[On March 2nd,
the great Cuban-American
actor and entertainer Desi
Arnaz would have celebrated his 100th birthday. So for Arnaz’s
centennial, a series on a handful of Cuban-American figures and histories!]
On what
distinguishes, and what links, the two Cuban-American politicians.
As my most
recent pieces for the Huffington
Post’s blog have illustrated
with (I imagine) particular clarity, I have come to believe that it’s neither
possible nor desirable for me to separate my public scholarly writing from
contemporary (and, inevitably, partisan) politics. This blog has of course
ranged across a far wider variety of topics, subjects, and disciplines than
have most of my public scholarly pieces for other sites, so I think it’s fair
to say that the vast majority of my posts here have not in any overt way
connected to contemporary politics. But even here, relatively recent posts such
as this pre-election
one in early November and this post-election
one in late December have offered much more blatant engagements with our
current political and historical moment than had been my norm over the previous
six years of AmericanStudying. All of which is to say, if you had told me any
time in the last half-year or so that I’d be writing a March 2017 post on Marco
Rubio and Ted Cruz, I would have bet the boys’ future college tuitions that it’d
be focused on a topic like GOP Senators going along with (or, hoping against
hope, resisting?!) President Trump’s outrageous agenda and proposals.
Good thing I didn’t
make that bet, though. Because the truth is that all of us, even political
leaders with whom I would disagree on pretty much every conceivable topic, have
complex and multi-layered identities. And in the case of Rubio and Cruz, that
includes two very distinct Cuban-American family stories and heritages; each of
which is hard to untangle from various attacks and defenses over the recent
presidential campaign, but I’ll try to focus on the main and less disputed
details here. Rubio’s parents were both born
in Cuba and immigrated to Miami in 1956; they would continue to travel back
and forth to Cuba in the next few years, and other relatives (including his
maternal grandfather) would gradually make their way to the U.S. as well
(although the family was well settled by Rubio’s birth in 1971). That’s not
quite the typical story of post-Castro exiles (although Rubio
has framed it as such at times), but it’s relatively straightforward
nonetheless. Cruz’s
family story is far more complex: his paternal grandfather immigrated to
Cuba (from the Canary Islands) as an infant, and his father Rafael was born
there; but Rafael came to the U.S. in 1957 to attend college at the University
of Texas, obtained political asylum when his student visa expired four years
later, and subsequently moved to Canada, obtaining Canadian citizenship in
1973. He met Cruz’s mother (a U.S. citizen of Irish and Italian heritage working
in Calgary) there, and Cruz
was born in Calgary in 1970; a few years later his father moved back to
Texas, and the family eventually followed him there.
Two widely
distinct family stories and heritages; indeed even describing Ted Cruz as Cuban
American is a more complex
and interpretative (and often purposeful, as it is for me in this post to be
sure) move (not at all unlike describing Barack Obama as Kenyan American or
even African American) than doing the same with Marco Rubio. But amidst all
those important details and differences, I would note one very clear and
important link: both Rubio’s parents and Cruz’s father, the Cuban American immigrants
in question in each family story, came to the United States before Castro’s
revolution, when Batista’s regime was still in power. I wrote in yesterday’s
Desi Arnaz post that most of our collective memories and narratives of Cuban
Americans focus on the last half century, on the exiles and refugees and
communities post-Castro. I would once argue that that’s true—but even within
those narratives and memories of the last half-century, we too often forget
that Cuban Americans could and did immigrate to the United States in
circumstances significantly different from the post-Castro period. Which is to
say, Cuban Americans immigrate, and have always immigrated, to the United
States for the same complex combination of push
and pull factors as any and every other immigrant community. Castro and his
aftermath and regime certainly comprise a significant subset of those factors,
but focusing solely on them limits and falsifies the recent, as well as the
longstanding, Cuban American experience.
February Recap
this weeked,
Ben
PS. What do you
think? Any other Cuban American stories or histories you’d highlight?
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