ing humans to their surroundings. This notion of belonging, or feeling at home, is what bonds people to places. Histories and memories of a place become as much a part of the space as its physical materiality, linking our identities, both personal and cultural, to the place. Our identities come from our past, especially a past we desire to remember. By giving attention to our own history we can begin to define the meaning we give to places. In his book, Invisible Cities, Italo Calvino describes the city of Zaira that cannot be defined apart from its past. Every nook, shadow, and alleyway has history written in it. To understand the city one must look to the “relationships between the measurements of its space and the events of its past.”3 Calvino’s words imply that the history of a place is not always overt. Over time, the spaces we inhabit become embedded with our memories. Like the creases in our hands, the deeper our bond with a place becomes, the more that place will increase in personal significance. Our memories remain vivid, and our identities become rooted to the space. When a place is tethered to identity, if it is taken from us, or we are taken from it, our history and culture can become endangered, and our identity is at stake. In her book, Building Change, Lisa Findley notes that this type of forced removal of people from places of home is the equivalent of dictating where and how those people are to move and act in any space: “it is to take away the power of individuals to determine movement through the world and to rob them of the dignity of the spatial aspect of free will.”4 If we are not allowed to occupy spaces appropriate to us, we risk losing a sense of identity. By destroying a physical connection to a place of significance, the control and forced exodus of people from home causes a shift in identity, where memories often remain the only link to home. For those in exile, nostalgia often exists for these places of the past. Stanley Tigerman, in The Ar-
chitecture of Exile, explains this condition, noting that exiles attribute a great deal of significance to these places even though the exiles may never again inhabit them.5 Exiles appropriate the spaces around them to be a reminder of home, yet there is often a longing to return to the place they have left behind. As Edward Said writes: “Exile is the unhealable rift forced between a human being and a native place, between the self and its true home. The essential sadness of the break can never be surmounted.”6 The exile is a person who is neither here nor there: clinging to a place of the past, while disconnected from it in the present. The condition of exile is evident in the case of political refugees who, for various reasons, find themselves forced to leave home to seek political asylum in other lands. For refugees, the legacy of exile can extend to future generations as well. Second- and even third-generation exiles are especially significant in the history of Cuban exiles. One need not look far to find accounts of those who, hearing only stories of the Cuba in which their parents or grandparents grew up, long to connect to these places of memory. In his memoir entitled, Take Me With You, Carlos Frías, a reporter gets the opportunity to travel to Cuba on business and is eager to visit some of the sites of his father’s past. He tracks down the location of a café in Old Havana, which his father owned and operated, only to find a field covered with rubble where boys kick around a soccer ball. Though he wants to step onto the lot, his feet will not budge, as if stepping one foot onto the rubble would erase all memory of his father’s presence: “Those dreams are my memories, and I won’t give them up for piles of rocks.”7 Circumstances such as this are prevalent: spaces are now lost, sometimes even permanently destroyed, affecting memories and identities connected to the space. Frías goes on to admit that the boys playing soccer and piles of rubble are now a part of his past, embedded in his identity.8