When Alfredo arrived from the airport to the house, he put the key in the front door and turned it. Then a few guards stepped toward him.
“You have to leave this place,” they said, taking the keys to the house and car. When we last spoke, Alfredo was eighty-one; he described the experience as traumatic.
Eventually, Alfredo became a political prisoner. He was arrested and jailed twice; once for counterrevolutionary activity, another time for having contraband in the form of U.S. dollars and gold coins. In 1979, he went into exile in the United States.
As Alfredo was dealing with the guards at the house on the hill, my mother boarded the KLM flight without suitcases, which had to be searched. My father brought the suitcases. He was detained for two hours and the flight waited. The guards suspected my father of carrying Fernández family money out of the country. At the time, my father was the general manager for his uncle’s business, a lumber company called José Fernández e Hijos.
Besides clothes and photographs, my parents packed accounting textbooks and other reference books. My father used the English-language accounting textbooks at the University of Havana. They remain on the bookshelves in his Miami house.
One by one, the guards paged through the books to see if any money was hidden among the pages. Finally, my father appealed to the guards’ reasoning. If he were taking money out of the country, wouldn’t it be foolish to hide it in the suitcases? They agreed. He boarded the airplane without being strip-searched.
My father carried a total of fourteen U.S. cents in his pocket, a dime and four brown pennies.
When my parents arrived in Miami, they went to the little rented house on Northwest 54th Street. For three months, they kept us sheltered with a $100 monthly stipend from the U.S. government. Surplus food was distributed to refugees. They welcomed the protein—powdered milk and powdered eggs, peanut butter, and canned meat.
From there, my parents rented a larger house with two bedrooms. It was on Northwest 79th Street and Sixth Avenue. My great-aunt and uncle moved with us.
Meanwhile, the U.S. government had a view about our presence—temporary. In Havana, U.S.A.: Cuban Exiles and Cuban Americans in South Florida, Maria Cristina Garcia explains how the Eisenhower administration viewed the Cuban influx. She writes,
This was the first time the United States had served as the country of first asylum for a group of refugees, he [Eisenhower] argued, and the Cubans’ plight deserved a generous response. In reality, however, the administration simply regarded the Cubans as temporary visitors. In March 1960, on the advice of Vice President Richard M. Nixon, Eisenhower approved a CIA plan to train a military invasion force that would ‘resolve the Cuban crisis’ once and for all. Thus, elaborate relief programs and strict quotas were unnecessary. The Cubans were not to be assimilated but rather assisted until they could resume their normal lives back in Cuba.
That plan was inherited by the new administration of John F. Kennedy in 1962; however, some changes ensued. When the Bay of Pigs invasion failed on April 17, 1961, my parents had to admit that returning to Cuba was impossible, as my father had predicted. To survive, they repressed or ignored their sadness over the loss. Survival trumped all.
Meanwhile, every month, Orlando and Carol Echevarria mailed his parents a check for $100. Orlando’s mother, my great-aunt Carmen, was a proud Spaniard. She had refused the $100 monthly government stipend because, as she said, “My son is a doctor.” Indeed, Orlando was a medical doctor, a graduate of the medical school at the Universidad Complutense de Madrid in Spain. However, he was unlicensed in the United States and completing his residency at a psychiatric hospital in Ohio; he and Carol were awaiting the birth of their first child, Orlando Jr.
In our little house in Miami, I burned the inside of my left arm on an iron. Juan Carlos cut his finger on a razor blade while reaching for something on a dresser. The noise of the Goodyear blimp stimulated the neighborhood dogs to incessant barking. Juan Carlos cried with the racket they made.
In that same house, despite our great-aunt’s warnings, Luis Gustavo continued to play with a ball inside. Once, he threw it up to the living room ceiling, where it hit the square glass lighting fixture. I watched it unwind from its screw and crash on his head.
One of my most vivid memories of our early days in Miami involves a trip to a department store, probably a Woolworth’s, with my mother and great-aunt. We passed a toy section where I was drawn to a black plastic doll. I wanted it so badly I threw a tantrum. My mother pulled me along, saying no. There was no money for a doll.
Since it is one of my few early memories, I have replayed it countless times to make sense of the incident. Clearly, I wanted a new doll. Over the years, my adult desire to understand a memory from a crucial time period resulted in many questions. I layered the incident with conjecture. Did I want the black doll because the plastic pink ones with yellow hair were so ugly? Was I drawn to the black doll because of my own complexion—olive skin, brown eyes and hair? Did I just want a new doll? Was I a spoiled child?
In 2010, on my first trip to Cuba after fifty years, those questions were answered. At the José Martí International Airport, I waited for the chartered flight back to the United States. I had a few Cuban dollars left so I was browsing the merchandise on tables outside of the cigar and alcohol store. There, I spotted a book by the beloved patriot and writer José Martí. The Black Doll is a Cuban classic. Without a doubt, the story of the girl and her love for her black doll was one that had been read to me as a child. I paid very little for a copy of the book. Fifty years of guesswork was resolved by an accidental discovery.
Luis Gustavo’s first experience with cultural misunderstandings occurred in this same Miami house. As the oldest child, he was a scout venturing into the English-speaking world of Little River Elementary School. He started first grade, where he learned how George Washington confessed to chopping down a family cherry tree. Luis was impressed.
One day, Luis played a game in the backyard, alone. He ran full tilt toward a metal T-pole that held clotheslines. He’d grab the pole with one hand and spin around it until he tumbled to the ground. It was great fun, he remembers, until he brought the pole down. The clotheslines were loaded with clean laundry.
He feared our mother’s discipline but took a chance on being forgiven, since George Washington had received a reprieve. Luis went inside the house to confess. Our mother ran to the window and wailed. Clean laundry on a sandy yard! The work it took to wash, wring, and hang it!
Cubans didn’t care about Washington as much as their laundry, he concluded.
From this same house we walked under I-95 to visit our paternal grandparents, Miguel and Evangelina Veiga, who lived nearby in a rented house. They stayed in Miami when we resettled to Minnesota.
Years ago, the house on Northwest 79th Street and a few others next to it were demolished. A hotel replaced them. It has changed hands several times but remains in business, though I wouldn’t rent a room there today.
I pass it when I drive south to the end of I-95 when I visit my parents in southwest Miami. I look to the right when the signs announce Northwest 79th Street. I like to note the place where my U.S. life began.
“That’s where we lived when we came from Cuba,” I think. “When we came from Cuba.”
If there are passengers, I point to the hotel and say the words aloud.
From this house, my parents went to work. My mother, a licensed optometrist and pharmacist in Cuba, found part-time work at Woolworth’s. I can see her behind the counter, flipping hamburgers, happy to see her aunt and children who’d come to visit.
My father found work at the Deauville Hotel on Miami Beach as a night auditor. On May 1, when the tourist season ended, the proprietors announced they were going north to the mountains in the Carolinas where they operated another hotel. They invited my father to join them.
However, my father didn’t want to relocate us for the summer. Instead, he took a temporary job with