Balseros, a film made in 2002 by Carlos Bosch (director) for Televisió de Catalunya, was nominated for an Oscar for best documentary in 2004.

It starts by showing the lives of seven young Cubans in the days leading up to their attempts to sail to the coast of Florida in a flimsy raft. The film also follows their families and depicts the economic hardship and lack of freedom and opportunity in Old Beardy's Cuba.

The balseros set off from Havana and are shipwrecked somewhere in the Straits of Florida, where they are picked up by the US Navy and taken to Guantánamo Bay. After spending a year in a refugee camp there, they are granted permission to travel on to the USA (I don't really understand why they are not repatriated - it's only a short walk - but that's not what happens).

The film then jumps another seven years to show what has become of them. This is probably one of its saddest parts. Although five have work and earn enough money to live, only one seems to be happy or optimistic. Quite a few have lost touch with their families back in Cuba* and most are disillusioned with life in the States.

One thing six of the Cubans seem to share is a sense of uprootedness and displacement. The third level of d-needs in Maslow’s hierarchy is a need for love/belonging. OK, Maslow was only presenting an abstract model so perhaps this need for love/belonging could have been better defined as an individual’s need to feel he or she belongs to a social structure. This would explain how, within that structure, he/she may have the role of sorting the family sewage by hand, yet once deprived of that role the individual is smitten by Weltschmerz. Hence, nostalgia for some horribly psychologically destructive social situations.

Anyway, getting off the point.

The Cubans chose between poverty and the opportunity/material "wellbeing" they would supposedly find in the States: this, at the expense of/with the result of breaking their social ties in Cuba. In the seven years that passed in the States, only one Cuban seemed to have a sense of belonging. He was a father who, upon arrival in the US, got papers for his wife and daughter to join him. They then established a small self-contained family; his little Cuba.

People have always moved from one place to another in search of water, food, work, or the spoils of war. Personally, unlike the Cubans in the film, I never went abroad in search of material wellbeing nor felt much sense of belonging as a child or teenager. As a young adult, farewells at stations and airports always involved watching other people’s families and lovers waving goodbye. So, when I left the UK I didn’t feel as if I was being uprooted; it was a relief and not imposed by material need.

Now, thankfully, I belong more than ever.

*The story of one of the Cubans reminded me of Guy de Maupassant’s Mon Oncle Jules (1884), a short tale of a man who squanders a family inheritance and goes off to seek his fortune in America. Back in France the rest of the family constantly drone on about how, one day, Jules will return, wealthy and successful. But on a trip to the Normandy coast the family come across the spitting image of Jules (and is in fact Jules) yet conclude that that it can’t possible be him because he’s rummaging about in a dustbin and is dressed like a tramp.