I was born in Havana and left Cuba when I was two years old on the Mariel boatlift.
In 1980, more than 125,000 Cubans crossed the Florida Straits after Fidel Castro opened the port of Mariel to those wishing to leave. My parents were among them. Like many exiles, they believed the separation would be temporary. Years passed. My parents, sister, and I built a life in Miami.
I grew up surrounded by Cubans. I spoke Spanish at home. I ate lechón con congrí y yuca con mojo, croquetas, and pastelitos. I listened to Cuban music and absorbed Cuban history, Cuban politics, and Cuban nostalgia. Cuba was always present — vivid, intimate, and out of reach.
I have never been back.
Recently, I read The Deep by Rivers Solomon. It is a novella inspired by the history of the Atlantic slave trade, specifically by the descendants of enslaved African women thrown overboard from ships during the Middle Passage, imagined as a people who have made their lives in the deep ocean, carrying the accumulated grief of that history in their bodies.
That is a story about the sea. I have a relationship with it. Born on an island, I was carried across the Florida Straits as a child and grew up with salt water at the edges of everything.
I wear Yemaya’s eleke among others. Elekes are the beaded necklaces consecrated to the orishas, received in ceremony in Lukumí, a Yoruba-derived religious tradition that survived the Middle Passage and took root in Cuba. I have also received the Guerreros, the warriors Elegguá, Ogún, Ochosi, and Osun, and, in a separate ceremony, Olokun, the bottom of the ocean. I am marked for Ogún. I came to these relationships through years of work in that tradition; I have written elsewhere about my journey to the orishas. Yemaya is the mother of waters. Those waters carried ships of enslaved Africans. When I read Solomon’s novella, I was not reading from the outside. Something in it was already mine in a way I had not fully confronted.
What the book cracked open was not only grief, though grief was part of it. It was the recognition of an absence. I have engaged extensively with the Holocaust — seen films, read memoirs, and met survivors who showed me their tattoos. I have always felt the weight of that history and believed in our collective responsibility to remember it. But reading Solomon’s novella made me realise I had not approached the history of Atlantic slavery with the same attention.
I realised the difference was proximity. The Holocaust is a history I study from a distance, a gravity I choose to approach. Slavery is a history I inherit, one that lives in my everyday reality, surfacing in unexpected moments.
Everything was just Cuban
Growing up in Miami’s Cuban diaspora, I did not experience my heritage as a set of distinct strands. There was no moment when someone said: “This part of our food comes from West Africa,” “This word is Taíno,” or “This rhythm belongs to the Yoruba.” Everything was just Cuban. The synthesis had already happened, generations before me, and I received it whole.
The African and Indigenous threads were present, but they had been absorbed into a broader cultural identity that didn’t name its own components. I absorbed them the same way — through food, music, language, the particular texture of Cuban exile — without knowing what I was absorbing.
The only signals that something more complex was underneath came encoded in offhand comments. My mother spoke of pelo malo — bad hair — to describe the curly hair that suggested African ancestry. She straightened her own hair. She straightened mine from childhood. The hair salons in every corner of Little Havana defaulted to straightening as a matter of course.
For a long time, I thought of straight hair as a beauty preference, a cultural habit. Now I understand it as a document. The preference for straight hair carries the long history of colourism in Latin America — the social hierarchies established under colonial rule, in which proximity to European appearance meant proximity to power. My mother didn’t create those standards. She inherited them. I inherited them from her.
The same is true of another phrase I grew up hearing: levantar la raza — elevate the race. As a child, I understood it vaguely as encouragement. As an adult, I understand it as part of the same colonial logic. Elevating the race meant moving toward whiteness. It was advice about survival dressed up as aspiration.
Survival in our house was working-class, Little Havana. I didn’t speak English until I started school at five. Mine has never been the privilege of money or ease. A friend once told me she thought I was bougie. I had to laugh. I am still paying off the student loans from the English degree I eventually earned, in the language that wasn’t mine until kindergarten. There is a colonial irony in that. But privilege is not a single axis. People read my appearance and make assumptions about my race. They also make assumptions about my class. The actual story sits awkwardly across both. This is how history often works. We imagine it in textbooks and monuments. Sometimes it lives in our mirrors.
The story of an island
Cuba was one of the first places where Europe, Africa, and the Indigenous peoples of the Americas collided with full force, and the consequences of that collision are everywhere on the island — in its music, its food, its language, its religion — if you know how to look.
The Taíno were the people Columbus encountered when he arrived in 1492. Within decades, their population had been decimated by disease, violence, and the brutal labour demands of the encomienda system, the colonial practice of granting Indigenous labour to Spanish settlers. They were not entirely erased, but they were rendered invisible by the historical record in ways that are only slowly being undone. Their presence persists in ways many Cubans don’t consciously register. The word huracán is Taíno. So is hamaca, canoa, and tabaco. The foods that feel most essentially Caribbean — yuca, batata, ají, guayaba — originated in Taíno cultivation and bear Taíno names. Sabana, the word for a grassy plain, is Taíno. So is bohío, the word for a thatched hut that still appears in Cuban song and poetry as a symbol of home. Recent genetic research suggests Indigenous ancestry persisted in Cuban bloodlines long after colonial accounts declared the Taíno extinct. They did not disappear. They were disappeared — absorbed, renamed, written out — and the language kept the record anyway.
As the colonial economy expanded and Indigenous labour was exhausted, enslaved Africans were brought to Cuba in vast numbers. By the nineteenth century, Cuba was one of the largest slave societies in the Americas. People from across West and Central Africa — Yoruba, Fon, Kongo, Mandinga, and many others — were transported to work sugar plantations, coffee estates, and tobacco fields under conditions of extraordinary brutality. What they carried with them — religion, language, music, ways of cooking and moving and organising the world — survived that brutality, sometimes openly, more often hidden in plain sight.
The African presence transformed Cuba completely. It can be heard in the drum rhythms of rumba and batá. It can be tasted in Cuban food. Plantains came to the island through the slave trade. So did okra. The slow-stewing, the one-pot meals, the layering of spices, these are African techniques that became the foundation of Cuban cooking. It appears in everyday language in ways most Cuban speakers don’t notice: bemba for lips, chévere for something excellent or cool, asere as a term of address between friends, bilongo for a hex or curse — all have African roots. Words for spiritual and material objects, for ways of moving and speaking, came across in the bodies and mouths of enslaved people and never left.
Most visibly, the African presence shaped Cuban religious life in ways that are irreducible. The Lukumí tradition, also known as Regla de Ocha or Santería, is a living Yoruba-derived system that survived the Middle Passage and took deep root in Cuban soil. It survived in part by necessity. African religious practices were persecuted under colonial rule, and the orishas were syncretised with Catholic saints as a form of protective camouflage, layers of meaning hidden beneath an acceptable surface. It was not alone. Ifá, the Yoruba system of divination and priesthood, developed a distinct Cuban lineage of its own. Palo Monte, drawing primarily on Kongo spiritual practices, has its own priests, sacred objects, and relationship with the dead. Abakuá, a fraternal secret society derived from the Ékpè leopard society of the Cross River region of what is now Nigeria and Cameroon, produced its own music, language, and ritual life, and gave Cuba some of its most distinctive carnival traditions. These are not variations on a single theme. They are separate living traditions, each with its own logic, its own history, its own communities of practitioners, maintained across generations under conditions that were often hostile to their survival. The ethnographer Lydia Cabrera spent decades documenting this world and wrote simply: no hay Cuba sin el africano. There is no Cuba without the African.
She was right. And yet, as I grew up, the African was simply Cuban. For much of the twentieth century, Cuba promoted cubanidad — a unified national identity with real strengths. It resisted the formalised racial segregation of the United States, though Cuba had its own entrenched racial hierarchies and colour lines long before the revolution. But cubanidad could also obscure differences and inequalities. If everyone is simply Cuban, it becomes easier to ignore the ongoing effects of anti-Black racism and colourism. The synthesis was so complete, so long-established, that it had become invisible. I had to learn, as an adult, to see the seams.
What the DNA test tells you and what it doesn’t
Multiple DNA tests and genealogical research confirm what the history of Cuba would already predict: my ancestry includes Indigenous roots spanning the Caribbean and broader Americas, including the Yucatan, alongside African and European, mostly Spanish, threads. None of this surprised me. It is the story of countless Cuban families. But knowing the composition of your ancestry and knowing what to do with that knowledge are entirely different things.
I sometimes describe myself as having African ancestry. I do not describe myself as Afro-Cuban.
I sometimes describe myself as having Indigenous ancestry. I do not describe myself as Indigenous.
In Australia, where I now live, Aboriginal identity is understood as involving three elements: descent, self-identification, and recognition by community. A DNA test alone establishes nothing. That framework insists that identity is not simply biological. It involves culture, relationship, shared experience, and accountability to a living community.
What Taíno community? There isn’t one to be recognised by, not in any straightforward sense, and I have not lived in relationship with contemporary communities engaged in Taíno cultural reclamation. The same complexity applies to my African ancestry. I have light skin. I have not moved through the world as a Black woman. The social experiences associated with Blackness — the particular weight of racism, the specific negotiations required to exist in a white-dominant world — are not my experiences, whatever my DNA says.
A Cape Coloured South African-Australian friend once told me she knew I was mixed Black when she saw me. A Sudanese Uber driver was surprised when I said I was Cuban; he assumed all Cubans are Black. These moments of being read differently by different people point to something about how race operates. It is a social process, not a biological fact, and it produces different results depending on context, community, and the reader’s eye.
The privilege of my light skin means that I can afford to sit with uncertainty, to decline to claim, because the social weight of Blackness does not fall on me either way. For others, it is not a question they get to leave open.
The version of this story I’m not telling
There is another way to write this essay. I know because I have seen it written.
It goes something like this: I discovered my Indigenous and African ancestry, I connected with those traditions, I claimed my full heritage, and I am now whole. It is a story of reclamation, of recovering what colonialism tried to take. There are authors, spiritual teachers, and public figures who tell this story compellingly, who build platforms, audiences, and identities from the raw material of mixed heritage, who capitalise, in every sense, on the richness of what was passed down to them.
I understand the appeal. It is a far more comfortable story than the one I’m actually in. But I can’t tell it honestly. The discomfort I feel when I consider claiming Afro-Cuban identity, or Indigenous identity, is not false modesty. It is a recognition that belonging requires more than ancestry. You cannot claim membership in a community you have not been in relationship with, whose struggles you have not shared, and whose recognition you have not earned.
I am accountable to these histories. They made me. The Taíno presence in Cuba is not a footnote; it is the foundation. The African presence is not background; it is structure. These are not things I discovered by taking a DNA test. They are things I grew up inside, without knowing I was inside them.
De la Yuma
“Pero Cosette, you sound just like a Cuban!”
To Cubans who grew up on the island, or who came to Australia from Cuba without passing through the United States, I am de la Yuma — American. The particular flavour of Cuban-ness I carry, the Miami diaspora version, marks me as foreign to the Cuban experience in ways that are sometimes spoken and sometimes simply felt.
To Americans, I am Latina, probably Mexican. The specificity of Cuban identity disappears into the broader category of Hispanic or Latin.
To Australians, I am American.
There is a loneliness in being always the wrong thing. Not belonging to the place you came from, not belonging to the place you live, not belonging to the community your ancestry points toward.
I still have family in Cuba, some of whom may remember me as a baby. I do not remember anything. I carry the island the way you carry something you were told about, rather than something you lived, through stories, through food, through exile nostalgia. What Cuba lost over sixty-five years of revolution and authoritarian rule is almost too large to catalogue: the professionals who left, the press that was shuttered, the buildings that weren’t maintained, the religious and cultural life that was suppressed, the economy that collapsed, the families scattered across continents, the rafts that crossed the Florida Straits. Havana is visually stunning and structurally decaying. The culture that survived did so because people fought to keep it alive through endurance, ingenuity, and a refusal to let it disappear. I carry grief about all of it, a sadness and sometimes an anger I don’t know what to do with.
What I inherit
At the end of all of this — the displacement, the misrecognitions, the histories I grew up inside without knowing it, the grief for a Cuba I never got to know — I am Cuban. That is the one identity that has never been in question, even when everyone around me seemed to be filing me under something else.
The grief is real, though — for the island I don’t remember, for the culture I received without knowing what I was receiving, for the self that might have been formed differently if history had gone another way. That person never existed. But I feel her absence.
Yemaya is the mother of waters, the ocean itself. She does not resolve grief; she contains it. The bones of the Middle Passage are in her. Every body thrown overboard, every name never recorded, every person who did not survive the crossing — she holds all of it, on a scale that dwarfs individual suffering while losing none of it. Those same waters between Cuba and Florida have been taking people for centuries in the slave trade, in wars, in the sixty-five years of Cubans on rafts and inner tubes trying to reach the other shore. My parents crossed those waters in 1980. I was two years old. I do not remember the crossing, but Yemaya does.