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01/18/13 - Miami Herald - Fabiola Santiago: Inaugural presence says Cuban Americans belong here

It will be a moment to savor, a ground-breaker, in a people's decades-long
journey to become a part of this country.

When President Barack Obama takes the oath of office Monday for a second
term, the inaugural ceremony will be filled with symbolism about
reconciling a diverse America - and two Cuban-Americans, a poet and a
priest with ties to Miami, will be at the forefront.

Who could have imagined this history-making moment during the fervor of
the presidential campaign?

Who could have imagined this 13 years ago when a boy plucked from the high
seas tore this country into two camps - the Cuban-Americans who wanted to
save Elián González from growing up in a dictatorship and the rest of a
nation that felt the child belonged with his Fidel-worshiping father on
the island?

But behold the two Cuban-Americans who will bask in the national spotlight
of a Democratic president's Inauguration Day.

Delivering the benediction will be Rev. Luis León, who fled Cuba in 1961
alone as an 11-year-old child in the secret exodus of unaccompanied minors
known as Operation Pedro Pan.

The Episcopal priest who leads St. John's, the church across from the
White House attended by presidents, lived in Miami with a foster family
for several years after his arrival. He also delivered the benediction in
2005 for President George W. Bush.

Poet Richard Blanco - son of exiles, Miami-raised and educated, part of
the city's literary arts community until he moved to Maine to live with
his partner a few years ago - will read a poem he was asked to compose for
the occasion.

Blanco, 44, will be the first gay man and the youngest inaugural poet. But
it's the soulful voice with which he writes about his family and ordinary
moments like sitting on his mother's porch in the quintessential Cuban
enclave of Westchester that has elevated him to a starring role held by
luminaries like Maya Angelou.

"Everything I am is here still,'' Blanco writes about that porch.

With millions of Americans watching, their words will ring with a sprig of
hope to those of us who have endured the stereotype of a monolithic,
intolerant community, one that pundits all too conveniently pack into neat
little political boxes. One that was disparaged without an iota of
understanding during the Elián saga - and that most recently surprised
even the experts when close to half of the Cuban-American vote went to
Obama.

Surely Obama the strategist was conscious of the political good will he
would foster among Cuban-Americans with his choices of Blanco and León,
who became the stand-in for an unsuitable pastor who had delivered a
sermon saying that being gay was a sin.

But regardless of the political calculations - we are, after all, only a
community of 1.8 million in a country with 53 million Hispanics - this is
a moment to celebrate.

With a poem and a prayer, the nation will see that Cuba's loss has been
the United States' gain, and that while we, the Cuban-Americans, may still
long to see a free Cuba, we belong here.


Original Source / Fuente Original:
http://www.miamiherald.com/2013/01/18/3189663/fabiola-santiago-inaugural-presence.html