Confronting (and Forgetting) Return: The Visitas de la Comunidad of 1979

• In Event: Queers, Laughs, Jabs, and Visitas: Exploring New Directions in Cuban-American Studies

Abstract

At the end of the 1970s, against the backdrop of ginger U.S.-Cuba détente and a fragile “socialist modernity” on the island, Cuban exiles in the United States started to do the unthinkable: go home. In speeches, television programs, and films from Havana, the natural flipside to tales of socialist triumph had always been an assumption of expatriate malevolence. Why would the Cuban authorities now consent to allowing them to return? Exiles, meanwhile, had to that point thought going back only would be possible, or wise, once Castro fell. By 1979, therefore, when an estimated 100,000 Cuban exile visitors descended on the island with the comandante still in power, the results were bound to ruffle feathers—on both sides of the Florida straits.
And yet, when the euphemistically named visitas de la comunidad (visits of “the community”) did commence, they transpired in a climate of considerable, transnational silence. By any political or emotional rubric, the temporary return of close to fifteen percent of the exile population after as many as twenty years away should have constituted a public historical occurrence of the first order. Yet criticized as such trips were in the diaspora for bolstering the Cuban economy to the tune of $100 or $150 million, little if anything was reported about what travelers saw, what the experience meant to them, or how they found the Cuba of 1979 as compared to the personal Cubas of their memories and dreams. In this way, a vast trove of “loose” personal experiences and recollections were excluded from emblematic frameworks for public discourse or remembrance in the diaspora. Whether in relation to family reunions joyous and tense, or the jealousies engendered among friends who did not receive gifts from Miami guests, the island press was equally mute.
This paper begins the work of excavating the meaning of the visitas de la comunidad by examining little known sources of cultural production from the period and recently gathered testimonies of those who participated in the visits themselves. In an off-hand way, the effect of the visits—with flush exiles regaling relatives with tales of capitalist consumer success—has often been linked to the outburst of social discontent that led to the Mariel boatlift in 1980. But while a direct causal relationship remains hard to pin down, testimonies do reveal interactions pregnant with a variety of ambivalent, politically fraught meanings.

Author

• Michael J Bustamante, Florida International University