A few weeks ago, on an any-day sort of day, my grandmother came home to her Los Angeles bungalow and sorted her mail, tossing junk and sorting bills, when she came upon a statement from her bank. The notice she pulled from the envelope indicated that the balance of her 401k, a fund to which she had been contributing for years and drawing from only recently in modest amounts, was $0.00.
She panicked, and why would she not? The statement had no mention of the reasons for which her account had—seemingly without warning—dropped to nil. Her frantic calls to my family failed to reach more than voicemails that evening as she grasped for an explanation and for help from loved ones, her husband (my grandfather, the one who had for nearly 60 years handled financial questions for her) having passed away over a year before. She was confused and feared that she had lost her savings, and what came to her mind was this: is Obama a socialist after all?
Yes, my grandmother suspected that Washington had appropriated her personal retirement savings, her assumption partially a function of large media fusses over health care that have led to President Obama’s branding as a socialist. But on the surface her problem was an issue with a bank. With the great financial crisis not yet far behind us, it would not have been surprising to jump to a different conclusion about the solvency of the bank or the honesty of its management. To have instead immediately assumed foul play by the government, indeed, outright theft by the government of the money that she had so painstakingly set aside for years: this came from a deep seated fear and mistrust of government intentions.
And whence would this come? Well, my grandmother is a Cuban migrant, having moved in 1960 from Havana to the United States.
I drew some insight from this story, or at least anecdotal evidence for theoretical musings.
Many of the generational differences in political leanings among Cubans in the United States (Cuban migrants and Cuban-Americans born here) can be attributed to having experienced or not experienced flight and exile, an otherwise impossible to understand experience that rends families and uproots lives built and cherished. My grandmother was displaced from the home she had made in Marianao and found herself with little in the way of money and belongings trying to raise three children in a foreign country. Her instinct to draw parallels to any apparently comparable infringements upon her livelihood, even a half century later, is entirely logical to me. Similarly, I greatly respect the reasons for differences in opinion between us on questions of U.S. policies toward Cuba—her views are no doubt shaped by a deep and difficult to mend hurt that I cannot imagine.
And if I may bring this story back to the big picture for a moment: to me, the shifting political character of the Cuban-American community toward a younger demographic that is more inclined to loosen embargo restrictions, including travel, is an indication that the emotional (and traditional) response to Cuba policy is not the best one. The generation that grew up knowing well their family histories and the U.S. history in Cuba but not having experienced the pain of flight is the impartial jury that can more reasonably weigh what U.S. policy toward Cuba is appropriate.
In the end, we learned that neither the bank nor the Obama administration had taken my grandmother’s savings. Her money had been transferred to a new account under a different number for several no doubt important and valid reasons, and the bank had previously sent notice of this change, as she discovered from an apologetic bank representative that evening (apparently my grandmother missed their earlier important letter).
When she told me the full story, I gasped when I should have and I laughed when I should have, and I understood it, start to finish.
I wonder what she will think of Obama if he loosens restrictions on Americans traveling to Cuba?
Photo: My grandmother at a market in Havana, circa 1955. (Photo credit: Evans/Three Lions/Getty Images)
