Gringa

There is no typical Cuban-American experience, but I feel like my Cuban-American experience barely even qualifies. It feels disingenuous to describe my Cuban-American experience as one at all.

My Cuban mother and American father raised my brother and me in an upper-middle class suburb of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania with good schools, steep hills, and lush green parks overpopulated with deer. My father, and his father before him, had been raised there too.

My mother didn’t exclaim ¡Gracias a Dios! or mutter ¡Mierda! under her breath like the mothers in the books I read about other first and second generation Latin families – The House on Mango Street; How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents; Bless Me, Ultima. She spoke in perfect, accentless English, and if it weren’t for her name, which she did not change when she married my father in 1977, you might have assumed her ethnic background was just another grab bag of fair-skinned European heritage, Polish-and-Italian or Croatian-and-German or Scots-Irish-and-Russian like my elementary school classmates, in the township my father sometimes refers to as “Caucasia.”

I think about being Cuban the most when a form I’m filling out asks me to specify my race/ethnicity. Often, the relevant options are White Non-Hispanic, Hispanic/Latino, and Other, check one. I hate when there isn’t an option to check multiple options, because as a data analyst, I know what happens to when you check Other: you get ignored. But I click Other anyway. Picking between White Non-Hispanic and Hispanic/Latino feels wrong.

The only Spanish I heard at home was my mother’s half of phone conversations with relatives in Miami, like my grandmother or her aunt Maria, and later their doctors, nurses, and caregivers. My mother advocated for early language instruction at the elementary schools in our district, but it was not implemented until long after I graduated high school. At the time, students with Tiger Mothers like mine had to give up their lunch recess once a week for Language Clubs, where other “ethnic” moms taught us the alphabet, numbers, and colors in whatever language our mothers chose to torture us with that year. Though I took Spanish classes in middle school and high school, they were always too easy and I was bored, and I never took the initiative to learn on my own. The most lasting lesson from all my Spanish classes is my perfect use of the subjunctive tense en inglés (I wish I were kidding!). As I write these words, I have to check Google Translate to put the accents in the right places if I want to spice up my writing with Spanglish.

I realized after returning from my trip to Cuba that most of the people I now interact with regularly had no idea that I am Cuban-American. My name is Claire Elizabeth O’Hanlon. I am white. I don’t speak Spanish. You’d never know that I’m Cuban unless I tell you.

Apparently, at some point I got tired of explaining it.

Back in Pittsburgh, people knew I was Cuban because they knew my mom was Cuban. In college, I knew a few other half-Cubans who looked like me and had names like mine, and I made more of a point of telling people I was Cuban. I made my band learn a song in Spanish. I joined the Society for the Advancement of Latino Scientific Achievement, but I didn’t feel like I fit in there, so I dropped out.

And I didn’t actually know that much about Cuban culture or history. I can’t dance salsa to save my life. I had literally never heard of the Mariel Boatlift until a few months ago when I was reading a bunch of books in preparation of my trip. It just was not a part of the conversations I had with my family about Cuba, which were few and far between.

Now, I tell people I’m Cuban if it seems relevant, and sometimes I’ll tell them if it is not, but more often than not, people make jokes at me when I tell them I’m Cuban. They think I’m lying to them, because how is it possible for someone with the last name O’Hanlon to be Cuban? (Never mind the existence of Soledad O’Brien, but at least her first name is Soledad.) They tell me I don’t look Cuban because they have no idea what a diverse society Cuba actually is. Or worst of all, they try to talk to me in Spanish. I know they don’t mean anything by it, but it makes it even harder to feel like this part of myself belongs to me.

My mother regrets not raising us bilingual, even though her Spanish was rusty and broken by the time my brother and I were born, and it’s only gotten worse after her mother died in 2011. But a messy, broken imperfect connection to our extended family would probably have been better than no connection at all. Between the geographic and cultural separation and the language barrier, it’s hard to believe my Cuban-American family is my family.

I suppose this is why I was able to go. To Cuba, that is.

It’s precisely because this part of my identity was so mysterious to me that the curiosity overcame the potential of betraying my grandparents. And I am so, so grateful that it did.

For a long time, when people would ask me if I had family in Cuba, I told them no, that everyone left after the revolución. It wasn’t until 2016, when I started applying to go to Cuba with the CubaOne Foundation, that my mom told me that one of her mother’s five siblings had stayed in Cuba, and that guy had a son, and that guy had a son as well. I found the grandson (my second cousin) on Facebook (thank goodness Cubans are not very creative and everyone has the same names), which allowed this to happen:

My cousins, their dog, and me on their farm near Havana.

I spent a day with my Cuban family, and I felt far more at home than I ever thought would be possible, in spite of the language barrier and cultural differences. The opportunity to meet them and get to know them and have a relationship with them is the greatest gift I could ever receive. It is allowing me to take some ownership over this Cuban-American identity.

Well, sort of. I’m still just their gringa prima.

You can watch some raw footage of our visit here: