Cuban Americans

"The day I decided to commit to being an artist was one of the best days of my life. I knew what I loved to do and what I now had to do. Although it was a totally frightening career choice, it was also one of the most liberating."

"On the day of, usually, I am just focused on all that needs to get done to get the shot right. When I am performing, I switch into my body and try to be as in the moment as possible. When I fell through the lake, I opened my eyes and it was so incredibly peaceful. Frozen lake water is this deep emerald green, and all I saw was this thick liquid that was so quiet. I held myself under the ice for as long as I could to experience it."

"For this project, I am wearing a suit made of raw silk inspired by William Turner’s color palette in "The Burning of the Houses of Lords and Commons." I wanted the fabric to reflect the light like the golden flames in the painting."

"Adrian Piper is incredible. I also love the work of Ana Mendieta, Chris Burden, Vito Acconci, Nam June Paik, Pipilotti Rist, Patty Chang, Diane Arbus, Nikki S. Lee, Hito Steyerl, Tino Seghal, T.S. Elliot, Wallace Stevens, Sylvia Plath, Emily Dickinson, Frank O’Hara. The list is endless and always changing."

"I start researching and make calls to people whom I think can help me. The first 10 calls are all usually the same: “You can’t do that, it's impossible.” But then I find someone who is one the same page as me and the fun starts. When we finally have a date, then I prepare physically and mentally. Trampoline training, tai chi practice, ice baths, ashram stays, etc. A lot of research goes into the projects—the goal is to make the final image."

"It’s sort of like building a puzzle. I get an idea and then see how it best fits. If it is an idea for a performance, I start to think, Should it be live? Is it best for video? What time of day? What kind of camera? Where should it be shot? Then I think, How should it be installed? Single-channel or installation? If it is for a live audience, then everything changes; now you are thinking outside the frame and with a 360-degree view. Then the questions start again. All the projects start with an image. If the work is physically challenging, then I work backward to figure out how I can make it. How can I cover myself with bees while doing tai chi? How can I throw myself through sheets of glass? How can I fall through the middle of a frozen lake?"

"Ezra Pound said poetry is “news that stays news,” which I’ve always liked."

"I feel like Miami is growing so fast it is hard to pinpoint what it is anymore because everything is constantly changing here, but at the same time, it’s Miami—this surreal, gritty, gorgeous city that attracts a unique type of person. The art community here reflects that. It is unconventional in its core; it is hardworking, dedicated, supportive, and fun."

"Falling in the lake the first time wasn’t what I would call traumatic. It was while it was happening —don’t get me wrong, but after, it was more of an exciting mystery. It was kind of like recovering from an intense illness. Or losing your virginity and wondering what the hell happened? I did feel an immense sense of power after I shot it last winter. I was in total control of the situation this time, which was more fun."

"There are two phases of the exhibition—day and night. When you walk into the gallery during the day, in this reality, it is actually night. There are 75 night-blooming jasmine plants in boxes with shop lights above them suspended from the ceiling. Because the lights are off, the plants are tricked into thinking it is night and release their rich smell. The viewer walks through a maze of flowers and arrives at the video projected on a screen of myself walking and falling through a frozen lake in the center of the gallery. There is an audio score accompanying the video by experimental jazz composer Jason Ajemian. Every day at 5:30pm, the video turns off and the lights start to turn on in a synchronized choreography to a piece of music. The "day" then begins and the lights turn off again at 5:30am. It is a very sensorial experience with smell, video, light, color, and sound."

"When I do these performances now, the feeling in my body seems to mirror that lake experience. I did a performance a few years ago where I threw myself through sheets of glass and after that I found the vocabulary to describe how I felt physically eluded me. It was like a secret in my body. When thinking about how to approach the reenactment, I started reading about how William Turner worked. He would take real-life events and turn them into the most beautiful images using color and light. He was also very interested in the sublime—man’s powerlessness in the face of nature. I channeled him as an inspiration when making the video."

"When I was 15, I fell in a frozen lake. I was walking on a lake outside of Boston and the ice started cracking. The next thing you know, I was fighting to get out. The lake was a water reservoir so it was illegal to walk on it. Afterward, I was scared to tell anyone about what happened for fear of getting into trouble. Even though I was freezing for days after, it was also kind of exciting."

"Moving to New York to get an MFA in poetry was a pretty affirming moment. I started to research poets who were performance artists and discovered people like Vito Acconci. From there, my poems walked off the page and into the streets in an action poem style. Photography has always been a big part of my life and when I started researching early performance work, I never understood why the “documentation” of the work was of such bad quality. I went back to school, to the International Center for Photography, to learn the skills necessary to capture aesthetically compelling work, to eliminate the hierarchy between the performance and video and photos. At that point, I hit my stride."

"Really, we could just refer you to the drum fill in Slayer’s “Angel of Death” and rest the case at that. But the so-called “Godfather of Double Bass” has so much more to offer. Endlessly innovative and tirelessly prolific, the Cuban-American virtuoso has played with everyone from Suicidal Tendencies, Testament and the Misfits to more avant-leaning rock bands such as Fantômas and Mr. Bungle — which doesn’t even cover his totally left-field collaborations with classical musician Lorenzo Arruga and fine artist Matthew Barney. Lombardo is the master and your clear pick as No. 1."

"Dave Lombardo is my biggest influence, of course. If it wasn't for him, I probably wouldn't be doing what I'm doing. He's the king of thrash, double bass and all that, so as a teenager, hearing him play in the mid-'80s, obviously I wasn't playing at that point yet — I [was] just starting out — so that really solidified me wanting to play the way I play today, what he was doing and still is doing."

"Without a doubt the best metal drummer on the planet! His speed and footwork completely set him apart from all other drummers from early Slayer to present day. I’ve been lucky to witness him playing close up, and nobody else comes close to his drumming. In my opinion, he is the kingpin of the way metal drummers play today."

"I think that in a society that requires people to be more and more educated, the college degree is almost equivalent to what the high school degree was 25 or 30 years ago. (2016)"

"It’s as if Ray Bradbury had married Michael Ende and occasionally flirted with Anais Nin.”"

"Man is a political animal in certain societies, but it is also an emotional and imaginative animal in any context. Its spirituality is a lot more powerful and omnipresent than politics. My characters might be influenced by political events, but politics isn’t what governs in their lives, but spirituality. A citizen in any Western country could describe themselves as a political animal”; but a druid priest, masai or pygmy in Africa, an indigenous person from the Caribbean in pre-historic times or even the Amazon today, doesn’t follow these parameters. According to these cultures, the spirit and emotions are a lot more important."

"Exile was where I was able to complete the amended or mutilated spaces that I was still missing to understand Cuba’s history. My novels, riddled with ghosts, journeys in time, mythological reinterpretations, are how I try to give a coherent image so as to reconstruct that incomplete reality which I was shown."

"Cuba is a ghost that feeds my literature...The seedling of what I am today took root on that island. But, that Cuba no longer exists, except for in my memories and my generation’s collective imagination. This is why it is a mythical and real land at the same time, which continues to sustain my ideas and dreams."

"In life, reality and fantasy are blended, and I deliberately look for that connection in my work. It gives me pleasure to do so"

"I would like my readers to levitate when they read the novel. I believe that there is too much violence and coarseness in the world, not just in books, but on television as well. People become degraded when they overuse these things. As I writer, I feel it is my challenge to come up with a phrase that can convey all the anguish a human being feels and to express it in a poetic way. Literature becomes simplistic when two out of every three words are vulgarisms. It requires no effort on the part of the creator or the reader."

"I’m more worried about exploring new subjects and places that give me interesting information, than speculate about what other people can think or say about my work. Life is getting shorter and shorter and I want to make the most of mine."

"there are just a lot of stories that I hope won’t be lost. I want to be sure that this legacy remains, even though it’s a miniature community and maybe not of great interest to everybody in the world. Especially for writers like myself, who come from minority backgrounds—we’re trying to fill in absences or gaps. There was obviously no literature like Tia Fortuna when I was growing up. There’s this very large Jewish Latino community in Miami, but they’re just not represented in literature. I felt that was a gap that I could fill."

"displacement has been a common path for Jews throughout history; they’ve always been displaced from one place to another, through diaspora, through a sense of expulsion, not being welcome anymore, being truly forced out."

"reading is one of our greatest human treasures, to be passed on from generation to generation, so the world might be a better place for everyone. (Acknowledgements)"

"I step out, legs trembling a little but my heart full, and set forth on the next journey, entrusting myself to the beauty and danger of life all over again. (Author's Note)"

"Healing is a journey and it takes its own sweet time. What a gift it is to get a second chance at life when the worst is past. (Author's Note)"

"Pain is pain. Speak up. Tell your story. (Author's Note)"

""I think if your dreams are small they can get lost, like trying to find a needle in a haystack...When a dream is big, you can see it better and hold on to it." (Ruthie)"

"“The only way to deal with fear is to treat it like an unwelcome guest. If you keep entertaining it, you’ll never be rid of it.” (Amara)"

"“Why is it that bad things have to happen so you learn there are lots of good people in the world?" (Ruthie)"

"“But wherever I go, I know I will feel most at home with the wounded of the world, who hold their heads up high no matter how broken they may seem.”"

"Being alive is the best gift of all. (p139)"

"When we lived in Cuba, I was smart. But when we got to Queens, in New York City, in the United States of America, I became dumb, just because I couldn't speak English. (first lines)"

"I think the most fundamental thing we can do to make the world a better place is to be open to the stories of people, to listen and take in the lived experiences of others. Stories have the power to change the world. Understanding the hopes and dreams of another person, we learn that we are all connected, and that to nurture all of our communities, our families, and our individual lives we must nurture one another."

"That is the magic of writing, and also the challenge of writing, not knowing what will happen until it’s on the page."

"I often say that I am Jewish because I am Cuban. I feel gratitude toward Cuba because my four grandparents found refuge there in the years before WW II at a time when the door was closed to them in the United States. If not for the welcome they received in Cuba, I would not have been born. My family came to love Cuba. When we left in the 1960s, to start a new life again in the United States after the turn to communism, it was with great sorrow. My family lived through a double exodus, a double migration, from Europe to Cuba, and then from Cuba to the United States. If we had not been given refuge twice, we would not have survived. Knowing that my ancestors fled persecution and genocide, I believe we should be compassionate and humane toward immigrants and foster policies of welcome, kindness, and generosity of spirit."

"In my children’s fiction, I also want to teach them ideas. I don’t want them just to have a story: I’m giving somebody who perhaps knows nothing about Sephardic Jews a sense of that culture. Even if it is a preliminary sense, it’s an affirmation that this culture and these people exist. In that way, I’m bringing my ethnographic work even into a domain like the picture book."

"self-interrogation is a special quality of anthropological work, one that we don’t see enough of in fiction. Sometimes in fiction, authors hide or erase the work and interrogation that they may have done to be able to write their novels. But in ethnography, we often include that interrogation within our texts. And to me, that’s an inspiring part of our storytelling."

"Contemporary Sephardic writers in Latin America include Ana Maria Shua in Argentina, Isaac Chocrón in Venezuela, Ruth Behar in Cuba, Angelina Muñiz-Huberman, and Rosa Nissan in Mexico, and Victor Perera in Guatemala. They write about Jewish life-Sephardic and otherwise in the modern world."

"Poll after phony poll, decade after decade, has decreed the end of the Cuban exile freedom movement. Pundits spewing ideological lines have rambled on about how young Cubans, turning away from their parents, seek to engage and open up to Castroism. These lies have not weakened the community for, in exile, Cubans comprise a young nation with deep truths. As in 1868, they still deeply believe in individual freedom, in the right to private property, in the right to life, in the rule of law. They deeply love America because it has institutionally enshrined these values and thereby made possible the opportunity to prosper, to be self-reliant, to be free. As a free people, they hold loyalty as a value and are deeply loyal to America."

"The church has taught us, the body is one. When one member is suffering, the whole body suffers, and we should never become complacent into the situations of others, but always be aware and do what we can. We can only do what is possible with a generous heart and an open mind, with arms that are ready to embrace."

"No other Hispanic community in the United States has felt as intensely and viciously as the Cubans the weight of communist oppression and the loss of freedom in their ancestral nation. The Cuban exile community closely monitors what happens in Cuba: the continuing repression and persecution against any who think and act differently from what the totalitarian state dictates. The Cuban exile community knows too much about Cuba to believe in banalities about the “equality” and “justice” brought about by socialism in Cuba."

"As a young man, you need a kick in the ass sometimes. Thank God, I really took that to heart."

"I get inspiration from everything. A lot of actors use this term, that they "steal from other actors," which I take more as being inspired by other performances and the tonality of those performances."

"Myths die hard. We humans define ourselves by the ideological teams we join. We are liberals or conservatives, Christians or atheists, Yankee fans or Red Sox fans. We filter facts to conform to our group’s ideology and then defend that ideology to the death. Only a truly momentous event can make us change teams…"

"…The play does not purport to be the play of the community—it’s really about that artist’s idiosyncratic voice and what that encounter elicits in them…"

"…I’ve been thinking a lot in terms of how growing up in the context impacts a person’s sense of place in the world. My sense of it. Never quite believing that anything is permanent, uncontested. Never quite landing. You always are a little bit “observing”…"