Of course I do it is one of my favorite movies and rests on my movie shelf amid the Spike Lee joints and other movies about the Black experience. I sum up all of these thoughts by simply saying “yea”.

Kiara beams with excitement as she responds “well in ‘Blues for Nina’ he talks about Yemayá”. When she says this I see a big wave crash against the ferry.
 

“Yemayá must appreciate the recognition.”
 

I recall the scene and wonder why I had never noticed that before. Much later, back in the states I searched the video and sure enough Yemayá as well as Oshun are mentioned. I have watched this movie several times in my life and never bothered to figure out who or what these two highly desired

beings were.
 

Speaking to other fellow African Americans within my circle I inquired about the line which mentioned these two Orishas. No one seemed to remember the line itself and when I recited or played it for him or her; no one seemed very interested in the explanation. One of my friends went as far as to ask “Why are you so interested in that?” Followed by a second question, “Why do these people matter to you?” I considered these questions quite fervently. I actually wanted to answer it for myself more than I wanted to answer it for my confused friend. I am still unraveling these questions in my head, but I think I am creeping closer to an answer. Below are some of my initial responses to my friends query.
 

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I. Who are these people to me?
     Being in Cuba made me more cognizant of something that I had always vaguely been aware of but had never given much thought. Cuba and many other countries are technically American too. U.S. citizens just assume so much ownership of the term America and the label American that it is quite easy to forget that there are many other “Americans” also. Maybe the whole point of claiming the term American as the label for those of us in the U.S. was done to purposely cut us off from other Americans. Maybe it was all accidental and merely done because saying I’m a U.S. citizen doesn’t have much of a ring to it. Whatever the reason, it is problematic for several reasons.

While in Cuba, I and several of my companions would respond “America” or “American” when people asked where we came from or what nationality we were. Although this is not the first time I had been out of the country, this is the first time that I received a blank stare for that response. After the first day I would simple say United States or Texas which was met with affirmation, recognition and usually a rendition of whatever song they associated with that area.
 

Of course I cannot consider the limited scope we in the U.S. use to classify people as American without also interrogating the way African Americans use the label African American. The Black community has a tendency to grant usage of the term African American in an often exclusionary way.  We only tend to consider people of African descent, who were born in the U.S. and descended from the Atlantic slave trade to be truly African American. The exclusion of people of African descent from the designation African American in the U.S. just because their (grand) parent(s) are African, Haitian, and Jamaican seems trivial; however it is often done in order to create a false sense of a definitive African American self. However, the fact that our stories are so similar today as well as yesterday should make our racial, spiritual and emotional kinship more tangible. Blacks in the U.S. experience racism, there is no doubt about that, but so do Blacks in Cuba, Haitians were and are discriminated against by entire nations and the list goes on and on. Furthermore, the very fact that Blacks in Haiti, in Jamaica, in Cuba, and many other places did not make the decision to be there should also build kinship. Blacks in the U.S. could have easily been Blacks in Cuba or Haiti, especially because the percentage of slaves that were sent to those islands was much higher than that of the U.S. We share the same history; we are just writing slightly different endings.