We not like them
For decades, I have stood looking aghast at my fellow Cubans. People who purportedly fled to this country to escape a dictator gave their fealty to an increasingly authoritarian party.
The thing with me is that I don't much care if the authoritarian is of the left or of the right. Just as I stand against Dear Leader Trump, I would stand against Big Brother Bernie Sanders. And you can save me with your caviling. A man who honeymooned in the prison house of nations is, at heart, no friend to democracy and democratic norms.
You can lay down Cubans' hatred of the Democratic Party to the failure of President John F. Kennedy to support the Bay of Pigs invasion. Of course, this invasion was led by old stalwarts of the discredited Batista regime, and Commandante Fidel Castro was actually popular. It was not going to succeed. Rather than learning from that, that first generation of Cuban exiles began the slow circle down the drain of right wing radicalism, leading to bombings of planes no different than what the Palestinian Liberation Organization did, or Black September's murder of Israeli athletes in Munich.
Eventually, the poison turned inward rather than outward. Rather than work toward the liberation of Cuba from a caudillo into a truly democratic state, Miami Cubans huddled in their Calle Ocho ghetto, nursing grievance over cafecitos, indoctrinating new arrivals and their children into a hatred for liberalism, which they equated with "communism".
I'm lucky. I grew up in New York, not Miami. I knew exactly two Cuban children in school. My mother was a union member, and went on strike. When Ronald Reagan defeated Jimmy Carter, she lamented his victory. We were not a normal Cuban family. For that I am eternally grateful.
While I savor my Cuban heritage, I felt myself a part of a larger Latin community. We all had funny names, spoke a strange language, and were looked down upon by the dominant white culture. I have never thought of myself as white, even though my skin is white. I have always known that whatever privilege I may accrue from being white-adjacent, I would never truly be white because unlike other waves of immigrants, Latinos have kept their language and their culture. That set us apart.
I could always rely that Latins would vote Democratic out of enlightened self-interest. That the history of the Chicano Moratorium, the grape boycott, "Operation Wetback" would solidify us as a collective in opposition to the party which increasingly came to symbolize that oppression.
The November 5, 2024 happened.
Our friend Rational Left was the first to tell me of the exit polls which showed that Latin men voted for Donald Trump by 55% to 45%. White female Kamala Harris supporters can speak to the sense of betrayal they felt when, again, the majority of white women voted to subjugate themselves. This was mine.
We were only two weeks removed from the comments about Puerto Rico. Trump had based his entire campaign on mass deporting undocumented, mostly-Latin migrants. No Latin voter had any logical reason to pull the lever for that scum.
And yet here we are.
The only saving grace is that Trump's regime has deported no more people than President Joe Biden had, year-to-year. In fact, even less. But we're only two months into his reign. The machinery of oppression is only getting started.
As a man, I look at these Latin men as scum. My mother taught me to respect, honor, and protect mis hermanas. What these men did was put a target not only on themselves, but on their mothers, wives, sisters.
Why did they do it? Well, racism and misogyny. They may have voted for Barack Obama. But a Black woman? No, that was a bridge too far. But we cannot discount white-adjacency. We cannot discount the desire of these men to leave their old identities behind and be incorporated into the white world, like Italians, Irish, and Germans had. We cannot discount the paradigm of "pulling up the ladder" of immigrant stock after they've established themselves in this country. We're the good ones. Those coming after us are messing up our game.
Even my fellow Cubans are not finding out after fucking around. The regime is revoking the protected status of thousands of Cuban emigres. Yes, even we Cubans, so loyal to the Republican Party, are expendable. Because we are not white. We not like them.
My mother, as she was ending her time on this earth, would always tell me that "you have to be in this country for four generations before you're considered American." I, of course, stridently stated that I'm as American as anyone who can trace descent from the Mayflower. But, I'm not. Not now, not in four generations, not in two centuries. White America sees us only as either a conquered people, or a source of cheap, illegal labor. Our successes only serve to increase its disdain for us. We not like them. And the sooner we realize this, the better. The sooner we join with our Black brothers and sisters, and leave behind our own shameful racist history in this country which requires new ways of thinking, the sooner we will be able to mold this country into an approximation of justice and equity.
"White-adjacent" is like "a little bit pregnant". It's meaningless. We need to create new meaning, one which will benefit not only us, but everyone seeking a country divorced from its racist past and present.