South to America: A Journey Below the Mason-Dixon to Understand the Soul of a Nation

by Imani Perry

I can tell you a story of how and why this is. How wealthy White Cubans fled the revolution and were re-baptized White in the US and have fed inequality on the island by sending money to their relatives. Meanwhile others have to make do with resources that are limited because of the endless embargo, the ongoing fallout of the end of the Soviet Union, and the steady global erosion of socialist possibility. Even if a nation isn’t capitalist, the global marketplace is. There’s really no avoiding it now. The heartbreak of a stymied revolution, and the failure of a nation to eradicate the badges of servitude and the legacy of slavery, is what it is two times over. The difference, this young woman reminded me, is that sometimes something is actually done about racism in Cuba. Unlike, she opined, in the US. Julia de Burgos wrote in her poem “Presencia de amor in the isla” (Presence of love in the island) the following words about Cuba: I remember that once the stars talked to me From a buried corner, without a glance and without a voyage Something like a world detained in its history Like a trill astray, like a wing without a bird . . . Even in the most virtuous of moments, the legacy of the twentieth century and its promises careens between bittersweet and bile.