Maximina González remembers the exact day she came to the United
States from Cuba. It was May 17, 1980, and she was 52. She has lived in Miami since 1982
and, she says, she had not interacted with a Haitian until this month.
Monday morning she found herself standing in front of a
half-finished mural at Casa Grande Cultural Center in downtown Miami, speaking to a group
of about 20 elderly Miami residents of Hispanic and Haitian descent who had put down their
markers and glue to listen. Nearly all the Hispanics were Cuban Americans.
``I am very happy to come together as brothers and sisters,''
González said. Two students from Coral Park High School, Charlene Brown, 18, and Rony
Die, 16, translated her words into English and then Creole. There was vigorous applause.
The mural painting was a remarkable creation of two similar
immigrant groups separated by neighborhood boundaries and U.S. immigration policy and torn
far apart by the Elián González affair. Cubans who make it to the United States are
generally allowed to stay. Haitians who try to come here are generally sent home.
While the nation focused on the Cuban community's struggle to keep
the 6-year-old Cuban boy in the United States, the Haitian community's resentment grew. It
didn't help that when a boatload of more than 400 people, most of them Haitian, tried to
sneak into Florida under cover of darkness and New Year's Eve celebrations on the morning
of Jan. 1, 2000, almost all were quickly sent back to Port-au-Prince.
``This project aims to heal the wounds of Elián,'' said Xavier
Cortada, a Miami artist who painted the background of the mural, which depicts Cuban and
Haitian men, women and children looking at a boat that is traveling forward, toward the
viewer. ``Elián is the ultimate rafter.''
Through meetings started in April, first in their separate
communities, and then together as a group, the elderly Haitians and Cubans met to write
down their thoughts and stories. Monday, they taped their photographs and those words to
the blank swaths of ocean and sky in the mural. They will finish today, and Cortada and
several art students from Coral Park will glue the pieces of paper down and glaze the
mural.
The project began with a $20,000 grant from the Dade Community
Foundation to Hands On Miami, a nonprofit community service organization.
``The purpose of the project was to explore the similarities
between the cultures,'' said Bobbi Wald, a volunteer coordinator for Hands On Miami. The
mural brought together ``people who would never in a million years have had anything to do
with each other.''
The idea for the mural's design came from Darline DeSil, a
ninth-grader at Coral Park. She remembers when her mother woke her up in the middle of the
night and said, ``We're going to some other place.'' She was 5 when she came to the United
States from Haiti. Her sisters are still there.
At an early meeting of the two groups, DeSil told her story. Soon
the Haitians and the Cubans recognized that it was everyone's story.
``We come from the same place - the Caribbean,'' DeSil said.
Cortada said he originally thought that the two groups would
explore shared areas of cultural experience: their cuisines, their religions, maybe even
their loneliness and isolation as elderly people in a foreign country that does not revere
age to the same degree as their native lands.
``I expected to be painting roosters, virgins, and black beans and
rice,'' he said.
Instead, he found something much deeper.
``It got rawer than that,'' he said. ``It became about the
psycho-trauma of their lives.''
Maximina González said she came from Cuba with her husband in
1980.
``Life over there,'' she said, ``was impossible.''
Her husband left her for another woman in 1995, and life here has
been difficult, she said.
One of her contributions to the mural was a photograph of herself
at age 50 accompanied by a short poem about Cuba:
``Verdant and lovely fields. Serpentine brooks. Lovebirds that sing
and breezes that sweeten life.''
Marie Preal, 77, came to Miami from Haiti by plane on June 26,
1974. Monday afternoon, she was taping pictures to the mural. One showed her and her son,
Romain. In another, she stood next to her daughter, her son and her son's girlfriend on
board the Jungle Queen riverboat.
``It's the same,'' she said, waving her arms at the dozens of
pictures and stories on the mural. ``Same problem, same everything. Leave Cuba, leave
Haiti.''
The inclusion of the students, who acted as listeners as well as
interpreters, was what made the project work for both the students as well as the elderly
people, Cortada said.
And for the older Haitians and Cubans, the mural is a way to record
their struggles.
``Their pain and suffering isn't lost. It doesn't evaporate - it's
there permanently,'' Cortada said.