Benigno's Passover

Every December 30 for as long as I could remember, my father recounted the story of his arrival in the United States.

The first member of the family to emigrate to los Estados Unidos, he had boarded a plane at Aeropuerto Rancho Boyeros in La Habana on a resplendent Caribbean morning on the next-to-last day of 1956. (In a few years, the air thick with the intoxicating spirit of revolutionary triumph, Rancho Boyeros would be rechristened like so many other landmarks, becoming Aeropuerto Internacional José Martí, after the 19th century poet-revolutionary that even cubanos of diametrically opposed political persuasions manage to claim exclusively as their own.) A few hours later, as the plane began its descent into New York City in preparation for landing in what was then Idlewild Airport (Senator JFK still being very much alive and almost seven years away from the immortality of having landmarks named after him), the skies were still clear and the sun continued to shine.

But after nearly 38 years of living in a tropical paradise, nothing had prepared him for what he would experience when he stepped out of the plane and on to the tarmac. Nueva York, la capital del mundo, home to his beloved Yanquis, was a parallel universe in which there existed the unimaginable incongruity of blue skies, dazzling sun – and subfreezing temperatures; a place where a forecast in the 20s didn’t mean the weather was just right for donning a short-sleeved guayabera and going for a stroll along the Malecón but instead for bundling up until you looked like una momia and walking as fast as possible to the closest enclosure that would offer warm shelter.

“Había un frío que pelaba,” he would recall. So cold it could peel your skin off.

And for nearly 50 years afterwards, until he disappeared into the void of Alzheimer’s, no December 30 was complete without my father retelling his passover experience:

Why is this day different from all other days?

Because on December 30, Benigno Cruz Brito had an epiphany – that the sun could still shine in God’s heaven when it was so bitterly cold.

Given a choice, it’s likely he would have stayed in Cuba. He certainly never anticipated the sequence of events that led to his exodus to an island so unlike the one he’d left behind. Settling in the Hell’s Kitchen section of Manhattan (now a gentrified neighborhood referred to by upscale realtors as “Midtown West”), he taught himself just enough inglés reading the Daily News to do business with the immigrant merchants up and down Ninth Avenue – the boulangerie where freshly-baked loaves of bread were wrapped in brown paper and tied with string; the grosseria where roosters strutted with impunity across a sawdust-covered floor.

But in our tiny fifth floor walk-up at 452 Ninth Avenue, he held on to his island, settling down in an armchair that, now in its fourth or fifth upholstered incarnation, still occupies a corner of my bedroom, lighting up a puro (a Cuban stogie) and listening to the music of la Orquesta Aragón while catching up on culture and politics with a copy of Bohemia. There, when I was no more than four, he taught me to read en español and, more importantly, to tell time so that I could wake him from his afternoon nap just before he had to get ready to leave for the night shift.

It was there, too, that I recall first hearing my father tell the story of December 30, 1956, how the sun shone so brightly while the temperature was so bitterly cold. And on each successive December 30 for nearly 50 years, he repeated the story, even as his other memories faded into the illness that took him from us a little bit at a time.

Three weeks short of what would have been the 53rd anniversary of the exodus experience that so defined him, my father passed over. He had teetered on the brink of death several times in the last couple of years, each time managing to defy the odds. But in early December, two months shy of his 91st birthday, with advanced Alzheimer’s and congestive heart failure, he went into respiratory distress and remained for the most part unconscious for four days until, in the wee hours of December 8, a few hours after receiving the sacrament of the sick, his body gave out.

The nurse working the night shift at the nursing home told us that a few minutes before, he had opened his eyes and smiled.

We'll never know for certain whether that was true, or just something she said to help ease the loss. But if he did, it would have been perfectly in character.

December 30, 2009…the sun dazzles above a clear blue sky...hay un frío que pela…