Gabriella Pinos/Staff Writer
Living in Miami and being Cuban American go together like rice and black beans. The food, language and culture of the island have become staples of life in South Florida.
But despite that, there are still stories from Cuban America that remain untold, buried underneath decades of exile and political struggle. These stories, dating back to the end of the Cuban Revolution in 1959, were the topic of Michael Bustamante’s discussion at the University’s Frost Art Museum on Monday, May 14.
Assistant professor of Latin American history at the University, Bustamante shared his insight on Cuban exile after the revolution as part of Mixtape Mondays, a series where faculty across disciplines use the museum’s collection to talk about their research interests.
The talk was held amongst artwork from the museum’s “Outsider Artists from Havana” exhibition, which showcased pieces from recognized Cuban artists with mental disorders. In the spirit of celebrating Cuban culture, the audience sat down with Bustamante while sipping on free beer from Biscayne Bay Brewing Company, the series’ sponsor.
The discussion centered around two pieces chosen by Bustamante, both by Cuban artists: a photograph of a handwritten letter by curator Elizabeth Cerejido, and a portfolio marking 20 years of Cuban exile by the late Agustín Fernández.
“There’s two types of erasure of things that happened in the Cuban exile story that I don’t think get talked about, which the two pieces of art that I chose prompted me to think about,” said Bustamante.
The first piece, a photograph of a letter written after the revolution, illustrates the story of Cuban exile from a more personal perspective. Like other letters of the time, Cerejido’s art, titled “Absence,” records the efforts of Cubans in Miami to stay in touch with those they left behind. The history professor also discussed how they reveal a side of the Cuban exile community that was once long forgotten.
“What do we find when we look at those letters? For me, we find works of art,” said Bustamante.
The second piece dives deeper into the history of exile and Cuban American life. Fernández’s portfolio, which contains six lithographs denoting Cuban patriotism and 18 poems by Cuban revolutionary José Martí, portrays an image of Cuban exile from 1959 to 1979.
The piece treats the events that happened in these 20 years as a “collective experience” where Cuban exiles shared the same story, according to Bustamante. However, his presentation showed that this wasn’t true for all Cubans, no matter where they lived. He highlighted the 1970s as an example, a time when violence was extremely high within the community.
“The 1970s for Cuban America was not just a decade of the Cuban American community coming into its own, it’s also a decade of discord,” said Bustamante. “It’s a decade in which the Cuban American community was very much at war with itself.”
He mentioned how children of Cuban exiles, who came of age at the time, grew bitter at America’s abandoning of the exile cause. While some fervently joined the anti-Castro movement, others turned left and embraced the Cuban Revolution. Yet others joined militant groups, like the anti-communist Agrupación Abdala, and disagreement between young generations of Cuban Americans would often lead to violence on the streets of Miami.
“We think of the Cuban American experience as kind of a unitary thing: everyone’s fleeing communism, everyone hates Fidel,” said Bustamante. “But then there is this debate that is never-ending, which is, ‘whose fault is it? Why are we here?’”
This period of turmoil has been erased from the memory of most Cubans living in Miami, said Bustamante, because it’s squished in between the events that defined the community in the ‘60s and ‘80s. He explained how, because of this conflict, the 20 years of exile Fernández depicts in his work could not have been shared as a collective experience.
“There are common threads and experiences that unite Cubans in the diaspora, of course,” said Bustamante. “But it doesn’t mean they don’t argue with one another. Anyone who’s Cuban knows the famous adage, ‘where there are three Cubans, there are five opinions.’ And that’s particularly true in the 1970s.”
It’s the arguments that ensued in the years following the Cuban Revolution, along with the efforts of Cubans to stay in touch with loved ones, that have yet to be discussed among Cuban Americans on a larger scale. It doesn’t take much time to see how Cuban Americans have influenced South Florida as a community, but Bustamante believes that the intricacies of their legacy require a little more digging.
“This argument over what happened and why, and in the case of the exile community, who’s at fault: that is at the center of Cuban exile culture in the ’60s and ‘70s, and that story I think is also worth investigating,” said Bustamante.
For more information on exhibitions and Frost Art Museum’s Mixtape Mondays, please click here.
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