El Norte

by Carrie Gibson

  THE FIRST TWO decades of the twenty-first century have also been eventful for Cubans and Puerto Ricans. Relations between the United States and Cuba were rocky throughout the 2000s, starting with the fight over Elián González. In November 1999, the five-year-old boy was found floating in an inner tube off the coast of Florida. His mother and others who had tried to leave Cuba on a raft had drowned. He was turned over to relatives in Miami, but the Cuban government requested that the boy be taken back to Cuba where his father lived. The Immigration and Naturalization Services ruled that his father be given custody of the boy. This decision was met by protests and lawsuits, and by January 2000 it had been turned over to the attorney general, Janet Reno, all the while growing into a national issue.

  Elián’s father, Juan Miguel González, arrived in the United States that April, but the boy’s Miami family continued to fight in the courts. The situation reached a climax on the morning of April 22 when federal agents burst into the home of his relatives in Miami and seized the boy. A photographer captured the moment when an armed INS agent holding a machine gun in his right arm reached out with his left to grab the terrified boy being hidden by one of his relatives in a closet. The shocking and dramatic image was transmitted around the world. The boy was taken back to Cuba—though not before another two months of lawsuits and paperwork—and greeted as a hero. He has lived on the island ever since. The episode was another low point in the relationship between the United States and Cuba, but in 2014 entirely new prospects appeared on the horizon.

  That December the Obama administration announced its plans to normalize relations with Cuba, a deal agreed on with the Cuban president Raúl Castro and brokered by Pope Francis. There would be a release of political prisoners and a loosening of U.S. restrictions on travel and banking transactions, allowing more tourists and more money into the island. However, a total end to the embargo would require a vote from Congress. Within a few months, rumors began to circulate within Cuba that Cubans would soon lose their privileged immigration status enshrined in the Cuban Adjustment Act, leading thousands to rush to reach the United States. Some Cubans with the money to leave by air were flying to Ecuador, which did not require a visa for them to enter, and then traveling by land through Central America to cross on foot at the Mexican border, hoping to get into the United States under the “dry foot” proviso of the existing legislation. In the last three months of 2015, around 12,100 Cubans entered via Texas border crossings alone, and a total of 43,159 arrived via all ports of entry in the whole year.68 Indeed, as feared, before he left office in January 2017, President Obama announced the end of “wet foot, dry foot,” as part of the normalization of relations. This left thousands of Cubans who were trying to get into the United States overland stranded at the border or elsewhere in Latin America.

  This was followed by Trump’s rolling back the Obama deal by the summer of 2017 and bringing back restrictions on travel and some trade, on the basis that the United States had a bad deal with Cuba and political reform there had not gone far enough. Some in the Cuban-American community think no relationship between the two nations should exist while Cuba remains communist. However, with Raúl Castro handing over the presidency to Miguel Díaz-Canel in April 2018, coupled with the death of Fidel in November 2016, the island has entered a post-Castro age, at least officially, though it remains unclear what it will take for the two nations to rekindle their relations.

  PUERTO RICO HAS also had a rough ride with the United States in recent decades, suffering a debt crisis; mass depopulation; and Maria, a devastating category 4 hurricane that slammed into the island in September 2017.

  At the root of the financial problems was Section 936, an exemption status created by the U.S. government in 1976 that allowed U.S. companies to operate in Puerto Rico tax-free. Pharmaceutical companies were among the firms that moved in, and economic growth followed, with some one hundred thousand people working in the pharmaceutical sector by the 1990s.69 Firms like Johnson & Johnson were estimated to have saved $1 billion in taxes between 1980 and 1990, while also providing the island with jobs.70 However, Congress decided that such a large corporate welfare scheme was too costly and in 1996 resolved to phase out Section 936 over the following decade. By 2006, much of the industry had departed along with it. The island scrambled to create a loophole that would persuade some businesses to stay, which took the form of allowing U.S. firms to create subsidiaries that would not pay tax on their revenue, so long as the money was held offshore.71

  To compound these problems, a debt crisis began to form in 2012. This would inflict more damage on Puerto Rico’s already fragile economy; by 2014, credit rating agencies had downgraded the island’s debt to junk status.72 Part of the reason Puerto Rico found itself in this mess is that its bonds are “triple-exempt,” meaning bondholders do not pay city, island, or federal tax on the interest; this made them a popular investment. When the economy faltered after 2006, the island government continued to issue bonds to cover budget shortfalls, and when those bonds—which were considered “safe” investments for many Puerto Ricans and their pension funds—were downgraded, hedge funds swooped in to provide loans to the indebted island, worsening its plight.

  Because of its commonwealth status, the island is not allowed to declare bankruptcy, unlike a U.S. state. As of 2017, Puerto Rico had $123 billion in debt and no way to pay it, lurching toward a default. One article in the New York Times in August 2016 branded it a “failed state” within the United States.73 The U.S. government established a seven-member “federal control board,” under the Puerto Rico Oversight, Management, and Economic Stability Act (PROMESA) passed in 2016 to restructure the island’s finances. In May 2017, Puerto Rico went to federal court to attempt to obtain some bankruptcy relief, as the lawsuits from creditors continued to mount.74

  Referendums on the island’s status continued to point in different directions. A plebiscite in 1993 gave a narrow victory, at 48.6 percent, to continuing as an Estado Libre Asociado (Commonwealth), while statehood garnered a close 46.3 percent.75 Another, in 1998, had a more complicated result. It offered: territorial free associated state (commonwealth status), free association, statehood, independence, or “none of the above,” and angry voters gave that last option 50.3 percent of the vote, with statehood gaining 46.5 percent. The next vote, in 2012, came in two parts. The first asked if the island should continue with the existing commonwealth status, to which 970,910 voters, or around 54 percent, said “no.” Voters were then asked a second question on the future options: statehood, “sovereign free association,” or independence. Statehood won, supported by more than 61 percent of people who cast a vote on the second question.

  In the 2016 elections, the pro-statehood politician Ricardo Rosselló, of the New Progressive Party, won the governorship of the island. He took office in the face of a population crisis: the island had lost about 9 percent of its residents since 2000, around 334,000 people, with three-quarters of that exodus taking place after 2010.76 Instead of New York, Florida, especially the Orlando area, has become home for many of these people, pushing the Puerto Rican population in the state past the one million mark.77 Rosselló held another plebiscite on the island’s status in June 2017; the results came back with 97 percent (518,199 votes) in favor of statehood, though turnout was only 23 percent, compared with the usual 60 to 70 percent, in part because of a boycott by the other parties.78

  Then, a few months later, the island was thrown into chaos by the 150-mile-per-hour winds of Hurricane María, which made landfall on September 20. The island lost all power, homes were destroyed, crops were wiped out. Official figures claim 64 people were killed, but an investigation by the New York Times calculated the number to be around 1,052, in part because people died after the storm owing to factors like the lack of electricity and the scarcity of medical provisions.79

  The Trump administration was criticized by many—including people on the island—for being too slow in its response. The image of inefficiency wa
s compounded by a picture of Trump tossing rolls of paper towels to people at a shelter in San Juan when he made a visit to see the devastation in early October 2017. Puerto Rico also found its initial relief efforts hamstrung by the Jones Act of 1920, which required that trade between all U.S. ports had to be in ships built, owned, and operated by Americans, a legislative hangover from a time when the country wanted to encourage shipbuilding. The law stayed on the books and disproportionally affected Puerto Rico compared with other U.S. ports. In the aftermath of the hurricane, it was temporarily waived to allow shipments of food, water, medicine, and other supplies to arrive.

  As the relief effort got under way, it emerged that only around 54 percent of people in the United States even realized Puerto Rico was a U.S. colony and that its 3.4 million people are U.S. citizens, which made the disaster a domestic, not a foreign, one.80 In the aftermath of the storm, thousands of Puerto Ricans used their citizenship to move to, or at least take respite in, the mainland United States. Many observers now expect the fall in the island’s population that was already under way to accelerate.

  Months after the event, Puerto Rico continued to suffer blackouts, with just under half of the island without electricity and its infrastructure still deeply damaged. However, in December 2017, lawmakers decided to allow a further financial blow to the island with a Republican tax plan that would bring to an end breaks for U.S. subsidiaries remaining there. The new rules would force any U.S. subsidiary to be treated like a foreign company, and so be subject to paying tax on any income generated from offshore assets, compounding the island’s problems.81

  Puerto Rico may be facing its biggest test since the combination of the 1898 Spanish-American War and the 1899 San Ciriaco hurricane, and it will take years for the island to recover. There are no signs in Washington of any interest in extending statehood to the island, and so it will struggle on as a territory, trying to rebuild its devastated infrastructure and solve its debt crisis.

  THE LEGACY OF the Hispanic past has made itself felt in the troubled present. As the United States grapples with immigration, NAFTA, relations with Cuba, and the reconstruction of Puerto Rico, uncertainty hangs in the air for everyone involved. Time pushes forward, though, and down on the border, on the U.S. side of the existing wall, cell phone users receive texts saying, “Welcome to MEXICO.” It is a useful reminder that borders remain elusive, and even if they can be drawn on a map, they are changeable. Controlling the fickle waters of the Río Grande proved tricky in the past, but changes in engineering reined it in; likewise, mobile phones and the internet now make it easier to bridge divides, connecting people whether or not they physically cross.

  It is the imagined walls or boundaries that are more difficult to traverse. The U.S. border will always loom large in the public imagination as long as it remains a symbol of a United States that wants to distance itself from its neighbors. More than that, beyond the wall is the zone of the other, the boundary of the unknown, the place of lawlessness so enshrined by lore and Hollywood legend. Perhaps that is the reason that one of the few films to capture the nuance and complexity of this tangled relationship is set in a border town. John Sayles’s Lone Star (1996) allows family secrets to overlap with local history. While he is trying to solve a murder, Sam Deeds, the sheriff of fictional Frontera, Texas, rekindles his romance with his former high school girlfriend, Pilar, now a history teacher in the town. Deeds later discovers that his father had a long-running affair with Pilar’s mother, Mercedes Cruz, a Mexican businesswoman. Throughout the film, Cruz claims she is “Spanish” and laments the arrival of undocumented immigrants from the other side of the border who don’t speak English, but whom she hires to work in her restaurant.

  Decades earlier, both parents—their affair then unknown—had been opposed to Deeds and Pilar’s dating when they were teenagers. The final scene reveals why: Deeds and Pilar were half siblings, sharing, as it transpires, the same father. Deeds and Cruz decide to continue their relationship anyway. Pilar says, “All that other stuff, all that history—the hell with it, right?” She continues, in the final line of the film: “Forget the Alamo.”

  Epilogue

  Dalton, Georgia, 2014

  I RETURNED TO MY old high school in October 2014 for my twentieth class reunion. The parking lot of Dalton High was full of new Mustang and classic Mercedes convertibles festooned with ribbons and balloons, under a clear blue sky and late-autumn Georgia sun. These chariots awaited the homecoming princesses, who would soon be waving to onlookers. A veritable tradition by the standards of such a young nation.

  Sometimes a visit to an old school can render it smaller than it loomed in a youthful imagination, but this time it was far bigger. The school had doubled in size, from fewer than 1,000 students when I was there to 1,875. Some of the same lockers still lined the hallways; the gym, the indoor pool, the athletics track, and the off-site football field had all changed little in twenty years—logos and references to the mascot of the school team, the Catamounts, were dotted around the building as they had always been before football games—but the main building included a large new wing, with more classrooms and lecture halls. The classroom where I studied Georgia history was now a room for Junior ROTC cadets. The school gave, as good ones always do give, a sense of continuity and progress. The biggest change is that the student body is now 69 percent Hispanic. Around 80 percent receive free or reduced-cost lunches, indicating that many students are from low-income families, and around 17 percent are English-language learners, meaning they are not yet proficient in English.

  The town became caught up in larger national events in 2014 when undocumented Central American minors began flocking to the U.S. border, and some of them were sent to Dalton, where they had family connections. The result was the Newcomer Academy, a small school designed to help them. Beth Jordan is a teacher of English-learners in Dalton and also a graduate of the high school, and she remembers the influx from 2014. “That was a crazy situation for us. At one point I had sixty-something students in my class. I put thirty in one room and thirty in another and just ran back and forth.” The school hired more staff to deal with the students, many of whom “had never been to school. They couldn’t read—they didn’t know their letters, their colors, their numbers.”1

  Jordan said the school district has about 150 English-learners at the high school level. Most of them are Hispanic, although some are from countries such as China. The Hispanic children come from Mexico, as well as Honduras, Guatemala, El Salvador, and even Cuba and Puerto Rico. “We’re a border city,” Jordan said, remarking that Dalton schools have more in common with those in Texas or Arizona than with other schools in Georgia.

  Jennifer Phinney, another Dalton High School graduate, is now a director of school support for Dalton Public Schools. “I graduated in 1986 and then I started teaching there in 1991 and it was very much the same high school I had left … it was very white and very privileged,” she said. Then, in the late 1990s, the change was sudden. “In three years [1996–1999] we went to 50 percent Hispanic. It was a very rapid shift.”2

  A local lawyer and former U.S. Congressman, Erwin Mitchell, set up an exchange program in 1997, with the support of Shaw Industries, one of Dalton’s major employers. The Georgia Project sent teachers from Dalton to the University of Monterrey, in Mexico, and vice versa for a decade.3 It helped the two groups of teachers to learn and understand more about each other, and prepared the town’s education facilities for the changes ahead.

  Dalton has maintained a population of around 33,000, but now about half the town is Hispanic, an explosive growth since 1990, when the Hispanic population was only 1,400.4 In the whole of Whitfield County, Georgia, the Hispanic population went from 2,321 out of a total of 72,462 in 1990 to 34,518 out of 103,542 people in 2014, a rise from 3 percent of the county’s population to 33 percent.5

  Not everyone works in the carpet industry that has long dominated the town’s economy; some people are seasonal agricultural workers, pi
cking apple crops in nearby Ellijay, for instance. As families have taken root and prospered, many have moved into white-collar jobs; indeed some of the Hispanic pupils who arrived in the late 1990s are now teachers in the Dalton school system.

  Immigrants from Guatemala and other Central American countries have joined the mix, and their arrival has brought a unique set of challenges for Esther Familia-Cabrera, a Puerto Rican who moved from New York City in 2010 to help Dalton coordinate community health care workers, known as promotoras de salud. She has a passion for the job, which, while similar to what she was doing in New York, has its unique aspects. “Language is a huge barrier,” she said. Many of the recent immigrants are from rural areas, not cities, and speak only indigenous languages.

  Many of the Hispanic people in Dalton and the region are also undocumented immigrants, so Familia-Cabrera and her staff have to find ways to reach these “invisibles,” as she calls them.6 Here, Dalton faces challenges similar to those of much larger cities. The biggest challenge is integration: “They feel segregated and they feel ‘Why should I adapt, if I don’t belong here, I’m not accepted here? I’m going back to Mexico at some point because I’m never going to be American.’” The second generation is stuck between the two worlds, she feels, with young people being told, “You’re not Mexican enough” by their families and, “You’re too Mexican—you need to be more American” by the outside world.

  LUIS VIAMONTE, A physician in Dalton, was born into a family of doctors in Cuba but left when he was seventeen, in 1961, as part of Operation Peter Pan, which ended the following October. “The story in Cuba was, in 1960, that they [the revolutionaries] were going to take the children away from the parents and educate them. And they had started that,” he recalled. “The other rumor was that at the age of eighteen I was going to have to serve in Castro’s military. Most of my friends were leaving. I only had four friends left in the class.” Soon he was on his way to Miami, where an aunt and uncle lived. “They [the Cuban government] allowed you $5,” he said. “So I got $5 and one suitcase, one blanket, one pair of shoes, and one change of clothes.” From there, Viamonte, like many Cubans, waited to return to the island but soon realized he would not be going back. He followed the family tradition and studied medicine at Emory University in Atlanta, where he met his wife. After stints in Dallas and San Diego, they moved to Georgia, where they have lived since the 1970s. He said that his patients, and most people in Dalton, have little or no idea of his connection to Cuba. In fact, for a long time he accepted, and even encouraged, the mispronunciation of his own name, the more Southern Lew-is. “I have an accent but they think it’s some kind of weird Southern accent,” he said. “I’m amazed how many out there have no idea I was born in Cuba.”