CUBAN CONNECTION

Johnny Diaz, Globe Staff
November 3, 2003

CAMBRIDGE - To Michael Calienes, Cuba has always been a virtual country, one that he can't help but wax rhapsodic over after hearing his parents' stories about their native tropical island: The beaches were prettier, the sky bluer, and the fruits sweeter.

When the copywriter moved to Somerville from his native Miami about seven years ago, he missed those tales and yearned for something closer to home, a Cuban connection in Boston. He found it in Cambridge, where he eats chicken and rice, yucca (a starchy root), and crisp Cuban sandwiches with his girlfriend at the new monthly gathering called the Cuban Social Club. He has also found that connection on the Internet, ordering soft-cotton shirts known as guayaberas and cigars from a Miami-based website that specializes in selling all things Cuban.

It's Cuban comfort, he says.

"It's like staying in touch with the generation I am not with right now," said Calienes, 33, as the music of late Cuban singer and queen of salsa Celia Cruz pulsates at a recent Cuban Social Club meeting in Cambridgeport at the Western Front, where raw rhythms and infectious energy filled the air the way the aroma of a strong espresso perfumes a room.

"I never appreciated Cuban music until I moved away and felt the disconnect," Calienes says. "The social club is a way to preserve ourselves as Cuban people here in Boston."

Calienes is among a growing group of Cubans and others whose longing to celebrate the island's culture has sparked a boom in Boston and beyond. Even if many of them have never visited Cuba or haven't returned since they moved away, they want to grasp a cultural lifeline to their roots. So they are trying to build an island of their own here, attending the social group or buying small pieces of the country from stores, websites, and companies that package the Cuban nostalgia in various products.

Cubans and Cuban-Americans say they feel compelled to explore and embrace that yearning through memorabilia and social events.

"You have now lots of young Cubans, not necessarily part of the exile community, who are starting to come to terms with their Cuban identity," says Imias Ramirez, a Waltham Cuban-American who helps coordinate the monthly gatherings with her mother and friends. "They are embracing their cultura."

On the Internet, they stock up on T-shirts that read "Made in the USA . . . with Cuban parts." In Jamaica Plain, they order chicken and rice at El Oriental de Cuba for weekend gatherings and visit the nearby Hi-Lo market for some Materva, a popular Cuban soft drink. In Miami, where a handful of new businesses cater to Cuban memorabilia, people are buying up purses made from cigar boxes and reprinted posters that boast the island as a tourist nirvana.

Or they go to the Gap, which has been selling T-shirts this fall featuring two baseball bats and the word "CUBANA," an ode to the country's national sport. A company spokesman calls them "retro-logo" shirts, something "our customers have been responding to really well."

Forty years after Cubans began emigrating to Miami, Boston, Los Angeles, and Union City, N.J., their nostalgia tugs at their hearts, a mix of loss and hope. Most are either children of baby boomers who left the island as children or those who are ready to embrace their Cuban identity without having to wave a flag in the street. They want to be caretakers of the culture for themselves and future generations.

They smoke stogies and listen to Cuban music, and increasingly they see themselves reflected in pop culture. The wife of the main character on ABC's "The George Lopez Show" is Cuban and makes regular references to growing up biculturally. Last month in New York City, a series of 13 documentaries called "Nosotros la Musica" ("We Are the Music") opened at the Lincoln Center, featuring films about the Cuban culture's earthy and spiritual sound.

"It's an awakening you have about your roots," Vazquez says over the phone from her Miami store, whose website sells Cuban products to 7,000 customers worldwide. "We are trying to put forth who our people are and what our culture is. . . . to find out where we came from and what is really our roots."

That's what Ramirez searched for while growing up in Cambridge to a Cuban father and an American mother. She felt she was caught in a cultural gap. "I always felt pulled in both directions," she said. She wanted to tap into her local Cuban heritage, but a lack of venues and cohesiveness among the 8,000 Cubans scattered in the Bay State made that difficult.

This summer, Ramirez and her mother, Merri Ansara who runs Common Ground Education and Travel Services in Cambridge, combined forces with other local Cuban dancers, musicians, and residents from Hyde Park to Somerville to launch the social club. At their most recent gathering, dozens of Cubans, Cuban-Americans, and others bantered in Spanish, danced, chowed down on rice and beans, and sipped Mojitos on a bright orange counter.

The group hosting the club meeting represents different slices of the Cuban-American community. Some arrived during an exodus of Castro's Cuba in the 1960s. Others came as recently as the 1990s or were born in the United States to Cuban parents.

Some, like Maria Cabrera, came to Boston before Fidel Castro overthrew dictator Fulgencio Batista in 1959.

Cabrera emigrated to Roxbury with her grandmother from her native Santiago, Cuba, when she was 3 1/2 years old. She hadn't been back to her native country until last year. When her daughters' Jamaica Plain youth dance group, La Pinata, planned a cultural exchange trip to Cuba to perform with 21 other Boston dancers, Cabrera went along.

"Once I got off the plane, I felt that vapor of tropical air," says Cabrera, 50. "I felt energized in a way I had never felt before. My mother would always tell me about Cuba. It was a mix of good, the bad, and the ugly. I discovered for myself the reality I could never see. I could never really grasp what it meant until I went there."

She visited the house where she was born. She introduced herself to cousins after years of sending them gifts and letters. More important, she felt complete. "It was so great to finally connect the faces with the names," she said, her voice thick with emotion. "I always felt there was a piece of a puzzle missing in my life. I was finally able to find that piece."

Volunteering each month at the social group, where she slings a mean crisp hot sandwich of pork, ham, melted cheese, and pickles, is just another way she can show off her Cuban pride with others. Last month, at Jamaica Plain's World's Fair, she sat at a booth, selling Cuban flags and telling passersby about the club.

"It's a yearning for all things Cuban," she says, taking a break from serving carne guisada (stewed beef) and salad. "Some have lost their identity here, and I didn't want that to happen to me or my daughters."

Johnny Diaz may be reached at jodiaz@globe.com.