Ramiro A. Hernandez
Spring 2022
A yellow shirt with a brown skirt; an airport filled with strange people; a sun-filled sky in Miami. These are Gaby’s first memories in the United States.
“I came here when I was 8. I landed in Miami, Florida, on July the Fourth, which is really funny,” she recalls.
“I was so skinny and scrawny. I remember arriving at the airport and seeing family members I wasn’t close to because they hadn’t lived with me.”
Gaby was born in Sancti Spíritus, Cuba, and grew up in the neighboring town of Jatibonico with her parents and brother until her aunt claimed them through a family reunification process.
“Little by little, they just kind of started bringing over many of our family members.”
For Gaby, though, leaving Cuba wasn’t easy.
“We left in the middle of the night, and I remember everybody gathered in my grandma’s farm, on my mom’s side, all of our family and friends. There had to be over 70 people there, the whole town and everything. We got in the car to go to the airport, and I just remember crying at the realization that I had no idea when I was going to see my family again.”
“We got in the car to go to the airport, and I just remember crying at the realization that I had no idea when I was going to see my family again.”
Remembering the months leading up to her migrating to the U.S, Gaby recalls the difficult choices her parents had to make.
“My mom obviously didn’t want to take us away from school midway through the year. She didn’t tell us when [the reunification process] got approved. She wanted us, you know, for me to finish second grade, and for my brother to finish first grade. She wanted us to enjoy our last couple of months with our friends, everything that was familiar to us.”
The months before coming to the U.S. weren’t all bad, though.
“As an 8 year old, you don’t really grasp what coming to the U.S. and immigrating somewhere is, what that process entails. So for [my brother and I], it was just really fun. We got parties at school thrown for us while we were leaving, and all of the attention was on us.”
While they tried to make the process as easy as possible for their children, Gaby’s parents also had to reconcile with what it meant for them as individuals to leave Cuba.
“My mom has always been such a strong person… when I saw her in that car sobbing — because it was largely her family that she was leaving behind — it was really…it was really eye-opening as an eight-year-old. I didn’t want to cry because it would add additional stress to both my parents and my little brother. It makes you mature a lot faster than you otherwise would have.”
“It makes you mature a lot faster than you otherwise would have.”
In many ways, Gaby’s early life in the U.S. was also filled with the expectation of maturity.
“When we arrived at the house [in the U.S.], my grandma on my dad’s side had thrown this big party, which was really overwhelming. They kept showing us rooms and new clothes. I remember I kept getting asked ‘How do you like it here? How do you like it here? Isn’t it so much better?’”
That younger version of Gaby couldn’t care less about the new things, though.
“I’d been here a matter of hours. How can you so actively ask an eight-year-old and a six-year-old those triggering questions? For me, it was all kind of like ‘What am I doing here? This is insane.’”
The expectation of maturity and gratefulness affected Gaby’s relationships with other people long after her first few days here.
“I think it places a lot of pressure to give the answer people are expecting. I often got asked things like ‘Oh my God, can you eat certain things here that you don’t eat over there?’ Like yes, but obviously what I cared about was the fact that everybody familiar to me wasn’t around anymore — my grandparents on my mom’s side, my friends from school, everybody that lived in my neighborhood.”
Aside from being away from everything familiar, one of the biggest challenges Gaby faced in her early days in the United States was adjusting to the new school environment.
“I would spend history, social studies, and science all in English without any translation. It’s super frustrating to go from being such a good student to being in a classroom and not having any idea what anybody is talking about, being lost entirely — as in you don’t even know what the topic is, you don’t know what class is next, you don’t know if Thursday is music class or if Friday is art. It feels like you’re in a movie.”
Navigating the new environment was challenging for Gaby, but her brother also had a hard time adjusting.
“My brother got bullied a bunch because he didn’t speak English — even in Miami, which is surprising because we have a really big Hispanic population. So when you come home and your parents ask ‘How was it? What did you learn?’, it’s kind of difficult to sit there and say that you don’t like the school, that you don’t have any friends because you don’t speak the same language.”
Coming home to parents who were working multiple jobs while not understanding the language themselves did not make things easier.
“We would come home crying every day to my mom, telling her we didn’t understand the language or the teachers, that we wanted to go home, asking her why she brought us here. It’s a whole day of being without your parents, who were the only familiar people in this country… all that and she never once allowed us to see her upset.”
“We would come home crying every day to my mom, telling her we didn’t understand the language or the teachers, that we wanted to go home, asking her why she brought us here.”
Despite all of the difficulties, Gaby’s parents did their best to support their children through the transition.
“I remember my mom doing homework with me with a dictionary, while she had no idea what the directions on the paper even were. It was really overwhelming for them, I’m sure.”
With time, Gaby’s family adjusted, relying on a community of family members, friends, and neighbors to get them through.
“You start getting used to it, you start learning a little bit of the language at school, and it just kind of fades away that you’re in a new place… I’m really grateful that we had that community to help my parents get their feet off the ground. I don’t know what it would have been like otherwise.”
When asked whether she now considers the U.S. her home, Gaby’s reaction was visceral.
“Home to me is the people that are around you, your friends and your family, not necessarily a geographic location. It’s where my grandparents are, where my parents are, where my brother is, where all my cousins that I’ve grown up with are. Miami, Florida is home to me because of them.”
Despite this, being an American Citizen is not an identity she easily claims.
“I credit a lot of who I am to having lived in Cuba. The way I go about my life is very much guided by my culture, not necessarily American culture. I have U.S. citizenship now, thankfully, but I consider myself Hispanic and Cuban, proudly so.”
Like many Latine folks who grow up in the U.S., though, she often finds herself having to assert her identity in the face of scrutiny by others.
“You know… being called a ‘gringa’ in comparison to other people that have just immigrated… they see somebody that’s grown up here since eight years old and speaks English; they consider me an American, but that’s not an identity I’ve so easily accepted.”
While home for her is in Miami, Gaby emphasizes that she still longs for the things she left behind in Cuba, detailing a complicated relationship with her homeland.
“What motivated my family to come here in the first place was the fact that Cuba is a really poor country. I realize that there’s a lot of relationships I’ve left behind and it’s sad to look back on… but I’m grateful nonetheless that I was able to leave a place that was hindering so many of my civil liberties in the first place. I’m definitely receiving more opportunities here.”
However, she was careful to note the harms of idealizing the United States and its politics.
“We should be grateful that we’ve received these liberties, but nonetheless I think it’s our job to question where we live and the way the U.S. acts on an international stage. I really try to emphasize to my parents that you shouldn’t be grateful to the point that you don’t question your government.”
“You shouldn’t be grateful to the point that you don’t question your government.”
Through it all, Gaby kept going back to one thing — the power of an immigrant’s voice.
“As an immigrant, it becomes really really important to leave a legacy for those that weren’t given the opportunities that you have now… and if there’s one thing I would like people to know about Cubans, it’s that we’re not voiceless. We have power in our words; you just have to listen to us.”
“We’re not voiceless. We have power in our words; you just have to listen to us.”