It must have been in the early Nineties, as the Soviet Union’s collapse rippled its way to Cuba, that I decided to build a spaceship. The plan was to collect anything made of metal: nuts, bolts, rebar. Also spark plugs, doorknobs, loose cables. I hauled large tin sheets blown off someone’s shoddy roof, rusty steel pipes left behind by the neighborhood plumber, the rim and spokes of a bicycle’s wheel. I even found the circuit board of a black-and-white television and the discarded innards of a radio, both of which, to my mind, possessed the dazzling intricacy of a computer. Within a few weeks, I accumulated enough to create an impressive mound of trash in my grandparents’ yard. The sheer size of it was promising: no doubt I’d be able to fit inside once I put everything together.
I can’t pinpoint a specific event or reason as the genesis of my idea, other than a general aspiration to explore and the belief that, in time, I could actually pull it off. I do remember being fascinated by space, something I inherited from my grandfather. He introduced me to astronomy and science fiction at an early age. He’d spend hours talking about what to him were the latest discoveries (information usually trickled into Cuba on years-long delay), the possible connections between ancient cultures and aliens, the Soviet Union versus the United States space race. He spoke with an infectious air of wonder about human achievements. He claimed we were on a precipitous path toward time travel and finding other dimensions. Once, he saw a documentary on black holes, and that’s all he discussed for weeks. He liked to cite Hawkins, Einstein, Newton, though I could never tell if he was doing so accurately. Regardless, he passed on enough of a quasi-scientific vocabulary for me to develop a ravenous curiosity for the astonishing, ruthless world beyond our sky.
When he saw the initial pile of garbage sprouting up in a corner of his yard, he chuckled and slowly shook his head. I explained my plan with the hope that he would offer his full support. Luckily, his chuckle had been one of approval. He chose to indulge me—as he would rarely have done for others, for my grandfather was an intransigent man, quick to lose his temper. He was, to put it as he might have, a man not adverse to confrontation. He wasn’t physically imposing. He was of average height for a Cuban, muscularly thin, and walked with a cautious, almost reserved manner due to his glass eye. He’d suffered an infection that nearly left him blind and which for most of my life I believed I had caused: the only time I saw my grandfather cry was after I accidentally poked his left eye, the functioning one, while horsing around. I must have been four or five years old. I carried this guilt with me until very recently, when my mother explained that my poke forced him to get the surgery he’d been stubbornly dodging, a surgery that, according to her, saved his vision.
Although I loved him and thought of him as a protector, there was a mythological aura about my grandfather, especially when he was trying to impose his will. Despite his unimpressive appearance, his personal history and reputation made him a foot taller and several pounds stronger in my youthful perception. He’d openly challenged a well-respected neighbor to a knife fight over a political argument (the neighbor declined and from then on refused to pass by the front of our house). He’d charged at one of my uncles with a lead pipe after my uncle had drunkenly yelled at my grandmother (my grandfather forbade him from entering the house again, and after separating from my aunt, my uncle never did). To help him build water tanks, he hired a friend of the family who’d been in prison for stabbing someone to death during an altercation, a man everyone in our neighborhood avoided and whom my grandfather—in what he likely saw as a defiant display of masculine empathy—treated as a protégé.
All of this is to say that I, a shy kid whose personality might be described as the direct opposite of my grandfather’s, both worshipped and feared him. His approval of my spaceship-building endeavor meant so much because he, more than any other person, could undo it with the simplest of words or gestures.
The typical layout of a Havana suburb is unlike its North American counterpart. There are no white picket fences, no large swaths of lawn or ample driveways, no lines of mailboxes neatly arranged down a noiseless street. Instead, there are compact rows of decaying buildings, old houses whose windows are at arm’s length from each other, potholed streets so narrow that two-way traffic becomes a challenge. Living in Santos Suarez—a heavily populated residential area nestled between two of Havana’s smallest municipalities—was a confining experience, as though I were sequestered in a tiny corner of the world. Santos Suarez was a place from which even the stars seemed inadequately close, as if, like everything else in Cuba, a specific portion of the sky had been allocated to us, with no access to another. This claustrophobic feeling of isolation made me want to leave.
A child, if sufficiently exposed to it, is capable of understanding the ramifications of abject poverty—the sense that tomorrow and the day after the struggle will be the same, regardless of your efforts or abilities. I recall a constant tension between the intellectually liberal atmosphere at home and the propaganda-riddled, duplicitous nature of Cuba’s strict school system. I recall my family’s frustrating interactions with Communist neighbors, all of whom were prospective informants for the state. Back then I also had a vague knowledge that life in other countries—and particularly in the United States—offered a more fruitful future, a knowledge that became more alluring by the mid-1990s, when the Special Period crisis gripped virtually every household and emigrating felt like the best solution to all our economic and socio-ideological woes.
A child is not supposed to be grappling with these sorts of questions, not to the extent that they lead to the thought of abandoning one’s country. But when you witness the abrupt absence of friends, and later hear how well they’re doing in Miami, New York, Madrid, Toronto, Mexico City; when you see photos of them wearing brand new clothes, living in freshly painted houses, riding in polished cars, smiling with a joy so effusive it can only come from people who know they’ve escaped a lifetime of hardship and disappointment; then the hand-me-down shirts and crumbling buildings and sputtering old cars and sun-beaten faces and socialist dictums suddenly take on a demoralizing quality. I wanted to leave Cuba because I sensed, very early on, that my adult self would be unhappy otherwise.
I suppose building a spaceship would have been one way to accomplish this. Yet I never made a connection between migration and shooting off past the earth’s atmosphere. What I do remember is the thrilling prospect of defying ridiculous odds. I remember picturing myself inside a metallic cocoon with beeping lights, hissing pipes, blinking screens. I remember imagining what it would be like to orbit our planet, to look back at its massive splendor, to drift toward distant stars. I was searching for a larger kind of escape.
Most Cubans know the name Yuri Gagarin. We know he was Russian, the first person to orbit the earth, even if we don’t always remember that he did so in 1961, that the name of the flight was Vostok 1, that the spacecraft had a spherical design to protect it from extreme heat on atmospheric reentry, and that the entire mission lasted 108 minutes. Gagarin’s trajectory around the earth clocked at a little over an hour. That’s more than sixty minutes in space relying on what is now more than half-a-century-old technology. Picture cars, planes, televisions, or phones from the same era, and it is remarkable that we accomplished such a feat with such rudimentary resources. That alone is worthy of genuine admiration. It should make us, regardless of politics or national affiliation or our personal relationship to science, proud of what humans are capable of achieving, of what a person like Gagarin was willing to do.
Unsurprisingly, he was turned into an international spectacle. Gagarin was a symbol not just of the Soviet Union’s power, but of its purported superiority over the United States. He was presented to Cubans as a hero, our hero. He was an example of Communism’s ability—through collaboration, ingenuity, and sacrifice—to attain the impossible. Most of my generation clumped his name alongside Laika (the first animal to orbit the earth) and Sputnik (the first man-made satellite to be launched into space), words that, in their sound and relevancy, evoked a sense of artificiality and imposition: a relationship between expansive, cold Russia and small, tropical Cuba that now feels like some historian’s cruel idea of a joke. It’s no wonder these words, like tovarish (Russian for “comrade”) or koniec (“end”), became a subject of mockery in our vernacular, the first for its obvious Communist connotation, the latter for appearing at the end of many a Soviet film with unresolved plot lines. Koniec stood for inexplicable, illogical, absurd—for the almost comical, improbable tragedy of what it meant to live in a Russian-dependent Cuban society.
Sputnik, however, holds greater significance for me. My grandfather referenced it often when I was a child. He wasn’t referring to the satellite, but to the magazine. The Soviet Union’s version of Reader’s Digest, poorly written and even more egregiously translated, Sputnik was one of the scarce access points we had to anything resembling international pop culture—science and literary news, political discussions, and thematic articles, all aesthetically mushed through a Soviet filter. Like others of his and my parents’ generation, Grandpa used it a source of information, particularly when it came to science.
But the irony of living under a despotic, propaganda-driven regime is that, once the idealist portion of the process has dried up and only the disappointment and poverty and oppression remain, the disenchanted youth gravitate toward what has been forbidden. In my generation’s case, it was American mythology and products. We consumed Hollywood movies and longed for a refreshing Coke while Fidel Castro spoke of socialist principles and our island’s defiance of imperialist threats. I was more fascinated by Neil Armstrong and NASA than by any of the Soviet stories we were told. I don’t remember seeing what Gagarin looked like, or memorizing the dates of the Soviet Union’s space exploits, but I could close my eyes and picture the iconic images of the moon landing. I could recognize the NASA logo from afar, and knew the Challenger disaster had occurred on the year of my birth; I had vivid images in my mind of the heartbreaking footage, the dense trail of smoke expanding behind the disintegrating spacecraft as fire consumed it.
Recently I stumbled upon what felt like an important question: What if I stripped away the politically marred layers of my memory, and allowed myself to explore this Soviet space history?
I learned that Yuri Gagarin was born into a peasant family in a Russian village near a town that would later be renamed after him. His father was a carpenter and bricklayer, his mother a milkmaid. During the Nazi occupation, the family was forced to live in a mud hut behind their home for nearly two years, while his two older brothers performed forced labor in Poland until the end of the war. As a young man, Gagarin volunteered as an air cadet at a local flying club and, after being drafted into the army, became a pilot. In 1960 the Soviet space program selected him as part of an elite training group. He was subjected to extensive training and tests designed to measure physical and psychological endurance. Distinguishing himself above the other pilots, and because of his diminutive stature (Gagarin was only five feet two inches tall), he was deemed the perfect candidate to fly into space.
By April 1961 he was aboard the Vostok spacecraft. There’s a recording of his voice at the exact instant he was receiving final instructions for the launch. One can hear static and then Gagarin shouting Poyekhali!, which translates to “Let’s go!”—a phrase that essentially marked the beginning of the Space Age. It’s the informal nature of what Gagarin chose to say, though, that intrigued me. Communism has a way of making even the mundane or empty sound laboriously grand. While Americans dress power and exceptionalism in colorful television commercials and romanticized views of democracy, there’s a crushingly bureaucratic and militaristic attitude behind the entire Communist enterprise, including the language. At such a pivotal moment for the Soviets, I’d expect Gagarin to sound official, stiff, contrived. Coming across his impatient “Let’s go!” stirred something in me. I hit play, again and again, and listened: Poyekhali! Poyekhali! Poyekhali!
The hairs on my arms rose. I skipped a breath. I was genuinely moved. Although all of this had taken place in Eastern Europe almost sixty years ago, I felt connected to it. It was as if my history—or, more accurately, a history that is and isn’t mine, but to which I’m irrevocably attached— was echoing from somewhere remote and shaking my present self. How do we define what’s ours, I wondered? Why did I have such a strong response to Gagarin’s voice? Why do I feel compelled to share both his story and my personal reaction, to explore them further? What am I, a Cuban-born American citizen caught between opposing mythologies, really trying to figure out?
There’s a danger that, as we get older, our world, instead of becoming larger and more connected, will remain relatively narrow and fractured. I’ve rarely encountered anyone in the United States, and this includes many writers and intellectuals, who knows about Neil Armstrong and Yuri Gagarin, who knows the details of the Moon Landing and Vostok 1, who can speak about American and Soviet events with a comparable level of interest, skepticism, or passion. We’ve been made to believe that another place’s history is someone else’s history, to the extent that extraordinary amounts of curiosity and empathy are needed to break through the barrier. Then there are the narratives imposed on us, the single-layered distortions meant to fuel our sense of pride and belonging. Whether we reject or internalize them, these narratives inevitably become entangled with our identity. I am Cuban, but the Soviet influence on my sensibilities, my cynicism and humor, my sense of the past and formative education are undeniable. They linger in my conscience in ways that American acculturation has failed to erase. How much say do we really have in what we discard or accept? How does a Cuban-born individual living in America reconcile the feeling of personal recognition—of a strange but visceral link—to the sound of a Russian astronaut he’s always associated with Communist indoctrination?
Maybe we’re just at the mercy of our instinctive reactions. Maybe what resonates for us as authentic, as somehow ours, is all that matters. But I can’t shake the suspicion that even in moments of recognition, I must continue to prod and question if I want to arrive at anything resembling a unified sense of self. Ultimately, I find solace in the little tokens history gives us. Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin, at the heart of the Cold War in 1969, left a medallion on the moon commemorating Gagarin’s contribution to space exploration. Their acknowledgement and appreciation of a fellow astronaut transcended politics. I choose to see this seemingly small gesture as a comforting metaphor for the complex, colliding realities that make up my immigrant life.
It wasn’t a simple word or sweep of the hand that extinguished my spaceship-building hopes. My grandfather paced in front of all the parts I’d spent weeks gathering, and with a menacing tremor in his voice ordered me to throw it all out. He needed to build a water tank, he said, and there was no reason for so much trash to be in the way. He offered no other explanation, no alternatives. He didn’t acknowledge all the effort I’d put in. He looked at the pile of metal with disdain and exasperation. His indulgence of my dream had reached its limit.
I pleaded with my mother to reason with him. I remember there being a brief argument. Then I was carrying everything to the dumpster on our street corner. I hid the circuit board somewhere in my home but threw it away soon after, for fear that he would find it.
Defying my grandfather was not an option. When I was in kindergarten, he supposedly saw my best friend, Roli, push me while we were in line waiting to be released from school. I don’t recall the push. I can barely recount any instances of animosity between Roli and me. But something must have happened, because on the walk home (my grandfather had permission from Roli’s mother to bring him with me), he made us fight. He said something about how I shouldn’t allow others to disrespect me, about not going home until Roli and I fought. We mainly grabbed each other and tussled on the ground, holding back tears. A neighbor who was walking by called my grandfather an animal. He told her to mind her business and only pulled us apart when he realized there would be no winner.
Roli and I never talked about the incident. We didn’t tell our parents. Our friendship continued until his family moved to a different neighborhood when we were in fourth or fifth grade. I also never spoke of it with my grandfather. He wasn’t the type to dwell on the past, at least not in the context of personal growth—admitting a wrong, offering or receiving forgiveness. Vulnerability was counter to what he believed and practiced. What hurt me most was his lack of self-awareness, his inability to grasp how much damage he could do.
Though my interest in science continued even after I realized how foolish the spaceship idea had been, my relationship with my grandfather was never the same. Once I left Cuba, we barely spoke for over a decade. A few years back, he and my grandmother came to visit my family in Miami. Time hadn’t been kind to him. Wrinkles had conquered the whole of his face. His glass eye had sunk deeper into his skull. His spine had developed a forward bend, his walk a sluggish drag. Following the initial hug and typical exchange between people whose distance has turned them into strangers, he said he had something important to ask me. We walked out to my mother’s balcony and shut the sliding door behind us. We sat across from each other, let a pause accentuate the moment—he for gravitas, me because I was expecting an insidious question about my long hair, my decision to become a writer, the lack of phone calls on my end. He moved to the edge of his chair, a surprisingly nervous appearance in his posture, and with a sheepish voice said, “I want you to be honest with me: do you believe in aliens?”
Science, and particularly anything related to astronomy, slowly faded from my life once I arrived in America. By high school graduation, I’d decided becoming an astronomer and working at NASA were out of the question. I dropped out of college within a semester, turning to heavy metal music as my escape and manual labor as my means of support. When I returned to school in my mid-twenties, creative writing had become my passion. Science only reappeared in the form of brief affairs with magazine subscriptions. A few Scientific American issues still sit unread on my bookshelf.
I’ve done a fair amount of online research, but I’ve failed to find any copies in Spanish of Sputnik. Perhaps in a future trip to Havana I’ll come across one, since these kinds of Communist memorabilia have a way of never completely disappearing. Perhaps I just need to reconnect with the person who, before getting on a plane in 1997, would look at the stars and wonder how it was possible for some of them to have died so long ago, how we’re able to see something that isn’t actually there.
I don’t believe my grandfather will ever be that pathway for me. If anything, my relationship with him has deteriorated further. I’ve learned things about him: the way he betrayed my grandmother with other women, the years of psychological abuse, the disparaging comments he made about my now-deceased father’s struggle with alcoholism. Suffice it to say, I don’t respect him as I did in my younger days; I now wish to be the opposite of him. My mother tells me he asks about me often, about my personal and professional achievements. She says he loves me. Still, my default emotion toward my grandfather is anger. In moments I’m not proud of, I wish my connection to science had nothing to do with him. I’m glad that leaving Cuba released me from his influence.
But migration isn’t only about escape. It’s also about irreparable loss. I know that who I am today is not just what I’ve become, but what is no longer with me. One learns to cope. The knowledge that something cannot be regained eventually moves past grief and nostalgia into a more indefinable state, a state in which hope begins working its way back—in my case to childhood, to what will always be the most authentic version of oneself. There, I find myself having built that spaceship. And unlike Gagarin, with his certainty of return, soon I’m truly in orbit, on an almost endless threshold between the known and unknown, beyond it the entire cosmos and its delightful abundance of possibilities.
Dariel Suarez is the Cuban-born author of the novel The Playwright’s House and the story collection A Kind of Solitude, which won the 2017 Spokane Prize for Short Fiction.
