Break­ing Stereo­types

KRISTY RAM­NAR­INE

Kristy.ram­nar­ine@cnc3.co.tt

Mi­gra­tion is nor­mal. That’s the view of Cuban-born Lu­cia Cabr­era-Jones, the co-founder of Women Owned Me­dia and Ed­u­ca­tion Net­work (W.O.M.E.N).

“Why are you look­ing at us like that, just be­cause we speak a dif­fer­ent lan­guage?” she asked.

“Peo­ple have this taboo and call us mi­grants. Mi­grants! Most of us are mi­grants in some way; even if you move from your home town to an­oth­er town with­in your coun­try, you have mi­grat­ed.”

The W.O.M.E.N. co-founder is al­so point­ing a fin­ger at those who cat­e­gories all ‘Span­ish’ women or place them in one box. “A Span­ish is some­one born in Spain,” she said. “They call us Span­ish be­cause our lan­guage is Span­ish, but we are from dif­fer­ent Latin Amer­i­can coun­tries.

“What is sad is that be­hind the Span­ish is a stereo­type of pros­ti­tu­tion. There are a lot of Span­ish-speak­ing women mak­ing great con­tri­bu­tions to Trinidad and To­ba­go. I could tell you, I lost my sec­ond mar­riage not to a Span­ish woman, it was to a lo­cal woman.”

Cabr­era-Jones said it was no se­cret that the sit­u­a­tion in Cu­ba was not ide­al. “Young peo­ple don’t get enough op­por­tu­ni­ties, and there was a great in­flux (to Trinidad), she added.

“One of the biggest prob­lems is the lan­guage bar­ri­er be­cause I will tell you, Cubans here in Trinidad are known for be­ing doc­tors and nurs­es well po­si­tioned in the pub­lic sec­tor. You have a lot of pro­fes­sion­als.”

But many of those pro­fes­sion­als are strug­gling dai­ly. “In Trinidad, we do not have laws for Cuban mi­grants,” she said. “Un­like Venezue­lans who have got­ten an amnesty, Cubans have not got­ten that. They do not con­sid­er our coun­try to be in cri­sis.”

Af­ter find­ing it dif­fi­cult to ad­vance her ca­reer in Cu­ba, Cabr­era-Jones de­cid­ed to mi­grate.

“When I moved from Cu­ba, I went to an­oth­er is­land in the Caribbean where my (first) hus­band is from,” she said. “One of my friends was get­ting mar­ried, and she in­vit­ed me to come to her wed­ding in Trinidad. To tell you the hon­est truth, when I crossed Pi­ar­co, I said this is it.

“I am a chem­i­cal en­gi­neer and I have a Mas­ter’s in Process Con­trol, and when I came out of Pi­ar­co and dri­ving through the high­way and passed Carib and Co­ca-Co­la, that sealed the deal.”

She dis­cussed mov­ing to Trinidad with her first hus­band. He was not in­ter­est­ed, cit­ing the crime sit­u­a­tion in T&T.

“I got a pro­pos­al to work at the Uni­ver­si­ty of the West In­dies,” she said. “Com­ing from Cu­ba, we do not have this kind of op­por­tu­ni­ty for or­di­nary peo­ple, sad­ly. I was like, God, you are re­al­ly, re­al­ly good.

“I came to an in­ter­view. I was not pre­pared for that; I had no clothes. A friend of mine took me to her of­fice on Pic­ton Street; she lent me her jack­et, and she took off her shoes. Back then, it had this store called Cat­walk. She took me to Cat­walk and bought me a top for un­der the jack­et. I did the in­ter­view, and it was suc­cess­ful.”

Cabr­era-Jones is still at UWI in the Elec­tri­cal and Com­put­er En­gi­neer­ing De­part­ment. She even­tu­al­ly re­mar­ried but be­came a vic­tim of do­mes­tic vi­o­lence. If that was not enough to deal with, she was robbed at gun­point not once but twice.

De­spite the chal­lenges, she con­tin­ues to be pas­sion­ate about T&T and con­tin­ues to work with women.

“W.O.M.E.N. is ded­i­cat­ed to em­pow­er­ing women—not on­ly mi­grant but lo­cal women—from the com­mu­ni­ty,” she ex­plained.

“In the past two years, we have im­pact­ed a lot of women not on­ly in Trinidad and To­ba­go but abroad be­cause of the on­line reach.”

The NGO is ded­i­cat­ed to sup­port­ing ca­pac­i­ty build­ing, ad­vo­cat­ing for equal­i­ty, and pro­mot­ing fel­low­ship and di­ver­si­ty. Its mis­sion is to em­pow­er women and girls through in­no­v­a­tive pro­grammes.

“Through our pro­grammes, we’ve seen first­hand the trans­for­ma­tion­al im­pact that they can have on the lives of women and girls,” she said.

“From launch­ing suc­cess­ful busi­ness­es to achiev­ing aca­d­e­m­ic and pro­fes­sion­al suc­cess, our par­tic­i­pants have gone on to do amaz­ing things.”

W.O.M.E.N. marked its sec­ond an­niver­sary on May 15.