IDENTIDADES 1 ENGLISH IDENTIDADES 5 ENGLISH | Page 86

The sister gave up the bedroom and
slept on the sofa in the living room.

behaviors of a growing middle class
who consumption rates were much like
those in the United States.

There were blackouts, but that wasn’t
the problem. Her own family began
being the insurmountable problem, and
even her husband’s few relatives. When
they’d get together, which was all the
time, the idea of going to buying this or
that, or having lunch at some restaurant
always came up. At the beginning, they
always agreed, with pleasure. But, by
the third day they realized that there
was money missing from the stash they
had stored in their luggage to pay for
their month-long vacation. Tensions
rose when they explained the difficult
situation to the family. All of a sudden,
it became really difficult to live together
day by day. Without realizing it, they
both got sick and tired of the situation,
of Cuba, again, and wanted to leave.
Any idea of remaining in Cuba quickly
disappeared from their minds: “You’d
have to be crazy!”

That is, traveling or staying in Miami is
like traveling to the future we lost during initial moments of the useless utopia’s creation. The Cuban Adjustment
Act was a saving grace. It allows that
exiled Cuba due to disobedience, and all
that source of creativity that the island
loses by drops and waves, to flow and
take shape constructively. This is an
invaluable flow.
Commercial travelers and the new feudal barrier
In the beginning, Yusemis traveled to
Ecuador a few times, taking advantage
of the fact that Cubans did not need a
visa. She was a mule, as people who
transport merchandise in suitcases are
called in Cuban slang. At first, she’d
bring cheap products from Ecuador,
because it did not require papers to be
brought into the country. Everything she
transported, sometimes once a week,
she resold to black market vendors. It
was an endless and tireless stream of
back and forth buying and dumping.
Then, the issue of her Spanish heritage
came up. Luckily, she had all the documents she needed to prove it, as her
grandfather had not thrown away any
papers. She took advantage of the new
Spanish law and became a citizen of the
European Union. She never went to
Spain, but with that passport, and by
stopping in Nassau, Bahamas, she was
able to visit Miami “ to see what she’d
find.” She did not seek protection under
the Cuban Adjustment Act. She did not
want to stay, although she saw many
turning in their Cuban passports to an

The road lost
In modern times, there are only three
examples of totalitarianism with a model, all quite close, geographically, but
with totally opposite societies. They are
the case of the two Germanys, two Koreas, and the very singular case of Cuba
and Miami.
This forced, peninsula-island connection is well known and even famous. It
is characterized by the constant drip and
sometimes gushing of idiosyncrasy and
exiled nation. Miami has become a Cuba, or better yet, a Havana ‘megalopolis,’ just as all indicators showed would
happen in the 1950s. At that time, it was
decidedly a city with the customs and

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