I just came back from my new dentist Dr Molina, who is repairing a back molar tooth, which btw, I waited repairing last year bc I thought it was not worth repairing with my life span! Well, the issue with NOT DYING! is some of the things I did prior are now "coming back to roost"! For example, when I purchased my home I took out a 7 year fixed than convertiable home loan.....with a KI Index of 30% and mets already in liver and belly, "I would never make 7 years?", I thought....now its coming up 2012! I like this problem however!!!!
In any event, Dr Molina who is very good btw, she is married to a Cuban and we talked "Cuba talk"! It turns out she just purchased this book for her Father and was reading it as I visted her the first time a few weeks ago.....She has yet to get to chapter 36, which is about our Family, my Grandmother, aunts, Mother and memories of my days as a youth of 7 years old in Havana ! I remember the evening Castro came to the house as we were surrounded by soldiers and went to hug Fidel.....! He was a 'rock star" when he first started as dictator in Cuba..... This is a great book and I highly recommend it (it won a Pulziper prize I believe) and Chapter 36 is about my family and mentions my Mother KIKA, whom Castro had a attraction for as she was a divoriced single Mom back then! As happened, nothing became of this fledging romance, I ended up on a Pan Am plane a year later and left Cuba in 1964......losing EVERYTHING with one suitcase with some pants, shirts, and one pair of shoes....!
This is a repeat of the blog entry I put togther in 2008! I remember I was writing it as I was having an IV hydration in Houston MD Anderson during my clinical trial which required qtly scans...so I had my lap top for work and for other things...
Here is my story with some added pictures! Hope you enjoy it.....I want to visit one day soon....Dr Baum went there for a conference after my first vist with him in May 2009! Cuba is more advanced on PRRT than the USA....! Go figure $?$
I used to travel to Houston, Texas (on my own cost!) and stay with my aunt May during the time I was on experimental treatment in a hospital there. One day last year, my aunt talked to me about a book which was written by the son of a very dear friend of our family in Cuba. His name is Carlos Eire and wrote and non fictional book "WAITING FOR THE SNOW IN HAVANA, CONFESSION OF A CUBAN BOY". It was written in 2003 and is a wonderful book about the memories of his childhood during the early days of Fidel Castro and the changes that took place in the country, from a 8 year old perspective. In 2003 it was the National Book Foundation award winner for a non fiction book. The foundation describes the book as follows:
Waiting for Snow in Havana: Confessions of a Cuban Boy
Noted religion scholar Carlos Eire's idyllic and privileged childhood in Havana came to an end in the wake of Castro's revolution. In this memoir, he reveals an exotic, magical Cuba and an eccentric family: his father - a municipal judge and art collector - believed that in a past life he had been King Louis XVI. In 1962, Carlos Eire's world changed forever when he and his brother were among the 14,000 children airlifted off the island, their parents left behind. In chronicling his life before and after his arrival in America, Mr. Eire's personal story is also a meditation on loss and suffering, redemption and rebirth. (Free Press / Simon & Schuster, Inc.)
I lived in Cuba for 7 years at the same time as Carlos did. In fact, we probably hung out with each other, as I was 7 or 8 years old, but can not remember him. However, I do remember many things about my boyhood in Cuba-- going to the farm and sucking on sugarcane, the factory we owned and stores, the ice cream cone factory my great uncle owned and the sweet smell of the place when he took me (my father divorced my mom when I was one and she went back home to Cuba).
I also remember the battle during the Bay of Pigs (Miramar airfield was very close to our house and the Cuban fighters that had left, and were now trained by the CIA, attempted to bomb the airfield and take out the small government air force prior to the land invasion. I remember the planes flying overhead very low, and the shooting that took place on the street and in our back yard and the family going to a hallway to not get hit by stray bullets. Afterwards, I recall going out with my three cousins that lived in the house also, and picking up the empty bullet shells, and most valued, the real bullets that were all over the place.
I have many quick "foto type" memories from those days. Carlos' book brings them out vividly! As fyi, we left Cuba to a willing and accepting USA in 1964 by plane.
Back then, you arrived, with nothing but the clothes you were wearing as you had to leave everything in Cuba (those that left were called gusanos (worms), not a good life when you applied to leave). I also remember the entire day we spent at the airport trying to leave the country as you were given one day to leave when one applied, and if you did not get out that day, you didn't leave. That day could fill two blog entries alone, but this is not about that.
When I found out about the book, my aunt also told me there was a chapter which was written about Carlos' memories of our house, our family, my Mother and her meeting with Castro on a fateful night at the house, and the movie nights and other memories. I knew I had to get it and wrote Carlos, AS I WAS GETTING AN IV AT THE HOSPITAL ON MY LAPTOP. Carlos was gracious enough to write me back immediately and sent me the chapter of the book for me to read as I killed my 4 hours and then 3 additional hours in the CAT scan prep room!
I also purchased the book and have read it twice as its a story. To a large part, its very similar to my life in Cuba back in the early 60's.
I wrote him the other day and he gave me his permission to post the chapter of the book on my blog, which I wanted to share (for you and for Steve). I have sent this to others and people have asked me where they can buy the book, etc. They loved it, so I thought I would share the book and the chapter thanks to Carlos.
As FYI, the 5 sisters noted in the house are my Mother and Aunts (only 3 still are alive).
My mother was nicked named "Kika" (a lot of Cubans have nicknames), and after her divorce from the American man I have seen once or twice in my life, she returned to Cuba to live with her Mother, the matriarch and owner of the Factory and bedding outlets called "La Lusita".
However, after the fall of the dictator Baptista in Cuba in 1959 by Fidel Castro, things changed in Cuba, slowly at first (Fidel was on the Jack Parr show in 1960! and loved by many Americans) then very rapidly. There was also a side which was not pleasant ,and that was the public executions of many, many people from the former government and others, and the nationalization of all businesses-- from the multi-national corporations to family owned business like "La Lusita". Therefor, we lost the business my grandfather had painstakingly developed over many years, due to the communist philosophy of the government. It was a painful day as my grandmother, who had been approached numerous times to sell the business but did not! Why, because she worried about her workers, many of whom had been decades with her, she had paid for operations and births, school, presents and loaned money and helped out when they needed...she was an elderly, independent, and a very catholic grandmother trying to run a business.
One day in 1962 or 63, she shows up at the factory and waiting for her are government military men who instructed her to hand over the keys and combination of the safe, and that if she "wanted to eat" she could work like the others. The painful thing about it was most of the factory workers, who had been with her for decades because of how she took care of them, were now outside waiting for her as she came inside and yelling insults, spitting and laughing at the humiliation this elderly lady was suffering at the hands of the government. Most of the assholes are probably now in Miami playing dominoes, on US aide and SS and remembering the good ol' days, as what happened to a majority of these people, supporters of Castro ism, ended up. And if I could find them, I would kick there sorry ungrateful ass from one end of Hialeah to the other!
But first, you spit and yell at a 60 year old lady that has taken care of you all your life. The business, assets and stores were confiscated without any payment and humiliating her in front of everyone. And in the end, the factory and stores closed down pretty soon after it was nationalized, "as "the people" were not ready" (and forget this shit about blockade, most of the material was from Cuba- wood, springs, etc) and are factory is in ruins today!
All governments and people have the right to choose the form of government and manner they desire. However, to humiliate, allow people to spit and yell and abuse a 60 years old lady (not to mention the firing squads) at the same time her property and hard work are confiscated without payment, is unthinkable.
And for those that talk about normalizing relations with the Government, this is one of the largest issues people have, compensation. I don't understand how people can also be so "pro Fidel" when it comes to normalizing relations without consideration of what happened to the hundreds of thousands of small shop keepers like my grandmother? How can one ask for reparations on one hand, and demand we normalize relations with Castro on the other without consideration of reparations for the honest Cubans who lost there holdings?? And its not only that group, there are many others that can be very forgiving in some cases, while asking for normalized relations without discussions of the treatment of people in past!
Can we get some help by our attorney general here maybe before we proceed?
Btw, Fulgencio Batista, a terrible dictator of Cuba , who needed to go, when Castro took power, supported by the CIA was black (black Father)
http://www.historyofcuba.com/history/funfacts/batist.htm
In any event, this is a small chapter of our lives from the book "WAITING FOR SNOW IN HAVANA, CONFESSION OF A CUBAN BOY" with permission of the author (gracias Carlos)!
PURCHASE THE BOOK AT
Amazon.com to purchase the book (also, http://www.amazon.com/Waiting-Snow-Havana-Confessions-Cuban/dp/0743246411#reader)
I hope you enjoy the chapter, and gets our minds off these damn tumors, if only for a small respite!
Una cuba libra por favor, con limon! Every time I read it I am reminded of home and my childhood and "the good ol days" in a 7 years old's heart--- catching lizards, snakes, collecting bullet shells and real bullets, fishing, ice cream cone factory and smells, etc)
CUBA IMAGES FROM PRE CASTRO DAYS
http://www.google.com/imgres?imgurl=http://frysingerreunion.org/1/Cuba/cuba19.jpg&imgrefurl=http://www.galenfrysinger.com/cuba.htm&usg=__1eyJpXsovGNOMfuAckrvEQRxf0o=&h=448&w=720&sz=107&hl=en&start=3&sig2=G9hNm37s2v2-FPcZNw4lew&itbs=1&tbnid=9tZYlKhwU1xUbM:&tbnh=87&tbnw=140&prev=/images%3Fq%3D%2522pre%2Bcastro%2Bdays%2522%26hl%3Den%26gbv%3D2%26tbs%3Disch:1&ei=XtkXTNyqEoH58Aa-nMDDDA=========================================================================
Waiting for snow in Havana- Chapter 36!
-36-
TREINTA Y SEIS
What we call the beginning is often the end
And to make an end is to make a beginning.
The end is where we start from...
Every phrase and every sentence is an end and a beginning,
Every poem is an epitaph.
— T.S. Eliot, “Little Gidding,” V, Four Quartets
It was a grand staircase all right. I’d never seen one so grand or so impressive or so modern. It looked like a giant, graceful corkscrew, or one of the paper streamers Cubans used to throw into the air at Carnival and at birthday parties.
And it seemed to float in the air.
It had a handrail, I think. It must have had one. Cubans were careless about safety--except when it came to swimming after eating or catching pneumonia--but I don’t think they would have been so reckless as to build a free-standing staircase without a handrail.
I don’t think so, anyway.
The staircase was inside a beautiful house not very far from my own in Miramar. The house had a swimming pool outside, free of sharks, and five marble statues around the pool. The five statues represented the five girls in the family, now fully grown.
The family that lived in the house had also owned a chain of bedding stores. All of the money used to build that house came from something as prosaic as mattresses and beds. They were friends of my mother and her family.
My aunt Lily had been engaged to an uncle of the five girls. But he had died very young, and my aunt never got to marry him. I have his sapphire ring, which my mother snuck out of Cuba inside a sanitary napkin, but I don’t wear it. It’s much too small for me, so my wife wears it. Better that it be on a woman’s finger, anyway. Whenever I think of that family, only women come to mind.
The entire house was full of nothing but women. The widowed matriarch, Pilar, and four of her five daughters. Three were unmarried, one was divorced. Another one was married, and lived nearby.
They were all very beautiful, these five women. Their mother had almost become a nun, and their father had studied for the priesthood. The almost-nun and the almost-priest were appropriately blessed with five enchanting daughters.
One balmy evening, Fidel met one of the daughters at a restaurant. At that time, fairly early in The Revolution, he would show up at restaurants now and then with his retinue of guards. One thing led to another, and Fidel ended up going home with that one daughter, whose nickname was Kika. He got into her car and let her drive. He told her that he was testing the Revolutionary merits of The People’s Car for the first time, and that it was really too small for him. He had discovered that The People’s Car, a Volkswagen, was uncomfortable for anyone over six feet tall. That’s what he told her anyway.
They drove to Miramar in a caravan, front, rear, and sides protected by other vehicles full of guards.
“You’re a very good driver,” Fidel told her.
When they got to her house, the guards surrounded the entire block. Fidel and Kika walked into the house, along with a bunch of other men. Fidel sat by the pool talking to this woman for a while, drinking a whole liter of milk from a bottle. He made a point of asking for a liter that hadn’t yet been opened. Back in those days, milk bottles had a seal that was held in place by a thin wire--wires we sometimes used to tie up hibiscus blossoms. Fidel wanted to make sure the milk hadn’t been tampered with. The great burden of every despot since ancient times: fear of poisoning. He didn’t even pour the milk into a glass; he just drank it straight from the bottle.
And he made small talk with Kika while a retinue of guards surrounded him and the entire house. Fidel asked: “Where’s the rest of the family?”
She hemmed and hawed. She said they were all in bed with colds. The matriarch and the other three daughters who lived there didn’t like Fidel at all, and had stayed upstairs in their bedrooms.
Fidel knew exactly where the rest of the family was, and why. He knew that the matriarch and the other sisters were not good Revolutionaries. Perhaps he knew exactly where their five stores were and what they looked like: they’d been confiscated, along with every other business. And the daughters now had to work as employees of the state at the stores they had once owned. Everyone had to work, you know. El que no trabaja, no come. If you don’t work, you don’t eat. It was one of Fidel’s favorite slogans.
He raised the milk bottle above his head and faced the upper story windows that looked over the pool.
“Here’s to you ladies! Hope your health improves. Thanks for the milk! I know it’s hard to come by.”
They tell me he laughed after he said that. He knew, of course, that milk was rationed.
I heard this story from Pilar herself, who said that she’d been standing at her window, behind closed shutters, when Fidel toasted her with a liter of her own rationed milk. Only so many ounces per week.
Pilar also told me that this knocked the wind out of her, literally, and that she couldn’t catch her breath for quite some time afterwards. When Fidel left the house along with his retinue, she said, she was still having trouble breathing.
Fidel never returned. No more dates with Kika. Maybe it was something she said, or something she didn’t say. Or maybe it was all those other women peeking through the shutters. Or maybe it was the poolside statues that turned him off. So bourgeois. Too bourgeois, even for a one-night stand, and the chance to sire yet another child.
Anyway, Pilar and her daughters loved to throw movie parties on Saturday nights. They had access to Hollywood films, some now banned from Cuban theaters, and screened them in their palatial living room with the same kind of projector that was used in a movie theater. Most of the time, I watched from the spiral staircase, the stairway to heaven.
Movies in a house! A house large enough for movies and an audience of twenty or so. Drinks. Rationed drinks, but still drinks. No popcorn, though. That wasn’t available. But it wasn’t the refreshments that made the evening, it was the event itself. And the fact that I got to stay up until way past midnight.
The grown-ups joked out loud as the movie played on the screen. No middle-finger shadows blacking out the actors, but the gist of the jokes was not much more advanced than that. We children just sat back and watched and listened.
Whenever I think of what my adult life in Cuba might have been, if the world hadn’t changed, it’s those movie parties that come to mind. The lights turned off, the hum and whirr of the projector, the pool glowing outside through the French doors, the jokes. That could have been my life, uninterrupted.
“Hey Demetrius, you need a bra!”
We were watching Victor Mature in Demetrius and the Gladiators, the sequel to The Robe. They’d spent so much on the sets for The Robe that the producers decided to spin off a sequel. It told the story of the Greek slave who had served the Roman centurion who ended up with the robe of Jesus at the crucifixion. The Robe had been based on a halfway decent historical novel, but Demetrius was pure Hollywood fluff. Since Richard Burton and Jeanne Simons had been killed in The Robe, martyred by the mad Emperor Caligula, someone wrote a lame story about what happened to Richard Burton’s slave. And since Victor Mature had played that slave before, he landed the starring role. And we were watching Victor Mature’s very large pectoral muscles convulse.
“Hey, Demetrius, I think you’d take a C-cup!”
It seemed like sharp humor at the time. No one in my house would ever think to shout out anything like that, especially during a religious movie. I might have been slapped for yelling anything like that.
So we watched Demetrius and the Gladiators, and How to Marry a Millionaire, and Three Coins in the Fountain, and a few other movies, over the space of a few months. The last months I would spend in Cuba.
Louis XVI never came with us to these parties. These were my mother’s friends, and he didn’t really like them much. Anyway, King Louis and Marie Antoinette never did anything together any more.
They weren’t even planning to join us together in the States. Nope. They’d already agreed that Marie Antoinette would be the only one to follow us. She was handicapped, knew no English, and had no job skills of any kind, save sewing. Still, she would be the one to join us and take care of us in the United States until we could return to Cuba. It wouldn’t be that long, two or three years at most. Fidel couldn’t possibly last longer than that. The plan called for King Louis to stay home to guard the precious art collection from The Cuban People. He wouldn’t give that up, not even to be with his real sons. He did keep us in mind, though: he repeatedly said, as the years dragged on and we all got older, and Fidel got more deeply entrenched in power, that he was staying behind so we wouldn’t lose our inheritance.
And one fine day his heart burst, and Arturo got to keep everything.
We’d be given a ride home from the movie parties by Kika, the daughter who had attracted Fidel’s attention. We’d ride through Miramar at one or two in the morning, in the car that had once given a lift to Fidel, through utter dark and utter silence. La madrugada, that magic time before sunrise when the entire world seems asleep and you think you are the only one who’s truly awake. The best time in the world. The only time that truth appears, uninvited. Still, you have to be careful; you musn’t let truth overtake you. Some truths are best left buried.
If you don’t bury some truths, they’ll have a chance at burying you.
I confess to being an idolater, and to performing sacrifices daily, even hourly, at the altar of the god of denial. I sacrifice painful truths constantly, especially about myself, and bury them without reading their entrails first.
It’s a means of survival I learned on the fly, when my world was stripped away, bit by bit. Somehow I learned to cling to one piece of fiction that floated calmly above the wreckage, undisturbed: I am still the same.
I’m still the same even though my friends have all vanished.
I’m still the same even though my favorite school will never exist again.
I’m still the same even though my first childish love vanished overnight.
I’m still the same even though I have no comic books, ice cream, baseball cards, Coca Cola, chewing gum, toys, good movies, or decent shoes.
I’m still the same even though I don’t have the right to say what’s on my mind inside my own house, let alone in public.
I’m still the same even though my father has adopted a wretch who is now my brother.
I’m still the same even though a pervert has tried to do drag me down to hell.
I’m still the same even though I’ve been shot at and bombed.
I’m still the same even though my parents have decided to send me away.
Still the same. I can’t change. I’m like Victor Mature’s pectoral muscles in Demetrius and the Gladiators. He’ll be dead and buried someday, but he’ll always need a bra in that movie. I’m like Kirk Douglas’ dead eye in The Vikings. No matter how old, or how dead Kirk and Janet are, that eye will always come to life when Janet Leigh comes into view on the screen, and it will burn, burn, burn.
I’ll always be who I am.
Denial is wonderful. Try it sometime, if you haven’t already. But don’t count on it too much. Sooner or later, denial denies even itself.
Fast forward two months from my last Saturday night movie party at the house of the pool with the five statues, in Miramar.
I’m sitting on a very modern-looking chair in a sparsely furnished and bright living room in a small house in Miami, South West, two blocks north of Coral Way, in the 7900 block. I’m in Paradise, where everything is perfect. There’s no religious art to be seen anywhere, only reproductions of Picasso and Miró. I don’t even recognize the art as art, and don’t even know that the artists are Spanish. It’s strange, this house, and wonderful. Nothing original inside a frame. Nothing old, anywhere in this house. The floor is wood, not marble. The living room and dining room are actually one large room, and there’s an air conditioner sticking out of the wall above the living room couch. Beyond the dining room, through clear glass sliding doors, I see a huge screened-in patio. This is like no patio I’ve ever seen. There’s actually this huge cube of a frame enclosing the entire thing, even on top.
What genius stole that idea from me? I’d longed for such an enclosure and planned it down to the smallest details while lying in bed under my mosquito tent in Havana. The idea came to me in a flash one morning as I studied the dust motes swirling inside the mosquito tent. Why not enclose the outdoors completely, blocking out the lizards and the bugs?
Now, in the United States, I find that someone has beaten me to the punch. But I’m glad to see my idea brought to life, even if it steals my thunder. I’m so glad this house has a totally screened-in patio. I’m glad to be in the United States, where everything is reasonable and new and perfect. I’m so glad to be in Paradise, among friendly strangers.
I’ve been driven miles and miles to this house to meet the family that wants to take me in. I’ve been driven here by the husband of a friend of my mother who has somehow arranged for this family to rescue me from the refugee camp at Homestead. He’s using up his only day off that week to take care of this.
I’ve been living in the camp for two weeks now, ever since I was separated from Tony at the airport. As soon as we cleared Immigration, we were loaded into different vans and taken to different camps. Tony went to a camp for teens in Kendall, I went to a camp for pre-teens in Homestead.
Already, I miss Tony terribly.
Already, I’ve seen my first Cuba cloud.
I’ve also learned the word “Spic” from the freckle-faced girls from the Air Force base who yell it out every time they approach the chain link fence surrounding the camp.
I’ve almost eaten shredded metal along with my ravioli in the camp dining hall. It was just there, this big twisted hunk of metal. I bit into it and almost cracked a tooth. Then the guy next to me also bit into one. And the guy next to him cut his tongue on one. Within one minute the whole dining hall was buzzing with alarm, and with children crying out in pain. Somehow shreds of metal from the cans of ravioli had made their way into the ravioli. I was one of the lucky ones. I didn’t cut my mouth, or swallow any of the shrapnel. We were told to throw out the ravioli and line up for peanut butter sandwiches instead.
I’ve also gotten married to a Coca-Cola bottle by accident.
It caught my eye, that rounded glass lip from the top of a Coke bottle, perfectly and cleanly severed, lying on the ground. It looked like a beautiful jade ring. I slipped it on, like a ring, but it was too tight and it cut off the blood flow and my finger began to turn purple and to swell. The harder I tried to slip it off, the worse the pain became. I felt so stupid. This wasn’t at all like the time I’d gotten my head stuck in a church pew. That had been a mystical experience. This was just plain idiocy. I ended up at the camp kitchen and the cook took one look and started to laugh. “Guess I’ll have to saw off your finger now,” he said in a totally serious voice. He was Cuban, so I believed him and started to panic, especially when he brought out a huge serrated knife. Then he laughed some more and applied lots of dish soap to my finger and worked the glass ring off. But not without taking off most of my skin along with the ring.
I’ve also been permanently transformed by a nun, without knowing it.
Nuns ran the camp at Homestead. Don’t ask why. It was a camp established by the Central Intelligence Agency, and run by Cuban nuns. Anyway, it was Holy Week, and one of the nuns told us, a room full of about eighty boys and girls who had just left all of their family behind in Cuba and were now in a foreign land, that when Jesus willingly embraced the cross on his way to Calvary he saw in it every sin that had ever been committed and would ever be committed in the entire history of the human race, including each and every sin that each one of us in that room would ever commit in our entire lifetime. Somehow she looked us all in the eye at the same time, with a look I’d never seen before, not even in a priest’s eye. I knew this nun had been somewhere none of us had never been, and probably would never, ever go, at least before death. Her eyes were living flames, hotter than the Cuban sun, and they sent out rays more concentrated than those that pass through a magnifying glass at high noon at the Tropic of Cancer. She didn’t talk to us about our present situation. Though she could have very easily dwelt on very particular, and very immediate problems, like the shrapnel in the ravioli, she talked to us in universal terms about our faults and about redemption from them. She went for the biggest problem of all, and the biggest solution. She told us that Jesus was actually very happy to take up his cross and that he wept with joy upon seeing all of the world’s sins embedded in those mean, raw pieces of wood that meant death for him at the age of thirty-three. She told us Jesus was God made flesh, a God who loved us, and had suffered and died so we could choose redemption freely. She spoke of Free Will redeemed by grace and of eternal life.
I walked out of that metal Army surplus pre-fabricated building in a stupor, wondering what had hit me. What she had said, and the way she had said it pierced me and stuck with me like no other religion lesson I’d had or any Mass I’d ever attended.
So I’ve been converted without realizing it. And to top it all off, I haven’t seen my parents or any other relatives for two long weeks. Meanwhile my powers of denial are working just fine. This exile thing is a breeze. It’s even fun.
In that living room of the small house in Miami, I’m introduced to the family that wants to take me in. They seem like such nice people. They’re both younger than my parents, and they also have two little boys they’ve adopted. One is about a year and a half old, the other is about eight months old. I am delighted to learn that the youngest has the same name as Tony Curtis’ character in The Vikings. And they also have a huge German Shepherd who, for now, barks on the other side of the glass doors, out in the screened-in patio. Such nice people. We talk mostly through my mother’s friend, who acts as an interpreter. My English is not quite up to speed, even for the simplest conversations.
I can only say rudimentary, yet essential things, such as “I don’t eat chicken,” and “I don’t eat fish. Too much like lizards.” All this with a very heavy accent.
These nice people ask me very nice questions about my family, my hobbies, and the camp at Homestead. They listen attentively. They seem to like me. They tell me that the house next door has a very nice pool, and that the neighbors have a boy my age, and that they’ve already offered to let me swim there any time I want.
Tony is there too. After we’re done at this house, we’ll go over to another house, to meet the family that wants to take him in. As luck--or Divine Providence--would have it, the folks that want to take in Tony are good friends with the family that wants to take me in. They live about ten blocks away, near Rockway Junior High School, where Tony would be enrolled. They have a teenage son, Tony’s age, and a teenage daughter, slightly younger.
My mother’s friend’s husband, Juan Becquer, has arranged all this under the oddest circumstances. He had been a lawyer in Cuba where he represented the interests of the Hilton Hotel. Now he is working as a janitor, mopping floors for an interior decorating firm in Miami, the very same firm that had decorated the Havana Hilton. When he landed in Miami, the first thing Juan did was to seek out every American businessman he’d come to know in Cuba. One of them was the interior decorator, who gave him a job as janitor in his warehouse. It was the interior decorator who wanted to take in Tony, and their friends who wanted to take me in.
Divine Providence. My mom had alerted her friend Marta about our arrival, and her friend had pestered her husband Juan about our plight. I’ve often tried to put myself in his place. I’m a lawyer mopping floors, I’ve got two babies, a wife, and both of my in-laws to feed, and now my wife wants me to do something about these two boys I barely know. If I’d been in his place, I think I might have forgotten to ask the boss about the boys. I might have asked for a raise instead.
Lucky for us, he didn’t forget to ask. That’s the kind of stuff Cubans did for one another in Miami back then. Everyone went the extra one hundred miles. Juan knew we were coming and had spoken to his new employer about Tony and me. He barely knew us, or we him. I think I’d seen him maybe three or four times in Havana, at the most. His boss had replied that maybe he could take one of us, and that he had some friends who might be able to take the other one.
Talk about miracles. This was close to the parrot fish. Very close.
Both families were Jewish. They wanted to take in two Catholic Cuban boys who barely spoke English. They’d have to feed and clothe us, and force us to do homework, and make sure we took showers and brushed our teeth, and stayed out of trouble, and they’d receive no help from any government agency for doing it. They already had kids of their own, and their houses weren’t very large. Yet they wanted to do it. They wanted to do something good, just because it needed to be done.
There were fourteen thousand of us, homeless. Fourteen thousand orphans, waiting for their parents to receive visas and exit permits. All of us had been sent here by parents who thought they’d follow just a few months later. We were supposed to be orphans for a few months only, maybe a year at most.
None of us knew we’d be orphans for much longer than that.
And I’m sitting there in that living room, with these nice people, and I look around, and I stare at the Picasso print with the three musicians and at the babies and at the dog out in the patio, and I listen to the English being spoken, and I notice that the sunlight outside is just slighly duller than the light I had grown up with, just a fraction of a fraction less bright.
And I realize that I was not the same any more, and that I never ever will be.
I miss my mother. I miss my father, even. I miss everyone so much, except Arturo.
I miss the sunlight.
I miss my model Viking ship and my comic books.
I’m not the same. I’m not the same. Maybe I’m dead. I’ve died, I’ve died!
All of this swept like a tidal wave over me without words.
What’s this? Why am I sobbing? Uh-oh, now I’ve done it. What’s this nice family going to think? Why? Why? Why am I crying like this?
I’ve never cried like this before. Oh God, please, make it stop. Coño, que mierda!
But I can’t stop. No puedo, no puedo parar.....no, no, no.
Juan Becquer, the lawyer-turned-janitor takes me outside, as far from the house as possible, beyond the screened-in patio. He talks to me; he asks me questions. I look at the lizards in the yard. They’re all over the place. Green ones and brown ones, cursing the screen that stands between them and the patio. I see a frog, too, a big brownish one, just sitting there on the thick grass like a stone. All I can do is sob, and tell Juan that I don’t know why I’m crying.
I really don’t know why. But he keeps telling me that I have to know, that everyone knows why they’re crying. He reminds me how important this “interview” is and points out in great detail what I stand to lose if I continue crying. He is firm, precise, and as cold as Kant.
To get him off my back, I say to him: “I’m crying because I’m not worthy of living with this nice family. They’re too good for me. They’re too nice.”
“Nonsense,” he says. “ No seas tan comemierda.” Don’t be such a fool.
My dad had never spoken to me like this.
Slowly, gradually, he wears me down with a lawyer’s resolve. It’s not anything he says in particular that calms me down, but simply the fact that he’s standing out there with me talking to me and trying to pursue and crush the poor logic of my made-up reason for crying. I barely know this guy, and he’s treating me as if I were his own kid. Maybe the nice people inside the house will be the same way.
Maybe you don’t need your own parents.
Maybe it’ll be nice to live without Arturo.
Maybe life after death can be good.
So I stop sobbing and I go back in and the nice people offer me something to drink and some cookies, and we talk some more, and we forget all about my crying fit.
They take me in. And their friends take in Tony. Two days later, the house with the screened-in patio and the Picasso print becomes my home. And these nice people give me a room of my own, and small transistor radio.
Such brave people. Such nice people. Such fine, fine proofs for the existence of God.
(My sixth proof, by the way, snuck in, as an aside.)
My new parents, Louis and Norma Chait, give me an allowance every week. They let me take out the garbage and teach me to cook my own scrambled eggs. They encourage me to ride my bike to school. They seek out friends for me in the neighborhood. They make me call Tony every other day, and urge me to visit him. They make me write to my family twice a week. They insist that I go to church at St. Brendan’s, and give me money so I can put something in the collection basket, even though they are Jewish. I start to think of them as my mother and father, because they are, and I begin to love them. My new dad takes me places. He takes me fishing. He takes me to the beach. He takes me out to restaurants. He takes me to the jazz sessions at which he plays the saxophone. My new mom cares for me with all the attention and tenderness of my old mom. And she is so funny. She makes me laugh. And she teaches me not to plagiarize articles from the encyclopedia for school reports.
“You didn’t write this!”
“Yes, I did. It’s my handwriting there, you see?” (My English pronunciation is getting better, but I still have a long way to go before I can compete with Desi Arnaz, who seems to speak flawlessly.)
“No, I mean, these aren’t your words: ‘eschew’? ‘altruistic enterprise’? ‘flawed, fragile premises’? I don’t think you can write like a college professor....”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean, you took this straight out of the encyclopedia.”
“Yes The World Book is a very nice encyclopedia. It has very good articles. My teacher said I should use it, so I went to the library and used it there today.”
“But you can’t just copy the whole article word for word and turn it in as your report. That’s too easy. And it’s wrong. It’s called plagiarism. You should try to find your own words. Always use your own words. Didn’t you have to write reports in Cuba?”
“No. We had essays and exams, but no reports like this one. No.”
“Well, you should always use your own words in a report. You can research the facts in encyclopedias or books, but you should always use your own words when you put it all together. You can always find your own way of saying things.”
Too bad you couldn’t keep me for longer than nine months. You just couldn’t. Marie Antoinette never showed up as she was supposed to. No one was allowed to leave Cuba after the Missile Crisis of October 1962. My mom and the parents of about twelve thousand other children were all trapped on the island, and no one knew when they would be allowed to leave. So you had to let us go.
And on the day I left that house I died again. And I buried the pain a little deeper this time around.
They loved me while they could, Norma and Lou, and did more than they should have. I was such a bad liar, and they knew it and put up with it. They gave me many gifts that have lasted a lifetime. And I loved them, and still do, and am ever mindful of the fact I’ll always fall short in the good deeds department when compared to them.
They put me on the right path, in my new land. The land of eventuality.
Eventually, I found out I could be my own father and mother, and for a while I convinced myself that I was doing a much better job than Marie Antoinette and King Louis.
Eventually, I found a life that didn’t include movie parties in palatial homes with statue-ringed swimming pools, but did have all sorts of other wonders to offer. Like videotapes of Demetrius and the Gladiators, and one Seinfeld episode that featured the male bra that Victor Mature could have used: the “Bro.” (I’m ready to wager that there was at least one Cuban on Seinfeld’s writing staff.)
Eventually, I acquired English. It’s mine. All mine. I bought it word by word, on credit, the American way. And English owns me, too. I think in English; I even dream in English, except when Louis XVI shows up. Spanish stopped growing and is now a homely, misshapen dwarf. An all-wise and almost mystical dwarf, keeper of the keys to my soul, but a dwarf nonetheless.
Eventually, I lost my accent. Well, almost. I prefer to think that I can pass for Jimmy Stewart, or Captain James Tiberius Kirk, but if you listen carefully, you can tell there’s something funny about the cadence of my speech, and the way I pronounce some words, like “eschew.” And don’t ever talk to me when I’m angry or tired; you might mistake me for Desi Arnaz.
Eventually, I even earned the right to plagiarize myself, using material from one encyclopedia article in another. I did, I swear. Lo juro. Mal rayo me parta. It was marvelous. I did it last week. And I got paid for doing it, too. Don’t ask me to be specific, though. One can get in trouble for plagiarizing even oneself, if one gets caught.
Especially if one uses the word “eschew” too often.
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