IDENTIDADES 1 ENGLISH IDENTIDADES 7 ENGLISH | Page 90

Gott, Kirov, etc. I remember how avidly
we watched the Estela Bravo documentary “Los Marielitos,” which was advertised with great pomp. The purpose was
to deal us a blow of reality to demystify
the paradise across from us, and reveal

to us the first people who visited from
“the community.” It showed victims of
apparent legal arbitrariness, and did not
clarify in all cases they were some of the
émigrés expressly released from prisons
to corrupt the exile community.

Yasser Castellanos, exile
Experts in the art of faking, we learn to
see more in omissions than in speeches.
That documentary was a testimony of
what there was beyond a horizon that
was so hard to cross. There was real curiosity concerning the fate of those who
had left amid insults and blows, leaving
behind shuttered homes bearing the
marks of splattered eggs, expressions of
anguished survival and also envy. Many
of those who shouted at the people who
left also ended up emigrating, when it
was no longer publically scorned. Absences were the counterpart of silence.

The multitudes filled the memorable
Plaza de la Revolución, across from the
Martí Memorial, which was also constructed prior to 59 and changed into a
bastion of the Revolution. Like an epidemic, absences plagued movie houses,
theaters and television, which caused
malicious rumors. Furthermore, decades
before they ceased being Stateless,
members of the underclass, and scum,
the outlawed stars we followed on TV
soap operas that circulated secretly or on
foreign programs confirmed they’d been
successful, although sometimes in lesser

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