Those Damned Cubans Are Everywhere

Marc has an exceptional editorial up at Uncommon Sense – Another Cuban in Florida – that you simply all must read.

Every year, my family celebrates “la noche buena” on Christmas Eve, and I love Cuban food, and the music. But what I have discovered within myself, as I researched and wrote about Cuba, was something much deeper and stronger. It’s as if what is happening to my companeros on the island, especially the journalists, is happening to me.

Their freedom has become my cause.

I am first and foremost an American, and proudly so, but I almost am Cuban, and just as proud.

Earlier this week, in a post and subsequent comments, Val described his Cubanidad, and the fact that his is the most popular Cuba blog on the Internet, as almost a burden. For Val, who I consider a friend, being a Cuban with a blog means having to answer the idiots out there who excuse the Castro regime’s bad behavior and to explain and defend why the focus of his blog is so narrow.

I share his pain. But rather than shirk from it, I, like Val, embrace it.

For me, spending hours almost every day working on this blog is not a burden but a responsibility I embrace proudly. As a journalist, as an American and as a Cuban, I have been guided by an invisible hand, from within and from above, to tell the stories of Cuba as best I can and to do my small part, I hope, to help free a nation.

I’d just like to say that I never meant to imply that the blog is a burden, it’s not. Babalu, and every other blog on that Cubiches blogroll, is a labor of love. It is just as Marc describes it, a responsibility that we all embrace proudly and wholeheartedly and with the only goal being that someday we’ll have made a difference.