By Lillian Manzor, University of Miami

May 15 is International Family Day since the United Nation’s 1994 proclamation. Today, May 15, I would like to express my disagreement with the new definition of the Cuban family offered by the Commission for a Free Cuba from a United States’ cultural perspective. The new definition and laws may serve U.S. foreign policy’s interests but they certainly do not take into account the needs or interests of the family in Greater Cuba, regardless of whether we live inside or outside the island.

Anywhere in the world, the family, independently of the type of family predominant in each society (nuclear or extended family), is that place of welcome and of solidarity that is practiced regardless of political or social transformations. In the specific case of Cuba, our family does not consist only of those close members identified by the Commission’s report. Obviously, those who wrote the report not only do not have family in Cuba but they are not aware of the meaning of family for Cubans and other Caribbeans. I left Cuba as a young girl in 1968. The rest of my (extended) family had left during the early years of the revolution with the exception of an uncle and his (nuclear) family. During the first ten birthdays, Christmas, vacations, illnesses, I can remember my parents and my sister next to me, along with my cousins in Cuba, the only ones that stayed behind. Twenty years went by before I returned to Cuba for academic reasons and could see them again. Nevertheless, thanks to my aunt, we always kept up with each other’s lives, with our personal and professional successes and failures.

During the most repressive period of Castro’s government, the (in)famous decenio gris, the grey decade, Cuba’s official culture also tried to redefine the notion of family so that it “disappeared” from the family tree all of those who had abandoned the island. As we know well, it was a failed attempt because no revolution can break family ties. In spite of the fact that in Cuba those who maintained contact with family members in the United States were chastised, our (extended) families were never transformed into nuclear ones; the family ties were never severed.

I have returned to Cuba many times because of my academic research. I have always traveled with a professional license but have always visited my family, that is, my aunt and my cousins, the very ones that the commission now has decided are not sufficiently close to me to be considered members of my family. Even when it was considered “improper conduct” to visit with members of the “community,” it never occurred to my family to shut their doors. Eventually, those of us who left were able to stay with our family members during our visits. My aunt’s apartment in El Vedado, the same apartment where I spent many happy days as a child, not only received me as an adult on numerous occasions, some of them unannounced and unexpected, but it has also received my students and colleagues who through the years have gone to Cuba for research.

Ironically, I have never had the opportunity to return to the house that is supposed to be the home of my (nuclear) family in Ciego de Avila (our first house was intervened and eventually torn down.) At this moment in my life, my house and home in Cuba is that apartment in El Vedado. It is there where I can arrive any time, where any friend of mine can also arrive without announcing the visit, many times without electricity or water or coffee. Why? Because the family is the strongest form of communal solidarity in all cultures; the family exerts its solidarity precisely at the moments of weak or non-existent institutional support. I do not know if the U.S. authors of the Commission’s report remember or know that when there were no direct telephone lines to Cuba, we used to call on birthdays via a number in Texas that would connect to a number in Canada that in turn would call Cuba. In other words, even when there was no direct “legal” communication, we would spend outrageous amount of money in order to talk to our loved ones, those members that were told by the revolution that they did not have any other family than the one in Cuba, those very members that now the U.S., from its cultural blind spot, has decided do not have the appropriate blood ties to be considered members of our family.

We really have to read the recommendations related to educational travel in order to unmask the true goals and interests of this Commission: “to promote the goals and exchange of U.S. values and norms in Cuba … [in order to] promote the goals of U.S. foreign policy.” I ask my self: Did this commission include an anthropologist? Did any member of the commission do research or field work in Cuba before writing this report? If the answers are negative, how can we, from a research and methodological perspective, assess the validity of this report? What expertise, what rights does the commission have to dictate to us who can be considered a member of our family?

In this International Family Day, I write these lines in order to reject this new definition of the Cuban family, just as I rejected it in 1986 when I returned to Cuba for the first time and visited again those loved ones who were and will always be my only family in Havana. Many times, U.S. norms and values do not coincide with the norms and values of others. Please, I urge the commission not to impose U.S. values on us so that others do not have the pleasure of calling you cultural imperialists. I urge other U.S. citizens to voice their concerns in solidarity with us. I urge the government not to waste our taxpayers’ money in a futile enterprise doomed to failure. Neither the revolution nor democracy can separate and redefine the Cuban family.

(While I am a professor at the university, this is note reflects solely my viewpoint and not those of the University of Miami.)

Dr. Lillian Manzor

Associate Professor and

Associate Chair

Department of Foreign Languages and Literatures

University of Miami