He grinned from ear to ear, immensely pleased with himself.
“Fuck you,” I said, and stormed away. This was my first time in Cuba (I was taking a semester off from my studies at the University of Hawai’i and was to stay in Cuba one month) — maybe my last too — and I sure as hell wasn’t going to cause a commotion at customs.
I grabbed my bags but kept a wary eye on the jerk. A baggage handler stacked box after box next to him. They were perfectly square, identical, and the handler treated them with loving care. The jerk, for his part, ignored the returning exiles, not even trying to hide his contempt as he looked over and through them with their anxious faces and excess baggage. While the mostly elderly in the crowd struggled with their overstuffed suitcases, he reached around them for his own bags, holding his arms out as if to avoid touching them. I couldn’t help but notice that his lips didn’t move, keeping any sort of courtesy from slipping out. In turn, the exiles eyed the jerk’s Che T-shirt with pained expressions. In Havana, even in customs, it certainly seemed redundant.
This guy, however, appeared to know everybody in any kind of official capacity: the customs inspectors, the nurse, the woman who checked the luggage tags. He shook each of their hands, even hugged some of them. In a few strategic cases, he gave out little presents — bribes? I wondered. It all seemed very acceptable. I wondered if I’d have to come up with something at any point. As per my sister’s instructions, I had brought plenty of generic ibuprofen, Band-Aids, deodorants. I’d also brought wasabi and packages of seaweed, macadamias, Kona coffee, and spices. Would any of these count as gifts here? And if so, would I know when to make an offer?
I lost sight of the guy when we stepped out to the searing sun. It took me a minute to adjust to the maddeningly white light (for a second I thought I was hallucinating, or fainting) but then I spotted Rocky — she was jumping up and down, just like the Cubans around her. Her dark frizzy hair was pulled back carelessly, an orchid with fat watery petals behind her ear. She seemed as eager to hug me as they were to hug their relatives, all apparently recovering from long separations. Except that Rocky — it was my childhood pronunciation of Raquel, which I’d soon learn had become Roh-keee in Havana — had just seen me briefly three weeks before, back on the family homestead on the other side of the world, in Honolulu.
Rocky’s unexpected return to our barely acknowledged Cuban homeland was, in fact, precisely why I had followed her back to Havana. Maybe because she was born in Cuba and uprooted early, she had always been emotionally tethered to it, considerably more so than my parents, certainly way more than me. When our parents won the visa lottery to enter the U.S., they were almost relieved to wind up in Hawai’i, so far away from all known Cubanness that most of the time, when we were confused for Puerto Ricans or Portuguese (“Potagee,” as the locals not so kindly said: “How do you get da one-arm potagee out da tree? Wave at um”) — the islands’ few Latinos — they never bothered to correct anybody.
It’s not that they weren’t proud of their Cubanness, but rather that folks in Hawai’i were completely indifferent to it. As a kid, Rocky used to walk around with T-shirts emblazoned with legends such as, Not only am I perfect, I’m Cuban too!, drawing stares from the Hawaiians, Samoans, Filipinos, and other Pacific islanders who looked at her sorrel skin and probably assumed she was one of them. (Though Honoluluborn, I elicited nothing but haole wariness with my freckles and blondish hair.)
All my life, I’d listened intently to Eddie Kamae and Keali’i Reichel; Rocky swooned to Charanga Habanera and homemade tapes of the band Porno Para Ricardo. I ate poi stirred with milk and sugar; she flatly refused it in any form, preferring when my mother sliced the taro — which they called malanga — and fried it in olive oil. I took hula lessons after school while Rocky had my dad teach her how to dance timba, and later, when she deemed he’d taken her as far as he could, she began buying videos that showed her how to shiver and thrust. My dad teased her about being so Cuban, and I said once that she was Cuban squared, which in the family vernacular became simply “Cubed.”
“Zenzizenzic,” suggested my mother, the scientist, upping the stakes, “to the fourth power.”
When my parents first arrived in Hawai’i — when Rocky was six and before I was even born — they each found fantastic, ridiculously well-suited jobs. My mother’s a marine biologist and got plugged in to a government-funded program that operated for a while off Ni’ihau, a feudal island community, normally off-limits to all but its residents. I think she was the first Cuban to ever set foot there. She spent days diving, coming back to our house with bizarre creatures and assorted ocean debris. For a while, her prized possession was an organism called a xenophyophore, which was about the size of a golf ball and looked like a moon rock. I could never tell if it was dead or alive but when it finally, officially expired, my mom moped around for weeks.
My dad also landed on his feet. In Havana, he’d studied Chinese. In Honolulu, that skill became a bonanza. Moreover, his experience coming from a Communist country gave him an aura of expertise well beyond language, even if the Cuban and Chinese models really had very little in common. As a result, he was able to pick and choose consulting clients, and our lifestyle slowly became more and more comfortable — a fact that seemed to shock my parents, who’d dreamed but never expected much in Cuba.
Whenever something wonderful happened — and in their minds, a working car and a full fridge fit the bill — my parents were dazed by their good luck. Delighted by how sunny their lives were in Hawai’i, they added a fist-sized volcanic rock — representing Pele, one of the Hawaiians’ main deities — to the tropical tableau of Oshún and Yemayá on their altar.
We weren’t Hawaiian but we identified with the natives in unexpected ways. Perhaps after all of those years hearing about America’s imperialism from the Cuban government (and because Hawai’i really didn’t seem American to us), my family drifted seamlessly into Hawaiian sovereignty activities and frequently found ourselves at rallies and other independence-related events. For me, it was what we did in Hawai’i — it never dawned on me that these issues didn’t matter to the rest of the world until I began to travel.
Rocky, however, was completely indifferent to Hawai’i. Rocky’s return to Cuba, initially just a visit under the auspices of a Japanese travel group, had been a total shock to my parents — but not to me. Rocky had always aimed her brown Cuban irises at the horizon, convinced that Hawai’i, for her, was a geographical accident. In fact, if I speak any Spanish at all — and I confess that mine is tentative — it’s because Rocky, even as a kid, insisted on talking in Spanish at home, long after we were all functioning mostly in English and I was deeply immersed in Hawaiian language classes.
“We’ll have to know Spanish when we go back,” she’d say, while my mom, dad, and I just kind of looked away, out to the Pacific. It all seemed so foolish then.
“Aloha, Malía! Que bolá!” Rocky exclaimed at the airport, all feisty and mostly Cubed. She unraveled her warm arms from around my neck and led me by the hand toward a shiny Fiat, where she flung my bags into the sliver of a backseat.
“Spiffy car!” I said, admiring the unexpected little sportster. It really stuck out next to the sad tangle of the patched Eastern European models with no names that populated the parking lot.
“We’re going to be tight,” she said, grinning.
“Tight? We can fit in there, no prob!” I said.
Rocky shook her head. “No, there’s one more person, a friend of Dionisio’s,” she said.