving in the same general direction toward healing. This was how we started sixth grade.

  In Miami-Dade County, building codes were strengthened after entire communities were literally blown away by Hurricane Andrew. We learned good lessons too late. Shutters remained up and rooms in our houses stayed dark as penance. Some of the lessons stuck: The house my sister bought came with impact windows rated up to 150 mph winds. But when a coming storm’s winds reportedly exceed that limit, she still doesn’t put up shutters. She banks on the storm losing strength as it approaches, a real Miami move. For Hurricane Irma in September 2017—the first storm she’d weather in that house—she didn’t evacuate, despite her home being in a recommended evacuation zone and despite having my niece, who was by then ten months old. She didn’t go to my parents’ house either; they are farther inland, but she told me she didn’t want to ride out Irma there because their house would be dark from the shutters they’d likely put up at the last minute. She wanted to see for herself what was coming.

  I watched from across the country as Irma strengthened. I read tweets from the National Hurricane Center saying that the storm’s size and strength left them utterly speechless. New trajectories showed that it didn’t matter which way the storm turned, it would no doubt hit them. I lost my Miami-born-and-bred resolve and sent frantic texts to my sister saying she should reconsider her choice not to evacuate. She assured me that she and her husband were prepared, she just needed to pick up baby yogurt and steak. The year before, I’d missed her baby shower in October when the threat of a hurricane headed to Florida canceled my connecting flight into Miami. My family thought I should’ve gone for it, that the worst-case scenario was that I’d have to turn back in Atlanta. “No,” I told them when I broke the news I wouldn’t make it, “the worst-case scenario is that I get stuck in Miami as a hurricane hits and I can’t get back to Nebraska, where I actually live now.” This scenario didn’t register for them as a possibility. They said, “You know it’s gonna turn like it always does.” In that case, they were right, and they’re still annoyed I missed the baby shower, that I didn’t make the airline fly me toward the storm. That I let my practicality and realism influence my choices.

  In the days before Irma made landfall, I was giving a talk at a liberal arts college in Washington State, the entire campus cloaked in thick smoke from raging wildfires—another disaster. Local authorities asked that we avoid going outside, as the air was hazardous. I went outside anyway, because it was time for the campus tour my hosts had planned for me. I wasn’t taking the threat seriously; I’m just like my sister.

  Hurricane Irma did not turn. And so It’s not really coming morphed into It’s not going to be that bad. In eastern Washington, within hours of landing, I turned off the storm coverage on my hotel’s TV and went to a rally in support of DACA (Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals), the reality of its end still sitting like a glacier inside me; then Attorney General Jeff Sessions had announced the Trump regime’s repeal of DACA the day before. Some rally attendees wore face masks or bandanas over their noses and mouths to protect them from the smoke. I had no such protection, didn’t think it was that bad to warrant the search for any. On the walk there, I texted my sister to start driving to Nebraska, that they could still make it with plenty of time, that I had an awesome basement, so she should bring our mom and dad, too. “Relax, don’t give in to panic,” she wrote back twenty minutes later. Why does the worst have to happen for us to believe it could happen at all? I thought of those Indiana billboards announcing the kind of country we now live in. How big do the signs have to be before we take the warnings seriously? How many years do the murals have to be up before we can see them anew as symbols for what has already been lost? How long before we realize that our own inaction—our own complacency, our own silence—is at the root of every disaster we watch unfold? These questions are no longer rhetorical. Our answers depend on how immediate the threat to our survival feels, and for many of us, the immediacy of that threat has already mobilized us toward revolutionary action. And then there are those of us who can keep ignoring the signs, for now. Right up until we take our next breath and realize just how long we’ve been inhaling the ash along with the air.

  * * *

  The smoke in Washington State was there for a while; they get less rain than they used to. It’s hotter, too—good for the wine industry, I was told on the tour. A silver lining, the guide said, it’s getting too hot for grapes in California now. I hear in that forecast a different version of It’s not going to be that bad. At least it’s an acknowledgment of our new not-normal, this era brought on by our very denial that the storms were on their way. The very least we can do now is accept that the disaster is here, but the fastest way to guarantee our peril is to do nothing in the face of it. No matter how dark it leaves the house, it’s time to put up the shutters. Take a deep breath and notice what you taste; no matter how uncomfortable it feels, it’s time to put on the face masks. In fact, it’s already too late.

  III

  RESISTANCE IN ACTION

  EASE OF EXIT

  My parents threw me a surprise party when I graduated from college. As the first person in my family to do so, it was in many ways a party for all of us, which is why they rented out a banquet hall—the same one in which several friends and cousins had held their quinceañeras years earlier. (Not me, though, as I didn’t have a quinceañera, which I suspect is partly why my parents threw me such an elaborate college graduation party.) They’d told me we were headed to a baby shower for a different cousin, this one a year older than me and recently married. They’d even made a fake invitation for the fake event, had tacked it up to the fridge for me to find.

  In a move reminiscent of Sesame Street’s “This Is Your Life” segment (the one hosted by a Muppet named Guy Smiley), my parents had packed Las Delicias Banquet Hall in Hialeah with everyone they felt had played a key part in me arriving at that moment, whether I knew them or not. Shortly after everyone yelled “Surprise!” my dad took the microphone and started the festivities by introducing one of the few white American families there.

  “Do you recognize these people?” he asked, pointing to them.

  I did not.

  “Those are the people who sold us our house. Because we lived in that house, you went to the schools you went to, had the teachers you had, everything. We would not be standing here today had they never sold us the house.”

  The family waved from their table.

  This sentiment, that a house is so much more than a house, that a house creates your destiny, shapes your fate, has played out in various ways throughout my life. My parents sti
ll live in that house even though my sister and I have long since moved out. When my dad paid it off while I was in high school, he celebrated by burning various mortgage-related documents over a charcoal grill in the backyard. He made us all come outside to watch. Within no time, he would decide to borrow against the house in order to help me pay for college.

  While I was married, I saved for a house, the word house being synonymous with future, with family. Marriage plopped me into a comforting, recognizable narrative: You save for a wedding, you have the wedding; you save for a house, you buy the house; you save for a baby, etc. For the first time in my life, I felt like I knew what I was supposed to be doing, and everyone around me seemed to be on board. But when I finally bought a house—in Tallahassee, Florida, the closing coming a month shy of my thirtieth birthday—my dad made an ominous pronouncement: “You guys aren’t house people. You are condo people.” I took this as an insult; he was saying we weren’t the kind of couple who liked to work on things. Now I understand his judgment as an indictment of a marriage that he sensed was destined to fail.

  The house in Tallahassee came with a cautionary tale. I bought it from a lawyer who’d been gifted the house as a wedding present from his parents, who just so happened to live in the much bigger house next door. For reasons that were never made clear but about which the town’s real estate agents loved to speculate, the house had been on the market for more than a year, the rumor being that the seller’s father (also a lawyer, powerful and well known in the community, famous in part for being fired by Ted Bundy) had put out a warning that no one should buy it. I was moving there from Los Angeles; his warning hadn’t made it that far.