He was remembering Cojímar, the fishing village where he and my mother had bought property on a hilltop. His cousin Raul had designed the modern house that overlooked the bay. The constant breezes onto Cuba’s north coast were delicious. The house benefited from them. When my parents bought the property, they believed there was no better place in the world to live. They planned to be buried there.
That place was gone.
More specifically, they had left it. They opted for freedoms for themselves and for their children, freedoms that would be denied under the new regime.
Forty-five minutes after our initial flight out of the country, we landed in Miami. In many ways, though work was scarce, Miami was comfortable as far as identifying culturally and politically. Its climate was similar to Cuba’s. The beaches were good. Thousands like us flew into town every month. The Spanish language returned to Florida. Most of the familiar tropical fruits and root vegetables were available. Native Miamians and retired Northerners in South Florida began adjusting to our arrival. If they couldn’t, they listed their homes and moved to Broward County or even farther north.
When we relocated to Minnesota we would be seen as aliens, outsiders—our first experience with this in exile.
After five years in Minnesota, my father had become comfortable with wool outerwear. He owned a black coat, a forest-green short-brimmed hat, a plaid scarf, and deerskin gloves with a double wool lining. Every weekday for work he wore a suit and tie, though sometimes he picked a clip bow tie. He looked the part of a company comptroller. The weekday commute from Roseville to downtown St. Paul took fifteen minutes, about the same time it took to commute from Cojímar to Havana. By that time, he’d learned that some mornings it took longer than that to shovel the driveway.
One particular morning, he remembers, it wasn’t so cold in the garage. He started the car to warm the engine and went back to lift the garage door. He faced a wall of snow. He stood before it, so he said, and thought, “What am I, a Cuban, doing here? Nothing in my life has prepared me for this.”
In the Caribbean, people don’t receive instruction on survival skills for cold climates. There is no need for it. The tropics have their lessons: hurricane preparedness, shark bite avoidance, malaria and dengue fever treatments. Moreover, during my parents’ last years in Cuba they became quick studies in dealing with annoying, then menacing revolutionaries.
He turned for the snow shovel and imagined a future evolving for his family in a place farther south.
Like many of the other Cubans who resettled in Minnesota, my parents weren’t prepared for drastic climate and cultural changes or extended exile. They adjusted to some ways and raised their eyebrows at others. They watched their children adopt these American ways—some questionable. While they accepted that changes were inevitable, I am sure they found some of our new ways painful, especially regarding family relationships.
For one thing, my siblings and I moved across the United States for better educational and job opportunities, especially as young adults. Such dispersal of family members is not as common in Cuba. While a family member might move to other provinces, the country is small enough to facilitate regular contact. The size of the United States makes frequent visits difficult to manage. Unfortunately, this dispersal, along with the money and time needed to overcome it, has resulted in less familiarity with my nieces and nephews.
Furthermore, my brothers and I married outside of our original Roman Catholic faith, uncommon for our family back in Cuba. Luis Gustavo, my older brother, is now Pastor Lou, an ordained Presbyterian minister with a Houston-based church. His wife and children are Presbyterian. My younger brother, Juan Carlos, now John, attends a nondenominational mega-church in McLean, Virginia, with his wife and children; his wife is a former Presbyterian. Meanwhile, I attend a Catholic Mass on Sunday while my husband attends a Presbyterian service. I sometimes join him there.
People learn to live in exile—no matter where one sets up housekeeping—by experiencing it. Exile is a state of being that continues for most Cubans who live outside their country if they have left for political, not economic, reasons. It ends when Cuba embraces democracy. If and when this transpires, the number of exiles who will return to the island remains to be seen.
With two exceptions, my family members who came to the United States were born in Cuba and raised in households with its customs. Therefore, it is natural for us to self-identify as Cubans who are U.S. citizens.
However, other differences exist.
Over the more than fifty years our family has lived in the United States, family members have assimilated at different rates. Each person has adopted norms that ease the way in the larger culture. Still the fact remains: we have dual identities. That is one way of beginning to describe what it means to be a Cuban raised in the United States, part of what it is to be bicultural.
My older brother, Luis Gustavo, was born in 1955. I was born in 1957. Our younger brother Juan Carlos was born in 1959. That year, Fidel Castro took control of the government from a former Cuban president who’d returned to the island from Daytona Beach, Florida, to become a dictator: Fulgencio Batista.
Since my earliest memories are from Cuba, my natural home, they are precious to me and I’ve kept them alive by reviewing them. Most are set on the grounds of our family’s house in Cojímar. To date, it is the only brand-new house I’ve lived in.
Ernest Hemingway kept his boat in Cojímar. Santiago, the protagonist in The Old Man and the Sea, is based on a Cuban fisherman who lived near the bay; from a humble home there, he set out in a skiff to make a living from the sea, as the fishermen there still do.
I lived in Cojímar from the time I came home from the Havana clinic until my mother and two brothers and I boarded a flight to Miami on December 30, 1960.
I have eight-by-ten black-and-white photographs of my first home. Although it is high on a hill, the midcentury modern house sits on stilts, like many of the houses in the Florida Keys. It weathers flooding due to hurricane rains and winds. It withstands high winds since it is made of poured, reinforced concrete with a monolithic roof of the same material. My father’s first cousin, Raul Arcia, designed it to last.
Three bedrooms, a bathroom, dining room, kitchen, and living room are upstairs. A double garage is on the ground level. Next to it is a bedroom with a full bathroom reserved for guests or a live-in helper. In those days, my parents employed a housekeeper who often stayed the night rather than take a bus back to her town only to return to work by bus the following morning.
Six properties sat at the top of the hill. Jaime Rabel and his wife and son lived to the west of our house. He was a hardware salesman who traveled the island. The neighbor to the east has attracted more interest. Fidel Castro lived next door and, as of this writing, still does so occasionally. His is a large house with about two acres of land, a property that once belonged to Tinito Cruz-Fernández, a senator, and his wife. They were killed in an accident while vacationing in Spain.
A few weeks after the revolutionaries took control of the government, a guardhouse and a chain were installed at the head of our short street. Guards were posted. They searched vehicles leaving and entering the street. My father’s car was not exempt. They searched his 1956 Chevrolet Bel Air when he left for work in the morning and when he returned in the afternoon.
One day, my father remembered, as he waited for the guards to finish a routine search, he noticed Jaime Rabel’s car stopped behind his. Behind Rabel’s car was another vehicle with a well-known passenger: Che Guevara. My father drove home after being cleared. Che’s car stopped in front of Rabel’s house. Che signaled for my father to join them.
“What I’ve just seen, that shouldn’t be,” said Che. “This wasn’t the purpose of the revolution.”
My father explained such searches were common practice.
“I’m going to give orders so this doesn’t happen,” Che said.
“Look, Commandante, I appreciate your concern,