Everyone has a story, perhaps thousands of stories. Your stories are unique to you yet resonate on a human level with anyone willing to listen. A well-told story has the power to build deep emotional connections that can change minds and lives.
One of my childhood stories was published in the anthology, The Difference: Essays on Loss, Courage, and Personal Transformation, which I co-edited with Achim Nowak. He and I added our personal essays to a collection of eight others by notable voices from diverse backgrounds and professions. Together, the stories offer compelling answers to the question, “What was the ONE factor or experience that unleashed the greatest personal transformation in your life?
My story starts in Cuba and ends with an unfulfilled desire to return to my homeland. In the epilogue, you will read how after it was published, my story made the difference in the life of one still anonymous reader. What follows is an condensed version.
The Return to the Homeland that Wasn’t
Scanning my brain for the pivotal moments and the people who made an indelible difference in my life, I would conjure up an array of topics that ended as discarded drafts. The value of any one dramatic moment in my 68-year timeline evaporated away once I began its exploration on the page. The time my heart stopped, and I saw heavenly apparitions; my struggles to overcome stuttering; the wisdom learned from a stranger on a park bench in Central Park; my three divorces; all contain secrets I will reveal on my deathbed. None of these seemed consequential enough to merit this essay.
I could not land on a compelling difference-making event until in a fit of insomnia I picked up a book and had an epiphany. Ninety Miles and a Lifetime Away: Memories of Early Cuban Exiles, by David Powell, lay unfinished for weeks on my nightstand. And voilà, there it was–the life altering event that uprooted me from my homeland abruptly at age seven and brought me to a strange new world.
We never expected to stay
My parents and I arrived in the United States on July 23, 1962. We shared the tragedy of thousands of Cubans whose lives were upended quickly and dramatically by political revolution. We brought with us the hope that the separation from our homeland would be short-lived, given the socio-political instability that had characterized life in Cuba for much of the 20th century. We never expected that the communist takeover would bedevil the island for over 60 years and make our permanent return impossible.
What would have happened had my parents decided to stay and succumb to the mandatory indoctrination and totalitarian policies of the Cuban revolution? This is a question asked by thousands of Cubans like me who were brought to the U.S. as children in the first wave of migration.
Nostalgia and vivid memories
My gratitude for the opportunities and privileges I have enjoyed in the U.S. is boundless. Yet, with the passing of time comes a deep sense of loss of family, tradition, national identity, and an idealized way of life. Curiously, these añoranzas or bouts of nostalgia come with surprisingly vivid memories I give myself permission to savor.
My parents’ decision to leave Cuba with their only daughter, a five-dollar bill, and merely the clothes we were wearing made the profound difference in what I would become. My parent’s decision to live in New York and not settle in Miami, the burgeoning Cuban exile mecca where friends and former neighbors would try to reconstitute the lives they left behind; their decision to enroll me in Catholic boarding school for the first years of my new life when I had never been away from home; created deep trauma that scarred me for life. As I grow older, I try to imagine what my life would have been like had we not left Cuba.
Go to prison or leave
The big changes in my young life began in 1961. Fidel Castro’s revolution had swept the island two years earlier and by now his intention to turn Cuba into a communist state was evident in every facet of life. Private enterprises and foreign companies were seized, and their local employees were forced to do hard labor in the sugarcane fields or join the military. Catholic schools were shuttered, and public schools were obligated to teach revisionist history and the doctrine of the nascent revolutionary government.
My father worked in finance for the Coca Cola Bottling Company. My mother was an elementary school teacher. Both lost their jobs and refused to be complicit with the demands of the revolution.
That meant risking prison or leaving the country. The answer was clear. But leaving Cuba was not easy, fraught with countless material and emotional hurdles. Plane tickets had to be purchased in U.S. dollars. There was a long waiting list for flights, and after 1961, people were allowed to leave with only five dollars and thirty pounds of luggage each. Permission for entry into the U.S. required a resident sponsor. Fortunately, my mother’s older sister was a U.S. citizen living in New York City.
Cubans who left were considered traitors to the revolution and repudiated publicly. We were called gusanos or worms by neighbors who turned on us for their self-preservation. We could not leave the house without some type of shaming incident. Neighborhood spies watched the house to track any items and people going in or out. We would have to forfeit the house an uncle built for us and all its contents. But in the middle of the night, I remember large parcels being hauled surreptitiously over the wall that separated the back of our house from the alley, destined for the home of a relative. Sadly, my piano was too big to carry to the other side.
The day of departure, the fishbowl, and Rosita
The day of departure remains etched in my memory. People in olive uniforms, matching caps, heavy boots, and guns in their holsters entered through the front door and marched down the hallways taking inventory. We were ushered out with our three suitcases. I held my favorite doll, Rosita, dressed in her finest outfit, tight to my chest.
The trip to Havana airport was long and hot. I sat on my mother’s lap with my head out the window. She told me to look carefully and say good-bye to all the buildings, the trees, and flowers because I would not see them again for a long time.
The airport was massive and buzzing with activity. I had never seen an airplane on the ground before. After saying goodbye to aunts, uncles, and cousins, we had to wait in a glass-enclosed room dubbed the pecera, or fishbowl. From inside we could see our family on the other side, pushing up against the glass, crying and sending air kisses. I remember that people everywhere were crying. At one point, my mother put on sunglasses to hide her puffy, red eyes. I cried, too, because the scene was so sad that even grown men were crying. Maybe millions of tears were the water in the fishbowl, I thought.
I clutched Rosita in one hand and my mother’s hand in the other as we approached the milicianos, stone-faced people dressed in the same olive-green military uniforms as the ones who took over our house, standing behind a long table. An enormous portrait of Fidel hung behind them. The officials told us to take off all our jewelry and empty our suitcases. They rifled through our belongings and tore up family photos and my mother’s college diploma. My father’s watch, wedding bands, and my mother’s prized ruby engagement ring were confiscated. The officials even searched the diaper of a baby in the arms of a woman standing behind us.
When it was my turn to be searched, a man with thick fingers took my gold name bracelet. I wondered innocently if he had a daughter named Rosa Maria, too. Luckily, he did not notice the small diamond studs on my ears (I still have them.) Another man yanked Rosita from my hands, took off her clothes, and carefully inspected her body. He shook her like a rattle listening for anything stashed inside. Then, another man grabbed her head, ripped it off her body, and took a closer took. Disappointed, he returned the mangled doll to me in pieces.
Decades later my mother would tell me about the humiliation of having to disrobe and have her private parts probed by a matron who was looking for hidden valuables.
When we boarded the Pan American plane you could hear people crying, no one said a word. My mother gave me the window seat and told me to check the seat pocket in front for chewing gum. I found none.
People applauded when the plane took off. My parents just sat looking somber. I asked my father to fix Rosita, but she was so damaged that he could not put her back together. He said it was better to leave her on the plane so she could return to Cuba and be taken to the doll cemetery. I would later understand that the headless Rosita would be a lasting reminder of that traumatic day.
Cold, cold and more cold
Life in the U.S. was cold, followed by more of the cold, and then some more. The Caribbean breezes of Cuba were replaced by blistering wind and blizzards that nearly froze my fingers off. The cheerful and warm classroom of my Catholic school fourth-grade classroom was history. Instead, I trembled in the drafty halls and ice-cold floors of St. Joseph’s boarding school for girls.
The warmth and loving company of friends, family, and neighbors in Camagüey, was replaced by classmates who did not speak Spanish and by long stretches of solitude because they did not want to befriend the foreign girl.
As my life evolved and the political climate in Cuba only hardened, my interest in going back waned. I often wondered how my life would have been had I stayed and grown up there. How different would it have been? I would guess it would have been quite different.
The right time to go back that wasn’t
My curiosity piqued when in 2015 President Barack Obama extended an olive branch to Cuban leaders and re-established diplomatic relations after half a century of severed ties. It seemed like the right time to go back. Thousands of tourists were visiting from all over the world, which gave me a measure of comfort that I would not be arrested for uttering anything against the revolution in public. There were flights to most major Cuban cities, including my hometown. My cousins who remained on the island were ecstatic to receive me and were saving their rations to make me a special welcome meal.
It was November 2, 2016, and I was scheduled to depart on my birthday, November 9, with bags overflowing with socks, underwear, soap, medicines, and other items in short supply or virtually non-existent in Cuba. Among my parcels would be an urn with my father’s ashes destined for the farmhouse where he was born. November 2 was my father’s birthday; he had passed three months earlier. As I turned to face the urn on the bookcase to say, “happy birthday,” I tripped on one of the bags, fell hard on the marble floor, and fractured my pelvis.
The injury would sideline me for three months. The long-awaited trip was postponed until February of 2017, but by then Donald Trump had reversed Obama’s policy of rapprochement, and travel to Cuba became risky again.
At age 60, the trip would have bookended my life by returning me to my roots. If I had gone, would it have made a difference in my sense of Cuban identity? I would love to compare my experience in the diaspora to the lessons I would learn from the sounds, smells, and sights of daily life in my native country. Yet, I know that every minute spent wishing I had lived a different life is a minute spent wasting my own.
Epilogue
A few weeks after The Difference was published, I received an unexpected delivery of a large box from Amazon. Inside was a very lifelike doll of a baby girl. The note inside read: “I know this baby doll can’t replace your beloved Rosita, but I hope she’ll remind you that the love you have experienced lives on forever and can’t be ripped away.” It was signed: “From a reader deeply touched by your story.”
Our personal narratives matter regardless of where we come from and help us understand that what unites us is stronger than what divides us. I invite you to collect your memories and experiences—the happy and the sad ones—and tell your story in your own voice so they are never forgotten.
The Difference: Essays on Loss, Courage and Personal Transformation is available on Amazon.
