A Saturday Cubanism
Cubano Arrepentido: Literally it means a regretful Cuban, in actuallity it means regretful of being Cuban or a self-loathing Cuban.
There's a lot of similarities between Jews and Cubans. I won't go into them too much, but both are extremely small minorities that manage to obtain a high profile and levels of professional success higher than the average American. Both groups are also very politically active and attacked for their political beliefs and being outspoken.
Among Jews there is an archetype of the self-loathing Jew, a person is embarrassed to be associated with other Jews.
Well it's the same thing with Cubans. We have Cubanos Arrepentidos, people who attack their own heritage, along with the prevalent ideas and traditions of that heritage.
Professor Sander L. Gilman of the University of Illinois-Chicago defines Jewish Self-Hatred as:
"...the internalization of the negative stereotypes about who you are--the identification with the reference group's image of you as "the other" in society. The person who is labeled as different wants to find out why he or she fits the stereotype, or to prove that he/she does not. But the more one attempts to identify with societal definitions in order to fit in, the more one accepts the attitudes of the determining group, the farther away from true acceptability one seems to be."
And so it is with Cubans too. The more a person (or pehaps a second rate author) tries distance himself/herself from his/her Cuban roots, the less likely he/she is to gain acceptance in either his/her group or the dominant group one is trying to gain the acceptance of.
As for me I am proud to be 100% Cuban-American.
Ditto for me.
Henry,
Right on target. I love everything Cuban, the bad, the good and the ugly, which I like to encompass in one phrase..."la indosincracia de mi gente." I believe that many cannot be Cuban arrepentidos, because they were never part of it.
Hmmmm, a "second-rate writer".... I wonder who he could have meant?
Henry, the "arrepentidos" will have their just reward. You must believe that. When liberation finally comes to Cuba, and it will, the arrepentidos won't know what to do. Each and every one of them will be a lonely voice crying in the desert... desperate souls yearning for someone --anyone-- to shelter them, to comfort them, to forgive them.
Believe me, they will get no shelter, no comfort, and no forgiveness.
Que Dios los coja confesados --or confesadas!
Because those of us *down here* are going to be a lot tougher on them!
Julio
It's understandable, in the historical context, that some Jeww, though they're the chosen people, would hide or even discard their heritage: for most of their history they've had nothing but persecution.
But for Cubans in the US (or anywhere else, for that matter), it's inexucusable; son gente acomplejada -- y equivocada.
And to all the Cubanos arrenpentidos in New Mexico who long for significance: MOVE to Miami. Try hawking your wares there.
Es facil ser pesado/a y criticon/a desde 1800 millas de distancia. Show your stuff, c'mon down.
Hey caballero,
I was really enjoying your posts (both here and over at AVR's site) until now. C'mon, man, what's up with this? You remind me of the obnoxious Mexican-American students at my university who played the "I'm more Mexican than you are" game whenever disagreements arose.
I don't see AVR as someone who "attack(s) their own heritage, along with the prevalent ideas and traditions of that heritage" and any fair-minded person who reads the spirited exchange between you two (or anything else she writes where it's clear that she's very proud of her Cuban roots) won't either.
So, call her a second-rate author. Call her whatever you want but this "Cubano Arrepentido" thing is really beneath you and this excellent blog you have going. Makes you fellows look pretty bad. I'm just sayin'.
Happy Easter everyone!
Lisa ~ in the same way you dislike those obnoxious Mexican-American students at your U. when you see how ridiculous they act, we dislike the CA's who do the SAME thing, except they're Cuban. Same church, different pew.
Lisa,
I wrote the post in question so don't paint all the authors at Babalu with the same brush. Whether or not the person you are referring to is a Cubano Arrepentido is not the issue. My post only refers to that person in the most fleeting of ways and posits a question as whether that person is or is not one. True that person is what inspired me to make the post but the phenomenon of the CA exists and since this blog is about all things Cuban-American I wanted to talk about it.
If you don't like my writing, fine. It's a free country. But you do yourself a disservice if you stop reading something because you disagree with one point.
As Pontius Pilate said "I have written what I have written"
PS that goes for the posts and comments I have made in support of Mexican immigrants on this and other blogs.
And many members of both groups are, inexplicably, still staunch socialists.
On another note, I'm guessing that a love of roasted pigs is NOT one of the common denominators.
Let's say someone apologizes, as AVR did, but then deletes the apology and the comments so there is no record of it. Zilch, nada, zip. I'm sorry to say Lisa, that it doesn't really speak very well of her.
As far as CA, it is an existing phenomenom that I've encountered it before. Honestly Henry, I don't have time for acomplejados so I blip them out of my existence. If they are ashamed of who they are, and their heritage (jew, cuban, hispanic, whatever it is), its their problem and their cross to bear.
You can take the girl out of brooklyn but you can't take brooklyn out of the girl. Your heritage follows you and is a part of you; if you choose to deny it, you can only suffer more than if you choose to embrace it.
Happy Easter everyone!
Henry,
I'm really glad that you're bringing up this topic on Babalublog. The scourge of self-hatred amongst Cuban-Americans or as we put it, "cubanos resentidos" needs to be addressed because it's become endemic in our community. As you point out, Professor Sander L. Gilman's definition of the self-hating Jew is analogous to "el cubano resentido." Using Gilman's definition, "el cubano resentido" is characterized by his rejection of his community and his identification with the others. For instance, I find that a hallmark of the self-hating Cuban is that he will uncritically repeat the mainstream media's negative stereotypes of Cubans, so that we become nothing more than "right-wingers, "fascists" "mafiosos," "intolerant" and "extremists." Mere cardboard figures instead of the complex people that we are. Even though Miami is a very tolerant city [doesn't pro-Castro Francisco Aruca have a radio station in Miami? Isn't Mar Azul everywhere, and haven't the Marxist Maceitos had public pro-Castro demonstations in Miami?] the self-hating Cuban will hammer in the notion that we are an unusually violent and intolerant people [the recycled stereotype of the hot head latin] that accept no dissent. He will often equate us to Castro; this is like the self-hating Jew who calls another Jew a Nazi [there are certain boundaries that should not be crossed]. By the way, you want to see intolerance? Look at what the gay activists did to Ann Coulter during a book presentation!
Anyway, the opposite of the self-hating Cuban, is the well-adjusted Cuban American who likes himself. The self-accepting Cuban American will do what all groups do when they're the victims of unfair and negative stereotypes. He will examine the stereotype and deconstruct it. For instance, the author in question uncritically repeated the canard that because Cuban Americans protested the Latin Grammies that this was a sign of our intolerance. The fact is that the American Civil Liberties Union was on our side in this case. What this author in an endeavor to slander her own people did was to omit the fact that all that the Cuban-American activists wanted to do was to have the right to protest [like the illegals that she defended did] the Latin Grammies in this case, but that the head of the Grammies did not want to give us that American right which is guaranteed by the US constitution. [Gee, I've seen all types of groups on TV protesting the Oscars and using the podium to make political instead of acceptance speeches] What's more, during Apartheid in South Africa, blacks groups in the USA used to routinely protest when entertainers from South Africa performed in the USA. Anyway, like I said, there are many self-hating Cubans, particularly in academia, the arts and in cultural circles, but I will limit myself and just name two outstanding self-haters: The dean of self-hating Cubans which is of course Max Castro of the Miami Herald. To read an article by Castro where he spews out so much venom about his own people [he is no doubt accumulating browning points like the "house negro" would do on the Plantation] like attending a KKK convention where the topic of conversation are blacks and Jews. Fast on Castro's heels is another Cuban professor from Miami, Lisandro Perez, who has made a career of publishign extremely negative studies on Cuban-Americans that are far from scholarly even though they pretend to be so.
Then there are those I call "Arrepentido de haberse arrepentido." People like Eloy Gutierrez Menoyo, Marx Lesnik, Alfredo Duran, Bernardo Benes, and their ilk.
True...those people that you mentioned are afflicted with a particularly virulent strain of "resentimiento cubano" which brings me to el cubano resentido por interes [the self-hating Cuban for political/monetary/career oriented interests].
Because American academia and culture is so dominated by a left leaning mentality where all things anti-American, pro-leftist/socialist are admired, Castro is quite naturally either ignored/excused or praised in these circles. El cubano resentido por interes, is well aware of this, what's more, he or she lacks the intellectual integrity to stand up for what is right, that is to say a total rejection of Castro.
El cubano resentido por interes will often agree with American leftists and join the chorus in attacking Cuban exiles in the hopes of showing los americanos that he is truly different than Cuban exiles, thus demonstrating to them how "enlightened" and how much like them he is. This is done so that he can get that publishing deal, get tenure in his teaching post, get that grant, or so that he will be asked to write an opinon piece in the New York Times, the Washington Post, or some other Castro apologetic national newspaper. Oh, el cubano resentido por interes will cloak his arguments in the same lame mainstream rhetoric and make it appear as if he is just tired of the "facist" "rightwinged" Cuban exiles, but the real reason behind his rhetoric is apparent if one only scratches at the surface. An example of this cubano resentido por interes is Soledad O'Brien [the daughter of an Australian father and a black Cuban mother]. During the Elian thing, Soledad became indignant and started repeating the Castroite argument that if Elian were black, Cuban exiles would not have rallied behind him [great browning point!]. Mirta Ojito who made a career as a New York Times journalist [yes, the same paper responsible for Castro's rise to power] is another cubana resentida por interes. In her book about her Mariel experience, her language is so carefully crafted that you would think that instead of a totalitarian dictatorship, Cuba is just another garden variety South-of-the-border country from whence her parents came to the USA for a better job. She even says that this is the reason that they came here! She also writes about Bernardo Benes in glowing colors! This is the woman who once wrote some lame report for which she won some journalistic award about racism in Miami among white and black Cubans in which of course, Cuban Americans are profiled as racists!
Nilo Cruz, the Pulitzer Prize winning playwright of "Anna in the Tropics" [proof that one does not have to be a good writer in order to win a literary prize in the USA, Anna is quite frankly lousy] is another cubano resentido por interes. Mr. Cruz is always extremely careful not to criticize the Cuban government in any of his plays and has turned steering away from any political argument even when asked into an art form.
Ray I was exposed to one such cubano resentido por interes named Alejandro Portes. He was (I don't know where he is now) a professor at Princeton. He wrote a ridiculous paper in order to discredit the Cuban diaspora as idiotic parrrots of corrupt politicians. You can read me email to him at http://www.trenblindado.com/portes.htm
Henry,
Yes indeed! I'm familiar with Alejandro Portes. And definitely, he is another cubano resentido por interes BIG TIME! He has to protect his teaching post at Princeton and his publications you know!
By the way, you're reply to him was great! It is a perfect example of what I mean about deconstructing the arguments of the left. This is what is passing for scholarly work nowadays! A published sociologist like Portes is not supposed to use subjective politically charged language when talking about his subject, yet, he does so repeatedly. Incredible! If you read Lisandro Perez's "The Legacy of Exiles: Cubans in the United States," you will encounter the same type of rhetoric.
The irony, the sickness of the Cuban exile community is that our scholars are often our enemies. In other communities, the scholars become the spokespeople for their communities, the sociologists explain the idyosyncracies of their community to the mainstream. Not with Cubans. Cuban scholars in an endeavor to get that tenure will often trash their own community. Heaven's forbid that they are put on the same level as those awful and unpopular [polls prove it you know!] Cuban exiles!
In other communities, like the black and Puerto Rican communities, their scholars and writers celebrate their political empowerment and concentrate on their successes [like the election of that young black senator from Illinois] in the Cuban community, cubanos resentidos por interes like Portes and Perez turn Cuban empowerment into something sinister, they OTHERRIZE CUBANS as if we don't have a right to empowerment. If some Cuban politician commits a crime, the resentidos hammer it in repeatedly as if this was something particular to us, ignoring that jails are full of corrupt politicians. Just read the New York and New Jersey newspapers. Every other day some non-Cuban American elected official is found in some bribery scandel or other type of schenanigans.
These resentidos love to mention that Cubans have been found to be unpopular in polls. Perez does the same thing. Can you imagine black scholars saying that blacks are unpopular in the USA and then giving a list of all black politicians who have been arrested? Can you imagine a Chicano, Puerto Rican or Jewish American scholar doing likewise about his community??
The word that comes to mind with these resentidos is sickening and revolting.