Missive #20: The meaning of "home"

Playing dominó under the streetlights on a Friday night

The moon is up, and there is still daylight, and I don’t know what that means except that it is the same moon that everyone in the world sees, no matter where on Earth we happen to be.

That has always been a comforting thought to me when I have been living for a long time far away from “home.”

Home may be where the heart is or where one’s treasure lies, but what about when the heart and home and treasure are still distant from one another? Does that mean that I am in the wrong place at the wrong time? I think it means just that: that my heart and my treasure and my home are separated from one another right now, but I know that I am in the right place at exactly the right time.

At the Centro Nautico boarding school

It’s been a while since I’ve written anything to post on the blog, for several reasons. First, because I’ve spent most of my writing time working on translations or sending e-mail to individuals, mostly family members. Another reason is that I have begun to question whether my time is better spent writing and talking, or reading and listening. I usually overdo the former in direct detriment to the latter. The last time I felt like this, it was because I was overwhelmed by so many new sights and sounds and thoughts, and it was too hard to get everything down in writing. This time, I am feeling differently.

A Matanzas bay fisherman

This time, my periods of relative “silence” are due to a combination of facts and feelings: the fact that I am entering the final trimester of my teaching sabbatical, coupled with the feeling that I am nearing the end of my stay in Cuba. Preparations for leaving have already begun, including the purchase of my return flight from Havana to Miami. When I pass by the stores on the Calle del Medio, it is no longer with the thought of what I need to purchase, but rather with the reminder that I need to assign nearly each article I’ve brought from the U.S., or bought or acquired to leave with a particular person.

I’ve only just recently learned the Cuban art of stockpiling. Since you never know when you’ll see any particular item in the stores again, everyone stockpiles on everything, to the extent that they can afford to buy more than one of anything. Toilet paper, powdered milk, canned soda and beer, and even brown sugar are a few examples of items that disappear for weeks on end from the shelves of all the stores, and nobody knows how long it will be before they reappear. Cubans have to substitute newspaper for toilet paper not only because toilet paper can only be bought with CUCs, but because it sometimes cannot be bought at all.

Another reason for my relative silence is that I’ve reached the point where I am beginning to understand too much. By that I mean that I have reached that plateau of linguistic and cultural comprehension that can spell danger for someone as generally naïve and talkative and tactless as I. Maybe it’s a bit of paranoia mixed with a good measure of confusion, as I add nearly daily, sometimes hourly, to the extensive list in my mind of ambiguities and contradictions that make up the Cuban culture.

Los Cocodrilos along Matanzas' waterfront park

My dearest and oldest male friend, Russell, just asked me: “What one thing have you found out about yourself in your home country that you didn’t expect and which surprised you?” I promised him that I would attempt to answer that question in my next blog entry. I think I may have just touched on part of the answer in that last paragraph.

All along, since my very first day in Cuba, I have been finding out the same thing about myself, and yet it continues to surprise me over and over again. And it is this: I am who I am because I was born in Cuba of Cuban parents and Cuban blood but, from the start, I was raised in two very different and often opposing cultures. Thus, I am by nature, by upbringing and by environment, a person full of ambivalence, ambiguity, contradiction, and multiplicity. And the never-ending surprise is learning that there’s nothing wrong or the matter with any of that.

Bridge over Rio San Juan

In Cuba, I’ve been able to embrace my entire Cuban genetic, historical, and cultural heritage. Cuba is a country of contradictions. Cuban-Americans are just as much a product of those contradictions as is the entire generation of Cubans who have grown up in Cuba since 1959. Everything about my character and my actions that was somewhat out of place in the United States is completely in order, acceptable, even admirable in Cuba.

So, in short, I feel very much “at home” living in my “home country.” And yet…just thinking about returning to “my other life” in Philadelphia makes me realize that there remains a long road ahead before I begin to feel truly and fully integrated into either culture. I suppose that teachers are the last to learn how much they still need to learn, that life is an ongoing learning experience, but that cliché only partly expresses what I am feeling. I feel scared.

At Matanzas' El Hotel Velazco with a Canadian student

Part of it is that scary feeling of not knowing what is going on around me. I am afraid that I am going to say or write something that will jeopardize my temporary residential status as a visiting professor. I am different here from the other visiting professors because of my dual citizenship, with neither of my two “homelands” recognizing me as a valid citizen of the other country.

With love from Cuba,
Matanzas, March 5, 2012

Elisa