I got into fitness because I’ve always felt like an outcast.
As a white cuban-american, I’ve always straddled two worlds: the world of whiteness and the world of The Other, never quite fitting into either. As much as I tried, I would never be Zack Morrison. As much as I tried, I would never be Eddie Murphy, who, after watching “Golden Child” when I was maybe 5 years old, I decided I wanted to be just like him: cool, funny, and… black.
Hispanics were, and are, rarely ever represented in a way that makes me proud. It’s something I’m realizing now, after 34 years. Growing up, who could I emulate? Desi Arnaz? All I had was DJ Laz, B Real, my uncle Fern, and my father, Marcelino.
Looking back, my life is punctuated by efforts to “fit in.” I was bullied in elementary and I got into a lot of fights. I became the problem child. Sometimes, I can still feel that frustrated boy inside of me wanting to lash out. I remember when he did, years later in college, with my first run in with the law.
Growing up, I thought of myself as “Cuban,” then I went to Cuba and realized I wasn’t Cuban at all. I felt, as Franz Fanon did when that little blonde girl in Paris, innocent as she was, pointed to him and exclaimed, “Regard maman, un negre!” Like Fanon, my identity was shattered into a million pieces by the look of The Other, by the jineteros lined up on the porches in Pinar Del Rio, who grilled me, who knew just by looking at me that I was not one of them. I got the message. It was a look I would see again in my own country. It is a feeling I’ve hardly shaken.
Then I thought I was American. I came up to Gainesville and realized I wasn’t. I would go in to kiss the white girls on the cheek like I had my entire life in Miami, just to be pushed away and made to feel like a weirdo. “Oh shit. My bad. I guess you don’t do that here…” After a few months in Gainesville, I had spent the longest amount of time away from my hometown, and I returned to find out I was born and raised in a city whose twin does not exist; it is a place in America where the first language you speak to a stranger is Spanish; where the sugar cane juice flows like water, and where you can buy exotic tropical fruits, flowers, American flags, and peanuts while your life withers away, minute by minute, in bumper-to-bumper traffic.
My sense of self was shattered time and again. At every turn I looked for ways to fill the gaping hole that was my identity. I turned to fundamentalism. I turned to Truth. I turned to activism. I turned to anything that would give me a concrete sense of the world. Anything that would help me place myself soundly in a square. “This is who I am.”
Today, I am still searching, albeit more comfortable with knowing that I will never be “normal.” I live on the edge of insanity. On the edge of criminality. My beloved wife tempers me. My friends console me, when, in my hyper reflexiveness, they reassure me that everything is okay. That I’m not insane. That I’m actually a genius and the whole world has gone crazy (I made that last part up).
My wife! Oh my goodness! She is an angel. Always beside me, even as I passed through some of the most difficult and unrelenting stages of my life. When I was the most radical, she was by my side. She listened. She never stopped loving me. She never ran away. She nurtured my good nature. She appealed to my throbbing heart.
All that is left is the residue, now, of an angry youth. Sometimes I still want to throw both of my middle fingers up and say, “Fuck the World!” I mean, it *is* fucked, isn’t it?
I’m grateful for the music that permeates my life. I’m grateful for the artists who speak my language. For you; for the outcasts of society. For the forlorn. I’m grateful for the youths who keep fighting. I never want to give up my activism; the thirst for justice that I had when I started to realize that the images and illusions placed before me at my feet were lies whose sole purpose was to shackle me to a life of bondage; a life of debt; and a future where the 1% escape to Versaille, while the 99% languish in an overheating, radioactive world, where cockroaches reign supreme.
There are days when I want to throw my body in front of The Machine. The War Machine. The Prison Machine. The Climate Machine. If it chews me up and spits me out in pieces, at least my daughter can look back and say, “He did something.” For now, I guess I’ll just settle for creating a space where people can workout and feel welcomed. Sometimes it feels worthless in the grand scheme of things. Then there are those other days, when I feel like I am really living out my purpose there, at 22 NE 11 street.