“I’m going to change it. This shouldn’t be happening.”
“Will you give me your phone number so I can call you right after we’re searched again?” my father asked.
The next day, Rabel and my father joked about Che’s belief that he would alter Fidel’s order. The search order wasn’t revoked.
The backyard of our house faced north and had a gentle slope. Luis Gustavo and I often played there on our swing set. A dirt road was at the northern edge. That path was forbidden. One day, I chased Luis Gustavo. Other children had caught his attention on that dirt road. He was about five years old and had more freedom. After a hard run, I stopped at the end of our yard where the grass met the dirt road. I looked to my left. A group of boys was hanging on a jeep or a cart. They were dressed in green military clothing. Luis ran to play with them. I returned to the yard where my grandmother Manuela waited, annoyed with my disobedience and maybe even with herself for the lapse in supervision.
The other memory is a scene, not a full story: I’m playing in a fountain with a limestone rock in the center that was in the cool patio area under the stilts of the house. My brother is nearby. I like to think we have an appreciation for one another born during those years, the cherished ones when we were playmates who lived in our own country and spoke only Spanish. Our younger brother Juan Carlos didn’t walk yet, was still a baby.
The two memories don’t reveal much. I have scanned them for clues to who I was back then, for hints of the person I was supposed to become. Once, I believed I would be satisfied if I could get in touch with the essence of that monolingual child with one set of customs. I would be complete, whole. In other words, I would be the person I was intended to be when I was born, a Cuban at home, not an outsider to people in two countries.
Life would be easier! I would cease evaluating and reconciling two halves, two cultures, two languages. My status as a child of two nations and not completely of either would evaporate.
Yet these are the adult musings of a person who moved from innocence to experience by age three. I long for a little more time in the former state. It would have been nice, I think. The nostalgia is born from a state of innocence cut short.
In December 1960, as Luis and I ran through the backyards and beaches during our last days on the island, the Cuban Refugee Emergency Center, called El Refugio by the newcomers, was set up in Miami inside the Freedom Tower on Biscayne Boulevard. The $1 million funds for the center came from President Eisenhower’s contingency fund under the Mutual Security Act of 1954. With this help from the U.S. government and from friends who opened their crowded home to give us shelter, we had a soft landing in Miami, our first, temporary U.S. home.
Two years before arriving in Minnesota, my father lived the saddest day of his life: December 30, 1960. That day he watched his wife, Maria, thirty-four, and my brothers and me board a KLM Royal Dutch Airlines airplane at the José Martí International Airport in Havana. Juan Carlos remembers standing on the tarmac, holding our mother’s hand and crying. This is his first childhood memory. He was fifteen months old.
That was my last day in Cuba for fifty years. That same day, my brothers and I took our first steps in the United States. We were on the wide and often lonely road to a bicultural life.
The Cuban influx was different from other migrations to the United States. For one, we were not previously screened by the U.S. government in our country of origin. Furthermore, we lacked sponsors to vouch for us. Like most Cubans who were leaving at this time, we simply boarded an airplane with our one suitcase apiece—we said we were going to a wedding—and in less than an hour we were in a new city as refugees. Between January 1959 and January 1961, some fifty thousand Cubans had left for the United States. More than thirty-seven thousand arrived in Miami Dade County. Like most of our compatriots, my parents hoped the stay wouldn’t be long.
Fairly quickly, a dual identity for Cubans like us was formalized by U.S. law. In his book Americans at the Gate: The United States and Refugees during the Cold War, Carl J. Bon Tempo writes, “Most remarkably, the Cuban Status Adjustment Act led politicians, refugee advocates, and Cuban refugees themselves to endorse a bifurcated citizenship in which Cubans might become permanent residents or citizens while still planning to return to the island. Status normalization, in the case of Cuban refugees, condoned divided loyalties. No previous refugee group, or immigrant group for that matter, had been granted such leeway.”
From Miami International Airport, we went to Southwest Twelfth Street to stay with Celia and Paco Vasquez and their two daughters, Delsa and Nora. They were my mother’s lifelong friends from Punta San Juan, the location of the Punta Alegre Sugar Mill in Camaguey, Cuba. They hosted us for a little more than a week.
In January 1961, my mother, who spoke some English, rented a small one-bedroom house with a den in northwest Miami, on Northwest 54th Street and Seventh Avenue. She lacked a telephone. Thankfully, the American landlord took messages and relayed them. His telephone remained available for vital calls.
Great-aunt Carmen Ballesteros Echevarria and her husband, Great-uncle Epifanio Echevarria, moved with us. Their exile had begun a month earlier. Soon, crowded conditions forced Epifanio to move temporarily to Kankakee, Illinois, with his son and daughter-in-law, Orlando and Carol Echevarria.
The United States broke off diplomatic relations with Cuba on January 3, 1961. The following month, with a valid travel visa, my mother returned to the island to join my father. A Cuban can always return to the island. My siblings and I stayed in Miami with Great-aunt Carmen.
My mother traveled with empty suitcases in order to pack more clothes, a few books, and some photographs. We care for these portable relics. I store two dresses made for me by my maternal grandfather’s sister Rosa in Caibarién, Cuba. My mother’s Larousse Spanish dictionary is on my bookshelf. There are a few other things. However, and I am most grateful for this, our family’s greatest treasures are intangible. Our biggest inheritances are faith in God, strength of family, and commitment to education.
One of the benefits of exile is that I pack and travel lightly. I am not burdened by needing to house quality furniture that has been passed down and is now antique. My dining room chairs aren’t mahogany but cherry. I don’t care for my parents’ wedding china. A cousin keeps it safe in her cabinets in Cuba. I was fifty-three years old before I saw it. I have no desire to own it.
Before leaving the island, my mother stored a few goods with her aunt in Caibarién, including her wedding dress. Long ago, it was cut apart, its fabric meeting other people’s need for clothing.
The last day my parents stood in their native land was February 24, 1961. My father had the foresight to buy tickets on the twice-weekly KLM flight, shunning the popular twice-daily Pan American airlines in case the countries severed diplomatic relations. He wasn’t taking chances on having to stay. He also bought KLM tickets for his parents, Miguel and Evangelina Veiga, who left for Miami the same year. Although diplomatic relations with the United States no longer existed, Cubans could travel into and out of the island with appropriate visas. By October 1962, civilian flights to the United States were banned in Cuba.
In 2015, the United States reestablished diplomatic relations with Cuba, opening an embassy there. In 2010 and 2011, I traveled to the island, along with thousands of other Cubans and Americans who live in the United States. Then and now, a visa is required.
My father left his Spanish classical guitar on top of his bed in Cojímar. My mother’s first cousin Alfredo drove my parents to the airport in a Chevrolet Bel Air, a green-and-white four-door sedan. My father implored my mother not to look back.
“We’re going to die in another country. It will take fifty to sixty years for the revolution to run its course,” he said.
He had read about Poland, Yugoslavia, Hungary, and Russia.
In their grief, they agreed to focus on the future in order to ensure our family’s survival in a new land.
Alfredo would care for the house and car until there was a real possibility of returning. Officially, he was the new owner