La Cubana
Excerpted from the essay, “La Cubana,” from Edge of the World: An Anthology of Queer Travel Writing. Blair, 2025. Reprinted with permission.
I like telling people that Hialeah, a city northwest of Miami, is what working-class Havana would be today if the Revolution had never happened in Cuba. Folks work shifts at the local hospitals or at Walmart. They fix cars and toilets, central AC systems and ceiling fans. They drive Uber and Lyft and take classes at the community college. Women don’t leave the house without a full face of makeup, not even for a quick car ride to Sedano’s to buy a bag of onions, and grown men live with their mothers and drive SUVs or Teslas. Hialeah, which along with Laredo, Texas, has the highest concentration of Latinos of any city in the country, brims with old folks whose children have gone on to study medicine or yoga or to work for the CIA. If you report a missing elderly parent or auntie to the local police, they will actually drive the city streets looking for the vieja. The one time I called 911, paramedics arrived fluent in Cuban Spanish, called my mother “Mami,” and assured me that she’d had a panic attack, not a heart attack.
There are gay men in Hialeah. One of them is my cousin, who lives with his husband. Once in a while, I’ll spot a woman who might be a lesbian, but it’s hard to say. I’m a pansexual with no gaydar. The woman could be a butch or simply a middle-aged Cubana who cut her hair short and is not shy about elbowing her way to the counter at the bakery. While Cuba legalized gay marriage in 2022 and Fidel Castro’s own niece, Mariela, has spent more than a decade advocating for pro-LGBTQ+ policies, Hialeah remains entrenched in a culture of “don’t ask, don’t tell.” Family friends and strangers alike ask me about my husband and children, and the one time I shaved my head, my mother’s friends looked at me with the most enormously sad eyes and spoke to her in low voices as if I had died. By the time of my next visit, a year later, my hair had grown back, and I looked like a Cuban woman sporting a pixie cut. No one gave me a second glance. I wasn’t queer. I wasn’t pansexual or bisexual or anything nonhetero. I was just a grown woman visiting her viejos in Hialeah.
No, I did not grow up in Hialeah. I was born and raised in Jersey (a fact about which I am very proud for the sole fact that I like to side with the underdogs in all matters), but my father could not return to Cuba to grow old and die, so the year I turned twenty-nine and finally moved out of their home, he hauled my Colombian mother to South Florida. They knew I was dating women at that point, and over the years they knew that I followed a woman out to California, that we broke up, and that I never brought her home for a formal visit. They knew about the other women and a man who they knew only as the Mexican and another man who they only knew as the Chino, but to be honest, it helped both my parents and me that traveling to Hialeah took more than five hours by plane from California. They didn’t have to see my love life as a lived reality, and I didn’t have to see their reactions to my love life.
All of this changed with Frankie. We met in North Carolina, where I was working at the time and where Frankie had relocated decades earlier from Philadelphia. Almost forty by then, I showed up for our first brunch date like a true city girl in a dress and boots, my dark hair flat ironed and perfumed. Frankie, in their early fifties, arrived as if they had stepped out of an REI catalog complete with the requisite puffy vest, the tidy jeans, the chiseled jaw, and the shorn salt-and-pepper hair. Over brunch, we bonded about growing up in the Northeast and navigating all twelve years of Catholic school. Frankie wasn’t Latinx but came from a white community where big tight-knit families were the norm, and as we talked about our childhoods, they felt familiar to me. When I shared that I was writing a narrative nonfiction book about a vector-borne disease, they asked about the insect: Do you know the species or genus? Frankie had degrees in botany and sustainable agriculture, and they appreciated the scientific names for bugs, as well as plants and flowers and trees.
Two years later, Frankie and I decided to make the trip to Hialeah. We told friends that we were headed to Florida. It sounded pleasant. It sounded like a trip white folks made, flying to their rental on the Gulf or staying at their grandma’s condo, that sort of thing. What I should have said was this: We’re leaving the country. We’re going to Hialeah, to old-school, working-class, white Cuba, where they vote for Trump and mostly talk in Spanish and make racist comments. It’s a city where having a gay kid is a bit of news about which grown women whisper and where if Frankie were not white, I would honestly never take them because the community, my parents included, are indeed that racist.
* * *
Hialeah is not a tourist destination. When you travel there, you stay with family. Your family pulls out the sofa bed or they find the cousin who’s getting rid of a mattress, and they throw that on the floor and call it a guest bed. The bulk of the hotels, from what I can tell, are motels for quickie sex, prostitution, and sex trafficking. Still, I was not taking Frankie to stay at my parents’, and without a guide on “where to stay with your nonbinary, white partner in Hialeah,” I picked a hotel that didn’t have hourly rates and served a continental breakfast. As we checked in, it occurred to me that I was forty-two years old and for the first time I would be sleeping in the same city as my parents but not in the same house.
After checking into our room, we hopped into the rental car and drove over to meet my parents. I got behind the wheel, not trusting Frankie to manage the antics of Hialeah drivers who, like those in Miami, don’t believe in signaling when they’re switching lanes and who consider a yellow light a signal to gun it toward the intersection. We made it to the house safely, and at the front door, I hugged and kissed my mother and auntie. In their seventies, they dressed like twins in cotton tops and the knit pants people now refer to as loungewear. They both had their short hair dyed a bright copper, and in that moment, neither had a poker face. Their faces were tight with anxiety. In fact, they barely looked at me, peering instead over my left shoulder as if they were unsure of who they might find there at my heels. I stepped aside so they could get a good look at Frankie, who hung back shyly, in their cargo shorts and thick T-shirt, a polite smile on their face. Since I had never formally introduced my family to a queer romantic partner before, I half yelled in a fake, cheery voice, “This is Frankie!” as if I had brought home a labradoodle puppy.
My mother gaped. My auntie, too. Frankie said, “Hola,” their voice tinged with anxiety. No one moved. We stood there with the door still open behind us as I realized two facts at the same moment: I had not taught Frankie to hug and kiss in lieu of shaking hands, and my mother and auntie had no experience hugging and kissing white people as in white-white, not Latine white. Luckily, Frankie quietly closed the door, and my mother and tía shuffled into the house. I told Frankie, “Let’s go say hi to my dad.”
My father was in his usual spot on the back porch, settled in his patio chair, a cigar in his right hand and the radio tuned into a local talk station whose sole purpose for the previous eight years had been to trash Obama and convince people like my parents to vote for Trump. Unlike my mother and tía, my father cast his eyes on Frankie and lit up with a smile. The stroke from six years earlier had slowed him down, but he leaned forward and steadied himself on the table with his left hand and got to his feet to shake Frankie’s hand. In the moment, I thought, Oh, good, that went well. Later I realized my mistake. My father had shaken Frankie’s hand because he was reading Frankie as a white man.
No, I had not called my family ahead of time and said, I’m bringing my partner to visit and they’re nonbinary and use the pronoun they—which in Spanish would still have to be gendered as ellos or ellas because this was in 2016 before anyone had told me that I could use elles or ellx. Yes, I could have phoned my mother and said, I’m bringing my novia to meet you, except that Frankie did not want to be described as a girlfriend or boyfriend. I had told my parents once that Frankie was a woman because that was easier for me than schooling them on nonbinary gender identity, but apparently my father had forgotten that he knew anything about Frankie’s gender.
We sat on the porch with my father, and I served as the interpreter. My father wanted to know about Frankie’s property in rural North Carolina. Frankie wanted to hear about everything that grew in my parents’ yard: the avocados, the mangoes, the bananas. They pointed to the roosters foraging in the yard. “Tú gallos?” they asked my father. No, the roosters belonged to the neighbors, but the man kept his yard extremely tidy while my father’s overflowed with trees and ferns and anything that managed to grow by itself. It offered the gallos a wild sanctuary. Frankie nodded in approval. They thought all yards should have a touch of the wild.
* * *
My father continued asking me about my husband. It was one thing to lie to the neighbor at eight o’clock in the morning and another to continue misleading my father, except that I stumbled in my own mind every time I wanted to say in Spanish, Frankie’s not my husband and also not my wife. Let’s call Frankie my pareja. I sighed every time I thought about it. I only saw my parents once or twice a year, but if I am being honest, that had nothing to do with it. My parents had never cut me off or thrown me out of their home for being queer, and I had no reason to expect that they would do that now. But I was a coward. I didn’t want to feel any rejection, none of it, not even the disappointed look my mother had given me after I first came out to her in my twenties, a look of such intense sorrow that to this day I can feel the sting of it.
My mother was clear that I had no husband, and when she spoke of Frankie, she used the pronoun ella. At her kitchen table one morning, I told my mother, “I don’t know what to do about Papi. He thinks Frankie’s my husband.”
Mami sighed and glanced at the clock. We were waiting on my father, and then the four of us, Frankie included, would be trekking farther south to the Fruit and Spice Park. I don’t know what I had thought my mother would say, but I had hoped it would be along the lines of I’ll talk with him. I’ll do the work for you. But my mother is even more conflict averse than I am, and she only shrugged her shoulders in response.
On the road, I filled the hour-long drive with sharing everything that I knew about the park in Spanish and English. It was a Miami Dade County park, almost forty acres of lush fruit trees, including mangoes and jackfruits. A tram would take us around the property with a tour guide so that my father, who used a cane now, would be comfortable, and luckily for us, a festival that day would let us taste a slew of fresh fruits, including blackberries, lychee, and pomegranates.
The day unfolded as I anticipated. The tram crawled slowly in between banana trees with the guide talking about the varieties of fruit trees at the park. The tram stopped at the jackfruit trees so the guide could pick one from the ground and hold it up for us to admire its heft. The tour ended at the festival, which turned out to be a slew of tents with musicians playing guitars and vendors hawking fresh fruits and juices. My father, who has an aversion to group activities, barked, “I don’t want to see anything. I’ll wait here.” He stood in the shade of a tent, and my mother tucked herself into his shadow while Frankie and I roamed through the festival tasting mora and kiwi that had been harvested from trees in the park. We drank water, too, and a lot of it because Frankie is almost fanatical about hydration, and the temperatures were in the eighties that day. I wasn’t surprised when they needed to use the restroom, and I also knew that this park would not have an all-genders bathroom. Still I said, “Go now. It could take us more than an hour to get back home. Do you want me to go with you?”
They frowned. Of course, they didn’t want me to go with them. They weren’t a child. We’d had this conversation before, but I always offered just in case this time, this one time, they did want an ally. “No, I’m fine,” Frankie said, and off they went. I wound back to my parents, who were turning slightly irritable from standing in the heat of the tent’s shade. “And Frankie?” my mother asked. “Fue a buscar el baño,” I told her.
The crowds waxed and waned around us. Frankie called. They had found the bathroom but lost track of where we were in the festival. I spotted them at a distance and gave them a few landmarks: this vendor, that vendor. When I hung up the phone, my mother decided to take action on the issue of gender and my father. “There’s Frankie!” she exclaimed in Spanish, and she began talking to my father about Frankie while emphasizing the female pronouns: “Mira, ELLA viene por allí. The bathroom must have been far for ELLA. But with this heat what are you going to do? ELLA, she went to find the bathrooms, because SHE had to. And it took HER time. Mira, SHE’S walking toward us. Do you see HER? I can see HER. Look, SHE sees us!”
My father’s face puzzled at the start of my mother’s monologue, and I watched his face as it shifted from confusion to the start of clarity until it settled on embarrassment. When Frankie reached us, my father was practically blushing, and unsure of what to do with his emotions and thoughts, he proclaimed in his old Cuban grandpa way, “Are we going now? I’ve seen enough.”
Papi did not speak to me afterwards about gender. He treated Frankie the same, as if Frankie were indeed a white man. On phone calls, Papi did start referring to Frankie by their name, but sometimes, when I called late in the day and he was tired, he would nod on the WhatsApp video and ask, “How’s the husband?”