Free Jubana! by Gigi Anders Page B

what?”
    â€œPeanuts.”
    â€œRight, peanuts. An’ dey come from de farms! Like peekeengh de cottons. Ees from de Amereecahn Southern farms, joo know? Een de South! Like from de slaveries! An’ den dey feed dat to de peegs! Das not for de leetl kiddies. We never had dat een Cuba. Never. Das johs for de peegs. De same ones dat eat de Wahndehr Brayt.”
    It took me decades to stop associating Skippy with slavery.
    Whatever Mami loved and hated, it was to extremity, and I tried real hard to also love and hate the same. She was my golden girl on the moon, my redheaded Cuban Grace Kelly with pearls on her earlobes, around her throat, encircling her wrists and fingers, the milk-white fingers with the perfect long red fingernails, the glazzy gal who was sleek and smart and thrilling. Mami knew the answers to everything and was sophisticated, worldly, and effortlessly beautiful, easily the most beautiful mother in the world, the very best woman. Oh, I was so in love with her. It never occurred to either one of us that it was possible to love her and still be separate people. One pre-Gramps psychiatrist, an American named Raymond Band, whom I saw briefly in Washington, D.C., said I was conflicted about my own individuation. Meaning that he thought that I thought that if I broke away and became my own person—which is apparently what all the well-adjusted albinos in America did—something awful would happen. I’d feel as though I were abandoning my mother. And my father. Hadn’t they beenthrough enough bad things? I figured if I clung to them and never left them alone, they would be less sad about losing Cuba and less sad about life in general. We would be this tight little constellation of love, understanding, comfort, closeness, safety, familiarity, fluency, and support in an otherwise vast, indifferent, confusing, lonely, threatening, strange, and empty cosmos. To me we were like three wounded mártires who had endured something intense and unspeakable together in an unwinnable war in a far-off land that only we understood and could never explain to anybody who wasn’t also a Cuban refugee. The American psychiatrist regarded me as though I were an alien.
    I guess I was.
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    The D.C. summers were hot and wet, unabated by sea breezes. Mami didn’t mind. She loved to bake—in the sun, not cakes. Being fair-skinned redheads, neither of us could tan. But we could freckle. The aspiration was to get so many freckles that eventually they’d merge into one gigantic tan. But from June to September my legs were covered in hives and assorted rashes from the chafe. Unlike Mami, I was “delicate.” A sensitive Jubana hothouse orchid who reacted violently to all sorts of outer and inner weather.
    â€œÂ¡Mira pa’ esto!” Mami said, examining my blistered inner thighs. Look at this! And then to my father, “¡Has algo!” Do something!
    â€œÂ¿Qué coño tu quieres que yo haga? ¡Hay calor! ¡No hay dinero!” What the hell do you want me to do? It’s hot! There’s no money!
    â€œÂ¡La niña no puede vivir así! Mira pa’ esto. A mi no m’importa un carajo. Compra un aire acondicionado, coño. O róbate uno, a mi que m’importa. Pero hazlo!” The child can’t live like this! Look atthis. I don’t give a fuck (what it takes). Buy an air conditioner, dammit. Or steal one, I don’t care. Just do it!
    â€œOkay.”
    My father went to Sears and bought an electric fan for $12. They put it in my bedroom. My hives and rashes cleared right up. Mami needed a target for her fury. Papi was the most convenient one to blame, as if he had caused our new impoverished circumstances with all its attendant problems and deprivations. Mami railed against Fidel Castro, she howled at the moon for the random unfairness of life, for the constan’ eensohlt of snow, for the red rash on my thighs.
    Later on we got a.c. and