Author Adrianne Miller's Blog

BBC April 17, 1961

“The Cuban Military have been on high alert for an imminent invasion for some days.”

Most of my friends had left the country and I was no longer going to school by April of 1961.  Our new next -door neighbors were Miguel and Rosa Estades and their children Roberto and Rosa María.

One morning in early April of 1961 my grandmother said that I needed to go next door.   I could sense she and my aunts were tense, but I could also sense this was no time to ask questions.  Being a kid in an unpredictable environment sharpens your emotional compass.

Rosa and Miguel’s maid opened the door for me and I sensed in her the same tension I had felt in my own house.  She led me to Rosa’s room where Rosa lay on a bed in traction.   After saying hello and listening to her explanation of her chronic back injury, I walked to the kitchen where Roberto and Rosa María sat at the kitchen table.  Suddenly there was a forceful knock at the front door.  Then another.  And another.  The maid walked slowly to answer the door at the same time that Miguel, running as if the devil were after him, jumped the fence in his backyard and disappeared into the neighbor’s yard.  The maid opened the door and several armed militiamen walked in asking, “Where is Miguel Estades?

The maid said he wasn’t there but they were welcome to wait for him if they liked. She asked the men if they would like some coffee. Two of the men said no and went outside.  We could see them walking in the yard where moments before Miguel had climbed the fence.  Then they disappeared from our view.

The other men said yes, they would stay and wait, and would have some coffee after they searched the house.  And search they did.  Every room except the room where Rosa lay in excruciating pain moaning incessantly-something she hadn’t been doing when I first arrived.

The maid put the small cups full of coffee on a tray and brought them to the militiamen who had joined us at the table.  Miraculously they reached their destination without spilling from the violent shaking of her hands.  The men joked with each other and tried to engage us in conversation.  They asked us where Miguel was and all of us said we didn’t know.  Children had learned to lie long before the Revolution.  During the time of Batista the wrong answer to whether our family was for Fu (Fulgencio Batista) or Fi (Fidel Castro) could have dangerous consequences.

Another knock at the door and a long walk down the hall later revealed Miguel, bloody and handcuffed at the doorway, flanked by the militiamen that had gone outside to search for him.  We didn’t move.  Rosa continued to moan unaware of the spectacle.  All the militiamen left taking Miguel with them.  Roberto, Rosa María and I stood holding hands in the hallway and watched the maid disappear into Rosa’s room.  The moaning stopped.  Whispers began.  Roberto led us to the room.

Rosa was out of bed on all fours on the floor handing the maid the rifles that had been under her bed all along.  She told me to run back home right away and tell my dad “they have Miguel and they know”.  I ran out the door, up the steps to the sidewalk, and without bothering to look around ran back to my house so fast that to this day I don’t think I ever took the time to draw a breath.  Everyone but my father was gathered in the living room.  I told them what Rosa said.  My aunt Mimi said they already knew.  They knew they were coming for my father and had asked me to go next door thinking I would be safe there. The counter revolution had been ready to join the invasion and they were legion.

One by one, for the three weeks preceding the Bay of Pigs invasion, almost every able-bodied man was taken from his home. My father was held at El Principe fortress in Havana.  When all the fortresses were full, the men were interned in schools, movie theaters, night clubs- anywhere they fit.  By the time the expedition landed at the Bay of Pigs only women, children, and the very old walked the streets of Havana.  It was an eerie sight that lasted for days.  That is part of the reason the invasion failed.  There was no one left to fight.  The men that came in the brigades expected their support.   I can’t imagine what they thought when they landed and found themselves alone.

The day after  it was over, church bells woke the citizenry.  Church bells.  From the churches where we no longer worshiped.  A strange way to announce the Revolution’s victory.  Malevolent.

In 1962 I left my once very well to do Cuban family and came to America seeking refuge.  I came here with a couple of changes of clothing and a book called Imitation of Christ by Thomas A. Kempis, a gift from my grandmother.  “Keep your eyes on Him. He who sought refuge in Egypt as a helpless child.”

I have no memory of my first four days in exile.  I came down the airplane steps into oblivion.  A new birth canal courtesy of KLM airlines.  Try as I might all I can glimpse are benches, the sound of children playing, and a chain link fence. Homestead. One of the camps set up in Miami to receive the Cuban children.

Unlike many other children I didn’t stay in Homestead long.  I went to stay with a Cuban family as their foster child in a one bedroom apartment in what later became Little Havana.  Five of us lived there.  Our maids’ quarters in Havana were roomier. The Refugee Center helped us with food like peanut butter and powdered milk.  After the Russian spam I’d become used to in Havana, peanut butter milkshakes tasted like ambrosia.

My mind was filled with new pictures of abundance.  The grocery store was like an enchanted forest.  So many different brands of everything!  My first purchase was a pack of gum.  I kept two pieces for myself and mailed the rest back home.  Time to pay it forward.  And I bought my first Hershey Bar in years.  Life was full of firsts:  first McDonald’s, first retail store, first trip to Miami Beach, first day in school in my new country.  Some things seemed strange to me, like people stopping at a stop sign when nobody was watching, how softly people spoke and how little they touched one another.  The simplicity of the churches and the carefree attitude of people.

Two of my friends from Cuba found out I had arrived and came to visit.  Olga Mari and Rosa María were girls I loved.  We had shared many good times at the country club when we were becoming young women and together we had learned to flirt and dance with boys.  I was excited to see familiar faces until I noticed their new car and their beautiful clothes so out of place in my new neighborhood.  After we kissed hello they became distant, sticking to each other like glue. At first sight we had understood our differences and all three of us self consciously talked for a short time right by their car.  They never set foot in the little apartment, and we never made plans to see each other again.  I learned that refugees were less than, even in the eyes of their own people.  Despite my insecurities I shrugged off the experience.  In the end all that mattered was my freedom.

Recently I experienced a sweet reunion with a friend after a fifty year absence.  I rode the train from Portland to Seattle and took a cab to the hotel where we would meet.  My cab driver was a beautiful young man, a refugee from Nigeria.  Despite the fact that I had waited fifty years to see my friend, I took some time to talk to him about his country, about his dreams for himself, his hopes, his impressions of his new country.  I find I like to see how we look to the new immigrants.  Their lens captures nuances that I now miss.

I learned he wanted to be a writer but couldn’t write in English yet, so he was recording his impressions in his native language and attending a junior college at night to learn to read and write in English.  He showed me his tattered notebook full of writing I could not understand.  He was grateful, thirsty for knowledge, and yearning for acceptance.  He thanked me profusely for my time.  He told me his father was an important man at home and he felt people here didn’t see anything but a “lowly cab driver”.  But he said he didn’t care. He made a sweeping gesture with his hand and said: “But I am free!  Nothing else is so important!”

I still have my Imitation of Christ.  It is a precious gift from my grandmother.  But her greatest gift, her best, was supporting my parents in their decision to send me here.  Freedom.  Nothing else is so important!

On January the 8th, 1959, eight days after our “liberation” by Fidel, my grandmother knew we were in trouble.  During Fidel’s speech doves were released around the Plaza of the Revolution.  Several landed on Fidel and as we held our breath in wonder at the apparent blessing of the Holy Spirit on this man,  my grandmother whispered “Ay Dios Mío!” While the rest of her family stood mesmerized by the new messiah, my grandmother noticed that one of the doves had defecated on Fidel.  She pointed it out to us and we  stared as the dove took its time doing the deed up and down Fidel’s shoulder.  My grandmother declared that this was a message from the Holy Spirit.  The man was not good.    That was it for my grandmother.  It was an omen.  The dove, symbol of the Holy Spirit, had spoken.  “Be careful, he is not who he appears to be”.  That day everyone gathered around the television laughed at the oblivious Fidel and at my grandmother and her superstitious beliefs including me, albeit with a little caution.  My grandmother was seldom wrong.

All through January,  hundreds of people had been killed by the saviors who came from the mountains wearing their crucifixes and their guns, to stop the bloodshed and set us free.   The churches once full of people praying for Fidel, were now full of people praying for Fidel to spare their loved ones lives.

A little over a month after the dove incident, roughly fifty days into the Revolution, an estimated fifteen thousand people gathered at the Havana Sports Palace.  Walking down the hall with some friends we stopped dead in our tracks unseen by the family and the maids whose eyes were fixed to the TV screen.  Staring at us from the screen was a chained man named Jesús.  Jesús Sosa Blanco was accused of killing over a hundred people when he was a Colonel under Batista in the Region of the Sierra Maestra where Fidel and his men fought their guerrilla warfare.    He looked sad and resigned as he stood chained waiting for his fate.  Around him thousands chanted Paredon!, Paredon! while other Cubans sold Coca Cola and peanuts to the thirsty and hungry crowd.

“Witnesses” who were brought forth to identify the accused Jesús Sosa Blanco could not pick him out, despite the chains he wore to restrain him.  When  the accuser didn’t know who to point to,  people around him began to play a game of “hot” and “cold”  to help him or her zero in on the unknown target.  People laughed and deafening shouts of Paredon! Paredon! filled the stadium that had transformed into a Roman Coliseum in the tropics, while the sun shone on brilliant sand, the palms moved sensually in the breeze and the clouds rolled by in innocence.  I was twelve years old that day, hidden in the back of the room with my friends, when I knew with absolute certainty that  our new government would be even crueler than our last.  Sosa Blanco was executed. My grandmother had been right.  The dove knew.

Carpe Libertatem

My friend Piti and I grew up next door to each other.  Our grandparents were friends as were our aunts and uncles.   Two generations above us tied us together.  Our families had become family.

Piti was a beautiful little girl.  She had alabaster skin, big brown eyes, and a gentle spirit.  But she hated her orthopedic shoes.  I was a chubby little girl with a crossed eye and curly hair courtesy of my mother who delighted in perming it.

When I think of Piti I never remember her shoes, because I didn’t “see” them.  I remember how beautiful and self -assured she was and how smart.  And I remember her dollhouse.

Piti’s dad Felo built us a life-size dollhouse in her back yard.  We played dolls with her dolls for hours on end, never tiring of one another’s company.  Sometimes we played at my house where a seesaw, a swing set and a slide provided a whole other world of play.  We learned to ride bikes and skate together and discovered chewing gum,.

When Fidel came down from the mountains we shared the excitement of the Revolution.  Quickly disillusioned we sat on our porch and watched the militiamen marching by.  Under our breaths we muttered:

“ Uno, dos, trés, cuatro

Comiendo mierda y gastando zapatos”

(one, two, three, four

eating shit and wearing out shoes)

There wasn’t much else to do any more.  We had seen too much to go back to our childhood games.  We had hurt too much.  We passed the time differently now- in a state of dread, and since all the industries had been nationalized, we couldn’t even de stress by chewing gum.

Many of our friends had already left and the day came when it was Piti’s turn.  We said goodbye twice.  Two heart- wrenching moments, the second made possible by a problem with paperwork that delayed her flight.  Then she was gone.  I was inconsolable.  The militiamen continued to march by almost daily, and I would watch them and pretend Piti was still by my side.  “Uno, dos, trés, cuatro”.   So many young men dressed in olive green wasting shoes.  A whole country dressed in olive green.  A never ending line of men that seemed to find no pleasure in anything but anger and envy, and hatred.

One morning my aunt Celia called me to her room.  She handed me an envelope.  Piti’s unmistakable handwriting spelled my name.  I opened it and got ready to read it as if I had been a dehydrated desert dweller, but I couldn’t start reading right away.  Taped to the paper was a totally unexpected treasure.  One piece of Juicy Fruit Gum!

After I read her letter I put the gum in my mouth and went to sit on the front porch, my heart warm from her words and my mouth in heaven.  Two militiamen passed by unaware of my antirevolutionary pleasure.   I chewed my gum feeling Piti next to me and remembered.

Although I lived with many adults and attended a Catholic School, my grandmother and I were the only two people in my family who went to Mass on Sundays.

My father was an altar boy when he was in grade school.   He quit going to church on his sixteenth birthday, when walking into the vestibule of a house of prostitution, he found himself waiting his turn behind the parish priest.   My aunts stopped attending after the nuns at school told them their father would go to hell because he was a Mason and thus belonged to a Satanic cult.   My mother occasionally attended on big days like First Communion and Confirmation.

But every Sunday without fail from the time I started school, my grandmother and I would meet by the front door in our newly starched dresses to begin our stroll to a beautiful Gothic church near our home called Los Pasionistas .  There, the altars were ornate and the stained glass transformed sunshine into a breathtaking spectacle.   Every single Sunday we read our Missals and prayed the Mass in Latin with reverence and blind faith.  Towards the end we both wore high heels through streets that had begun to be changed by the Revolution.  In our defiance, we wore our veils and held our Missals to derisive glances and shouts of “Gusanas!” (Worms!) by  our erudite revolutionary comrades.  If looks could kill…

One Sunday morning everything changed.    The Bay of Pigs had already happened and the people’s fear had conquered their defiance.  Our veils and our Missals now went to church inside our purses and we were aware that the watching had become less obtrusive but much more intense.  We arrived at our pews that Sunday, genuflected, and waited for the Mass to begin.   There was a heaviness in the air, the mistrust of not knowing if your neighbor was a fellow faithful or a watcher; the knowledge that we had entered an era of further unimaginable repression.

Suddenly, a militiaman I did not see walk into the church began to run towards the altar just as the priest was elevating the Host; right at the moment of Consecration.  The startled priest watched helplessly as the militiaman took the host from him, threw it to the floor, and began stepping on it with all his might.

“So THIS is the body of your Christ?  Do you see it bleed?? Why doesn’t he get up??”

The congregation froze.  No one moved.  The age of terror seemed to beg a miracle.  Even the militiaman had a moment of uncertainty.  Where was our Jesus?  Why didn’t he stand up in all his shining glory just to show us that he could?   Why didn’t he show this man his power?  And where were we, no longer the defiant believers having been conquered by the ugliness of terror?  No one moved.  The man laughed demoniacally and marched out of our church, each step sending the message: God is dead here.   Tears streaming down faces were all that chased him.

My grandmother and I never went to church together again.  And we didn’t talk about that day for the rest of our lives.  It was our secret.  It wasn’t too much longer that I became a Pedro Pan.  I came to freedom.  This is just one reason why.

After spending seven months in a foster home in Miami I was sent to boarding school in Santa Rosa, CA.

My flight arrived in San Francisco late at night and two nuns picked me up at the airport.  They looked friendly and reminded me of the nuns who had last taught me in Havana.  I was again in the care of Ursuline Sisters, for the third time in my life.   I was now thousands of miles away from my country and my life in English had begun in earnest.

Every other weekend boarders were allowed to go home.  Since I didn’t have a home, I always stayed in school in the company of other girls who sometimes chose to stay, preferring the company of their friends.

Then Thanksgiving came.  It was my first Thanksgiving and I wasn’t familiar with the tradition, but I knew I would be the only girl alone over the Holiday.   Just as despair was setting in, the principal called me to her office and told me that the PTA president, Anna Mae Thomas, had offered to take me home for Thanksgiving.

It was a magical Thanksgiving!  The Thomases welcomed me into their very loving home without reservation.  My classmate Linda, their daughter, became my best friend.   For the next two years I spent every other weekend and vacation in their home.  Rex and Anna Mae Thomas became Mamma and Pappa T and Linda and I became inseparable.  Her sister Mary Ann (now Rovai) was already happily married and another lovely member of the family.  I wore her persimmon colored dress to the junior prom and felt like a princess!

I loved Ursuline High School, the Thomases, and Linda.  For a time they provided a much needed healing place.  I began to look forward to our times together.  Linda and I delighted in music, ice skating, and when she learned how to drive we delighted in driving around the town square “being seen” by cute boys.  Twice we dated brothers- the Zuurs and the Hermansons.  We always went on double dates regardless.  At Christmastime the Thomases gave us each five dollars to buy a present for each other.  Our junior year we bought each other identical hats and laughed wildly when we realized how alike we had become.  We had become sisters.

I will never be able to thank Mamma and Pappa T enough for the love they gave this Cuban girl.  They made me a part of their family forever.  After I reunited with my parents, we continued our friendship through the years.  Linda and I shared the joys of our marriages, and the birth of  our children, from separate ends of the country.  Our children met and for a while we prayed that her Tony and my Karen would end up together, but it was not to be.   We grieved our divorces together partying too hard in Santa Rosa.  We hurt and we healed together and we both found priceless men to share our lives with the second time around.  Linda’s voice on the other side of the phone was like the sound of a spring when I was thirsty.  I can’t think of one time when we disagreed in all those years.  She was always there.  Always steady.  Beautiful and talented, she opened her own restaurant in Santa Rosa, The English Rose.  She was beloved by all who knew her.  Mamma T was always a soft place to fall.  Pappa T’s laughing eyes and wonderful sense of humor warmed my heart.  They kept my picture on their TV set with Linda’s and Mary Ann’s- always.  I was their third girl.

Linda died after her breast cancer metastasized several years ago.  I was able to spend time with her.  I bathed her and took care of her for a few days and we had the last pajama party of our lives the night before I left.  We reminisced, laughed and cried.  We knew we would not be together again.  Mamma T waited for her on the other side.  We talked with each other every day after I went home until her words were unintelligible.  But I know she was saying she loved me, because she always did.

The day after she died I stood in the back yard looking at my roses.  It was a  windless day, but I was suddenly caressed by a very real soft breeze that felt like Linda.

At that moment, I was overcome with gratitude for a family that took a Pedro Pan into their home and into their hearts when she needed a family the most.   I will never forget their kindness and their love.  They were a living example of the power of welcome and generosity.

Many of us have similar stories to share about American families that took us in and provided for us when we had nothing.  They gave us the strength to continue our journey and delivered us safely back into the arms of our families.  I dedicate this blog to them and to the Ursuline nuns who were terrific teachers and of whom I have nothing but good memories.

Sept. 19 – In the second half of the 1970s, the military junta of the Argentine Republic broke the grain embargo imposed by the United States and sold wheat to the Soviet Union.
The USSR, under the leadership of Leonid Brezhnev, expressed its gratitude by awarding The Order of Lenin Medal to several high-ranking Argentinean junta generals, with no thought to the thousands of leftist militants that were being held in the concentration camps of Argentina. These men were being savagely tortured and then thrown into the Plata River from low-flying airplanes, disappearing forever into a wet variation of the Auschwitz ovens.
The Argentinean generals responded in kind. They awarded the medal of José de San Martin to a group of high-ranking Soviet government officials who traveled to Argentina for the occasion. Money is money.
Those of us who were Argentineans exiled in Cuba, listened to Fidel Castro’s interminable discourses year after year waiting for some word of protest. Not once did he denounce the practices of the fascist government in the land that had once been the land of his best friend, and by his own description his most valued guerrilla leader, Ché Guevara.
Fidel’s silence had been bought for a handful of rubles.

Occasionally he denounced the abuses of “the fascist governments of Chile, Bolivia, Uruguay, and “others.” “Others” became his new name for Argentina — a nonoffensive moniker that would not risk a halt to the flow of currency.
My friends had no idea why we were exiles in Cuba. My explanations were met with looks of disbelief. It appeared our government in Argentina was not sufficiently evil to justify our exile. How to explain my father’s 8 ½ years of incarceration in Argentina or the 30,000 people who disappeared, double the number of dead in Chile, to people who had never heard Fidel mention such injustices?
For many years and for reasons of family loyalty and, perhaps, some leftover indoctrination, I abdicated my right and my freedom to speak of what I had seen. I have been silent, and in that silence I have risked becoming an accomplice to evil.
I owe nothing to the Castro regime. It separated not only the Cuban nation
from the world, the Cuban people from one another, but it also affected my family with the repugnant hypocrisy and corruption that Fidel left in all he touched, including myself.
When Orlando Zapata, a Cuban dissident, died in a Cuban prison on March 9 after going on a hunger strike, many of the intellectuals who had spent their lives defending or ignoring the brutality of the Castro government said, “Enough.” They could no longer give Fidel the benefit of the doubt just because he had declared himself a champion of the poor of the world.
This must have bothered Fidel, because throughout his life he has been able to behave badly without risking the disapproval of the progressive intellectuals of the world. Their declarations against his treatment of Zapata must have been worrisome for his government’s image. In this day of instant communication, image is of the essence to a government that wishes to also become a family dynasty.
Why is it so difficult for us to condemn any excess, crime, violent act or abuse committed by self-proclaimed leftists, revolutionaries or communists? What part of our brain falters or becomes anesthetized when the time comes to protest against these injustices?

In any case, it appeared that Fidel was approaching his hour of shame. If there is anything that Fidel hates worse than not being the center of constant attention it is losing face. He cannot bear for anyone to know the truths of his life. He doesn’t want the world to know that he drinks Castilian wines that cost more than 200 euros a bottle every day, even as he asks his people to sacrifice all for the revolution.
Concerned about his place in history, he came up with the idea of instituting the cruelest capitalism, in order to befriend the current fashion. It will be a system that pits Cuba’s severely impoverished people, who after years of being supported by the state have no ability for business and little knowledge of technology, against the investors of the world who have been longing to make a profit on the island.
The Cuban workers have no power. The Cuban labor unions have no experience working in a free market. The Cuban worker who works for a foreign investor has fewer rights than an Indian. None.
The vigilance required now is extreme. We need to see what repressive measures the government will use as soon as there is any type of discontent expressed by the Cuban people when changes begin to affect them, and we must guard against the acquiescence of the international community, which is likely to be infinitely more concerned about the success of their investments and the profit they generate, than about the welfare of the Cuban people.
Martín Guevara is Ché Guevara’s nephew. He was expelled from Cuba by the Council of State and is currently writing his memoir in collaboration with Adrianne Miller, a Cuban Pedro Pan.

http://www.miamiherald.com/2010/09/19/1830125/cuba-ignoring-the-cruelty.html

If you thought that the worst possible fate was about to befall your family and you had an opportunity to save your child, would you?  Even if that meant you might never see your child again?

In Havana, Cuba almost a half a century ago, over fourteen thousand parents answered yes to those questions and Operation Pedro Pan (Peter Pan) quietly began.  Ours was a silent exile of fourteen thousand plus children secretly flown to the United States from Cuba to escape the Revolutionary government of Fidel Castro.

The government had already seized private property, closed the churches, and expelled the clergy from the country.   The shouts of Paredon! Paredon! had not quieted and people continued being shot and killed by firing squads, many times without the benefit of trial.  Our beautiful national anthem had been replaced by The International, the hymn of the International Communist Party.

In the schools indoctrination had already begun.   Children were told to ask God for food.  Nothing happened.  Then they were told: “Ask the Revolution for food” and their plates would be filled.

Our parents were afraid.  They couldn’t leave the country.  So they decided to send us. Six to sixteen, we filled the camps like Matecumbe and Homestead created specifically to house us for what everyone thought would be a short time.  Some of us were fostered, others sent to orphanages.  We were scattered all over the U.S.

I have been asked so many times if I didn’t think the decision to send us here was barbaric.  How could our parents abandon us in such a way- throw us away not knowing if we would ever be reunited?

As I look back, now that I am a mother and grandmother, I think those parents made the ultimate sacrifice out of a love that knew no bounds.  And I think they were wise.

In the process of my collaboration with Martín Guevara, I have learned how difficult life became for the children who stayed.  Yet I ask myself if I could have done what those parents did.  Could I have been so unselfish?  Could you?

I belong to a professional listserve of mental health practitioners.   We are a diverse group living all over the world who have been trained to practice EMDR, a technique that is very effectively used for dealing with trauma.  Recently there was some discussion about working with the refugee population elsewhere in the world.  Some of our list members dedicate their time solely to working with the world’s displaced citizens.

I shared the following experience with them:

When I was in my mid twenties and KNEW I needed therapy, I finally got up the courage to go to a psychiatrist.  I was riddled with anxiety, had panic attacks while driving, was feeling overwhelmed by a failing marriage and three children twenty months apart.  And I was pulling a 3.8 GPA while attending college and working four to midnight at a Convenience store.

The psychiatrist did what was expected back in those days.  She sat across from me and asked me to tell her about my childhood.  So I began to speak.  After some time the psychiatrist stood up and began to pace.  I kept on talking.  She walked to the window and closed the shutters and went back to her pacing.  By then on a roll, I continued to tell the story she had wanted to hear.  Suddenly she stopped pacing, turned towards me and said: “Stop!  I can’t take it any more!”  She apologized and asked me to find another psychiatrist to help me.  She said I was carrying too much pain!  So my pain and I walked out, our relationship intact, and stayed together for years while the family doctor went through all his magic pills to help us to coexist.

Years later I got the help I needed and became a therapist myself, the kind that never paces or gets up to close the shutters.

I know that many of us Cuban exiles, and particularly Pedro Pans, were never able to tell our stories.  Back in the early sixties there was no talk of PTSD (Post Traumatic Stress Disorder).  But I wager that many of us had clinical symptoms when we walked out of the airplanes that brought us to freedom, and that many suffer from it still.

When I arrived in the United States from the bowels of repression, sadness, injustice, madness and violence, I landed in the land of White Castles, McDonald’s, and Rock and Roll.  I landed in a place where most kids my age had no point of reference for understanding terror.  No one had to tell me not to talk about my experiences- it was viscerally obvious that there was no room for that pain in this society.  Simon and Garfunkel’s lyrics “ I am a rock , I am an island….and a rock feels no pain, and an island never cries” became my anthem.   And I didn’t talk much about my story.  Not with my girlfriends, not with the man that eventually became my husband, or even my children.  It was only four years ago that my middle son found out I was a Pedro Pan.  His paternal grandmother was born in Poland and came here as a war bride.  Her sadness for the fate of her homeland took up all the room available in the family for tragedy.  I couldn’t compete with her dramatic flair.

When I began writing my memoir and pitching to agents I often heard that there had been too many memoirs written about Cuba and that people weren’t interested in hearing more stories.  Yet when I finally began to let little morsels of my story out, people would invariably say “you need to write a book!”

Not one of our stories is identical.  Each is a brushstroke that colors the canvas of life in the Cuba we knew; the more brushstrokes the more beautiful and accurate the picture.  We need to  bear witness to history of how our island went from red white and blue, to olive green, and red and black, then red.  I have no idea what color it is now.  We owe it to our children and we owe it to the world.  Ours is the last generation that remembers that incomparable Cuba that even its current citizens have no idea existed.  And we are the only ones that were there when the nightmare began.

I encourage you to share your stories on the blog.  There is room here for pain and for healing.  There is room for wonderful reunion stories and for humor.  And remember the words of Elie Wiesel

“I decided to devote my life to telling the story because I felt that having survived I owe something to the dead. and anyone who does not remember betrays them again.”

On Prejudice

I was born in Havana in the neighborhood of La Víbora.  My parents’ house was on the same property as my grandparents’ and I spent most of my time at my grandmother’s house.  Eight adult family members, two maids, a chauffeur, and my nanny surrounded me.

La Víbora was not a swanky neighborhood.  The house we lived in was fifty years old, but spacious and full of conveniences and great charm.

My first memories are of resting my little head in the arms of a black woman, my first nanny.  I remember lying in her arms in our beautiful porch, feeling the ocean breeze caress my skin.  She smelled of talcum powder in her white nanny’s uniform.  I am one of those people, for better or worse, that remembers her “babyhood”, to include teething on the railing of my crib and tasting what was hopefully not lead paint.

Hortensia, my nanny, was heavyset and her ample figure provided a soft cushion for my little body.  I spent most of my waking hours with her while the family went on about its business, their lives not significantly changed by the new addition to the family.  My memories of Hortensia are of her scent, her coal dark skin, her deep voice singing lullabies in my ear, and her sweet laughter.  I am told Hortensia left when I was three years old to live in Matanzas province with her new husband.  One day she was there, and one day she was gone, quickly substituted by Vicenta, a white Spanish woman newly arrived from Galicia, a topic for another day.

Perhaps because my nanny was black and being in her arms was such a loving experience I grew up with little prejudice.  That is why in April of 1962 I boarded a bus in Miami, FL and sat in the back of the bus comfortable with being around people of color.  In fact, it wasn’t until many of them began to protest my presence that I realized I was the only white person in the back of the bus!

At first I wondered why no one warned me that blacks didn’t like whites in the U.S.  I sat there paralyzed as the blacks shooed me and the whites stared me down.  It appeared I had done something to offend both groups.  At fourteen I was already equipped with the usual insecurities about my looks and in my new role as a refugee I was just beginning to redefine myself.  I burst into tears.

A very kind older black woman said: “Go move to the front, you don’t belong with us black folk”.  Having been taken over by fear, I got off the bus at the next stop and walked the three miles to my destination.  How was it possible that blacks and whites didn’t sit together in the land of the free?

Much has changed since that day in Miami, and not much.  Now we don’t like the Mexicans and as it is impossible to distinguish an illegal “alien” from a legal one, we choose to judge them all the same, and don’t make any of them feel welcome.    I can only imagine the experience of being a middle eastern or Moslem in our country today.

Yes, the face of America has changed since 1962.  There are more people seeking freedom from repression and poverty in their countries, and our population appears to be and is more diverse.  As the face of our population changes, our fear level soars.  But wait: is this not the country that issued an invitation to the world – an invitation that to my knowledge has still not been rescinded?

“Not like the brazen giant of Greek fame,

With conquering limbs astride from land to land;

Here at our sea-washed, sunset hates shall stand

A mighty woman with a torch, whose flame

Is the imprisoned lighting, and her name

Mother of Exiles. From her beacon hand

Glows worldwide welcome; her mild eyes command

The air-bridged harbor that twin cities frame.

“Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp!” cries she

With silent lips. “Give me your tired, your poor,

Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,

The wretched refuse of your teeming shore,

Send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed to me,

I lift my lamp beside the golden door!

I fear for Lady Liberty’s safety in the current mood of intolerance.  We should repeat her message like a mantra and remember that ALL of us are here at her invitation save the Native Americans, and that the land we now claim as our own was once the refuge of at least one of our ancestors.