Being Cuban-American Has Made Me Check My Privilege

Kelsey Garcia
Kelsey Garcia

Kelsey Garcia is an editorial assistant at POPSUGAR.

When my mother was 12, she got scorned by her teacher for wanting to leave Havana. Her father — my grandfather — had already made arrangements for them to leave after living in Fidel Castro's Cuba for over a decade. In front of the entire class, the teacher admonished my mother for abandoning her country and its new, progressive (read: oppressive) politics and threatened to send her away to a revolutionary youth camp. According to him, she would be labeled as a traitor were she to leave.

With her back against the blackboard and the teacher's finger in her face, my mother replied with something the teacher hadn't known: "If you had bothered to check, you would have known that I was born in the capital of MY country — the United States — and if you bother me again, I'm going to send for the Marines to come and rescue me!" See, funny enough, my mother was actually born in Washington DC; however, because she had spent most of her life in Cuba, she was officially a Cuban citizen. Recalling this story to me now, she laughed as she said, "I was very brave . . . or stupid."

Kelsey Garcia

My mother and my grandfather (pictured, far left) at a birthday party in Havana.

My father was also born and raised in Cuba, in a city called Artemisa, which is about an hour outside of Havana. Like many other Cubans fleeing the revolution, he left at a very young age with the rest of his family in the early '60s and settled in Miami. Naturally, he doesn't remember as much from his days there. He hasn't gone back since.

Though my parents did not come to the United States together and wouldn't meet until years later, they both consider themselves lucky to have made it over safely. I find that they're also both incredibly grateful for the very existence of Miami, a one-of-a-kind city that simultaneously mitigates the assimilation process and nurtures its inhabitants' varied cultures.

As a first-generation Cuban-American who was born and raised in Miami, I never really thought about my parents' immigration narrative simply because it was so similar to those of my peers or, rather, their parents. It wasn't until I moved to New York for college that I really understood the magnitude and importance of their migration. Because of them, I was starting at New York University with my biggest sources of stress being whether or not I was going to make friends or how heavy my books would be.

Perhaps most importantly, being Cuban-American has made me check my privilege. Though my parents both worked very hard for what one might consider to be the American dream, I know not to take everything we have for granted . . . or at least I'm working toward it. This is a classic and often-used tactic, but growing up, my grandmother would always convince me to finish my meal by noting that if we were still in Cuba, we wouldn't have all this food. Those seated at the table would usually laugh because, well, she was being a little dramatic, but for her, it was also true. "¡Burlarse!" she would say, sarcastically urging us to continue making fun of her.

I recently saw a movie, Sin Alas, that was the first American film to be shot in Cuba since 1959. It portrays the present-day life of an aging Cuban journalist with flashbacks to the time spent with the love of his life around the time of the revolution. Watching the movie — its many shots of modern-day Havana and those bustling streets — was, in a word, heartbreaking. I felt the culture, the accents, the humor so deep in my bones, and yet I couldn't relate at all because I have never been there. It's strange to know that being Cuban amounts for so much of my very being, even though I don't know what it's like to live there. Long after the credits rolled, I couldn't help but just cry and cry because I know that I'll never really know.