Degrees of Separation

Inspired by the (mis)adventures of Michaele and Tareq Salahi, Philip's latest blog post recounts the story of the time we, too, crashed the White House – well, sort of. What he didn’t mention was that 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue isn’t the only presidential residence where we’ve made our presence known.

In 1999, three years after our wanderings through forbidden corridors of the White House, we visited El Museo de la Revolución in La Habana – the former Palacio Presidencial, official home to cubano presidents until 1959. (As victorious rebel forces marched into town, the last pre-revolutionary president, Fulgencio Batista y Zaldívar, high-tailed it out of there in the closing hours of 1958, in the process putting a damper on what seemed like an otherwise terrific New Year’s Eve party. If you’re having a sense of déjà vu about all this, it’s probably because you’ve seen The Godfather: Part II as many times as we have.)

Given the circumstances that led my father to leave Cuba for los Estados Unidos, I've grown convinced that there exist fewer than six degrees of separation between Batista and me.

My father, Benigno Cruz Brito, was born in 1919 and was six months old when his mother, Teresa Brito Peinado, succumbed to the global flu pandemic. He was raised by his maternal aunt, Marta Brito Peinado (for whom he named me) and her husband Amado (literally “Beloved”) Valdés (for whom he did not). Amado and Marta, my Abuelito and Abuelita, never had children of their own, but more than 30 years after taking in Benigno, they would take in and raise a neighborhood boy, my tío Leonél, who to this day lives with his wife, daughter and grandchildren in the little house in the San Miguel del Padrón section of La Habana that my father built when he and my mother were married.

I never saw my abuelos again after 1960 and my only vivid memory of Abuelito Amado involves his sliding out his upper dentures in an effort to make me laugh but which had the opposite effect. Most of what I heard about them over the years made them sound like a proper, upright, strict couple that had shown generosity and selflessness in opening their home and their hearts – twice – to a child who needed a family.

What I didn’t know about the abuelos until that 1999 trip to the island was that the couple whose pictures resemble a cubano version of American Gothic had a radical streak. They belonged to a decidedly left-of-center political party; a political party that had stood in opposition to Batista throughout much of the quarter century during which he wielded both overt and covert power.

Marta and Amado were members of the Partido Revolucionario Auténtico-Cubano, or simply, los Auténticos.

The period from 1944-1952 was good for los Auténticos. Two successive Auténtico presidents, Ramón Grau San Martín and Carlos Prío Socarrás, came to power in what many consider to have been (by the island's standards, at any rate) reasonably free and democratic elections. In the 1940s, the family’s party loyalty was rewarded with a patronage job for my father with la Policía Nacional de Cuba. (He eventually was assigned to a police precinct in Lawton, a few blocks from where my mother’s family, los Montes, lived. The rest is history...or another blog post.)

But when Batista, apparently not content to remain behind the scenes for too long, staged coup number two in 1952, the political landscape began to shift again. My father remained on the job through the transition: it was good work; he was a newlywed; and before long, there would be a baby on the way. Sometimes, as policía, he performed ceremonial duties such as serving as guardia de honor for some event or other. A certificate recognizing his service on one such occasion hangs on the living room wall in my mother’s apartment.

The story of how my father ended up in Nueva York at the end of 1956 was always told in a straightforward, “just the facts” manner. In mid-1955, when I was seven months old, he lost his job and wasn’t able to find work again so he left for los Estados Unidos in search of a better life.

For a long time, I assumed it was the result of some massive layoff, that civil service jobs had been eliminated and that he, along with countless others, had gotten pink-slipped. But as details surfaced here and there, it became increasingly clear that my father’s Auténtico sympathies also ran deep. And that’s where his troubles had begun.

One primo hermano, a child at the time, remembers hearing the adults speak about my father’s outspoken criticism of the regime and its injustices. Tías and tíos say that what happened was político – it was a bad time to be associated with an opposition party. As my father’s Alzheimer’s progressed, he began filling in some of the gaps himself. Whether true or just the illness playing tricks with his memories, it nonetheless made for some good stories. One involved his taking a poster with Batista’s picture and placing it on the bare metal seat of a Jeep then sitting on top of it. ¿Por qué? Because there was a jagged edge in the seat, and that’s all the picture was good for anyway. Eventually, someone reported him to his superiors and not long afterwards, he was discharged, neither honorably nor dishonorably but according to the discharge papers, under circunstancias especiales.

It's true that he couldn’t find work after that; he was effectively blacklisted. Eighteen months later, he landed in Idlewild International Airport in New York City and for the next seven months, he worked as a dishwasher at the Thayer Hotel on the grounds of the United States Military Academy at West Point – where more than one presidente americano who would influence U.S. policy toward Cuba got his start – until my mother and I arrived in the summer of 1957. By then, he had rented a little apartment in Manhattan and found a new job working the night shift as an elevator operator in the legendary Hotel Astor, in the heart of the theater district. There he remained until the hotel was demolished in 1967 to make way for a high-rise office tower that now houses, among other things, MTV Studios.

But in a strange kind of way, it was my father’s degrees of separation from – or proximity to – a petty dictator that set in motion the events that made it possible for Philip and me to find ourselves exploring out-of-the-way rooms in the Clinton White House 40 years later. And certainly, it was as privileged turistas norteamericanos returning to the island in 1999 that we made our way through the former Palacio Presidencial, Will and Victoria shoving each other the entire time (as I'm assured siblings do), in a place where fates much worse than the one that befell their grandfather were decided against those who dared oppose an oppressive regime.

I may pop The Godfather: Part II in the DVD player this weekend. Maybe in one of those scenes in which Batista appears with Michael Corleone and Hyman Roth – attempting to sell the soul of an island paradise, not for 30 pieces of silver but for a gold telephone – I’ll imagine that one of the extras way in the background looks like my father. The chronology would be off – by then, he would be 1,300 miles away giving elevator rides to celebrities and well-to-do tourists – but hey, that’s artistic license.

In my imagination, the bit part will be played by an actor named Benigno.