Free Las Christmas by Esmeralda Santiago Page B

citizenship and languages and homes and dreams—like Lumi said I would—Papi told me the story of how Tío Puchulo had been hidden in an upstairs closet of our house for two weeks before they had found a way to smuggle him out of the country through the interior and across the Haitian border.
    Christmas morning, Mami’s face was happier, as if some weight had been lifted from her shoulders. And there it was in the
sala
of our house, a TV. But it turned out, in the weeks to come, that there was nothing to watch. Recently, with trouble from rebels and such, programming had been limited to long reports from the national palace. “Be careful what you ask for!” Lumi scolded when I complained.
    But what I remember about that first Christmas we switched to Santicló is not the new TV or the subsequent disappointment of having nothing to watch, but how I woke up in the middle of Christmas night to the sound of footsteps above my head, and my heart filled with happiness. Santicló had come, after all! Mami had been wrong. He did like my uncle.
    I was oh-so-tempted to go see the presents piled high by the sea-grape tree in the living room. But I couldn’t seem to pull myself out of bed. My body felt heavier and heavier as slowly, sheet after sheet after sheet of darkness descended on me, and I fell asleep.

Liz Balmaseda
    Liz Balmaseda, a columnist for the
Miami Herald
,
was awarded the
1993
Pulitzer Prize for commentary. She was
Newsweek’
s
Central America bureau
chief, based in El Salvador, and a field producer for NBC News based in Honduras.
The National Association of Hispanic Journalists awarded her the first prize for
print in the Guillermo Martinez-Márquez contest; and she was honored by the
National Association of Black Journalists for her commentaries on Haiti.
    NEXT YEAR IN HAVANA

    THERE ALWAYS SEEMED to be that one lucky lechón, plumped by nostalgia, marinated by exile politics, and always in the end— that lucky pig—spared by Fidel.
    It was the one the old Cubans in Miami perennially vowed to consume in Havana the next Nochebuena.
    â€œOye chico, el año que viene el lechoncito lo comemos allá . . .”
    Over there.
    This would be a
lechón
slaughtered at dawn, skewered with particular satisfaction, lowered into an earth hole in the back yard—or perhaps into one of those tin contraptions they use in
el exilio,
called “
La
Caja China.
” It would be slow-roasted to perfection as morning dissolved into afternoon, the cousin population swelled inside the kitchen, and in a rustle of palms the strains of triumph filtered into the night, serenading the martyred
lechoncito
like a Willy Chirino song.
    We all asked Santa for bicycles and Barbies.
    Mami and Papi and Abuelo and Abuela asked for Christmas in Cuba.
    For as long as I can remember, Nochebuena Miami-style has been a feast of fantasy. We would spray our winter wonderlands upon the sliding glass door in the Florida room
—¡Feliz
Navidad!
/snowflake/snowflake/snowman/candy cane—oblivious to the contrast of the scene outside, the palm trees and banana trees and oranges and mangos, the Virgencita de la Caridad shrine, the Slip-n-Slide, and the basketball net.
    We celebrated a stream of Nochebuenas in Hialeah, the
viejos
invoking the spirits of long-ago celebrations as their sons and daughters picked apart the Miami Dolphins’ starting lineup. Our unwitting stabs at assimilation left us in a bizarre time capsule. Consider the juxtaposition of Celia Cruz, Benny Moré, and Joe Cuba with Dasher, Dancer, Prancer, and Vixen.
    My uncle sang rum-soaked tangos. My cousin sang Charles Aznavour songs. I chased her into startling octaves with my guitar. We drank eggnog and nibbled
turrón.
And sometime during the night, as inevitably as Christmas would dawn the next day, somebody in the house cried for those left behind in Puerto Padre, Cuba—those who seemed to exist in another dimension, a