There is so much of my family’s story that I will never know or understand. My mother’s family came to the United States from Cuba in 1960, during the early years of the Cuban Revolution. They certainly didn’t want to leave, but they felt that for their safety and their future, they had no choice. That rupture imposed a very clear before and after within our familia: I was born in New York City in 1987, very firmly in the after. And my book, The Eternal Forest: A Memoir of the Cuban Diaspora, is a conversation between the two.
Mi familia wasn’t permitted to bring much with them when they came – only “$5 and a suitcase,” according to the family refrain – but they brought with them generations of memories. Memories which I, for as long as I can remember, have been obsessed with capturing and memorializing, keeping them close to my heart so I could pass them down to my own children one day.
Even as a little girl, I found it viscerally meaningful to hear my grandparents’ stories of the island they left – the small town they called home and their parents called home before them. When my mother would tell me about her own girlhood in Cifuentes, Cuba – riding bicycles through her neighborhood, playing on her living room’s brightly colored tiled floors, listening to her father recite poetry on the palm-tree-breezed terrace after dinner – I felt like I was touching a part of our family’s history that was deeply a part of me too, even if I’d never seen it first hand. Their longing for their island was contagious, and their memories helped me understand that I, too, am Cuban, that heritage follows people no matter where they make a home.
Mi abuela Rosita always felt to me like a crucial portal to this past. She came to the United States when she was in her late 30s, roughly the age I am now, and brought with her all of the experiences that came before. When I was in high school, I began recording her as she recounted her experiences, capturing both stories she had lived through herself, and ones she’d been told about events before she was born. I understood very plainly that when she died, this portal would close, and that the details of her life – so consequential to me and so inconsequential to history – would be forgotten if I didn’t capture them. Lifetimes get so easily erased as time marches forward.
I began working on my book, The Eternal Forest, in 2018. My grandmother was still alive, but 97 years old and losing her memories to dementia. From the beginning, this book felt like an homage to her and a way of capturing my family’s legacy. But I also wanted it to be deeply connected to the larger experience of the Cuban people and the island. Big political events like revolutions may define centuries and fill books, but we can so easily forget about the everyday people whose lives were impacted by those historical eras. The personal and the political are built upon one another – and with The Eternal Forest, it was my goal to really capture that.
In writing this book, I was also very conscious of the fact that so much of what we know about history is defined by men. But so much of what I know about my family is because of my family’s women. Which brings me back to mi abuelita and how the stories she told me so quietly in the kitchen are the bits of her life that I can gather and pass down.
I have sons now, twin boys who are three years old and who I am raising in New York City. They will never know so many of the people in my family who defined my life and who populate the pages of my book. But I do take comfort in knowing that, when they are older, they will have The Eternal Forest to read and learn more about who and where they came from.
Immigration cleaves a family’s history: there is always a before and an after. I am proud of my family, our story, and this book. I am proud to take the pieces of what they brought with them from the before, all those years ago, and preserve them in these pages for the future.
