On Gonzo's Pond — Becoming American“No soy de aquí, ni soy de allá.” — Facundo CabralI remember Cuba.
It’s not a vibrant, living memory like the memories of Junior High dances, High School football games, and Christmases forty years past. It feels more like the awareness of a shadow of a memory—like recalling a movie you watched long ago, or something that happened to someone else. Very much like that, in fact. Very much like I’m reaching back toward the childhood of a stranger.
I blame time, naturally. It’s been a long while since those memories were made. And yet, it’s been nearly as long since I sat on the floor of a small house near Cape Canaveral, watching Neil Armstrong step onto the moon on a 19″ black-and-white TV—and those memories remain sharp and bright and unblinking. So time alone doesn’t explain the fade.
Cuba, for me, has become a stack of brittle sepia photographs—stiff shirts, starched shorts, hair combed into obedient waves, shiny shoes reflecting a little boy who was expected to grow into someone I never became. There was a path written for me in the language of my birth, a version of myself that simply never had the chance to materialize. My own lifeline stops abruptly, then begins again a small distance away, veering off on a new and improbable trajectory.
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