An American Son: A Memoir (4 page)

My grandmother’s health began to deteriorate rapidly from the physical strain of giving birth to eight children and the emotional strain caused by their poverty. In 1935, on her forty-second birthday, she passed away from pneumonia. My father was four days shy of his ninth birthday. They held her wake in the common living room of the boardinghouse, and buried her in a small ossuary my grandfather had purchased in Havana’s Colón Cemetery.

My grandfather was left to care for seven devastated children, the oldest just sixteen and the youngest four. He became deeply depressed after his
wife’s death, and was never the same man again. He worked the streets all day, leaving the kids to fend for themselves. Nena moved in with her aunt permanently, and the rest of the children remained with their father in a single bedroom at the boardinghouse.

They were hard times, and food was scarce. When she was nine, my aunt Georgina went to work as a maid for a Spanish family, who let her bring their leftovers home. But many nights, my father and his siblings went to bed hungry. None of the kids ever complained. “When you grow up hungry,” Georgina recalled, “you learn not to ask.” My father’s memory of not having enough to eat might explain why, rather than chastise us, he would always get up from the table and bring us something else to eat when we refused to eat the meal my mother had prepared. He never wanted us to go to bed hungry, even if it meant spoiling us.

My father found his first steady employment at a bodega near the boardinghouse, where he had often watched the shop’s Spanish owner and his customers play dominoes. One day he found a wallet on the ground and asked the men if any of them had lost it. One of the customers accused my father of stealing it. The owner came to his defense, and scolded his accuser. Rather than scream at him, he told his customer, you should give him a reward. Chastened, the other man offered him a small reward, but my father refused it. Impressed by his character, the shop owner offered him a job on the spot, busing tables in the bodega’s small cafeteria. My father was only nine years old, and would earn his own living for the next seventy years. The job didn’t last long; the owner fired him when he caught him eating a chocolate bar without asking permission.

A few years after his wife died, my grandfather began a relationship with a woman named Dolores Cardín. She lived with her children in her own home, and my grandfather moved in with them. My father and his brothers, Papo and Emilio, remained at the boardinghouse. My grandfather and Dolores never married, but they had a son, and remained together for the rest of my grandfather’s life.

My father rarely discussed Dolores with us. On the few occasions he mentioned her, he did so very matter of factly, without giving much weight to her role in his life. We know from my mother and aunt that she was very unkind to him and his siblings. Her own children took precedence over the motherless Rubios. She made them feel like outcasts in their father’s
home. Five years after my grandmother died, my father was living on his own. He was just fourteen years old.

My father never resented his father for bringing Dolores into their lives and, according to my aunt, he never criticized her. He visited his father, and occasionally spent the night. Naturally, he must have wondered why his father hadn’t insisted on keeping his children with him. What else could a fourteen-year-old boy abandoned by his father have felt but that he was unloved and unwanted?

My father was a humble man, and a cheerful one. I never saw him betray bitterness or resentment toward anyone. He had learned to cope with adversity as a boy and conceal his emotions. Some people who bear painful memories in silence appear aloof and unfeeling. My father was just the opposite: he was kind, considerate and friendly to almost everyone he met.

I never saw the scars he hid. The evidence of his pain wasn’t apparent in the things he said, but in all the things he left unsaid. Yet his behavior often hinted at the insecurities hidden beneath his stoicism. If he felt he was being made fun of, he could get easily offended.

I learned much of what I know of his childhood from my aunt and my mother. It wasn’t until shortly before his eightieth birthday that he finally shared some stories from his boyhood with my sister Veronica—stories my mother said he had never shared with her.

He remained on good terms with his father during his teens, but he never lived with him again. My father lived on the streets and was raised by the streets, as his father had been. He became a man without a very good example of what a man should be, and eventually became the father he had never had. He was nineteen years old when his father contracted pneumonia and died. After that, he was truly on his own.

Working as a street vendor, my father searched for opportunities to get ahead. In 1947, twenty-one years old and looking for a little excitement, he joined an ill-fated military plot to overthrow Dominican dictator Rafael Trujillo, known as the Cayo Confites Expedition. Twelve hundred men were detained by the Cuban navy before they reached the Dominican Republic. A young law student, Fidel Castro, had joined the plot as well, although I don’t believe my father met him.

When the commotion over the expedition subsided, he found work as
a security guard in a cafeteria. He lived in a storage room in the back of the cafeteria with several young coworkers, and slept on wooden crates.

Later that year the cafeteria was purchased by the store next door, La Casa de los Uno, Dos y Tres Centavos. The new owners kept my father on, and allowed him to continue sleeping in the storage room. He met a girl there, one of the cashiers, Oriales García, and they started dating. My mother bragged to her sisters that her new boyfriend looked like the famous film star Tyrone Power. Less than a year after they met, they married on April 28, 1949, in a small civil ceremony attended by close friends and my mother’s family. My father was twenty-two, my mother eighteen.

My mother’s parents embraced their new son in law as one of their own, and for the first time since his mother died, he experienced the happiness of a loving family life. The newlyweds moved into a small apartment of their own, and continued working in the store where they had met. A year later, my older brother, Mario Víctor Rubio, was born.

My father worked hard to provide for his family on his meager salary as a security guard. He tried desperately to improve their circumstances, but these were difficult times in Cuba, and opportunities for a kid from the streets were scarce. He took a correspondence course to learn how to repair televisions and radios, but he struggled because he still had a very limited reading ability. By all accounts, he had a wonderful singing voice, and was especially fond of singing tango. He got an audition for a popular radio talent show, but his nerves got the better of him. After three failed attempts to hit a high note, he got the hook. My mother also loved to perform, and dreamed of becoming an actress. She competed in several talent competitions, and won one of them. But both of their personal aspirations gave way to the immediate needs of providing for their child.

With no education and no connections, my father’s prospects for escaping a life of poverty were poor. They were even worse after he injured his leg by stepping into a hole while playing baseball with friends. The injury caused severe nerve damage, and he would walk with a limp for the rest of his life.

One of my mother’s sisters, Dolores, or Lola as she was known, had emigrated to the United States, and reported back that jobs were plentiful there. On May 27, 1956, seven years after they had married, my parents and their son left Cuba for America. It cost around five hundred dollars at the
time to bring someone to the United States. Each family member who arrived in the States paid for the next member to come, and soon my grandparents and most of the family had emigrated. Their timing was fortuitous. That same year, Fidel Castro was busy making camp in the Sierra Maestra Mountains, where he would begin his revolution against the dictatorship of Fulgencio Batista.

While Cuba descended into violence in the revolution that would eventually replace the corrupt Batista dictatorship with Castro’s communist dictatorship, the United States enjoyed a period of unprecedented growth and prosperity. My family moved first to New York, where my father took whatever small day jobs he could find. The New York winter proved too much for my mother, though, and the following year they moved to Miami, where both my parents found steady work in an assembly plant that built aluminum lawn chairs. My mother still has a visible scar from an accident she suffered at the plant when machinery tore her thumbnail from the root.

They had very little money, but they had the will to improve their circumstances and the confidence they were in the right place to do it. Life in the United States wasn’t easy for my parents, but it was better than the alternative.

By the end of the 1950s, my father had begun training as a bar boy, a bartender’s assistant, and was hired by the Roney Plaza Hotel in Miami Beach. But his real dream was to own his own business. Between 1958 and 1965 he opened a succession of small businesses, including a vegetable stand, a dry cleaning store, a discount store and a small supermarket. My mother claims my father never had much of a business mind—he was too generous, she said, and often gave items away to customers who couldn’t afford them. The businesses all failed, and at some point—we can never be quite sure when—he gave up his dream, deciding instead to provide the best living he could for his family by working in the employ of others.

He worked hard at the hotel bar and was promoted to bartender in 1959. Yet the family was discouraged by the business failures, and they missed Cuba. My grandfather, too, had hated the cold in New York, and his attempt to establish a shoe repair business in Miami had failed. So after the fall of Batista, he returned to Cuba. He intended to stay there for the rest of his life even though his wife and daughters were still in the United States. The immigrant experience is seldom an instantly successful one. In the
beginning it’s usually a tale of hardship, menial labor, sacrifice, scrimping and heartache for the country and family you left behind. My parents’ and grandparents’ experience was no different, and like many Cuban Americans, they believed they might one day return home.

My sister Barbara was born in the early summer of 1959. By the end of that year my parents began to contemplate doing what my grandfather had already decided to do, return permanently to Cuba. Early on there were few signs that Cuba would soon join the Soviet Bloc. On a visit to the United States in April 1959, Fidel Castro professed his belief in democracy and denied being a communist. He even wore a medal with the image of the Virgin Mary. At the time he was a hero to many working-class Cubans.

In the summer of 1960, my father and my brother, Mario, took a ferry to Cuba so they could bring my father’s car, which he wanted to show off to his family. My mother and Barbara flew to Havana and met them there. They wanted to see the new Cuba and explore giving life on the island another try. But during their visit they began to comprehend the direction of Castro’s revolution.

Castro’s criticism of the United States had begun to severely damage relations between the two countries. While claiming he wasn’t a communist, he was nationalizing oil companies and commercial real estate. He expropriated sugar refineries as well, and began receiving economic and military assistance from the Soviets. When my parents arrived in Cuba, my father’s brother Emilio warned him against returning permanently. The regime was imprisoning thousands of dissidents, he explained; opposition newspapers had been shuttered, and the regime controlled all radio and television stations. Better to stay in the States, Emilio said, at least for another year.

My father heeded my uncle’s advice. He never returned to Cuba, nor did he ever see his siblings, Emilio, Antonio and Concha, again. But my mother would return one last time.

In March 1961, my mother returned to Havana to care for her father, who had tripped while boarding a bus and broken his one good leg. She stayed with him for nearly a month while he healed. It was clear during her visit that events in Cuba were going from bad to worse. The entire family wanted my grandfather to go back to Miami. She pleaded with my grandfather to return, and he finally consented.

Cuba had changed radically by then, and travel privileges were curtailed.
When she attempted to board her return flight to Miami, she encountered the scare of her life. Because she had been born in the United States, my sister, only two at the time, could leave Cuba. But my brother and my mother would not be allowed to leave, she was told. She was ordered to leave the airport, and to consider Cuba her home from now on. Though frightened, she refused to accept the decree. She returned each day for several days, pleading that her husband was in Miami, and she couldn’t remain in Cuba without him. Finally, one of the guards took pity on her, instructing her to come back the next day and get in his line. When she did, he waved her through, and she boarded a flight for Miami. The experience scared her so badly she never went back to Cuba again.

The CIA-supported Bay of Pigs invasion began the following month. In December, Castro declared he was a Marxist-Leninist, and the United States broke off diplomatic relations. In early 1962, the United States imposed a near-total economic embargo against Cuba, and by October the Cuban Missile Crisis had begun. I’ve always been immensely grateful to my uncle Emilio for warning my parents when he did. Had he hesitated, I might have lived a very different life.

With a return to Cuba now an impossibility, my parents devoted themselves to making their life in America work. My father continued working as a bartender at the Roney Plaza, and eventually became one of the hotel’s head bartenders. But my parents were always on the lookout for a place where the grass appeared greener, and they became restless whenever their prospects for advancement seemed uncertain. In the summer of 1964 they moved the family to Los Angeles in search of better opportunities in the fast-growing city; they moved into a small and dingy apartment where my brother slept on a recliner. Yet my father could find only odd jobs, and after just a few weeks, they tried Las Vegas next. The only employment he was offered was as bar boy, so by the end of the summer the family returned to Miami, where my father got back his job at the Roney Plaza.