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Traveling to Cuba: My Internal Struggle As A First-Generation Cuban American

Issues of institutional inequality have always plagued me, and persist today

Cuban Boy, Havana 1993, unedited slide by Lilliana Méndez-Soto the author

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I went to Cuba when I was 28 years old. When my curiosity about my roots, my people, and the land they came from, grew so strong I applied for a family visa to visit relatives who still lived there. Aunts, uncles, and cousins. It was 1993.

My parents landed in Chicago in 1961, two years after the revolution. They never returned, and they didn’t want me to go.

When people learn I’m Cuban, frequently they ask if I’ve been, and the answer is yes. But when they ask me if I’m planning to go again, my chest feels tight, and my throat clenches, and I dread explaining the feelings that come up for me.

I wasn’t a tourist when I visited in 1993

I traveled there during the of fiscal crisis and austerity soon after the Soviet Union fell in December 1991 and withdrew its support. Cuba’s oil imports from the Soviet Union dropped catastrophically from 13 million tons in 1989 to about 3 million tons in 1993 and paralyzed industry on…