November of 1994. The culinary trend in Miami that year was nouvelle cuisine cubaine, delicacies such as porgy in tamale cream, mamey flan, and sweet potato pudding with blueberry sauce; none of it great competition for the real Cuban food like congrí and pernil that one could still find at Versailles and other restaurants. Strolling down SW 8th Street, you’d hear émigrés lauding the imagined candidacy of the next president of Cuba, an anti-Castro lobbyist named Jorge Más Canosa who was destined to reclaim our beloved country: yet another pipe dream for the community. The hot news item in town was the Raft People, los balseros; they had displaced the Marielitos as the most recent chapter in our diaspora. It seemed that in Miami there was always someone who had just escaped the confines of communist Hell, and someone offering messianic hopes of saving the Island from communism.
In November of that year, while Cuba was going through the most desperate economic crisis of its history, the Miami Book Fair (housed at Miami Dade College) was at full throttle. I had been invited to be part of a panel at the Fair with fellow Cuban American writers Dina Pérez, Francisco M. Rodríguez, and Rafael Valdés Alfaro, all of us usually referred to as “the Guayaba Pack,” though I wasn’t part of their group initially. While it was true that we’d all shown up on the literary scene at about the same time, none of my fellow Cubiches dwelled in the murky waters and “wild side” of our immigrant experience like I did, hence my initial exclusion. Amazing that, as distant as we were geographically (I hailed from CA; they were all Miami-grown but nesting now in NYC, CO and PA respectively) and, to some extent, artistically, we could still assemble as a troupe, a sort of minor “movement.” The fact that we’d seen our names strung together in several academic articles and book reviews helped, plus the presence of Cuba in our lives.
The Fair was putting us up at the South Beach Inn, musty yet quaint with its 1937 Art Deco interior design. I met up with Francisco at the hotel bar. Overdressed as always, he was impeccably clad in a light-gray linen summer suit with a blue silk necktie. The contrast between us was sharp; I was wearing blue jeans and a white T-shirt. Francisco was short, barrel-chested; he had light brown skin, a friendly smile, expressive eyes. Over Cuba Libres, we engaged in the usual discussion and mutual exaltation of our work. He liked it that way. Francisco couldn’t handle choteo, even though it was the unifying element in his fiction, an explosion of jokes and translated puns that kept his readers –definitely if they spoke cubanglés– cracking up. Francisco’s writing wasn’t one of deep philosophical layers but it was fun and culturally relevant. Ironically, in his personal dealings, he preferred to have a gentle mood of camaraderie with no sarcastic turns. Hence we toasted to being part of Pueblo Press’ Cuban American legacy, to his flair for wordplay and his parody of Miami life; and to my work, described by him as lyrical and daring. Cheers! After this mutual pat on the back, Francisco told me I should find myself a sexy boyfriend and settle down with him. He didn’t see me with a woman. “I doubt anyone would after reading your books,” he said. “Thanks for your feedback and your suggestion,” I told him, “but, as you well know, books can never tell the whole story…”
Dina joined us briefly for a drink, typically guarded, aloof, and unwilling to discuss her current projects. She wouldn’t have dinner with us because her non-writer Anglo husband would feel out of place, she said. But also –we were sure– because she liked to play the mainstream diva, the unreachable celebrity of this and other events. She had, after all, a Pulitzer; and she was the most written about and academically enthroned of our bunch, our own Cubiche star. According to some machista critics, she also had the extra edge of being a foxy broad who looked and carried herself like a tall Gloria Estefan. Her best-known novel –youthful, poetic, linguistically exuberant– dealt with the travails of a Miami teenager born to wealthy exiles as she tries to plan a visit to Cuba against her parents’ wishes and consent; an eloquent, stirring character who’d been compared to Salinger’s Holden Caulfield.
We were having a late lunch at Versailles, hall of mirrors, echo chamber of gossip and politics and the quintessential Cuban meal in Miami. As expected, Rafael appeared with an entourage of three local profs, his “fans.” Eight years my senior, Rafael saw himself as our wise older brother. He was tall, thin, verging on gaunt, and his face showed traces of adolescent acne. Handsome despite his blemishes, Sr. Valdés Alfaro proudly displayed his aquiline visage and his opinions. The “midpoint” was his big symbol, the one he put forth in much of his poetry and academic writing. It was the site where many of us Cubiches supposedly thrived, navigating between two cultures and two nationalities. He also talked about “fruitful ambivalence” (“fruity,” if he tried to be funny) when defining the strength of our cultural character. And he referred to our group as the Limbo Generation, people who’d arrived in the United States as children and couldn’t claim to be fully Cuban nor totally assimilated Americans. Not a particularly attractive or original place, in my opinion, though Dante did make room in Limbo for the great thinkers and artists of his time. Stimulating company, no doubt, yet if given a choice I would’ve been an eternal spirit in Lust, the Second Circle of Hell. Yeah! Of course I got what Rafael meant, that unsettling yet potentially productive neither-here-nor-there condition we all shared, whether we wanted to or not. I could relate, yes, I could see his limbo through the experience and discourse of sexuality. And wasn’t there a midpoint in gender identity as well? Got it, Raffy!
Rafael observed and was envious of the fact that my English was more colloquial than his, because I said things like veg out, dig, cool, dude, and for real. He boasted about being our precursor, the first of us to have published a book in English with a notable house. Mischievous me, I pointed out that the book he referred to was a scholarly work with a limited readership and no mainstream press attention. Hence it didn’t count! I also mentioned that, even though his oeuvre had become increasingly popular, he was still being published by a university press –not, by a long shot, a “notable house.” And, anyway, there were Cubans writing in this country long before he and I and all the other Guayaberos came into the picture. We’d only been the most visible, thanks in part to the 1959 Revolution. Bursting his bubble even more, I indicated that José Yglesias was the one who truly deserved the title of Trailblazing Cubiche, since he had published his first novel, A Wake in Ybor City (a widely read book about Cuban immigrants in Florida) in 1963. Rafael stated that Yglesias was only Cuban on his mother’s side, thus he was a cubano manqué who considered himself one-hundred-percent American. “Regardless of how Yglesias saw himself,” I said, “the fact remains that he’s our true precursor, the father of the Guayabitos, and the only one entitled to first place. So there! ¡Pa’ que no jodas más! ”
Rafael dropped the subject, unable or unwilling to provide more counter-arguments. Evidently famished, he dug into his pernil with abandon. But now he was hung up on the word guayabitos, which I’d just used to refer to Cuban American writers of our generation. “How dare you call us ‘baby mice’?!” he pronounced. Then he proceeded to complain that there was an excess of exile angst and old-school poetry about our “lost, suffering island” at the Fair. And I agreed but told him, poking fun at his terminology, that there was also too much of his “halfway house” and his “Limbo Rock” and his “ambivalent fruitiness.” He retaliated by saying that I had it all wrong. “If there’s a surplus of anything,” he asserted, “it’s your deviant contribution to our pack, the malcontent, suicidal faggots in your writings, an excess of pedophiles and dark widows and oneiric monsters. And too many nutcases!” I came back with, “Happy to oblige, compatriota.”
As always, good old choteo was our way of getting to the truth without beating each other up for real. We laughed to try to bridge the chasm between us, though maybe we’d crossed the line this time. Maybe Rafael Valdés Alfaro had already placed me on his blacklist, along with a horde of left-leaning academics whom he had publicly denounced as his enemies. Still, we made a toast with a mojito to a bountiful guava harvest. ¡Salud!
A Minor Movement is an excerpt from a novel in progress (© 2015 by E. M. Muñoz)
Photo: Enrique Dans. Interior of Versailles Restaurant, in Miami.