UC Irvine

This is a project of Creative Nonfiction. It employs Literary Journalism and Narrative Nonfiction as its primary operating models.

My whole life people have asked me where I'm from. Dark haired and slant-eyed, they ask if I'm Italian, whether I have Asian blood. My answer is always different. Sometimes I say: I'm Cuban. Sometimes I say: I'm from Miami, but my parents are Cuban. Sometimes, if I really don't want to get into it I simply say: Miami Beach. The question that inevitably follows when the word Cuba makes its way into my answer is: What's Cuba like? Until November of 2014, I always had to reveal, always with dismay, that I had never stepped foot on the island. My explanations were always seemingly insufficient. "It would take a book," I always end up saying.

This dissertation is my real answer to the question: Why not Cuba for so long? And why Cuba now? Why, when I had travelled to so many other places, did Cuba remain the place I could not go?

My Cuban Routes answers this question through a combination of story, personal narrative/memoir, and journalism. Through my family's narrative and its effects on my own, personal experiences, reactions, and formation, I try and get to the core of the answer, which is long and winding. This dissertation is made up of the alternate routes I had to take to Cuba -- alternate routes that both took me closer and further from Cuba, until the end of 2014, when everything began to change. For years there has been an economic embargo on Cuba that is slowly being lifted, due to Obama's speech on Dec. 17, 2014, opening up diplomatic relations with the island for the first time in over half a century.

My argument in this dissertation is that this shift could not have happened without a shift in what I call the Familial embargo -- the embargo imposed by Cuban-American families on themselves and their children, due to the pain of exile, and their faith-based beliefs against the Castro regime.