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By Barbara Caver, author of A Little Piece of Cuba: A Journey to Become Cubana-Americana.
Barbara Caver’s debut, A Little Piece of Cuba, traces a homecoming journey that bridges identity, memory, and belonging across generations.
My first Halloween in Jackson Heights was a weeknight, maybe a Tuesday. As I left the subway station and walked to my apartment, I noticed a shift in my new neighborhood’s energy. Office doldrums dissolved as a festive Halloween began to bubble in the air.
Trick-or-treaters and revelers emerged and promenaded down the middle of 37th Avenue, a main thoroughfare usually choked with traffic, now closed to make way for the monster mash that was getting underway. Torn between hurrying home to put on my own costume to join the fun and not wanting to miss a moment, I moved along but kept stopping to take in the incredible sights around me. Entire families coordinated and showed off elaborately themed costumes, such as the family of four inflatable tyrannosaurus rexes of varying sizes each with a sparkling tutu and speaker blasting out ballet music who periodically stopped for a little pas de deux, or the entire Addams family including the new baby in the stroller dressed as Thing. Businesses handed out candy, musicians sang and danced at every corner, bubbles floated everywhere, two magicians on opposite corners pulled coins from behind ears and played card tricks, a harlequin tossed candy from a tall unicycle that rolled gracefully through the growing crowd. Doors gaped open at restaurants and those lucky enough to grab a table got a front row seat as the whole neighborhood turned out to put their whole selves into the infectious spirit of Halloween.
A tall arch of marigolds above a large ofrenda for Dia de los Muertos caught my eye as I turned off the main avenue and onto the side street to my apartment. Ofrendas, or altars to beloved deceased family members, are a centerpiece of the Latin American holiday Dia de los Muertos or Day of the Dead. Standing beside the ofrenda, a figure dressed an elaborate tiered gown of overlapping black lace edged with colorful ribbons held vigil. I thought it was a statue until the wide-brimmed hat tilted up to reveal a skeleton’s face, sickly white with a dark slash for the mouth and black holes where the eyes should be. I felt a solemn pause, like a breath held, as I took in the tableau and shivered not from the cool breeze rolling through the night but from the fear that inevitably rises up whenever we living beings confront the unknown state of death and decay. Then, the reverent moment was broken as the Avengers dashed by, laughing and shouting on their way to thwart healthy choices. Even the skeleton cracked a smile as Iron Man shouted, “Avengers assemble!” I hurried on, ready to shed my workday attire for my Princess Poppy Troll costume with its hot pink two-foot high wig.
My mother’s family comes from Cuba, and while I was aware of Dia de los Muertos as a Latin American festival – a Cuban relative once called it “Mexican Halloween” – I had never seen an ofrenda or any celebration of it myself until that night in Jackson Heights, a vibrant diverse area in the New York City borough of Queens home to me and to a large Hispanic and Latin American population. My family, even the Cuban side, celebrated Halloween in a big, demonstrative way with costumes, parties with friends, trick-or-treating, and a jack-o-lantern hand carved by my non-Cuban father that was both creepy and structurally sound, a wide grin still in place after hours withstanding intense heat from the votive candle planted in its skull.
Halloween was always a chance to banish the malaise of routine and ignite a childlike spirit of mischief and fun. On October 31st at sundown, I donned the costume and off I went giggling into the night. But when the sun rose on November 1st, it was time to sober up and go to church. In the catholic tradition in which I was raised, two solemn days immediately follow Halloween: All Saints Day on November 1st, honoring those halo’d folks who have been fully welcomed into God’s presence with rousing anthems and litanies or lists of the saints’ names, and All Souls Day on November 2nd, remembering our loved ones who had recently died and making offerings and prayers to save lost souls. When I saw the ofrenda on that Halloween night, I immediately recalled contemplative church services on All Souls Day praying for the souls in Purgatory.
Attempts to draw parallels between traditions both help me to understand at the same time as those parallels miss the mark. All Souls Day was a dreary affair as I worried mostly about my soul and how I was likely booked on the express train to Purgatory after too much partying, gluttony, and mischief on Halloween, but Dia de los Muertos has an overtly festive aspect, inviting the living to dance, sing, play music, and recount joyful and entertaining stories as the ways to remember and honor their beloved dead. There is no stress or worry over the current state of their soul; death sheds its cloak of fear as the living send a heartful joyful wish that wherever they now find themselves, the dead are at peace and the lives they lived can be fully celebrated by those who knew them best. Every year in Jackson Heights, as the neighborhood takes a moment for Halloween and Dia de los Muertos share the stage together, I see that the barrier between a remembrance of the dead and a celebration of life shouldn’t be a hard one.
By unifying the festive, the silly, the scary, and the solemn, we have the opportunity to celebrate completely the full circle of life and death.
BARBARA CAVER is a lifelong student of the arts and is an accomplished film and television production executive. She is currently the Vice President East Coast Production for Warner Bros. Discovery. She loves traveling, exercising, hiking, dancing, cooking, and eating, as well as writing about all of these things with great enthusiasm, affection, and humor. A Little Piece of Cuba is her first full-length memoir. Raised in South Carolina, Barbara currently resides in Jackson Heights, New York City.