Young social-justice protesters can turn anger into transformative action | Opinion
This year’s racial-justice protests have captured the attention of the exiled Cuban community in Los Angeles and other parts of the country — and especially that of a former Castro’s Cuba child like me. Perhaps nothing has rattled me more than watching the violence against fellow citizens and local businesses burned or looted on television.
My life experience compels me to warn today’s young protesters to be critical of furious mobs that seek to derail what might otherwise become a fount of political transformation: their youth.
I left Cuba in 1981, a 9-year-old refugee whose only experience with sheltering in place and protesting came from the numerous repudiation rallies in front of our home during the 1980 Mariel Boatlift. The rallies broke like a fever all over the island, indicting innocent and guilty alike. We feared for our lives, barricaded the doors and nailed our windows shut. There was no distinction between criminals and upstanding citizens, no gray area in which to take refuge. There was only “them” and “us.” What may otherwise have led to dialogue and political transformation turned into divisiveness and chaos.
Since the protests that began after the brutal killing of George Floyd, my family and I have watched from afar, with a certain amount of pride for a country that believes in its citizens’ right to dissent and raise their voices against injustices. But also with great fear — after all, we are all-too-familiar with sprawling anger and frustration that embroils everything in its path, losing sight of its original destination.
When a mob marched on our house in April 1980, demanding we leave our beloved island, all we could do was find a way to do so. Fear is powerful, and paralyzing. The dangers that speaking out posed for us then were far greater than those that might await for us in exile. As we watch this year’s social-justice protests from afar — we know we’ve been there before.
I know that was decades ago, in a place a few people have ever been, but as foreign and recalcitrant Castro’s Cuba may seem, no nation is immune to violence, or censorship, or repression. No nation is immune to human-rights violations and social injustices so profoundly painful we can’t bear to breath.
In contrast to the mob that marched against my house in the spring of 1980, young people today have the potential to find their most pressing expression of discontent at the intersection of age (youth), gender (in flux) and race (ever more diverse). For it is not any youth who takes action against a nation they feel has betrayed them, but young Americans who bear the responsibility to become true agents of change, ultimately giving political significance to the sentimental, romantic notion of unruly youths. Become the voice of the one and the many, and lead us into political action.
My family and I were victims of a system that silenced us. My parents were not part of the privileged class, nor were they radical opponents of the 1959 Cuban Revolution. We held no official titles, owned no palace in Havana. We lived in a small town, with intermittent electricity and little water or food. We were not national leaders who defected or student body presidents who suddenly turned right.
But our very desire for opportunity and dreaming was enough to get us accused of ideological misconduct and civil disobedience. Thinking for ourselves was a crime against the state. For this — and at great personal risk and with no small sacrifice — we had no choice but to leave Cuba. We have lived in Los Angeles since 1984 and, in all these years, I never felt a need to speak as I do now.
Young people, who stand in that interstitial space between childhood and adulthood, and as a special group of humanity, have the potential to reveal the deeper truths many of us no longer remember. Straddling maturity and the generative power of a child’s imagination, their finer aesthetic and profound awareness of what is just in this world should guide them. Not violence, not chaos.
They should be angry — we all should. But they must let that anger turn into a dynamic, potent and critical perspective. They are more than a social construction and the consequence of cultural trends. They are young and in absolute possession of that magical state called transformation — a true political machine. I would advise them to go to work, write letters, join a local caucus, continue to protest peacefully and realize that they have a power many places in the world do not have: the power of their votes. Use it.
Susannah Rodriguez Drissi is an award-winning writer, poet, playwright. translator, and scholar on the faculty of the Writing Programs at the University of California, Los Angeles. She will discuss her new book, “Until We’re Fish,” during a virtual event at Books & Books at 7 p.m., Oct. 20. The presentation is co-sponsored by the Cuban Research Institute at FIU. Go to booksandbooks.com/event/virtual-author-series-dr-susannah-rodriguez-drissi-and-dr-vanessa-garcia for more information.
