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Chapter One, page 12
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fifty-four
questions that were impossible to answer but perhaps dangerous to ignore.
To discard the questions could send the signal that I was desperately trying
to avoid: that as the daughter of avowed gusanos, I was beyond redemption.
There
was nothing I could do for the revolution, and therefore there was nothing
the
revolution could do for me.
No one has the right to invade our privacy like this, my father said. I knew
not
to go further.
He rolled up the papers and put them inside one of the glasses from an
orange-and-green set my mother kept in the cupboard. I skipped school that
day,
complaining of stomach pains. The next day my teachers asked me if we had
filled out the questionnaire. I said my father was working on it. They asked
again
the next day, and the next. Until one day they stopped asking. The papers
remained
inside the cupboard for as long as we lived in Cuba.
The school year ended, as did all my years in grade school, with a student
show. Teachers would pick their favorite students and coach them to display
their talents on graduation day, when awards were issued along with the diplomas.
I’d had such a chaotic year that I knew I wouldn’t receive any
special awards
or be picked to perform in any of the shows. My class had organized a fashion
show representing the countries of the world. There were girls dressed in
flowing
white Panamanian dresses, elaborate Spanish dancers’ costumes, and
even Japanese
kimonos. Others wore short, skin-colored smocks and feathers in their hair;
they were American Indians. A black girl wrapped her lithe body with a colorful
curtain from her living room to represent Africa. Another wore baggy pants
and
a veil around her face; she was the Cuban version of an Arabic country.
I stood on the sidelines pretending to enjoy the preparations for the show
as
much as if I were participating in it. But I couldn’t, because for
the first time I had
not been chosen. I was no longer good enough to play a Vietnamese farmer,
harvesting
rice with a stick while pretending to dodge American bombs, or even Angela
Davis, a role I had played before, clad in a black plastic miniskirt, my
hands
bound by paper chains while the people of the world swirled around me and
clamored for my freedom. I had danced and sung and recited revolutionary
