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"I have no memory to recall what happened, I have no home to keep the memories. (Emilio Bejel, 1995)" "?Que quiere decir "ser de aqui"? (Dolores Prida, 1991)"
Memory and home
There are two themes, however nuanced, which have surrounded, defined, and at times, haunted Cuban-United States historiography: memory and home. For the 1959 exile community and those born to it, they remain inseparable. The multiple meanings attached to each are invaluable starting points for unraveling what it means to be Cuban in the United States during a period of exile and separation. For the US Cuban writer and poet Achy Obejas, being Cuban in the United States has meant realizing and accepting that her parents' anti-Communist politics as well as their decision to leave Cuba marked her early on as an exile. Because of her parents' politics and their decision to leave Cuba for the United States as refugees, Obejas can only imagine what would have happened "if we'd stayed, and there had been no revolution?"
The question posed by Obejas is both deceptively simple and very powerful. With it she reveals how nostalgia operates in her own personal reinvention, in her own attempts to travel back and reconfigure time, politics, and space, during a period of global and political transition. While Obejas' wondering is not a new intervention in the exile dialogue, what makes it important is that at the same time that she allows memory to shape her identity as a Cuban exile, she is also cognizant of its potential dangers. "I try to imagine who I would have been if Fidel had never come into Havana sitting triumphantly on top of the tank, but I can't. I can only think of variations of who I am, not who I might have been" (Obejas, 1994: 124-125). As Obejas decides not to speculate on what could have happened had her family stayed in Cuba, and Castro had not come into power, she challenges the traditional narrative of the post-1959 Cuban exile, a narrative that has been consumed by images of dreaming, possibility, memory, and returning home. By reworking her own definitions of exile and revolution without falling into a litany of "what ifs," Obejas initiates a discussion on what it means to be