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is
currently Professor of Spanish at Duke University. His numerous volumes of
literary and cultural criticism include
Literature and Liminality
and
Do the Americas Have a Common Literature?
(both Duke University Press) and
Life on the Hyphen: The Cuban-American Way
(University of Texas Press),
which was awarded the Eugene M. Kayden University Press National Book Award.
His collections of poetry in Spanish and English include
Carolina Cuban, Equivocaciones,
and
Bilingual Blues.
This story is adapted from a chapter
of his memoir,
Next Year in Cuba: A Cubano’s Coming of Age in America
(Anchor Books).
    GOOD NIGHT TO NOCHEBUENA

    WHEN I WAS GROWING up in Cuba, Nochebuena—literally, “the good night”—was the holiest and happiest night of the year. Divided in half by midnight mass, the Cuban Christmas Eve oscillated, sharply but predictably, between the sacred and the profane, between religious ritual and secular mirth-making. Since, in the fifties, Catholics were still required to fast before receiving Holy Communion, the celebration that accompanied the religious observance was not supposed to begin until one or two o’clock in the morning, after everyone got back from
la misa del gallo,
whose name goes back to the Roman custom of holding mass at dawn, when the
gallos,
or cocks, crowed. But cultural differences being what they are, Cuban roosters began crowing long before the Roman cocks. Well before midnight my uncles, who typically were less devout than their wives, were already well into their Bacardi cups. When they accompanied their wives and children to midnight mass, they remained on the steps of the church while the rest of us went inside to pray. It was a curious sight: from inside the church I could see the crowd of men, impeccably dressed in their long-sleeved guayaberas with bow ties, milling around and talking. The hubbub was such that Father Spirali, the Italian-born pastor of the San Agustín parish in Havana, sometimes had to interrupt the mass to hush the men congregated outside. I couldn’t wait to be old enough to join them.

    Nochebuena was essentially a feast for grown-ups. Because most Cuban children received their holiday gifts on January 6, the Feast of the Epiphany, nothing that happened on Christmas Eve had to do directly with us. At our house my brothers, my baby sister, and I had to go to sleep before
la misa del
gallo.
The last couple of years in Cuba, my brother Pepe and I were allowed to attend midnight mass, but since our American-tinged household was visited both by Santa Claus and the Three Wise Men (Santa brought the better gifts), we were still packed off to bed sooner rather than later with the pretext that Santa wouldn’t come until all of the children were asleep. But it was hard to get to sleep on Nochebuena, a good but not a silent night.
    At least for me, the best part of Christmas wasn’t Nochebuena but the preparations that preceded it. Like other Cuban couples, my parents had an uneven division of festive labor: my mother prepared, and my father partied. Her job was to set everything up; his job was to make the most of her arrangements, for the benefit of others as well as himself. If he was the life of the party, she was its machinery. Her preparations for Nochebuena began in early December with the arrival of boxes of Spanish nougat, marzipan, filberts, sparkling wines, and other holiday staples—gifts from the people my father did business with. We’d buy the tallest Christmas tree available at the American-style supermarket and then spend several afternoons putting up the ornaments and setting up the Nativity scene. The fake fireplace in the living room, which was just the right size for the large plaster figures of Baby Jesus, Mary, and Joseph, made a marvelous manger. Under the tree we built a replica of Bethlehem, complete with river, bridge, shepherds, and sheep. Off to one side, somewhat in the distance, the Three Wise Men