Cuban Migrants in Curitiba, Brazil
HAVANA TIMES – I have no idea how many Cubans are currently living in this city. However, after a somewhat lazy search on the internet, I found a report from the Brazilian online Gaceta do Povo (“People’s Gazette”) asserting that 931 of the 999 asylum applicants in the first semester of 2025 in Brazil’s Parana State were Cubans.
Will this rhythm of immigration be increasing or decreasing? That will depend on factors such as the situation inside Cuba and the immigration policies of Brazil and the United States. Still, if everything continues the way it’s going, in a few more years, Curitiba could be a second Miami.
It will be a shock of two cultures: those from the Caribbean blowing like a hurricane into the cold and sustainable Curitiba. What could come out of this mix?
Here begins the terrain of conjectures. Everything I’m going to write are personal impressions and conclusions drawn from some news items read in passing. Here goes…
What do we Cubans bring to this city?
The great majority of us Cubans suffer to some extent from so-called “anthropological damage,” which theoreticians define as “damage to the human condition as such.”
The term, which originated in Cuba, is associated with countries where the government has profoundly intervened in people’s social relations, provoking undesirable effects in the psyche of its inhabitants.
One of the most devastating aspects of anthropological damage is the deterioration of moral sense, hindering a person from discerning good from evil.
In the places where I’ve worked, I’ve known many Cubans who look upon the Brazilians as enemies. This could be due to an instinct for resisting the empowerment of the locals, or in some cases frustration, because the person we’re subordinated to has a lower intellectual level than our own.
Nevertheless, in a general sense, what happens is that we’re proud, arrogant; we lack professional ethics, and we don’t know how to be grateful for the welcome they give us. The Brazilians don’t see us as a threat, unlike some other countries where any immigrant is considered inferior.
I’ve begun to hear, not without astonishment, that many of my fellow Cubans consider the Brazilians to be intellectually inferior. Cubans, who are co-participants in a dictatorship that has done nothing except destroy the country, arrive in Curitiba, a city that’s been called “the Vienna of America” for being so well thought out, and then boast of having a superior intelligence? Bah!
Another of the phrases that I found outrageous is: “This is de pinga” (fucked up) More than just a vulgarity, it’s a constant state of mind among many Cubans and has become a form of communication. It seems they still think they’re in Cuba, where everything is bad.
“I was the director of the Ñico López Refinery, but this is worse,” a Cuban told me before putting in his resignation at the supermarket where I work.
Do we bring suggestions to make this city an even better place, or do we just make fun of it?
What do we Cubans bring to Curitiba? Music, dance, a different way of dressing, or joking? Perhaps some recipes for cooking? Or do we just bring arrogance, resentment, and swollen pride to hide the fact that we fled the land we should have defended?
Curitiba has many things to teach us. Respect for people, for other people’s property, for hierarchies. A focus on work, on savings, on our health. Justice beyond what we understand as justice, and equality – not the hypocritical communist equality, nor utopian equality either, but a system where we can reach whatever we’re capable of fighting for.
This city could reconnect us with our Mambi roots [National Liberation Army in Cuba that defeated the Spanish], with our life under the republic that was so violently interrupted in the year 1959. We just have to pull our heads out of the barrel and regard our surroundings with humility.
We bring the labor force that today is working in construction, in the supermarkets, in the car washes, and that could be a great help to the region’s economic growth.
However, if we prepare ourselves, tomorrow we’ll be the brains, the managers, the owners, those who launch initiatives with our creativity and our unique charm, enriching the sense of being Cubans in Curitiba.
Those who don’t adapt, unfortunately, will continue defining themselves by a vulgarity and arrogance I try harder to forget.