Immigrants in Brazil: The Pain of Separation
HAVANA TIMES – I haven’t seen my mother in two and a half years. My wife hasn’t seen hers in the same amount of time. My father died while I was away—without a goodbye, without a few words of comfort or a final hug.
My daughter only knows her grandmothers through video calls. She has no real bond with them. Sometimes she tells them she loves them, very timidly, in the way an innocent being might love a pair of elderly women she only knows through digitized affection.
We have no plans to return to Cuba, not even for a visit. There are no legal or economic conditions for it, and we don’t even have the desire.
Of course, I would like to walk once more through the places of my childhood, to hug the family members who have survived that socio-political catastrophe, and to visit the friends who are still there. But what I don’t want is to relive are the airport customs atmosphere, the blackouts, the helplessness of having money and nothing to buy, the widespread mistreatment.
If we can in the future, we’ll bring our mothers here for a vacation, and that’s it. And if things go better than I imagine, we’ll spend money visiting countries like Chile or Uruguay, or states within Brazil that hold priceless beauty.
Separation is painful, and here we’ve met people who suffer it even more than we do. Such is the case of Angelica, a Venezuelan woman with three children who was only able to bring the youngest with her, while the others remain in her home country, waiting for her to save enough money to bring them.
“That pain is constant and sharp,” she tells me.
Dainier, a Cuban who works with me, says he would give everything to be close to his son again. Like many compatriots, he sold everything to come to Brazil, with the hope of bringing his son later.
He works two jobs. He gets up at five in the morning from Monday to Friday and works at an auto repair shop until eleven, then goes to the butcher shop, where he works until nine-thirty at night, six days a week. All with the goal of saving money to bring his son.
For this young man, things have turned out to be more complicated than he imagined—not just because of the cost involved in reuniting with his son, but also because the boy’s mother, who is no longer his partner, has changed her mind and now doesn’t want to come to Brazil.
Every immigrant in this country carries a story of pain. Sharing a common language and having fairly similar cultures, Cubans and Venezuelans give each other encouragement.
Brazil is a country with open doors, as I once said. Immigration plays an active role in shaping the nation’s identity, and all these stories of pain, thank God, eventually settle into the fabric of this country’s soul, transformed into something beautiful.