August 24, 2006

Nestor Sr., and his son, Vicente, are two of the Cuban-Americans featured in the photo exhibit “Love, Loss and Longing” at the Emporium through August 30. The exhibit focuses on the impact the U.S. travel policy has on Cuban-American families.

By Lauren Heaton

In the photo, the headless torso of Juan-Sí González stands with a miniature home in his arms; he is a faceless person without a clear identity. Now a Yellow Springs resident, González came to the U.S. from his homeland in Cuba 15 years ago to escape the tightly controlled government of Fidel Castro. But now, due to travel bans imposed on U.S. residents, he is permitted to visit his parents and siblings in Cuba just once every three years.

González’s struggle with what he feels are issues of freedom and human rights in both Cuba and the U.S. mirrors similar struggles of thousands of Cuban-Americans across the country, he believes. Twenty of those stories are documented in a photography exhibit entitled “Love, Loss, and Longing” which opened at the Emporium this week and will hang through Aug. 30. An opening reception will be held at the Emporium on Saturday, Aug. 12, from 4 to 7 p.m., following a benefit screening at the Little Art Theatre of Love & Suicide, one of the first feature films shot in Cuba since the U.S. embargo began in 1961.

The exhibit, curated by local psychologist Jeanne Lemkau and her colleague, David Strug, features photographs by González and Nestor Hernández, Jr., with text translations by Victor Garcia, Antioch College professor emeritus. The exhibit debuted in May at the Rayburn Gallery in Washington, D.C., and has so far been scheduled for six other locations, including Baltimore, Minneapolis, Jackson Hole, Wyo. and Oakland, Calif. The exhibit has found a national audience because it addresses people’s universal need to define themselves in relation to their family, Lemkau said.

The exhibit’s photos and their intimate captions show how people’s lives have been impacted by the U.S. travel policy, which began in 2004. The policy allows Cuban-Americans to visit Cuba only once every three years, regardless of family illness or crisis, and only to see immediate family members. The policy also reduced the amount of money families can send to Cuba, from $3,000 to $300 per quarter.

One of the exhibit’s photos shows Manolo, who left his children and his family in Cuba to come to the U.S. alone in 1979. A ballet dancer in Cuba, he has spent his life in Miami, Fla., picking tomatoes, cleaning offices and working as a handyman. Now at 82, he would like to spend the end of his life in Cuba with his children and grandchildren. But in the three years since his last visit to the island, his health has deteriorated so much that he wonders if he would survive the trip.

Arlene, a 51-year-old software company executive, lives with her niece in Chantilly, Va., while her only sister waits in Cuba for their visits. Since the restrictions reducing visits to every three years, Arlene’s sister has become despondent, and Arlene has developed hives and stomach problems from the stress of separation.

María married a widower in Cuba with two small children who she raised into adulthood as her own. She moved to Miami in the early 90s and continued to visit her children and later, grandchildren, several times a year. But the new restrictions ended her visits because she had never legally adopted her children, who were therefore not considered family. María, now 73, takes medicine for anxiety and depression.

“This is a human rights and a mental health issue, and I want to see people speak out on this,” Lemkau said. “It’s incredibly arrogant and ethnocentric, the idea of the government telling me who is and isn’t family for me. It should offend anyone.”

Lemkau, a professor emerita of clinical phychology with the Wright State School of Medicine, developed a fascination with Cuba while she was there on sabbatical in 2002. She went to Cuba again in 2005 where she met Strug, a professor of social work at Yeshiva University in New York, and the two began discussing the detrimental effects of the travel restrictions and the negative implications for American public health policy.

“Cuba is so close, yet we know so little about it,” she said

Lemkau and Strug partnered with the Latin American Working Group Education Fund and later the Washington Office on Latin America to connect with Cuban-American residents, first in Miami and New Jersey, then later from other cities such as Baltimore, Seattle, and New York. Hernández, a Cuban-American whose family is featured in the exhibit, took half of the photos before a serious illness forced him to turn the project over to González. Hernández died the day after the opening at the Rayburn. The exhibit is dedicated to his memory.

For González, the fact that he is Cuban-American is incidental to his passionate belief that the travel embargo, or any embargo, against Cuba is wrong. It isn’t that he supports Castro, he said; he left Cuba to evade prosecution for his art and political activism. But he was disppointed to find that American international policy seems like the same insular and short-sighted policy that has kept Cuba from progressing, he said.

“I can’t believe this country sells me the freedom and then has the idea to tell me I can’t visit my family, when the U.S. government was working with Fidel 47 years to oppress my people,” he said. “When the government has an idea of other people, the government never thinks how they feel when they make this law. The sacrifice is the people.”

González, who is married to Yellow Springs native Paloma Dallas, needs to return to Cuba to visit his ill father, he said. And he feels the pangs of longing for a country, which, while not perfect, is his homeland.

“When you live outside your country you miss everything because it’s your legacy, and you live all the time with nostalgia,” he said.

But politics can be blind toward human needs, and to some extent, according to Lemkau, the travel ban was a concession the Bush administration made to influential Cuban-Americans who will do anything to put Castro down.

Though the relationship between Cuba and the U.S. is complicated, Lemkau hopes that people who see the exhibit will be moved to call their representative in Congress to oppose the current policy. And at the very least, she hopes it will raise awareness of the issues faced by those who emigrate to this country. Because the travel ban represents a human rights issue, Lemkau also hopes the exhibit will make people ponder a question she asks herself: “If our government can do this to Cuban-Americans, what else can it do to abridge our rights?”

Contact: lheaton@ysnews.com