BY ENRIQUE FERNANDEZ

Templad mi lira.

Tune my lyre. Engulfed by emotion, the poet, in a neoclassical version of a sound check, asks for his lyre to be tuned so he can give free flow to the inspiration triggered by the torrent he has seen. Niagara Falls.

I had read Jose María Heredia's 1823 Oda al Niágara in school, for he was one of Cuba's great national poets. And 30 years later, I read it again where I least, but should have most, expected to find it. On a commemorative plaque at Niagara Falls.

I felt the rush of cubanía -- Cubanness. And I felt the rush of exile.

Heredia was a Cuban exile, one of many throughout my native island's history. Exiles in the United States, Heredia and I: Bound by our Cubanness and our Otherness in North America, connected by a long thread that passed through José Martí, that exile who, in this country, wrote poetry, like Heredia did before him, and journalism, like I would.

Finding the Ode on the shore of Niagara planted the seed of questions that have haunted me for another 30 years: What is exile? What is Cuban identity? Why do these conditions weigh so heavily on my consciousness and those of others like me? Why do they find their only true expression in poetry -- in art?

Tune my lyre.

IDENTITY AT STAKE

''We are the last of the Mohicans,'' Miami architect Raul Rodríguez says of his generation, who were, as he says, ``children at the time of the Revolution.''

They are, indeed, the last of the classic exiles. Pushed out of Cuba by the Castro revolution, their parents hoped to return, sans Fidel, in a few months. On New Year's Day, it will have been half a century.

And still, their parents mostly gone, these ''children'' define themselves in terms of exile. Rodríguez, now 60, was, in fact, the subject of a 1993 book on Cuban Americans titled The Exile.

Every weekday at lunch, he meets a group of Cuban-American friends, all of them professionals more or less his age, at a homey Cuban restaurant in Coral Gables. On this day in April, he is excited about a speech the historian of the city of Havana, Eusebio Leal, has given to the Cuban Artists and Writers Union.

Rodríguez knows Leal, having traveled to Havana many times to research the city's glorious architecture. Some of his lunch companions consider such trips tantamount to abetting the enemy and Leal an unethical creep. Still, Rodríguez is crestfallen when he realizes most of them have not read the text of the speech he e-mailed them.

Leal, a prominent Cuban government functionary, says it's time for a change in attitudes toward blacks, toward gays, toward peasants who farm their land for profit.

In remarks that were surely sanctioned, if not dictated, by the post-Fidel powers, Leal talks about the end of an era that he and others have ''survived,'' and says it's time for a new beginning, as important as that of 1959 -- that is, as important as the Revolution.

Perhaps most significantly to Rodríguez, Leal affirms the Cuban identity of those who live abroad.

''I am not ashamed of those who are outside,'' he says, '. . . and I shall never take away from them the name `Cubans' -- they decided what road to take -- so long as they don't take arms against the motherland that saw their birth.''

This bold assertion, coming from such a high official, is unprecedented. In the past, the Cuban regime denied the Cubanness of the exiles, labeling them gusanos (worms). And many exiles have said -- still say -- that it is the Cubans on the island who, having embraced a Communist dictatorship, forfeited their cubanía.

To all sides in this war of words, what is at stake is something deeply special, something different than other national identities. I call it Cuban exceptionalism. Many call it, not unjustifiably, Cuban arrogance.

THE CONCEPT OF HOME

I am technically not an exile. My family emigrated to Tampa, Florida's original Cuban city, with resident visas in 1956. Less than a year after the triumphant popular revolt against Fulgencio Batista, we went home, visited family, checked which way the wind was blowing and turned back to the United States.

When Castro grabbed power for himself and began to confiscate property, he took nothing away from us. All that we owned -- a 1953 Studebaker and furniture we'd bought at Havana's Sears Roebuck -- we brought with us.

Shaped by a family of Social Democrats, Socialists, Syndicalists and Communists, my politics also set me apart from most Cuban Americans. Yet I, too, feel like one of the last of the Mohicans.

Exile is not the right word, though.

''In the 19th century they were called emigrés,'' says Guarioné Díaz, author of The Cuban American Experience.

The word I prefer is destierro. It means exile but is literally ''unearthing,'' to rip one from one's soil. It is the word Mexican poet Octavio Paz used in 1996 when he addressed a group of Cuban-American poets in Miami. I am unearthed.

But then so many are. The globe is full of people who live somewhere other than their homeland -- two hundred million. Why should Cubans feel special?

In public, we are careful and politically correct when we answer this question -- we are, after all, the model Hispanics.

''Cuba has had an impact out of proportion to the size of the country or people who live in the island,'' says Jaime Suchlicki, director of the University of Miami's Institute for Cuban and Cuban-American Studies. ' `Significant' is a better word than 'exceptional,' '' he adds diplomatically.

In private, we are awed by Cuban culture: the glory of its literature, visual arts, dance, music. And though most Cuban Americans fervently believe regime change on the island is long overdue, more than one secretly chuckled each time Fidel pulled Uncle Sam's beard. He was, after all, the shameless leading man on the world's stage of Cuban exceptionalism.

And still we ache. We yearn. We are the cloven children of a cloven nation.

The office of a professional Cubanologist such as Suchlicki is filled with art, books, periodicals in which the most repeated word is Cuba, Cuba, Cuba. His UM institute and parallel offices of different ideological orientations at Florida International University and Miami Dade College -- and Rodriguez's daily ''round table'' of well-educated professionals and the Universal bookstore and publishing house on Calle Ocho -- are the sophisticated flip side of ''folkloric'' exile sites like the Versailles Restaurant or the Cuba Nostalgia fair.

It is as if we were snails secreting a shell of Cubanness to surround us in exile -- a shell that grows so big it seems like Cuba itself.

''We live here as if in a borrowed country,'' as the late Miami Cuban writer Reinaldo Bragado put it.

But Miami is not, and will never be, Cuba. Its history is covered by layers of modernity. As a child in Havana, I would stand on my grandmother's balcony and see, across a cobbled colonial street, an 18th century cathedral, built in the style I associate with Cuban culture: decadent Baroque.

WAVE OF RECOGNITION

Cubans of various political leanings agree on what exile is, or at least on when it will cease to exist.

The tolerant Rodríguez says: ''The condition of exile does not end until our country's government decriminalizes us,'' that is, lets Cubans abroad come in and out of the island at will.

The more conservative Suchlicki puts it differently, but the meaning is the same: "Exile will remain as a concept as long as there is a regime in Cuba like the one that exists now. Once there is a change in Cuba, the concept will disappear or dissipate.''

And Marifeli Pérez-Stable, a liberal academic, says that ``exile has not ended, because no matter how many Cuban Americans go to the island, how many send remittances to family members in Cuba, the relation between Cuba and those of us outside of Cuba is nowhere near that of Mexicans and Mexican Americans, Dominicans on the island and here, Colombians there and here.''

Again, she means the freedom to come and go, the end of hostilities across the Florida Straits.

Pérez-Stable, a professor of sociology at FIU, belongs to a segment of the Mohican generation that became radicalized by the student movement of the '60s. Embracing the New Left, these young Cuban Americans broke with their parents' politics and began to see Castro's Cuba in a golden light.

They were denounced in Miami as traitors, but as they matured, most came to recognize the gross flaws of a system which, on trips organized by the Cuban government, they had seen first-hand. Much to the dismay of Havana, these former fellow travelers ''came out,'' in Pérez-Stable's words, publicly criticizing the regime.

Like them, I was swept by the wave of student radicalism that peaked precisely 40 years ago, but my own family's political history checked my zeal. My father had flirted with Communism in his own radical youth, but after Stalin, how could anyone wave a red flag?

Friends invited me on an Antonio Maceo Brigade solidarity trip to the island, but it sounded like a glorified pep rally. A conversation with a leftist acquaintance well-connected on the island clinched my decision not to go. ''The Cuban government is not interested in financing nostalgia trips,'' he said.

Hell, I wanted to go home to wallow in nostalgia.

THE CUBA IN ONE'S MIND

Exile is quite real -- there are Cuban Americans who, having participated in armed attempts to overthrow Castro's government, have good reason to believe they would be imprisoned or even executed if they went back. But it is also a state of mind. For while an immigrant leaves home to find a better life, an exile feels forced to leave, is haunted by nostalgia and longs to return.

After a lifetime in the United States, Cubans from the last generation of what has been called ''the golden exile'' are caught in a conundrum.

''Not for one day have I stopped feeling like a Cuban,'' says music producer Nat Chediak, who was born on the island of Lebanese parents and raised in Havana. Yet he knows that the Cuba to which many exiles long to return is ``a place that no longer exists.''

In my darkest moments, I nurse a fantasy. I will move back to Cuba, not after regime change but now. I will find a simple apartment in Havana near the bay. I will go for solitary walks. I will look no one up. I will shun all but the human contact necessary for survival. And I will be finally alone with my true love, Havana. We will watch each other crumble and die.

TRUTH OF SEPARATION

''I have a problem with the term Cuban American,'' says Jorge Santis, curator at the Museum of Art Fort Lauderdale, where he is presenting a show of Cuban artists on and off the island titled "Unbroken Ties.''

"I am a Cuban who is very honored and privileged to live in the U.S. as a citizen. But once a Cuban, always a Cuban.''

The exhibition he has mounted, Santis says, "demonstrates that the emotional linkage between Cubans in the U.S. and Cubans in the mainland is vibrant and powerful; we gravitate to each other.''

Santis quotes the notes written by one of the artists in the show, Rocío Rodríguez of Atlanta. Her work, in which ''the human body is in some state of disintegration,'' reflects "the sense of emotional amputation from one's birthplace.''

The body, in her paintings, "is halved much like one's soul when one cannot return to one's homeland.''

What intellectuals and academics express in rational terms, albeit passionately, art shows raw. Disintegration. Displacement. Amputation.

One can hope for a reintegration of those souls amputated by political history. One can monitor events in Cuba, and know that fundamental change is as inevitable as it is unpredictable.

But the artists will simply tell what it is. Exile is pain.