WHEN FACTS FAIL YOU TRY FICTION
Guest Post By Lauren Rivera Fernández
Through studying one learns that: that a man is the same man in all places, and looks and grows in the same way, and does and thinks the same things, without more difference than that of the land in which he lives, because the man who is born in a land of trees and flowers thinks more of beauty and adornment, and has more to say, than the man who is born in a frigid land, gazing at dark skies and his cave in the mountain.
~The History of Man Told by Way of his Houses by José Martí.
In 2009, I read about five Cuban men who drowned in the Florida Straits. The Miami Herald article focused on how Monroe County Law Enforcement and a Miami Radio personality collaborated with Cuban State Security to identify their bodies despite the longstanding material and diplomatic blockade. Without that their involvement, individual drowned Cubans, which are estimated in the tens of thousands, would not have been so newsworthy in and of themselves.
I was born and raised in Miami, where survivors of this harrowing journey garner fascination, but also disdain. Some of their rafts have been recovered and preserved in a museum in Key West, yet the term "balsero,” or rafter, is often used to ostracize those that craft or launch these makeshift vessels. Biases, passion and politics complicate writing about Cuba, or even just understanding yourself as a Cuban and where you belong in society if you are also American like me. This struggle has motivated me to follow the facts in order to reach the truth. I clipped the story from the paper and decided to develop a deeper piece of journalism, or profound expository essay, or long-form creative nonfiction, or something worthy of the balseros’ sacrifice.
WHEN FACTS FAIL YOU TRY FICTION
It didn’t go so well. Surviving family members on either shore were wary of me, plus visiting the island was impossible at the time. My investigation unearthed little more than what was published in the newspaper article. I felt like an imposter when trying to understand the motives of the men who died at sea, having no way to build context for their daily struggles or persistent fears. Paradoxically, the more I researched, the more I felt the story needed to be told. The man I learned the most about was Osmany, whose mother, sister and wife all confirmed that he had wanted to be a journalist since he was a teenager, but the education ministry denied his admission to an official Cuban J-school since he refused to join the Cuban Communist Party. Instead, they sent him to commercial kitchen technical training. He blogged, in English, about being detained by Cuban State Security, who called him a “mercenary” for accepting an invitation to write from a computer lab at the courtesy of the U.S. Government. His family confirmed that shortly after being detained, he was fired from his kitchen job at a state-run hotel and told he would be imprisoned if he returned to the writing lab.
During my only conversation with his grieving wife, she told me, from a neighbor’s land line, that he was better off mauled by sharks over rotting in a Cuban prison. The second time I called her neighbor’s house, my call was answered by a confused voice telling me I’d reached a military office. I wondered if my call had been purposely rerouted, and if someone had tapped our previous conversation. That same week, a blogger I had emailed returned my message: He claimed to have Osmany’s exit visa and wanted his wife’s address so that she could use it. Knowing immediately that this was impossible—visas are not given posthumously to friends nor are they transferrable to wives—I realized I had fallen into the parallel lane of state informants that travels alongside dissident activity in Cuba and had no choice but to cease contact with the family who I could endanger, and bloggers I couldn’t trust.
I felt demoralized and stuck, so I moved on to other projects. In the interval, I was finally able to visit the island, and I learned what it was like to fear not seeing my husband again because of travel bans during the COVID-19 pandemic, all necessary to help reduce my Writer’s Impostor Syndrome (WIS). Another force that tamped down my WIS enough to dust off my notes on this story was a tribute to John Dufresne at an AWP event in Tampa, where I learned three important principles: First, if you do not solve the problems you have in one manuscript, they will just turn up again in the next; Second, fiction is the lie that tells the truth; and third, in fiction, you can write about anything you can research and you can imagine.
Once I accepted that I could not tell the story exactly as it happened, I finally got to the heart of the matter. Why do some Cubans desperately launch themselves into shark-infested waters? If any doctor can use what they know about other people’s bodies to diagnose Celiac disease, then any teacher can apply what has worked with other students to help understand trigonometry, and any civil engineer can study one city to find out how to improve the traffic flow in any other town, then couldn’t I use what other black-market bloggers had reported to understand the threat of imprisonment, loss of employment, corporal punishment and social repudiation that the particular men who drowned had faced when they made their fatal decision? Aligning these comparable cases to my notes from interviewing surviving family members led to surprising discoveries.
An important pattern emerged: bloggers were being trained and recruited, to cover a particular beat that justified U.S. foreign policy. Osmany had written for online blogs published in the United States and had used a computer lab at the U.S. Interests Section within the Swiss Embassy to access the internet. As late as 2015, the U.S. Interests Section had been offering journalism courses, taught via video conference from lecturers at Florida International University. What I found on a blog published in Cuba gave me a perspective that Osmany’s writing, published in the Unites States, had not. One trainee reported that a U.S. agent at this gathering gave homework: bring back accounts of violations to human rights. When the writer asked for supplies, like notepads and pencils to carry out the assignment, the agent reportedly went to the trunk of his car and returned with copies of the International Declaration of Human Rights—a document that is illegal to hold on the streets of Havana.
I have no way to decipher what lane the writer in this account travelled on—dissident, or informant. I have no way to verify that this really happened, at all. Or that Osmany was given such a document. But this account got me asking why the U.S. government offered Osmany a seat at a computer lab without offering any protection from the repercussions—being “constantly accosted,” Osmany’s wife had called it—that forced him to flee. To add insult to injury, he might have survived, as many do, if he had not timed the trip on the eve of a stronger-than-forecasted storm when Cuban maritime guards and the U.S. Coast Guard normally stop patrolling the Straits. Leaving under dangerous circumstances seemed inevitable, since staying on the island meant going to prison and being captured at sea also meant going to prison. But the trouble seemed to have started at that lab.
Writing fiction demands the author give the character trouble. My characters had plenty of that. Before reading more widely about the trouble facing independent bloggers, I had only thought of them as oppressed victims of their own government. And if you grow up in Miami, you are told that all of Cuba’s problems are solely the fault of the corruption and abuses of the current Cuban government. I made a good decision marrying a historian of Latin American history who specializes in Cuba, is generous with his time, explanations and books. This helped me answer some questions but also ask more questions, an important act that the process of writing fiction requires. Thus, writing fiction helped me succeed when focusing on facts alone failed. Eventually, the array of particular, piecemeal clues from various reports, enabled me to see these men who drowned between two nations as caught in a political hurricane, a pressure system trapped between one nation’s defense of sovereignty and another’s imperialistic intervention. Cast adrift by state-sponsored competing visions of modernity, human rights and the role of journalists in society, these rafters had been pushed to choose between abandoning all they knew or becoming something else altogether. They were doubly doomed.
I drafted a short story called “A Window for Tantalus,” in the limited first-person perspective of Osmany’s wife, since I could especially relate to her having more questions than answers. The story is set in their home, which is a recreation of the home I stayed in on my visit to Havana. It begins the moment she says goodbye, fully aware of his risk, and the suffering that forces him to take it. I asked myself how I would feel sending my husband off to the sharks, and what it would look like watching him say goodbye to our children. In tears, I wrote, and word after word, the story felt exceedingly real.
Lauren Rivera Fernández is a writer of fiction and nonfiction. Her writing has appeared in Real South/West Magazine, The Florida Book Review, Equinox: Poetry and Prose, The Miami Herald and The San Juan Star.
Cully Perlman is a Substantive Editor. He can be reached at UpWork
As expressed in a recent Miami Herald op-ed written by a local high school student, Cuba and its hardships provoke complex and rarely linear feelings and realities. Rivera successfully captures the difficulties of writing Cuba, especially when who the victim is victimized by is not so simple.