A Cuban-American Thanksgiving

By Pedro Blas González.

Thanksgiving of many flavors

Bad habits may be hard to break, but some are practiced so often and with such indelible zest that with time they become empty clichés. Take the notion propagated by the popular media that American holidays “mean many different things to many people.” If we embrace this logic wholeheartedly, we quickly come to accept the idea that holidays are celebrated differently, depending on our beer of choice, for regrettably this is what many holidays boil down to today.

The American Thanksgiving feast may be accented with regional and ethnic color, but fortunately what is celebrated, that is, what is taken seriously and respected on that date is still standard fare. It is important for Americans to reflect on the values that we share and which help define us as a people. A simple reason for this is that we cannot take the liberty and personal dignity that we still enjoy as Americans for granted.

As a Cuban-American boy, I sat at our Thanksgiving Day table and listened to my parents say grace. Mother thanked God for the welcome that this nation extended to us. This is important for several reasons. Father served five and a half years in a forced labor camp in Cuba for being a Catholic and for wanting to flee a communist dictatorship. He knew what awaited his children in the coming years, as my sister and I would become the property of the state as “pioneers of the revolution,” at age twelve.

Reflection during a holiday such as Thanksgiving is essential because it roots us to the purpose and meaning of what it means to be thankful, and just what exactly we are celebrating. The worst thing that can happen to any given special celebration, whether a wedding anniversary, a birthday or in this case, a national holiday, is to take it for granted. The latter is important for several reasons.

Let us point out just three of these. In these nihilistic times there are many active forces that are very diligent in attempting to sidetrack the essence of Thanksgiving in order to ridicule it as a fundamental aspect of American culture. To the virulent, untiring detractors of the American way of life – especially those within our most cherished institutions – Thanksgiving serves as a threat because it grounds our day-to-day existence in belief in a transcendent God, allegiance to the nation and not the government, and because frankly speaking, Thanksgiving has a civilizing effect over us precisely because it is a family celebration. Consider how radical ideologues hate the aforementioned list of hierarchical values. A close look at these spirited malcontents and one cannot deny that Thanksgiving, along with other American cultural icons, is under threat of extinction.

Because we were political refugees who fled an aberrant and evil totalitarian social-political order, our Thanksgiving celebrations in the last forty years have never taken the things that I just mentioned for granted. Thanksgiving, my parents always instilled in us, is a celebration of the coming together of the traditional family. Leading up to, during and after our meal together, my parents reminded us of the importance of being selfless within the confines of the family structure. For instance, the practice of lending money within the family is still anathema in our family. What this suggests to those who operate under the illusion that a dysfunctional family, or other such artificial gatherings is equivalent to the nuclear family, is that the nuclear family serves as the nucleus and nerve center of a healthy nation. The closest that we human beings will ever come to enjoying paradise on Earth, or what soft-headed utopians refer to as “a perfect world,” is achieved within the modest and humble structure that is a healthy family.

Thus, Thanksgiving in America has much to do with the liberty that the first Americans sought in her. It is also a celebration of the will to survive under adverse and infrahuman conditions. Thanksgiving Day is possible because caring and selfless adults gambled their very lives in the process of creating a much better life for their children and their progeny. The early Americans remind us that human existence may not be perfect, but with the cultivation and nurturing of healthy, life-affirming values, life nonetheless can be agreeable. These wayfaring Americans made it possible for us to even dream of attaining a good life. We ought not to forget this elementary fact of American history.

Our Thanksgiving Day feast is actually an extension of all our other family meals together. Much like the Pilgrims, my parents understood that human beings are like plants in the sense that plants must be pruned in order to flourish. The contributions that family meals taken together make to the great social world – a nation – are truly mind- boggling. Our Cuban-American Thanksgiving Day celebration has always served as an occasion to embrace the land that has allowed us to live to the best of our ability as dignified persons.

The concerted effort that we make to remember what we celebrate during Thanksgiving, or our desire to give thanks every day of the year, exists in equal proportion to our struggle in maintaining morally and spiritually prosperous families. Let us not allow the vacuous rhetoric of materialist psychologists and sociologists to cloud our perception of history and reality. The reason that America has remained strong as a nation has everything to do with its emphasis on celebrating the importance of sound, healthy families. Lost in all the nonsensical talk of “dysfunctional” families is the fact that no modern nation can survive the personal inadequacies, disenchantment, and self-loathing that the fissure and fragmentary nature of the nihilistic, dysfunctional family brings about. This truism is a transparent fact of contemporary life. Anyone with open eyes and a sincere desire to make sense of where we stand as Americans today can easily verify this. We do not need more studies, grants, and the ideological ire of “experts” to make sense of the reality that we currently embrace in America. The next time economists talk about personal bankruptcy, credit card debt, bailouts, repossessed automobiles, lackluster industrial production and double digit unemployment, ask yourself, “what is the role of the family in all this?”

Pedro Blas Gonzalez, Ph.D. is a Professor of Philosophy at Barry University.