Los cubanos están entre vosotros, pero no son de vosotros. No intentéis conocerlos porque su alma vive en el mundo impenetrable del dualismo. The

The bus says Belén - by Antonio García Martínez - The Pull Request

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2021-07-06 11:30:05

Los cubanos están entre vosotros, pero no son de vosotros. No intentéis conocerlos porque su alma vive en el mundo impenetrable del dualismo.

The ‘Colegio de Belén’ was founded in 1854 under royal charter from Queen Isabel II in what was then the Spanish colony of Cuba. Perhaps its most notorious alum Fidel Castro shuttered the school in the wake of the Cuban Revolution, and the Jesuit fathers rebooted the school—as the Cuban diaspora did the rest of pre-revolutionary Cuban society—in the suburban Miami sprawl of my childhood.

Despite the somewhat illustrious history, we the students—at least in our pre-smartphone 90s versions—were uncontrollable imps of obnoxious bedlam. We got kicked off the plane on that ‘Close Up’ trip to Washington DC that was popular with schools in the 90s. Field trips for film viewings were 50/50 on whether we’d even make it to the end. Overnight stays in hotels were rowdy bacchanals of smuggled beer and the odd late-night brawl, followed by some apologetic administrator paying damages the next morning.

Such bouts of havoc were typically punctuated by screams of ‘bayú!’ (brothel2, in Cuban slang), as some sort of deranged war cry. The whole howling mob resembled a preppy version of a Huron war party getting themselves jazzed up for battle, or perhaps Confederates charging at Gettysburg with the rebel yell.

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