Rubio’s Mother did it Right

By Juana Bimba

I'm a progressive and not a fan of former GOP presidential contender Marco Rubio-- but I admire his mother, Oriales Rubio, and I dedicate this Mother's Day Post to her. I think she's one Cuban mom who got it right.

My generation of middle class exiles was brought up by servants in Cuba. If early memories serve, my mother was the wraith who swept nightly into my room, draped in cocktail dresses and perfume, to kiss me goodnight and disappear until the next evening.

Then the revolution came and changed all that.

Whole families fled to Miami and, sans servants as a buffer, thousands of us began the process of getting to know the strangers who called themselves our parents. It wasn't easy.

Our fathers worked long hours. Our mothers, unfamiliar with parenting, left us to raise ourselves while they mastered the intricacies of housekeeping without the help.  

This being 60's America, we turned to Beaver Cleaver and his TV family for default role models. 

We wanted to be good kids. We did household chores and never talked back. We earned our own money (our parents had none to spare). We babysat, mowed lawns, flipped burgers, pumped gas. We bought jalopies with our meager savings. We went to public school. We attended college on loans and scholarships. 

And we turned out all right. Or so we thought.

Because when it was our turn to have kids, we screwed up, big-time. We tried to give them everything we hadn't enjoyed as young exiles and it backfired.  We made them into monumental wastes of space: arrogant, sullen, entitled and disrespectful brats.

True, the world has changed, and it's no longer possible to grow up as we did. Public schools are now dangerous places, and the after-school jobs that we did for pin money have been taken over by hordes of the unwashed. So our children attended private schools and didn't work for pocket money, college tuition, brand new cars, or anything else they wanted.

Still, it seems we could've done SOMETHING so they wouldn't have turned out as nasty. We’ve done them no favor by spoiling them. When they step out into the world and discover that their shit DOES stink after all, they have a hard time handling reality. They crash and burn. I’ve seen some tragic examples of it.

(My own son has turned out okay; maybe it's because there were few opportunities to pamper him, since I had to struggle to raise him by myself.)

I'm not saying absolute poverty is a virtue; it can drive people to crime. But living in merely modest circumstances can be a different story, a catalyst to teach kids to overcome and excel. 

This, I think, is what Oriales Rubio did with her son Marco, who went from a paycheck-to-paycheck childhood in Miami all the way to a senator's seat in Washington DC. Would he have turned out any differently if raised in a Spanish-style mansion in Coral Gables? 

Probably. But then, we'll never know. 

Happy Mother's Day to all.

Growing up with the Rebel Flag

 

By Juana Bimba

People say that if Germans don't display swastikas over their public buildings, US Southerners shouldn't fly Confederate Flags over theirs. They're both reminders of shameful pasts, right?

But Hitler never got to cloak his infamy in rosy myths; an avalanche of appalling media images and firsthand horror stories have prevented it, as has the historical proximity of the event.

Also, Nazis never benefited from the ministrations of  beloved pop culture apologists, like fiction writers and movie stars.

Views on antebellum culture had begun to transform with this nation's

first efforts to heal by honoring war veterans from both sides at early 20th century parades. Then along came "Gone with the Wind", and historical revisionism dug in for good.

Subsequent media depictions of the Confederacy were mostly sympathetic.  The Antebellum South became a happy memory-land of singing darkies and the kindly whites who "took care" of them. The Confederate struggle morphed in memory, from a dogged defense of the indefensible to a noble fight against invading Yankee barbarians. 

For at least a century, white Southerners were left to cherish these fantasies   while the rest of the country looked away, or joined in. The white South's celebration of its antebellum history was considered a harmless quirk. Racism? Slavery? Those pages conveniently flapped loose from the main script to become as  anomalies, unrelated to the True Glories of Dixie's Past.

As the child of Cuban exiles, I landed in 1960's Miami amid all these historical delusions.  Florida, though it dissembles, is still very much The South, in a bone-deep way that you'd miss if you didn't know any better. 

Florida schools were segregated back then, so they housed no black sensibilities and were free to celebrate their antebellum heritage. One local learning institution named itself after Robert E. Lee, while another, the South Dade

Rebels, draped its marching band in Confederate uniforms. In my public high school, boys carried Confederate flags to football games and waved them whenever our side scored. 

For us, that flag was just a symbol of battle, too bad it's been hijacked by the lunatic fringe. Redneck atrocities only perpetuate the resentment that most American blacks feel towards just about everyone else today.

 However, back in the 60's, we Cubans were oblivious to any considerations of prejudice or bigotry. We even ignored the subtle fumes of de apartheid that enveloped us in high school, because we believed they were coming from us, and not from the ones who were excluding us.

Tacitly kept from Anglo American fraternities and sororities, we created our own, or joined honor societies and academic clubs. We flocked together in hallways, classrooms, games, sock hops and the cafeteria. We only dated each other. We had no "American" friends, because acceptance by the larger group 

would mean suppressing our ethnic ways.

 And we thought Anglos (or "whites" ) were boring. 

The more sinister racial implications of Southern history also eluded us, since we considered ourselves white. So I grew up with the idea of  Former Confederate Glory as a normal ingredient of the Zeitgeist, part and parcel of my adopted background as an American.

And when I moved up North as an adult, I was startled to discover how deeply the Southern perspective had been etched into my soul, and that I was now on the "other" side of an existing cultural and historical divide. Who knew that a cemetery in rural Vermont could hold nothing but Union Soldiers? That a historic hotel in upstate New York would proudly display Union relics and daguerreotypes? That anyone could celebrate the same people who had victimized poor antebellum Southerners? 

It took some getting used to.

I've since gotten over those qualms; I know that white Southerners probably don't like Cubans any better than they do Blacks. But I had to wince at the recent outpour of media vitriol against the South, at the hate one segment of the country was directing towards another. To me, that's like stomping on a corpse, or disparaging American war dead.  It's compounding past wrongs.

And wrong as it was, they sincerely believed in their wretched cause and supported it against overwhelming odds, hence, their insane pride in defeat. I think it’s sad.

Yes, slavery was a major disaster and surely this entire country would have been much, much better off without it and all of its unfortunate ramifications. Just think: we could be Canada! (Kidding.) But no, we're rabid Americans, bent on redressing historical wrongs with violence. On both sides. 

It occurs to me that while we're at it, we could also start trashing the hayseeds who died at  the Alamo, trying to defend Texans' right to lynch Mexicans and steal their land. Instead, we celebrate them, which I’ve always found appalling as a Hispanic. And I’m sure that must be offensive to other Latinos (now the largest US minority, BTW) as well.

So why isn't anyone mentioning THAT?

STOMPING THE VOTE, EL BARRIO STYLE  

by Juana Bimba

Heard about blatant, crude, public voter suppression attempts? Here’s a peek at smaller, more private, more insidious, (but no less lethal) aspects of voter suppression.  

A few years ago, I argued with one of my neighbors on Roosevelt Island, some moronic alterations lady who saw fit to reposition a row of buttons on the wrong side of my blazer. I wasn’t too nice about it, and I permanently damaged whatever superficial acquaintance we'd had until then.

My bad. As my mother used to say, no hay enemigo chiquito— there is no small enemy. Some time after our altercation, this same woman was hired as a poll worker at the local voting site. 

And wouldn’t you know it, during the last New York gubernatorial elections, the wretch tried to block my entry to the polls, asking me questions about where I lived and pretending she didn't know me. I kept mentioning my building and pointing to my customary station inside the voting facility, but she wouldn't budge. This went on for a while.

I was on the verge of panic, when the other poll workers came to my rescue and waved me through. Most are minority women who have been my neighbors for years, but my wannabe vote blocker was also a minority person: an elderly Puerto Rican who is active in community affairs, and who decided to use whatever low-rent power she's gained to intimidate me.

Could this Puerto Rican additionally dislike me because I’m a Cuban?  It’s not unheard of.  Even if so, I could never return the favor: my own son is half Puerto Rican, and we’re all supposed to be as Uno, remember? Kumbayah, and all that…

Plus, I have lived and voted in Roosevelt Island for a long time. My name, information and a copy of my signature have been on the island's voting rolls for years.

However,I feared another door-blocking incident during this year's primary elections, so I grabbed every bit of ID I could find and stuffed it in my purse before heading out to the polls.

Fortunately, the staffers at the voting site had already moved to prevent any more trouble: the woman stationed at the entrance this time welcomed me with a smile, gave me the number of my polling station and even pointed me towards it for good measure. 

But I noticed that all of this was done in a rather hurried fashion, as though they were hustling

me inside before my erstwhile antagonist could intervene. Needless to say, I was surprised that she hadn’t been dismissed after that first door-blocking incident (she must have friends in low places).

Though right was done by me in the end, I still feel vulnerable because I’m a naturalized Cuban, and everyone here knows this about me, including anyone who might want to use it to mess with my voting rights.

I don't believe that I was being "innocently" questioned by a person trying to act "responsibly" in her "official" capacity--given the circumstances, there was no need. And I don’t believe that she was just playing silly games to amuse herself. 

At best, it felt like bullying, at worst, like an assault on my voting rights.

And if I’d been less educated, less articulate, or living in a larger, more impersonal community, she might have gotten away with it! Now, I’m hoping some very permanent steps will be taken to prevent this from happening again (translation: I hope to never see this woman’s face at the polls again, unless she’s exercising her own voting rights).

So I e-mailed a shorter version of my little story to New York City Comptroller Scott Stringer, who’s been taking copious local complaints in a similar vein, BTW.

It seems several thousand names magically disappeared from New York voting rolls just before the primaries.

Recount for Bernie, anyone? That may be yet another story, amigos…