Other than my name and the way I drink two shots of Cafe Bustelo black on a regular basis, wondering why I’m wide eyed and pacing my bedroom floor at three in the morning, I don’t think anybody can tell I’m half Cuban. My skin’s so white I can get on a majority of this country’s golf courses with no issue…although sometimes when I get a tan, dudes wearing khakis and Lacoste polos start asking if I can mow the grass quickly because they’re about to tee off. You’d think after all Tiger Woods did every golf course would stop looking whiter than an episode of The Andy Griffith Show.
I honestly don’t know if this is current attire or if these guys are reenacting a Three Stooges bit.
Side Note: I was at a driving range once with my dad, he was standing behind me teaching me how to use my pitching wedge and I split his eyebrow open when I brought the club back. He then proceeded to give himself stitches at home instead of going to the hospital. True fucking story.
Back to the original topic, not only do I have the appropriate skin tone needed to survive most horror films but I also speak little to no Spanish. I was never taught how to speak Spanish because my dad was determined I mastered English first which….if you read anything I write didn’t seem to work out all that well. I really think that he believed if I learned both languages at too young of an age I’d be way too ethnic to make it in this fucking country. We never lived in Miami so if I started getting a tone of voice like Tony Montana I’d probably have the cast of Deliverance surrounding me saying something like, “Hey boy I want a Reuben sandwich and the finest cigars or else you’re swimming back 90 miles and taking back Elian Gonzalez with ya!”
Immigrant children didn’t start being in danger under the Trump Administration.
I really think they were hoping I’d learn Spanish once I took classes in high school, certainly a whiter and less ethnic way to learn a foreign language, but I always had Spanish towards the beginning of the day when I was still waking up so it was a no go. I once got my Spanish class to watch Howard the Duck with the Spanish audio track on it because when it came down to a vote between that and Indiana Jones, my teacher said we’re watching Howard The Duck because it was the only time I ever showed enthusiasm in her class.
My grandma for the last decade or so every now and then will start speaking Spanish to me when we talk. At first it began when she was leaving messages on my voicemail and every now and then she’d do it when speaking to me and shake it off like she forgot. Recently it’s gotten to the point where I ask her three times to repeat what she said and every time she rattles it off in Spanish to which I feel like saying, “Listen Maria we wouldn’t be having this fucking interaction right now if you fucking spoke Spanish to me when I was also learning English but here we are. You mother fuckers raised me to fit in with the whites and you got what you fucking wished for!”
My dad could be anal about how I was being raised when under the care of other family members. True story, my aunt jokingly said she dressed me up in her clothing when I stayed over once and my dad cornered her and said, “If you put him in a dress you will NEVER see him again.” He votes for Team Blue but when it comes two dudes getting in a convertible and cruising down the Hershey Highway my dad can be about as progressive as Archie Bunker.
True story, we rented Milk once and he immediately took it out when Sean Penn and James Franco were reenacting Cary Elwes and Mandy Patinkin’s Princess Bride sword fight with their tongues.
So as you can tell, I don’t know dick about the motherland. The Cuban side of my family came over to America back in the 1960s and from the moment they stepped onto American soil I’m pretty sure they had this gameplan locked down to where they would do whatever it took to blend in with white people. Around the time they came into this country black people were getting hosed down by cops and chased by German Shepards. They were risking their lives doing the simplest of daily activities like fucking sitting at the counter of a diner. I’m pretty sure my grandma and grandpa saw all that and said to themselves “alright well we’re gonna be so fucking white we could get into an episode of Gunsmoke or Bonanza and vote Republican EVERY FUCKING ELECTION!” My aunt carries on the tradition of voting red while my dad ALLEGEDLY is on Team Blue. He doesn’t really confirm or deny who he voted for so for all I know he’s talking a big game and like a good Cuban is giving a thumbs up to whoever is closest to Marco Rubio.
Going back to the family’s gameplan of being as white as they could possibly be, my grandpa is even slightly racist which is fucking weird because if you look at Cuba you’ll see people blacker than black. My grandparents used to know this Cuban couple where the woman was darker and my grandfather could not stop mentioning the fact that she was black no matter how many times he saw her, he treated it like an elephant in the room problem. It’s kinda scary to think about since he was a police officer back in Cuba. I’m really hoping my grandfather didn’t have a 90s Los Angeles Police Department streak in him. Could you fucking imagine that if some archived Cuban police brutality film came out and I found out the guy who took me to McDonald’s and Burger King as many times as I wanted to go as a kid was George Zimmerman on steroids? Fuck…
This is the guy who also once flipped through the channels, landed on BET, turned off the TV and said to me, “Too many black.”
My grandma isn’t THAT bad….although once I do clearly remember her saying, “So I was at the flea market the other day…FULLLLLLL of black people…” Not including my dad, these are all people who voted for Donald Trump so does it surprise me they have moments of dialogue that sound like something from The Armitage’s gathering/bingo auction party in Get Out? Nope.
I mentioned earlier my Cuban side of the family avoided the cliche of basing their family in Miami and that’s a true fact. Some of my grandma’s family resides in Tampa but never once did my immediate Cuban side of the family live in Florida as long as I’ve been alive. My grandparents went all the way to a tip of Illinois so northern you stretch your arms out too far and you’re in Wisconsin. They have been living there ever since. The most they ever moved is a few blocks down the road. Even my dad and aunt have only moved about a half hour away, fine with the brutal windy winters.
I bring up them never planting the family flag in Miami because I don’t know if this is the case with anybody else who was born into a family of different ethnicity, but these mother fuckers (say it out of love of course, no incest accusations) love to talk about how pretty much everybody who isn’t them is far from being an authentic Cuban. I think my grandma has flown to Cuba a handful of times since becoming an American citizen but the rest of the family members haven’t nor have they been in Miami all that often which is pretty much the base of Cuban operations. It seems like they haven’t had their finger on the pulse in decades….but they’re looking at other Cubans like “what the fuck are these morons doing?”
This had happened a couple of times in the past year. My dad came down to Kentucky where I now reside to spend some time and oddly enough, the comedian that would be there the weekend he was visiting, Joey Diaz is Cuban. Not only is Joey Diaz Cuban but he speaks like a character from The Sopranos so I was FUCKING ready to go! Sure enough, we go that show and Joey Diaz gives a five star performance, dude’s been doing comedy for probably over two decades now and the experience shows. On the way back to the hotel though, my dad was commenting on Joey Diaz’s life experiences like he wasn’t a true authentic Cuban. Joey Diaz is a guy who was raised in the New York/New Jersey area once coming to this country and I think my dad basically wrote that off as his experiences being more in common with the Italians you see in Martin Scorsese’s movies. I guess he was hoping for a more “authentic Cuban” show, whatever the fuck that is in the eyes of my family and what he got was something with more similarities to a Chazz Palminteri one man show.
Which was a kinda weird thing to be bothered by since I know the Cuban side of the family first resided in Italy before making their way over to Cuba…as far as I know at least. Pretty sure my great grandparents were Italian. They lived in New York so I’ll have to assume they were Italian. Apparently my dad when visiting that side of the family as a kid would pretend he was homeless and hang out on the streets of New York to make a quick buck. Keep in mind this was during the 1970s so it’s a miracle somebody didn’t shoot and kill him for a hatful of dollar bills thus preventing him from creampieing my mother and leading to my creation and this perfect fucking blog.
The other “this isn’t authentic Cuban material” interaction I had recently was with my aunt who was commenting about the Netflix show One Day at a Time. She said for the most part she enjoyed it but they tended to go overboard with “the Cuban stuff.” Hell she’s probably telling the truth here because I did some brief research and there isn’t one Cuban on this fucking show. The show’s creators and producers are whiter than a fucking 1950s high schooler sipping milk from a straw while watching The Ed Sullivan Show. None of the actors are Cuban as far as I can tell. I shit you not it looks like they gathered some Puerto Rican actors and said “fuck it close enough.” The closest Cuban they got on the show is a fucking Colombian who lives in Orlando. Christ I bet if I looked up the writers and saw their bios it’d say “well they aren’t Cuban but they all read The Motorcycle Diaries.”
Now time for a great segue, is Che Guevara a good guy or a bad guy? As a half-Cuban raised to know little to nothing about this side of the family I don’t know where to land on this mother fucker. In the eyes of most people he’s seen as this great activist but I know in the eyes of my family he’s an asshole. My grandfather was in the military back in the motherland and I believe some of his friends were actually killed off by Che Guevara’s guys. What I do know is no matter where you land with Che Guevara I think everybody can agree wearing a Che Guevara shirt is the tackiest shit you could ever do. It’s the equivalent of putting the lyrics of John Lennon’s Imagine on a bumper sticker and slapping it onto the back of your car while you’re out making deliveries.
As a half Cuban I don’t know shit about the culture and I guess I can’t really blame my family for whatever intent they had to make me appear as white as possible. America is a fucked up country plagued with racism. We are a country dominated by immigrants who would rather be racist than celebrate the country’s origin of being a melting pot. Unless you’re Chief Jay Strongbow crying at bags of trash on the side of the road and snuffing out Jack Nicholson with a pillow after the cunt nurse fries his brains, it makes no point to be racist because you’re a fucking immigrant yourself. When my family came to this country, the word wop was still being thrown around in order to make Italians feel bad for being immigrants. Even an ethnic group as white as Italians weren’t safe when my family came to this country, it’s no surprise they filed in with every American and tried to play it off that they’re Wonder Bread White.
It’s a shame they were focused on insuring I could blend in with a rugby team because as I get older, I feel guilty as fuck for having nothing to offer when it comes to making sure the flame of a certain culture stays alive. What the fuck do I have to offer Cuban culture? “Sure I can’t speak Spanish but I do recall that flan cake and eating as many loaves of bread as we can consume is our thing.”
I guess I’ll be alright when ICE kicks down my door and sees if my heart responds a certain way when Quimbara begins to play, but it still feels like I’m doing something wrong. Maybe someday I’ll have a grasp on what exactly “the real Cuba” is.
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