Life as a Reluctant Immigrant: An Autoethnographic Inquiry

In this dissertation, I draw on memories inspired and heightened by compassionate interviews in order to produce a unifying narrative of interactions with family and friends prior to and following my exile from Cuba in 1960. I use autoethnography and narrative inquiry to understand how I made the decision to leave Cuba and the life I have lived in exile for almost sixty years. My dissertation focuses on what it means to live as a reluctant immigrant and how historically constituted power relations define the identity of many Cuban exiles. I discuss and contrast the politics of passion and the politics of affection. The politics of affection undermine the goals of the politics of passion; the moral imperative of what ought to be is not achieved and becomes an antecedent of the necessity to exile. The story I tell draws attention to memory, identity, displacement, the experience of ambiguous loss, the sadness of unfulfilled dreams of return, and the decision to live in exile as a survivor not a victim regardless of my disenchantment and resistance to the Castro Revolution