from a commentator on Generacion Y xeusater dice:
Who describes the Cubano connection with the universe far better than I ever could as an outsider.:
Cubans are like this:
Cubans have left from a small island and have spread throughout the world. One is professor at a university in Australia, another opened a restaurant in Alaska. Nothing stops them, neither cold nor heat. They are seduced by the tropic heat of Florida, but also bear firm-footed the ice in Boston and New York. They don’t beg, but work. Those who were poor in Cuba, here are rich. No obstacle stops their belligerent laboriousness if the offer is decent. One is rector at a University, another puts makeup to dead people. They change, but only on the surface. In Miami they still play the “bolita” (forbidden lottery), fighting roosters in secret and sending their children to private schools. In Madrid, they are against Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero and in Caracas against Hugo Chávez, always in opposition. They are criticized and envied but deep inside they are admired. Like Galicians at working and Jews for the will to survive, they are a legion, stubborn not to be left ignored.

They bring their warm music, the noise of their drums, black beans, steak with “Moros y Cristianos” and banana. But also bring the sympathy, warmth and dedication. Who are they? Cubans, children of the exile, the only transplanted population (except for Jews), which has not lost its identity in almost half a century. Those who admired Cuba from afar as an example of supreme strength in Latin America, which saw Cuba as an ethnic and cultural miracle, where everything seemed a mess but all worked well, no longer have to go to Cuba to meet it! Here it is in the inside of the United States. This is Cuba. These are the Cubans. Exaggerated, bragging, loud, yes, but also intense, deeply creative and good friends.

And what have Cubans not done in these 50 years of exile to survive with dignity? Which manual activity have they not tested in this or that country? What would seem complicated, they have it done to not stay behind, to avoid being discriminated. In any of those activities they have gone so far, beyond migrations which preceded them by nearly half a century. There’s no hospital in United States where there is no Cuban doctor. No newspaper where there is no Cuban journalist, or a bank where there is no Cuban banker, or advertisement company without a Cuban, or a school without a Cuban teacher, or a university without a Cuban professor. In the Major League Baseball their names also shine. In Madrid, the first Latin American poet is a black Cuban. At Coca Cola, Kellogg s, McCormick, Pepsi Cola and many others their leader is or was a Cuban. In the Congress in Washington there are four Cubans, in the U.S. Senate there are two, the Minister of Commerce is a Cuban, the Deputy Minister of Health is a Cuban doctor. Wow, they are few in this country and arrived very recently.

In the borrowed land from abroad they seem to always carry on the forehead the mark of the place they came from. Cubans take Cuba with them. They praise and worship it, because, as well as in the forehead they wear it in they heart. But there is something in the Cuban exile superior to that triumphant career, and that is their hatred to the despotism from which they fled and their love for the land they left. That is what separates and defines them. That gives to their triumphs in the midst of rootlessness, a greatness that otherwise they would not have.

They have finally settled on this land that had received them and where they live on the material things many times better than how they lived in Cuba. But even having everything, if they lack Cuba, they have nothing. Perhaps for this reason they have made their Cuba here. So if you take a good look, you will see that sometimes it seems that the Cuban laughs, but is really crying inside. His son is born, grows, graduates from the University, but the Cuban sighs. “Oh, if he were in my Cuba!”. He buys a house, a car or a boat and still sighing. “Ah! If I had everything of this in Cuba!” In a mysterious way, which they can not define, there is a link that drags them over there.

Now that he lost his country, he gets to know that he can not live without Cuba, and he dreams of it at night, and enhances its values and beauty, and idealizes it, and blames himself for not having understood it better, and recreates it in his songs and dances and relive their stories in their customs and their food. Why do Cubans buy today more Cubans books than ever?. Why are their houses, their businesses and their offices filled with palms, flags, coats of arms and portraits of José Martí? Why are they U.S. citizens but STILL CUBANS? Why do they meet in their municipalities formed in exile, erasing old antagonisms of party or class?

Because the Cuban knows that the only thing that genuinely belonged to him was HIS CUBA and to it they want to return. They do not care about being returned their residence or business, if they had. All they want is to return home. The house where he was born was destroyed, the village he knew has become unrecognizable, his mother has died. It doesn’t matter. The exiled Cuban wants anyway go to that house in that village and to that tomb. The homeland starts there.