From Cuba with Love

Dr. Vilma Fuentes invites Professor Dr. Javier Sampedro, professor of Humanities, to the studio.  Dr. Sampedro, talks about the complex dynamic of growing up in Cuba under communist rule and alternatively living most of his adult life outside his homeland. 

Dr. Sampedro touches upon the resiliency and joy provided through the arts and the adaptations made possible through childhood's tendencies towards creativity and exploration. He also reflects on how his experiences in Cuba have influenced moments throughout his life and how a chance meeting of an American girl abroad captured his heart, altering his life in unexpected ways. This episode expresses emotions about the difficulty of bridging two cultures, two countries, with hearts and memories deeply seated in both. 

Transcript

Vilma Fuentes

Welcome to Santa Fe College. My name is Vilma Fuentes, and this is our podcast, Developing Global Citizens. Today, I'm joined by one of our designated faculty at Santa Fe. Dr. Javier Sampedro, who is a professor of Spanish and Latin American Humanities. So, Dr. Sampedro, thank you for joining us. We're so happy you could be here today.

Javier Sampedro

Thank you. Thank you for having me.

Vilma Fuentes

So, I want to begin with what brought you here, and by here, I mean Santa Fe, Florida, the United States? If I'm not mistaken, I think you were born in and spent an early part of your life in Cuba. 

Javier Sampedro

Yes.

Vilma Fuentes 

 So, could you tell me about your experiences there? What are your memories of Cuba?

Javier Sampedro

Of course, and like many other Cubans, I love talking about where I'm from. And I've answered these questions so many times, and I feel that with time, question fights to stay the same, but it doesn't.

Vilma Fuentes

It doesn't have to stay the same. Keep changing it. Add flowers.

Javier Sampedro

(Laughing) I mean, the answer, the answer changes, but it's the same at the same time. 

Now, I grew up in Havana, not very far from the southernmost city in Florida. And I grew up under the tension, the restrictions, and under the surveillance of a very restrictive government and society. But I didn't realize at that time that it was, as a matter of fact, I had a pretty content childhood.

Vilma Fuentes

Good. 

Javier Sampedro

I was not an unhappy, child for the most part, because I was totally, well, ignoring the bad part and trusting that my parents and my family made the right and the best decisions for me. Therefore, there's nothing to be worried about. And the fact that I grew up in a household where my dad was very much in symphony and very much in agreement with the communist socialist transformation of the country, the way was happening in the late seventies when I was born.

So, to me, if… the earliest memories I have were mostly about, or I guess the memories were less about the hardship of growing up and the scarcity and the necessities and this kind of stuff. It was more about really being the child of divorced parents, like many Cubans, because it's a very common thing, was at least, it still is a very common thing. Your parents are divorced, married several times. (Laughs).

Vilma Fuentes

So. So I'm curious when American kids might think about their childhood, they might think about, I don't know. I was playing soccer. I was swimming. I was playing video games. Give me some of the impressions you have. What did you do as a child? 

Javier Sampedro

Oh my God.

Vilma Fuentes

What did you play?

Javier Sampedro

I played everything that had nothing to do with toys.

Vilma Fuentes

(Laughing) Okay. 

Javier Sampedro

Because I simply and I don't say this so sad anymore, because I see some advantages in it now that I have my own children. I didn't have many toys, any kind of toy. Therefore I, it not because my family was so poor or anything. It's because to obtain a toy back in the seventies and early eighties in Cuba was to undergo a very, you know, sad process where as a parent, as a parent, you had to feel almost humiliated to give your child this designated specifically quantified, classified toy according to your child's age, because that's what the allocation of your, you know, quota of the toy for the year for the children. 

It is really, my my mom especially, she fought this way of equal distribution of you know, communist society so bad that I basically didn't have any toys. Because they were all imported from Russia, too, you know? (Scoffs) And then I made my own toys. A lot of them were board games, and most of the time I spent time really in the street, chasing after cats, dogs or any stray animal and drinking water from taps. Like so basically, you know, now I see children playing saying that they're bored, and they have so much and I'm like, you know, that makes a...

Vilma Fuentes

One could argue, I'm almost envious, almost in that here, I think in the United States, oftentimes as parents we struggle to tell our kids get out of the house, go play outside, use your imagination without electronics. I'm imagining that maybe you, started developing your creativity and imagination at an early age with no toys. Yes?

Javier Sampedro

I would say that precisely that lacking of choice is what triggered my imagination, creativity, and later on in my adult life, a sense of adaptation to survival, you know, survival mode, which is why you develop, why you live in the island of Cuba is a constant adaptation towards the scarcity. The needing to make up things work with the little options that you have, combining old elements to form new ones.

That's the logic great structure behind the survival modes in Cuba. So, recycling of components is essential. And if you have one component that I lack, then we trade and then I make my own project full and you maybe later on will be able to do the same. So yes, in that type of upbringing, whatever you want to say about this totalitarian, oppressive regime that I grew up with, it does, it did form some sense of self-preservation in me that triggered, you know, the type of creativity that is less and less abundant in this world.

That is the one that comes out of necessity. You know, not the one that comes out of the pressure of being from, you know, richer, wealthier, you know, but rather the one that comes from I have nothing to eat tonight or tomorrow night. So, I know that this, of course, to you is not at all, you know, in the worst situation and this hunger and real need in the world way, way beyond Cuban. But this is the case that I have lived, and I have felt in person the longest, the one that I can speak with more authority and the one that I perhaps can probably teach, you know, better about as a result of.

Vilma Fuentes

So, I had, I'm the daughter of a political a Cuban political refugee. And it, you know, in when I was growing up it was easier for me to imagine traveling to, I don't know, Mongolia, I don't know, halfway around the world, than it was for me to imagine traveling from Miami to Havana. Yet thanks to Santa Fe, specifically a Santa Fe Foundation, I was able very briefly for a few days to travel to Havana in 2017, and one of, I have lots of impressions of that, but perhaps one of the best ones is about Cubans commitment to the arts.

It's everywhere, it's palpable. It's in the music, it's in dance, it's in visual arts, and so, and I, I, I, I'm just curious, were you exposed to the arts at an early age? Did you, did you dance? Did you play an instrument? Did you sing? Tell me about that.

Javier Sampedro

Yes, Oh, my God. Oh, I'm very very exposed to the arts from a very young age, but not only as a passive consumer, also as someone who could argue something about art, something and someone who could criticize a little bit and apparently create an informed opinion about what he listening or seeing. I was the kid who had to endure my mom's decision to go to a guitar, classical guitar recital, for 2 hours straight at age seven, you know, eight when I was like, “No, really, I need to sit there?”

Vilma Fuentes

(Gasping) The worse horrible Torture. (Laughing)

Javier Sampedro

You can imagine. But this was like world class, classic guitar and I was like, yeah, enduring it, but at the same time, I kind of knew there was something good about it. Now I am like the number one fan of guitar as an instrument and Flamenco music as a, as a genre. I was also taken to the theater at a young age, and this is something that I really, really miss about my childhood.

I don't have puppets and Muppets anymore around me and my kids don't have them. And growing up in in Havana and going to Theatro de Neon or Theatro de Calle.

Vilma Fuentes

Street theatre. 

Javier Sampedro

Basically improvise, you know, and play little thing in the corner of your neighborhood where fantasy became some, you know, that little moment, not TV, rather something more in person with voices, with performance, with music. That is something that truly awoken in me a special sensitivity towards most of the expressions that are not just playing for everyday language, that art is the language of the arts. And I'm still very much passionate about it. And this is what I tried to bring to my students in the classroom today.

Vilma Fuentes

So, to be clear, when you're talking about your visits to the theater as a child, you're not talking about AMC Theater, you're talking about live theater, theatrical performances. And were they musical? Was it acting?

Javier Sampedro

Playhouses, puppets, a lot of the not Broadway style, not so huge, small street theater and not so big, not so small sometimes, but real-life venues with, you know, dark, then the curtains open, and then the magic begins. I had a lot of that. So, my brain as a child and I don't think that this is, you know, you can blame or give credit really to the Cuban government for having allowed this to happen.

Come on, it’s the artists themselves its people who worked on those theaters for years and who put so much dedication and passion into what they did, would allow me to feel this way. So, something has to be very clear, is that I'm not praising the so-called Cuban revolution or the so-called Cuban government's here. You know, this is has not to do with politics or the way that countries are governed. This is about the resilience of Cuban people beyond all of those restrictions.

Vilma Fuentes

So, I must admit, I've never heard about what did you call, Theatro de calle, the street theater or these improvised street things. The maybe because I haven't studied this, but I, I do know that in apartheid South Africa, they had something similar. They had these improvised street theaters and street performances. But as I understand it, during the apartheid period, this was also used as a space of resistance that, you know, the people would just totally impromptu go out on the street and have a little play or comedy show or something.

But it was incredibly critical of the apartheid regime. Is this what was taking place in Cuba? Was that even allowed?

Javier Sampedro

Very much, just like at a very young age. See, with Puppets and Muppets. When I was in my elementary school years, I was not so much aware of it. But the content and the quality increased and became more complex with the years. And as a young college student in Cuba, when I was 17 years old, I was exposed to ways of constant contestation, to the reality that I was living, from the arts, in a space that was not free.

It was very censored, but yet had the determination of making a difference. And that was the theater. So, yes, monologues, remakes of classics like Shakespeare, but within the Cuban perspective, within the Cuban time period, the same nineties that were really the, you know, one of the harshest countries in the history of my country, which were euphemistically called the special period.

What was special about it is that, you know, the restriction on the control over the you know, the government over their own people became a lot harder.

Vilma Fuentes

So, hold on. So, let's contextualize for people who may not be aware. So, the 1990 is the special period in Cuba. Why? So, the Soviet Union collapsed in 19, December 1991. Communism had fallen in most of the world, but not in Cuba. And Cuba lost its primary patron, which was the Soviet Union. And so, as I understand it, many of the supplies, imports, etc., that it had been receiving up until that point ceased. And so, Cubans had to fend for themselves.

Javier Sampedro 

Yeah.

Vilma Fuentes

Essentially that's the special period.

Javier Sampedro

It became a period of roughly a decade because I would say that it, you know, in some ways it still has. And that and we refer to the current economic crisis as the new special period, because in essence, it demonstrated or it showed perhaps where the biggest problems of this socialist program were the social, the special period was a period of increased awareness of the Cuban people about the structure, the decision making behind all of this illusion that had been the communist revolution up until 1989.

You know, it was basically the true and strongest first revealing of that veil of illusion that for so many decades, a lot of Cubans have followed as the obvious choice, after Batista times, after 1940s, capitalist, uncontrolled capitalism, growth in Cuba happened. So is the moment of great disillusion. You know, one of the many that Cubans as people, as nations have had the 1990s, therefore, 1994, the Balacera Crisis, the Cuban drafted crisis, which is a is a big landmark in the recent history of Cuba, where a record number of people happen on anything that could float to escape the island.

And then the United States had to open the Guantanamo military base as a provision, probationary or temporary facility to a Harvard. And so, this is the time period when I am borderline crossing into high school. And even though all of this insanity is happening, arts is still going, is thriving. And there's a concert of my favorite troubadour happening in 1994 as the rafters are leaving the islands.

So, I'm here singing to my favorite, you know, folk singer crying because I know the half of my brothers are leaving, it is a very, very powerful moment in my in the history of my early youth that it just I cannot forget and will always, always be there be because I'm seeing the same the same moments happening again, you know, just last year with a big spontaneous uprising.

And there precisely in exactly an exact year from today, Cuban people in a very spontaneous, unheard way, decided to take over the cities and 11J became all of a sudden, a new meaning and a new and new moment of awakening, not just for Cubans, for everyone outside of Cuba, that things aren't the best way. The things are not well.

Things can be different. And we don't need anyone else outside of Cuba to tell us how to do that. We can do it ourselves, but we need to change the minds of the people who are in power right now is how I found a way to express myself through the language of art that was freer, that was uncensored, that was more me.

And even though I don't consider myself an artist necessarily, I've been around artists and art enough myself that I, you know, have of I guess put a lot of my own hopes and a lot of my a lot of my own trust in that. This is a language that produces common, common grounds, that produces common places, ways to put people to learn how to tolerate and coexist with each other.

And that makes me a professor of humanities at Santa Fe College.

Vilma Fuentes

Okay. Which we definitely want to talk about. So as a segue way to that and because I don't know, I can't, I can visualize, but I don't know what songs you were hearing on the streets of Havana during your childhood, but I do know what you were referencing last year. The song is called, ’Patria Y Vida,’ the Homeland and Life, and it's really turning on its head.

Right. Was Fidel Castro in the communist regime used to say, which was Patria o Muerte, which was either, you know, homeland or death, because, of course, they were fighting against the U.S., the Yankee imperialist power. And the idea was everybody had to go out and die for their country.

Yes?

Javier Sampedro

Yes. And precisely this new generation of hip hop artists and rapperos, we call them in Cuba, are taking the microphone in very improvised settings, in very improvised neighborhoods, creating a whole festival of hip hop. And they're unfortunately extremely repressed. But this is one of the vehicles of repression. I mean, of expression that Cubans have found in the recent years.

One of, this song is so powerful that made it all the way to the Grammys. And now it's in the Latin Grammys. The number one song been heard. One of the singers of the song is still in jail in Cuba for having expressed his inconformity with the system.

Vilma Fuentes

Well, I think we should all resist and go out and download the song on your playlist if you haven't already, Patria Y Vida,  the Homeland and Life. So, the refrain in this song basically says, ”Se acabó”, like it's over 60 years of this dude where it's over, a so for you, in particular, I presume it ended when you left, and you came to Florida.

So, were you or maybe you didn't come to Florida? Did you leave as a balacero, or how did you leave Cuba?

Javier Sampedro

Great question. And obviously, it's the question that have been asked so many times. How did you get here? Because you're Cuban and this is Florida. 

Vilma Fuentes

Did you swim across?

Javier Sampedro

Yeah. Most people want to hear the, you know, an adventure story. And I don't take it personal anymore. You know, I used to. Like no, why do you think we all bolsonaro's now we're not. I came legally on an airplane, actually, not from Cuba directly, because I never had the plan to live in the United States. This was not really my number, my obvious choice growing up in Cuba, hearing constantly that this is your enemy, something filters through.

Javier Sampedro

And at some point, I was not motivated in my early youth to come to the United States. I always thought that Europe was a better destination for fulfilling my academic, you know, dreams and whatnot. Maybe find love. Spain probably was the number one target, like many Latin Americans and many of my friends at the time actually made it to Spain and lived and became European citizens because, before I ever could dream of leaving the island.

Javier Sampedro

So that was basically where I was pointing at.

Vilma Fuentes

So, you went to Spain?

Javier Sampedro

And I didn't go to Spain.

Vilma Fuentes

No?

Javier Sampedro

No. It was more and more, more and more complicated and unexpected than that. And life brought me to this international student party where there was an American girl dancing at my own pace. And when we realized that our dancing was great together, we started a relationship and actually some of my family was living in Europe at the time, and I decided to make the bold move to leave everything behind for one year until I asked this girl that I had barely met, would you do the same?

Javier Sampedro

And guess what? She did it. So, this relationship with the United States started with a love story, and I moved to England, of all places, to start this love story. And after a while, after marrying this girl over there in Europe, I came here.To Europe to Florida, to live with her. And she was a student at the University of Florida.So that brings me to Gainesville.

Vilma Fuentes

So, love. Love made you leave Cuba, follow this American girl to London?

Javier Sampedro

But and obviously everyone else is. And it's like, come on, are you kidding me? Who are you kidding? We all say that that's what happened. Love. Love is what happened, right? But you were desperate to leave, right? You were desperate to leave. So how come, love is what happened? Well, let me tell you, I wasn't desperate to leave.

I knew that there was more for me. You know, in life waiting, you know, to happen. And I have so much eagerness and so many dreams. And I knew that in order to fill so many them, I had to travel and I had to be outside of the island. But leaving my home country forever, saying no to all of those corners.

For 25 years I became who I was. That was never the plan. That was never the plan to leave behind my mornings, my routines, my neighbors, my plans, my coffee, the amount of sugar that I put in their coffee. You know, all these things were never the plan. All these things were just part of the price that we had to pay, you know, as citizens of another country that is not your homeland.

And when I left, I felt very happy because I had hope for the future. I have better hope that my parents did for their own future. My mom is a retired person. She's 80 years old.

Vilma Fuentes

Is she still in Havana?

Javier Sampedro

She lives between Havana and Europe. When my rest of my family history goes back and forth, that's an amazing advantage to someone, to anyone that lives in Cuba. But she doesn't want to live with their children. She wants to live in her own apartment, in her.

Vilma Fuentes

Space.

Javier Sampedro

The one that she fought for so hard and clean and maintained for so long. She wants to have her retirement age at 80 to be decent and tears. I wanted her to fight for food so hard, so she chooses to be in a little room with her husband inside of her daughter's apartment in Europe. Not because she loves Europe, not because she hates Cuba.

Is it because there's no other choice, you know, to people like us? So, it was love what brought me to the United States and is still love what is keeping me here? You know, you need to understand that there, a I am American citizen now for my 10th year now. 

Vilma Fuentes

Yeah.

Javier Sampedro

and I feel an amount of freedom, you know, that I perhaps could only imagine of, naming so, during my life in Cuba.

However, you know, I run old enough to understand that freedom is nothing like the concept or the dictionary says it's much more complicated than that. So, I'm not idealizing my life right now either. I don't think I live in the most perfect world. This perfect the world is a huge of contradictions and problems as well, you know.

But at least now I can freely and openly study my problems, vocalizing them, channel them, ventilate them, find support, and it's all just normal and not illegal and not persecute it, you know? So, I don't know if it does.

Vilma Fuentes

I mean, so and I really thank you for being this forthright and open, sharing your experiences and your thoughts. That's another way. I'm wondering, do you have opportunities to discuss this with your students or I don't know if you ever go and tell them, here is my life story. But maybe a better question is how do you use these experiences in the classroom or at Santa Fe in general to teach your students about Latin America or about the world?

Javier Sampedro

I think it's a great question because I put so much time in thinking precisely how not to transmit just the pain and the sorrow, but the positive outcome of all of this experience. And, you know, to my students who barely can pronounce the name of my country.

Vilma Fuentes

Please tell me they can say Cooba (Laughing).

Javier Sampedro

Cuba is actually very acceptable, and sometimes, something else comes like an “r” at the end, you know, strange things. But no, I mean, what I try to bring is obviously a little bit of combination of things that have brought me in front of them, make them more visible, first of all, that I am a difficult person to define culturally because I've been almost as much in my adult life in in part of a Cuban culture that I have been part of in American culture.

And I have lived not only in Florida, but I live in Pennsylvania as well. And one of the cities that I know the most is Washington, D.C., actually, that's the capital of this country. And I know because I've studied and taught about American history and American literature and American art and Native American history, which is one of my passions.

My reason was common passion, tremendously, so when I speak about in my humanities classes, American cultural identity, I bring forth an experience of my own life that at least tries to inspire a different perspective on my students, on what they have in front of them. You know, being an American or being a Cuban is not a simple thing to define.

It has never been, you know, because we are in constant transformation of who we are. And at the same time, we are in constant preservation of who we are. That means that our identity is both solid in place and in constant transformation. I see myself as a Cuban American, but that isn't to say that I am neither Cuban nor American.

I am something quite in the middle. And that would be where the hyphen is located. There's a very great book about Cuban ness by a Cuban American scholar called Life on the Hyphen. His name is Gustavo Perez Ferrer. Matt and is precisely, precisely what I'm talking about. Life on the hyphen means that you are perhaps in some form of trans cultural state.

And this phrase is obviously a very famous phrase coined by Cuban anthropologist Fernando Ortiz in the 1940. He said that perhaps the way that we should see Cuban identity is as a result of mixing the African and the European, but not in a degenerative way or a deconstructive way. But where both are or both are promoting equally towards the generation of a new type of culture.

And he called it trans cultivation. I feel a little bit like I am trans cultured person now, neither one or the other yet of course certain traits in me are pushing to stay the same. I cannot cook beans the way the Americans do. Yeah. Will never do good. But you know that. That I guarantee you will not change.

But, you know, modulating my tone of voice so that other people can hear better what I'm saying and don't get the wrong the idea that perhaps I'm being mad at them, you know, is one way that I guess me and many Cubans could probably adapt to, you know, modulate.

Vilma Fuentes

So. Hmm. So, you live in the hyphen, but I'm thinking maybe you really are, you know, Americano. I know when I was a little girl and I would travel to Latin America and people would ask me where I'm from, and I would say, You're so Americana. Depending on where you were, people would get deeply offended and say, no, you are not Americana.

Nosotros somos almost Americanos, right? We are all American. You are una Estados Unidos right? You are from the United States. And but now I realize. Oh, and my first semester in college, actually, I took a one critic colloquium, a small study that was about the Americas and what it meant to be an American in the Americas. And so now I don't live in the hyphen.

Vilma Fuentes

I don't think my children live in the hyphen. But I'd like to think that we are truly American, and that represents all facets of what it means on this hemisphere. Maybe you and your children and your loved one are the same.

Javier Sampedro

How am I going to consider myself just an American in the future? Maybe I don't deny anything. Anything can go in any direction with regards to your the word choice when you define yourself. Because I think it's all about where you feel you belong. Right. And, you know, it's not a secret that Cuban and many other cultural communities in this country have a way of creating their own countries.

Inside of this one, we call it Little China, Little Cuba, Little Haiti, Little Havana. All right. So, I've never been a myself a great fan of recreating my country outside. I'm always been more of someone who finds the Cuban traits within the Americanness.

Vilma Fuentes

Doctor Sampedro, thank you so much for sharing your thoughts and experiences with us. And thank you for all you do every semester, every week for helping our students become more global citizens.

Javier Sampedro

Thank you. Has been a pleasure.