They Left With Everything They Could Carry

We film anyone whose story is worth keeping. Where they came from is never the point. The story is.

I’ve made films about Cuban exiles in Houston. More than a few.

There’s a reason so many of them ended up here. There’s also a reason so many of them built something remarkable once they did. I’ve sat across from enough of them now that I have a theory about it, though I’ll save the theory for another post.

What I want to talk about today is the particular texture of those interviews.

The history you already know. Or you can find it. Batista, Castro, the revolution, the exodus. Two hundred thousand people, maybe four hundred thousand, leaving an island over a few years. Most of them expecting to go back.

They didn’t. They still haven’t.

What you can’t find in the books is the suitcase.

I mean that literally. Several of the people I’ve filmed described, in specific detail, the process of packing a single bag knowing it might be the last bag. Not “we took what we could.” The particular thing they left on the bed because it didn’t fit. The object they carried instead that turned out to be wrong. The decision that seemed practical and in retrospect was a whole worldview in one choice.

One man we filmed, he told me he’d watched Castro’s army march toward Havana not like conquerors but like men feeling their way down a dark hall. Cautious. Uncertain. Not sure what they’d find at the end.

He left the following year. Never went back.

Another couple, in Houston for decades by the time we met them. Built a business here, raised their kids here, knew their neighborhood the way you only know a place when you’ve really decided to stay.

You’d never look at them and think: these people carried a country in a suitcase.

But they had.

The wife said something sticky. “We didn’t think of ourselves as refugees. We thought of ourselves as people who needed to get on with things.”

I think about that line a lot when people ask me why I do this work.

The reason is that line. The thing that exists in this woman’s head, in this particular phrasing, in this particular combination of pride and pragmatism and a very quiet grief that she’s never named out loud, that exists nowhere else in the world.

It’s not in the history books. It’s not in the documentaries. It’s not on Google.

It’s in her.

And now it’s in a film.

Her grandkids have it. Their kids will have it. The specific version of how this family left one world and built another, in her words, in her voice, with her seventy-year-old composure and the thing that flickers in her eyes when she talks about Havana.

That’s what we make.