Consider for a moment, Carmelita Tropicana’s “Milk of Amnesia,” a performance piece we’ve discussed here before. Or Cristina Garcia’s 1992 National Book Award-nominated “Dreaming in Cuban.” Both works explore the post-Fidel Castro Cuban diaspora from the perspective of island-born, American-raised second-
generation exiles.
In both works, the protagonists come to terms with their identity crises through an act that a generation ago would have been considered unthinkable: returning to Cuba, even if just as visitors. But for many exiles, the mere idea of going back while Fidel is alive is treasonous.
Now comes Carmen Pelaez, great-niece of Amelia Pelaez, one of Cuba’s great pre-revolutionary painters. The younger Pelaez — a beautiful writer and performer — brings the notion of a baptismal homecoming to new heights in her one-person show, “Rum & Coke.” Pelaez makes her Chicago debut Thursday at DePaul University.
“The decision to go back (to Cuba) has implications, but what I’ve found is that the people who are the most hard-core are those who left (Cuba) in the ’60s,” she explains. “They had no idea what was coming, they never expected what happened, and they’ve never healed from the mistrust.”
“Rum & Coke,” which Pelaez scripted after an acting teacher told her that her possibilities were limited not by lack of talent but because she was overweight, opened in New York last year to excellent word of mouth. Then it moved to Miami Beach’s tiny Area Theater, where, for three solid months, the media fawned and sold-out audiences stood and applauded, wept and screamed at the end.
“There were things I was afraid to do in Miami, like talk about going back,” she says. “But the truth is, nobody said anything about it. I found Miami this time much more open. Maybe that’s because last year, 75,000 Cuban-Americans visited the island — a record.”
Pelaez’s message, like Tropicana’s and Garcia’s, is that, for Cubans, the island itself is the real thing, the motherlode, not Miami or New York or San Juan.
“The point is the journey,” says Pelaez. “For any exile, there’s always this piece in your psyche that doesn’t fall into place. For an exile, going back to (your) country — emotionally, spiritually, physically — helps you get over the loss, helps you understand your place in the world and go on from there.”
There is one little hitch: Because she was born and raised in Miami, the 26-year-old Pelaez is not technically an exile, perhaps not even legally Cuban. That doesn’t stop her from expounding freely on the notion of Cubanness, regaling visitors with opinions about life on the island, or talking about “our country.”
“I’m Cuban because I was born in Miami,” she says, as if that makes sense, “and Miami is what Cuba would have been, for better or worse. I could have moved to Alaska, to the middle of nowhere, but I would still have been more Cuban than sugar.”
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She’d felt at home once in Spain, the mother country, where everything seemed familiar to her. But it was nothing like the sense of belonging she had while on her parents’ native island.
“I don’t feel right in Miami, I can’t sleep in Miami, but in Havana, like a rock,” she says.
“Rum & Coke,” which is performed without an intermission, is Pelaez’s story of her journey to Castro’s playground. Much of it takes place while she was staying in her family’s house in Cuba. With a change in eyeglasses, headband or accent, Pelaez takes on six different characters, each interacting with the other to keep the story flowing. Two are islanders; one, in fact, begs her husband, who’s leaving on a raft, to stay with her.
“I met people in Cuba not any less or more valiant than those who left; they just chose to take on a different challenge by staying,” she says. “We tend to martyrize those who stay and people who threw themselves into the sea. Neither choice is necessarily courageous, just a choice.”
In “Rum & Coke,” Pelaez’s principal character, Camila, comes to her realization that she’s really Cuban not when she arrives on the island but when she’s about to leave for her home in the U.S. Havana has made an indelible impression on Camila and on her creator.
“My career keeps me in the U.S., but if I make it as an actress, I’d like to have a house in Cuba,” says Pelaez, “not like a summer house, but a house. I’d love to live in Cuba.”
She has no illusions, though, about how far-fetched that dream is.
“I think there’s a lot of reconstruction that needs to happen (in Cuba), including a lot of psychological reconstruction as well as social, physical and emotional,” she says.
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the facts
Thursday, 7 p.m., Carmen Pelaez’s “Rum & Coke,” DePaul University Recital Hall, 804 W. Belden Ave. 773-325-7472. The Recital Hall is wheelchair accessible.