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By MARISELLA VEIGA
Hispanic Link
It's the morning of the Fourth of July and I ask my U.S.-born husband if he's begun the holiday rituals.
"I've sung the national anthem, I've pledged allegiance to the flag, I've examined the Federalist Papers," he says.
He's joking. But he wasn't joking a few days ago when he expressed a desire to watch the 20-minute fireworks display over Matanzas Bay in St. Augustine, Fla., where we now live. Ugh. I dislike crowds.
Because I prefer to live where my name and use of Spanish is not considered eccentric, my husband and I chose St. Augustine. Everyone in town and everyone who visits the town knows the Spanish settled it in 1565. As Michael Grunwald writes in "The Swamp: The Everglades, Florida, and the Politics of Paradise," Pedro Menendez de Aviles founded the settlement "fifty-five years before the better-publicized Pilgrims landed at Plymouth Rock."
Eventually, Spain ceded Florida to the British in 1763; Florida joined the Union in 1845, becoming the 27th state.
And so it is right to have a day to celebrate independence from the British, though in Florida, like in many other parts of the United States, independence from the Spanish might be celebrated, too.
I have mixed feelings about the holiday, as I do for most holidays.
Sometimes I feel I should do more. Should I use the flagpole in our front yard? Invite friends over for a barbecue even though we lack a grill? Agree to go watch the fireworks with my husband?
As a Cuban refugee child in Minnesota, I remember the holiday picnics with other resettled families at nearby lakes. We brought a portable grill. Like other children, we lit sparklers and waved them around. We ran when my brothers lit firecrackers and smoke bombs.
We didn't dress in red, white and blue, the same colors of the Cuban flag.
In those days we weren't yet U.S. citizens. But we enjoyed this important holiday and celebrated freedom and independence in ways many U.S.-born people know nothing about. We left an oppressive government and our island homeland. Like all refugees and immigrants, my family knows what the price of this freedom has been. We are glad to have lived without the confines imposed by the dictatorship of Fidel Castro.
Forty-seven years have passed since I came to this country. Besides Florida, I have lived in Minnesota, Ohio, Virginia and Puerto Rico. I've learned it's preferable to live in a town where I won't be marginalized because I'm different.
A year ago, the baby of our family, Glenna, 43, packed her two cats and what didn't go with the movers into her car to drive seven hours north to her new home and job in Jacksonville. After spending the majority of her life in South Florida, she was happy to be leaving. Miami has become an urban center that she says "has all the problems of a major city but few of the benefits."
Many Cuban-Americans have decided to leave the comfort of their exile community for a similar reason: improved quality of life. They may not make it out of the state, but they are moving north. Jacksonville, for example, has a Hispanic community of 68,000. When she told one of her older Cuban colleagues at work that she was leaving, he pulled her aside: "What are you doing that for? You know it's almost all gringos up there."
Indeed, in the United States the gringos are everywhere. But so are the Germans, the Italians, the Welsh, the Mexicans, the Polish, the Norwegians and everyone else who immigrated to this country. The Native Americans remain and so do African-Americans, who were brought in slavery.
Today, we are celebrating independence and freedom, the rights every human being needs to improve the quality of his or her life and flourish.
(Marisella Veiga is a contributing columnist with Hispanic Link News Service. She may be contacted at mveiga@bellsouth.net.)
(Distributed by Scripps Howard News Service.)
