Free Jubana! by Gigi Anders

embrace. Martí was great. The cover of the book has a color illustration in the Renoir style, with a touch of rococo: a kindly and handsome man surrounded by beautiful, placid, elegantly dressed turn-of-the-century children surrounded by their fancy little imported dogs. Very French, very sugary. Mami repeatedly read me the long poem called “Los Zapatitos de Rosa” (“The Little Rose Shoes”) about a rich mother and her daughter, Pilar. They go to the beach in a luxurious coach to see and be seen. Pilar is all decked out in her plumed hat and silken rose-colored slippers. As Martí describes the individuals Pilar and her mother encounter at the beach, he’s in effect describing all of Cuban society and the distinct partition in class that existed during that period. There are las señoras, the Cuban, English, and French ladies who sit conversing como flores, like flowers, under their parasols. There’s a creepy little rich girl named Magdalena, dressed all in ribbons and bows, who enjoys burying her armless dolls in the sand.
    Pilar wanders off to the other side of the beach, where, Martí tells us, the sea is brinier, saltier. That’s where the poor and the old people sit. Pilar meets a sickly, barefoot girl and gives her the precious zapatitos de rosa and the plumed hat. At first Pilar’s mother is furious, but later she realizes what a good girl she has, and ends up also giving away to the poor girl her cape, her ring, a carnation, and a kiss.
    Sounds mawkish by contemporary American standards. But as a Jubana child I just loved the poem because it made me cryand it was a reminder to share what you have with people who don’t have anything. In Martí’s world, that sharing is moral and voluntary. But in Fidel’s world, that “sharing” is achieved through fiat, like a perverted Robin Hood having his way with those he deems gusanos. Worms. Worms like my mother and father. Fidel called everybody in my family that. I mean, not personally to our faces, but collectively to all who fled (and still flee) his regime. Was I too young to be a worm at age three? I may have been born with little rose-colored slippers on my soft little pounded veal cutlet feet, but now, exiled, the cutlets were bare. And I, a worm or the child of worms—which would have made me a worm or maybe a wormlette—had to learn to depend on the kindness of American strangers.
    Pamela helped me make the transition into my second language by reading English-language stories to me and making me read others back to her, correcting me whenever I made a mistake. The most useful and helpful book she gave me was The Cat in the Hat Beginner Book Dictionary; the basic words— camp, friend, happy —were each illustrated and used in sentences. I loved that book. Or rather, I relied on it to expand my new lexicon. To master English was the most important and intense thing for me then. Learning it, getting it, using it confidently was as exciting and unfolding an experience as I could imagine, like Helen Keller making the connection between water and the word water. I deeply identified with Helen Keller, as I did with Carson McCullers’s Frankie, and those two characters would become more significant in my life as time went on.
    Emily Dickinson, with whom I share a birthday, wrote. “There is no Frigate like a Book/To take us Lands away,” and truly, little made me happier than getting into bed with a pile of books. Whenever Mami went someplace she’d ask, “What do joo want me to breengh joo back?” and I’d always answer, “A new book.” Unknown to any of us, at least consciously, I was already moving in a certain direction; my vocation was calling me by my name. When your child would rather stay inside reading books than go out and play kick-ball with the neighborhood kids—it’s a sign. Mami would say, “Joo have to get out DER!” and