Some Cuban expats head home
McClatchy Newspapers
Jorge's friends at work call him the "Sixth Hero."
Folks here figure Jorge must be the secret spy who got away. Why else
would he have returned to Cuba after living in the United States for six
years? The "sixth hero" reference relates to the five Cuban intelligence
agents the Cuban government nicknamed "the Five Heroes" who are serving
long U.S. prison sentences.
Despite the freedom Jorge enjoyed and the ability to earn a better
living as a school custodian in Miami Beach, Jorge returned to Cuba in
2002 to face a government that mistrusted him, a year of probation and
friends who assume he is a member of the intelligence service. He said
he is one of a growing number of emigres who after years of living
abroad yearn for the sounds and familiarity of home.
So they pack a few things and return to a country where they might make
in a month what they used to earn in an hour.
Jorge says he feels now like a TV mute button - every time he walks into
a room full of Cubans, everyone stops talking.
"The government here thinks you are CIA, and the people think you are
state security who went to the United States and came back after
completing your mission," said Jorge, 47, who works as a guitarist. "The
others just think you are crazy for coming back. But, you know, every
now and then someone visiting from Miami passes by my house and asks me,
`I want to come back, too. How did you do it?""
It was not easy. Just like leaving Cuba legally is filled with
bureaucratic red tape, so is returning.
Cubans who leave for longer than 11 months are considered permanent
residents of someplace else, so they must reapply for identity papers,
then report monthly to immigration for a year until they are cleared.
It's unclear whether people who left Cuba without the required exit
papers can ever legally return.
"I went to immigration and said, `I'm not going back. Like it or not,
I'm staying,' " Jorge said. "They did not take it so well."
The Cuban government does not publish statistics on people who return to
the island. It's clearly a tiny portion of the tens of thousands of
Cubans who leave each year for the United States and Europe. At least
20,000 Cubans migrate legally to the United States every year, and the
vast majority return only to visit.
Well-known Havana blogger Yoani Sanchez returned to Cuba from Zurich
four years ago with her 8-year-old son in tow. She says friends advised
her to rip up her passport so the Cuban government could not force her
to leave again.
In her Generation Y blog, she describes how she showed up at a
provincial immigration office and was simply told to get in line -
behind all the other "crazies."
"A man who returned from Spain with his wife and daughter after living
there five years told me, `Don't worry, they are going to try to force
you to leave, but you have to refuse. The worst thing that happens is
that they detain you for two weeks, but the jail is right here, and the
mattresses are quite fine,' " she wrote.
Sanchez never did have to test the jail mattresses.
"People think it's weird for you to return, but in any other place in
the world, leaving for a few years and coming back is the most normal
thing," she said in a telephone interview. "It's Cuban law that makes it
absurd."
She lived in Switzerland for two years with her husband and child but
came back for family reasons. She has encountered several people who did
the same thing.
"Some ... had elderly parents who were alone. Some never adapted to
where they were or had property issues to deal with here," she said.
"Some come back for love, because they never could get their family
member out of Cuba."
Jorge left Cuba in 1996 with his wife when they won the visa lottery,
and landed first in Oregon, where they stayed for two years. The couple
eventually moved to South Florida but never felt comfortable, in part
because they found the exile community too politicized. Jorge did like
the freedom, the right to speak out in public, and still misses the
polite manners and clean streets. But he grew weary of mopping floors
and washing dishes for a living instead of playing music.
"It was hard to integrate," he said. "I think I always knew I would come
back. For me, it had nothing to do with politics. It has to do with
being Cuban, the love I have for my people and my land."
In 2002, the couple brought $20,000 in savings back to Havana and
returned to stay, moving back to the home where Jorge's mother-in-law
lives. They used the money to renovate the home, but the marriage was on
the rocks and did not last.
Jorge's ex stayed in the renovated house, and he now lives in a tiny
studio on the same property, a bit worse off than he did in Miami Beach.
He makes a decent enough living off tips playing the guitar at a local
tourist restaurant and has no regrets.
Andy Gomez, senior provost at the University of Miami's Institute for
Cuban and Cuban-American Studies, said cases of returnees are isolated.
Twenty years ago, it was virtually unheard of.
"Some people left loved ones behind and just miss them. Others just
can't psychologically adjust to a free society," Gomez said. "The longer
you live in that system, the more difficult it is to break the
psychological barrier.
"You are trapped in two systems, so what do you do? You revert to the old."
Katrin Hansing, associate director of Florida International University's
Cuban Research Institute, said that in the dozen years she lived in
Cuba, she met about nine people who had returned from living abroad.
Most did so because they longed for a sense of community and could not
fit into the South Florida rat race, she said.
"There is a tremendous pressure to come here and make it; to go back is
seen as failure," Hansing said. "When they go back, they keep a very low
profile in Cuba. It breaks the myth that people come here and find
bliss. Neither place is paradise."
If the Cuban government made the process easier, Hansing said, more
probably would return.
For Silvia, the daughter of government officials who lived a comfortable
life in Cuba, the decision to return to the island after six months in
the United States was easy: She ran out of money and had nowhere to go.
"I hate Fidel Castro, but does that mean I should work in a cafeteria?"
she said. "I am 44 years old, and the first and only time in my life I
went hungry was in the United States. Here, I live in a four-bedroom
house and have a car. Over there, I had to live in an apartment the size
of a table."
The Cuban government told blogger Sanchez once her paperwork was
processed that she could never leave again. That is not an issue for her
- at least not now.
"I want to live many more years here, but I am not closed to anything,"
Sanchez said. "I don't believe in false patriotism. I am a citizen of
the world, and I feel happy anywhere. For now, I'm good here."
Jorge says he is glad he came home, too.
"I have a lot of nice memories of Oregon," he said. "It's a very
beautiful place. But I always knew I was coming back."
The Miami Herald withheld the name of the correspondent who wrote this
report and the surnames of some people quoted because the reporter did
not have the journalist visa required by the Cuban government to report
from the island.
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