An American Son: A Memoir (3 page)

P
EDRO VÍCTOR GARCÍA, MY MATERNAL GRANDFATHER, was born in the Cuban province of Villa Clara on January 31, 1899, the same month and year Spanish forces left. Much of the country lay in ruins, and a provisional American military authority governed the island.

My great-grandparents had emigrated from Spain. They were landowners and farmers in the small rural community of Jicotea, in the northern part of the province. My great-grandmother Ramona García was a petite woman, but what she lacked in size she made up for in personality. She was the independent, outspoken matriarch of her household, which included seventeen children from her relationship with my great-grandfather Carlos Pérez and at least three children from a previous relationship. She is said to have been a stern but loving mother, who demanded formal courtesy and respect from her children. For reasons no one in the family remembers, she didn’t marry my great-grandfather until shortly before his death.

Carlos Pérez was a quiet and simple man, a hard worker who left the raising of his children entirely in the capable hands of their mother, while he made a comfortable livelihood for the family. American capital dominated Cuban agriculture after the Spanish left. The American military authority controlled Cuba’s currency. American monopolies owned 25 percent of the country’s best farmland, buying properties at bargain prices
from farmers who couldn’t afford to maintain them. Carlos had refused to sell, and farmed his own land.

Cubans held their first official elections the year after my grandfather was born. The results were a defeat for supporters of annexation to the United States. The United States military subsequently withdrew from Cuba in 1902, and the president of the new Cuban republic was sworn into office. Cuba was independent at last, and the Cuban people were eager to make the most of their hard-won freedom.

My great-grandparents modestly prospered in the new Cuba. They never became wealthy, but achieved a respectable self-sufficiency that relied on the labor of the entire family. As soon as they were physically able, my grandfather’s siblings worked beside their father in the fields rather than attend school. Most of the rural population was illiterate.

My grandfather was the only one of his brothers and sisters to receive an education. He was stricken by polio when he was a small boy, which left one of his legs permanently damaged. His disability prevented him from working in the fields, and with nothing productive for him to do at home, my great-grandparents sent him to school.

He thrived. He loved to read, especially history, and he acquired a love of learning he would cherish until the end of his life. The knowledge he attained prepared him to make a living with his head rather than his hands, and to escape the physical toil that was the common fate of children with his background. It made him ambitious for professional and social status. It informed his political beliefs and patriotism, the way he looked at history and the way he lived his life.

He was part of the first generation of free Cubans, and he was heavily influenced by the writings of José Martí, the Cuban statesman, poet and journalist who gave his life to the cause of Cuban independence. My grandfather was usually deliberate and soft-spoken when he talked, but his voice would raise an octave when he spoke of Martí. He came of age as the republic came of age, and its principles were ingrained in his psyche. The ideals of political and intellectual independence shaped more than his political philosophy. They were the essence of his personality—the insistent individualist, who made his own way in the world. After his parents married and his father died, he was advised to adopt his father’s surname to acquire a share of the inheritance. He refused, and kept his mother’s maiden name.
Many years later, he would make a pupil of me, and impart his ideals, his love of learning and his self-regard.

He became a telegraph operator and climbed the ranks of the railroad business. He was an intelligent and ambitious young man, with a good, steady income and a bright future. He often traveled for business, and he met Dominga Rodríguez, my grandmother, at a festival in the city of Cabaiguán. She was one of seven children born to Nicolás Rodríguez and Beatriz Chiroldes. She had been raised in poverty and had finished her formal education after the sixth grade. Despite the differences in my grandparents’ backgrounds, they fell in love and married in April 1920, when my grandfather was twenty-one years old and my grandmother was just shy of her seventeenth birthday. One year later, she gave birth to their first daughter, my aunt Olga.

They enjoyed financial security and a large home with servants and nannies. They welcomed another daughter, Elda, in 1922, and then a third, Orlanda, in 1924. Tragedy struck them eight months later, when Orlanda died of meningitis. Two years later, a fourth daughter, Irma, was born.

But by the time their fifth daughter, Dolores, was born, their fortunes had turned. First, the railroad line demoted my grandfather in favor of someone who had better connections; then, later, he was dismissed permanently. There wasn’t much work available for someone with a physical disability, and their situation had become dire by the time their sixth daughter, my mother, Oriales García, was born on November 2, 1930.

My grandfather took any work he could find. They lost their house and moved into a tiny, one-room home, which my grandmother kept clean and tidy. “Just because we’re poor,” she told her daughters, “it doesn’t mean we have to live like pigs.” She taught her daughters to help with household chores. She made their clothes, handing down dresses and shoes from one child to the next. They bore their misfortune with dignity.

My grandfather walked with a cane, and often lost his balance. He would come home from work with scrapes on his knees from the falls he suffered on long walks to and from jobs. My mother helped my grandmother treat his injuries with herbs and other natural remedies. She was the baby in the family at the time, and was very close to both her parents. The physical pain my grandfather suffered for their sake distressed her terribly. But no one in her family ever went to bed hungry—my grandfather made sure of it, no matter what he had to endure.

He eventually found work at a tobacco mill. It wasn’t a glamorous job, but it allowed him to do the things he most loved: read and learn. He was responsible for keeping the workers’ minds occupied so they wouldn’t become restless with the drudgery of rolling cigars. Each morning he began by reading newspapers aloud as if he were a radio news broadcaster. When he finished the papers, he read novels to them, taking care to accentuate in his speech and manner the drama and emotions of the stories. The job didn’t pay well, but it didn’t take a physical toll on him, either, and he enjoyed it. He became a skillful storyteller, and used his education to share knowledge with his illiterate but captive audience. I think he was proud of that, and never lost the skills or the desire to employ them for the entertainment and education of others.

I imagine when he lost his job at the railroad line he must have been close to despair, though he never conceded it to me. He was a proud man then and always. How defeated he must have felt to lose everything: profession, standard of living, distinction, every aspiration he had. To fear he wouldn’t be able to feed, house or clothe his family. To see his dreams disappear overnight, never to return again. Education was considered a privilege in Cuba then; to have an education and then lose all opportunities to make good use of it must have been heartbreaking. I don’t know if I could recover from it, or bear it with the austere dignity my grandfather possessed.

The experience taught my grandfather that anything in life can be taken from you. He never lost his spartan realism. In time, he would lose his country. And he would suffer the consequences of that, too, with dignity, though whenever he discussed the subject he would show anger and other emotions he normally restrained. He never raised his voice with his children or grandchildren unless the conversation turned to the country he had loved and lost.

They had two more daughters, my aunts Adria and Magdalena. They were now a family of nine living in a one-room house with a dirt floor. My grandmother assumed almost all the parenting responsibilities as my grandfather spent days away from home looking for work that would put food on their table.

My mother recalls the humiliation she and her sisters endured. Their parents gave them dolls made of Coke bottles dressed with rags, while other girls, who had “real” dolls, laughed at them. She used to sit outside a
neighbor’s house, listening at the window as their daughter played the piano, and dreamed of taking piano lessons herself. The girl’s mother discovered her one afternoon, insulted her and chased her away.

As soon as my mother and her sisters were old enough, they had to work outside their home. They handed over their paychecks to my grandmother, who used the money to buy food and other necessities. Three of the older girls found jobs in a home in Havana where nuns cared for abandoned children. They soon determined that job prospects were better in the nation’s capital, and convinced my grandparents to move. In 1940, the family packed their few belongings, said good-bye to Cabaiguán and moved to Havana.

They moved into a
solar
, a low-income housing complex that typically consisted of one large building surrounding an open courtyard. Several families would live in the building’s apartments, which were very small and without a private bathroom. No one knows how or when he learned the trade, but my grandfather began repairing shoes outside the
solar
.

My mother found work as a cashier in a store called La Casa de los Uno, Dos y Tres Centavos (The One, Two and Three Cent Store). Like her sisters, she gave all her earnings to her mother, and kept nothing for herself. The job was menial and unrewarding. But it would change her life forever, when one morning a young man with an even sadder story walked into the store.

M
Y PATERNAL GRANDFATHER, ANTONIO RUBIO, WAS ORIGinally from the Pinar del Río province at the western end of the island. He was fourteen when he lost his parents, Dionisio Rubio and Concepción Pazos, in some sort of tragedy, the details of which are lost to history. He was left in the care of relatives. After his older sister, Pura, moved to Havana, Antonio ran away. He wandered the country alone, at one point spending nights in an abandoned canoe. Eventually he reached Havana, and was reunited with his sister.

He worked odd jobs in the capital, where he met and married my grandmother, Eloisa Reina. My grandmother was born and raised in Havana and had six siblings. I know virtually nothing else about her family history except that her father, Rafael, was born in Spain.

My paternal grandparents didn’t have their first child until 1920, when my grandfather was in his midthirties and my grandmother in her late twenties. Their first child, I learned from my aunt Georgina, died at birth; my father never spoke of it. Antonio (Papo) was the next of seven more children, followed by Emilio, Eloisa (Nena) and Concepción (Concha). Mario Rubio, my father, was next, born on October 29, 1926, followed by another sister and brother, Georgina and Alberto.

The family lived in a house on Tenerife Street in Havana. When my
father was a boy, there were usually six children at home. My grandfather’s sister never married or had children of her own, so my grandparents let her care for Nena much of the time. My grandparents ran a catering business, preparing breakfast and dinner for the workers at a nearby cigar factory. My grandmother cooked the meals, and my grandfather delivered them.

My grandfather liked to joke and tease his family, and my father inherited his playful character and clear blue eyes. My grandmother, who suffered from tuberculosis much of her life, is remembered as being more conservative and reserved. She had the stronger personality of the two, and was the disciplinarian.

The family lived simply but comfortably in a large house by contemporary urban Cuban standards, and their children were content and well cared for. My father shared only general recollections of his early childhood, mostly scenes of playing at home with his siblings and holidays spent with relatives. They often held the family’s Christmas Eve dinner at their home. My grandmother would roast a pig that had been slaughtered and hung to dry the night before, and serve a traditional Cuban
lechón
.

The good times came to an abrupt end when the cigar factory closed its doors, and the catering business lost its only client. The family was forced to leave their home and move in with relatives. Eventually the family moved into a boardinghouse in their old neighborhood.

My grandfather would struggle the rest of his life to support the family, working as a vendor selling coffee and cookies on the street corners of Havana and any other jobs he could find. My father was only eight years old when he had to quit school to work. Though his formal education had ended, he would teach himself to read and write, a testament to his natural intelligence, discipline and work ethic.