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…

Tweet, Tweet

A long time ago (which is to say until about February of this year), I firmly believed that social media were, at best, tools of the devil; a cyber-playground for what a former colleague used to call the "chronologically challenged" whose frontal lobes, through no fault of their own, simply weren't sufficiently developed to make good judgments about the long-term consequences of living an uncensored and public life. (I – like most Baby Boomers – am forever grateful that there exists no online record of my own pre-lobal years, or at least none that I'm aware of.)

But a couple hundred Facebook BFFs later – with a Twitter account and a blog on top – I’m hooked. Big time.

Over the past 10 months, these networks have allowed me to reconnect with family members I hadn’t seen in more than a decade – some of whom are now grown with families of their own. I’ve reestablished ties with about two dozen seminary friends from the early 1980s and have discovered – or been discovered by – high school classmates from Saint Michael Academy’s Class of 1972. An eclectic online community cheered our daughter Angela when she received her Ph.D. last spring; prayed for our daughter Victoria when she was hospitalized at the beginning of the fall semester; rejoiced in the birth of our granddaughter Charlotte in October; sent healing thoughts when Philip broke his wrist and arm last month; and expressed immeasurable love and support when my father passed away last week.

But until today, the ever-widening circle has been comprised of people with whom I’ve had at least a tangential connection. Now, the circle has expanded.

This evening, Yoani asked to follow me on Twitter.

Yoani María Sánchez is a 34-year old, award-winning, bloguera cubana who writes from inside Cuba. Her blog, Generación Y – named by Time magazine as one of the 25 best of 2009 – has sparked controversy on both sides of the political divide and offers a fascinating, rare – and forbidden – look at la vida cotidiana en Cuba.

Tonight, for some reason, I became the 125^th person that Yoani – a  newcomer to the world of tweets – has asked to follow.

I’m sure it wasn’t my witty 140-characters-or-less updates (“Watching Glee!”... “Got a 10-minute manicure at the Cincinnati airport while waiting for a delayed connecting flight. Fly-through mani-how cool is that?”) that piqued Yoani’s curiosity, especially in comparison to the gravitas of her own messages (“Twitter is a means of chasing away that fear, of believing that you belong to a supra-national community foreign to accusation& punishment.”… “I have a dream: one day in this country no one will be discriminated for thinking differently. There will be space for everyone.”). If I were to hazard a guess, it would be that: a) I already followed her, and b) my Twitter moniker, CubanMatriarch, borders on clever. Or not.

But perhaps it’s just that storytellers seek one another out. And her story, played out in the here and now, in a place so close but about which we know so little, cries out to be heard just as much as those of the ancestors who inspired this blog. And these forums allow us, in ways never before possible, to be connected to one another and to honor even the stories of friends we have yet to meet.

So, Yoani – ¡bienvenida a Twitter! I’ll help share tu historia. Y un día, in a not-too-distant future, we'll sit down together and share una tazita de café and our stories, face-to-face, as friends, on that island we both call home.

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.

Siento Hermosa

Andy: So none of the girls here eat anything?

Nigel: Not since 2 became new 4 and 0 became the new 2.

Andy: Well, I'm a 6...

Nigel: Which is the new 14.

– Conversation between Anne Hathaway (as Andy) and Stanley Tucci (Nigel) in the movie, The Devil Wears Prada

We moved into our home the year Victoria, our youngest, was born. Now that she’s almost 20 – and fearful that a video crew from the new A&E show Hoarders might appear on our doorstep at any moment – I spent a good part of Thanksgiving weekend sorting through almost two decades’ worth of stuff that had accumulated up in the attic.

There – nestled among old baseball cards and Beanie Babies, amid obsolete computer equipment (1 GB hard drive!) and baby furniture, in a pile of clothing that included a red nightshirt of the type worn by Ebenezer Scrooge that had once belonged to my spouse as well as the top half of a Port Chester High School Marching Band uniform that our son’s best friend neglected to turn in after their last Band Night performance in 2003 – was a short denim skirt and a pair of snug black jeans that, based on reliable photographic evidence, I had last worn circa 1992-93. The tags read: size 4.

They’d probably fit my daughter Katie, who stands 4-foot-10 and weighs 90-something lbs.

Among the women of my maternal line, my 5-foot-1 stature was considered average – even tall – until the family’s current generation of muscular, iron-pumping, soccer-playing, track-running and indisputably tall goddesses put the height issue into clearer perspective. However, the last time I weighed 90-something lbs. was after a bout of mono in my junior year of high school and my brief size 4 phase some 20 years later coincided with a period in between two major episodes of depression – neither of which, I’m pretty certain, is a medically sanctioned approach to weight management.

Still, in my late 30s, the idea of a body that had spent most of the previous decade either pregnant or lactating fitting into clothing I would have had a hard time squeezing into in adolescence was almost seductive enough to cast all caution (and common sense) to the wind. If stress + insomnia + antidepressants = size 4, how much more of a disordered mood would you need to get into, say, a size 2, which by then would probably have become the new 4 anyway? Or, given the tyrannical politics of fashion and beauty, maybe even the new 14? (I was never very good at math.)

When my mother married my father, her waist was smaller than the circumference of his policeman’s hat – Scarlett O’Hara with her corseted 17-inch waist had nothing on her! But ironically, her goal was to fill out, to become mas gordita. (Now, at age 82 and asked on a regular basis to show proof that she’s eligible for senior citizen’s discounts, she is resolute in her conviction that a few extra pounds are better than Botox for minimizing wrinkles.) 

Earlier this year, West Side Story returned to Broadway for the first time since 1980 in a breathtaking bilingual production that included new lyrics by the brilliant Lin-Manuel Miranda, the Tony Award-winning genius who gave the theater world the gift that is In the Heights.

As the pit orchestra plays the familiar strains of I Feel Pretty, an even more confident María now sings:

Hoy me siento tan hermosa

Tan graciosa que puedo volar
Y no hay diosa
En el mundo que me va alcanzar

¿Vez en el espejo que hermosa soy? (See the pretty girl in that mirror there?)
¿Quién es esa bella mujer? (Who can that attractive woman be?)

¡Que bonita faz! (What a pretty face!)

¡Que bonita atrás! (How pretty from the back!)

¡Que bonita forma de ser! (What a lovely way to be!)

You just know that this María likes what she sees – from any and all angles, at any size.

I never really expected to wear those size 4s again. But after all this time, I don’t especially want to. With all due respect to the late Duchess of Windsor – a woman who might have benefitted from a few extra pounds herself – there is such a thing as being too flaca.

That’s not to say that I won’t make friends with my Wii Fit or maintain a healthy lifestyle. But as a woman in her mid-50s who has brought three amazing human beings into the world; helped take care of an aging parent; and partnered with a soulmate to create a new family, I’ve earned the the right to honor this temple – round and imperfect though it may be – where the Spirit makes herself at home.  It's earned my respect.

And while She settles in and pulls up a chair and makes herself comfortable, I'll be standing in front of one of those three-way dressing room mirrors and singing:

Hoy me siento tan hermosa…

Oh Montes, Where Art Thou?

Some of you are already following The Little Scroll, written by my spouse (and caricaturist extraordinaire) Philip Jenks. Recently, he linked his readers to Antojitos y Alabanzas, something that would have been described as an example of shameless cross-selling in the Marketing 101 class I took a couple of years ago. In any case, if you aren’t a Scroll follower, you should be. The blog traces its roots to a column of the same name that Philip wrote for 20 years for a succession of ill-fated denominational publications. Back then, if you wanted to read his writings, you had to pay for a subscription. Now it’s free, which is always better.

In his last posting, Philip raised the question as to why, in the 1920s, his maternal grandfather had migrated east – from Minnesota to central New York – when other young men sought their fortunes out west. Within minutes, he had heard from two friends – one as far away as Strasbourg, France – who had looked up century-old U.S. census records and discovered facts about Grandpa’s forebears that my spouse and his siblings had never known. Which was surprising because Philip’s genealogy is exceptionally well-documented, with a family tree that includes, among others, an unusually tall 17th century colonial governor who wrote to England to request a six foot-long cloak but due to extraordinarily bad penmanship received a six foot-tall clock instead; an ironworks magnate who acquired the first machine patent in the American colonies; and a character actor who appeared opposite George Reeves in two episodes of The Amazing Adventures of Superman.

I’m always fascinated – and a tad envious – when I hear about these ancestors, in part because no one on my side of the family ever did anything as cool as hang out with Superman, but mostly because there’s so little recorded history of those before my parents’ generation.

However, I can boast a grandfather who, as a young man, did go west.

Francisco Montes Cuervo was known in the family as Papito, literally “little father,” which was appropriate since he was barely five feet tall. Born in 1874 in Cangas de Onís, the capital of the Principality of Asturias in northern Spain, his childhood is best described as Dickens meets Iberia. He was too young to remember when his father died; only seven when he found his mother dead. At the insistence of pious relatives, Francisco and his brother Antonio, who was four or five years older, arranged to bury her in consecrated ground rather than in the municipal cemetery, but to pay for the church burial they sold their only valuable possession: a cow. The two orphans lived by their wits until a schoolteacher caught them foraging for berries in his yard and took them in. They lived with the teacher until 1888, when they boarded a ship bound for la perla del Caribe, the Spanish colony of Cuba. Francisco was 14 years old.

No one knows for sure what the Montes brothers found when they disembarked in la bahía de La Habana. But Cuba in 1888 was a hotbed of revolutionary activity. Two wars for independence had already been fought – and lost. Slavery had been abolished only two years earlier. José Martí simultaneously wrote poetry – Versos Sencillos, which contained the verses that would be immortalized in the song Guantanamera, was published in 1891 – and inspired rebellion. A third war for independence would break out in 1895, culminating with the Spanish-American-Cuban War of 1898.

What is known is that after going west across the Atlantic, they continued their westward trek further, to Viñales, sugar cane country, and eventually to the Central Azucarero Mercedita, a sugar plantation and mill owned by the American Sugar Company. There are different stories about what they did, depending on who does the telling. Some say Papito worked as a carpenter on the plantation, repairing the wooden carts used in the cañaverales; others say he worked the harvest; still others say that because he had a natural gift for numbers, he was sought out by other campesinos when they wanted to make sure they weren’t being cheated out of an agreed-upon wage, which no doubt rankled management. Perhaps it was all of the above. Maybe more.

Sometime around the turn of the century, Francisco took a wife 11 years his junior – my grandmother Jacinta María or María Jacinta, depending on which of their 14 children’s birth certificates you happen to pick up, but more commonly known as Mamita (“little mother”). Antonio married as well and fathered three sons: Antonio, José and Francisco. Antonio-the-Younger, a labor organizer, once served a three-month prison sentence on La Isla de Pinos (the Isle of Pines, now La Isla de la Juventud, the Isle of Youth) for being a member of the Communist Party, a confirmation that then, as now, our clan has spanned the political spectrum. In the mid-1930s – when the Cuban economy was still reeling from the combined effects of the deregulation of sugar prices by the U.S. and the global economic depression – most of the family moved to La Habana, where they have remained since. Papito died in 1951, in his 77th year, a few months before my parents were married and three years before I was born. Only his three youngest children – my mother, Julia, and my tías, Mercedes and Paula – are still around to fill in some of the blanks of the last 20 or so years of his life.

But there are gaps in his timeline that may never be filled. Census statistics are not easily accessible. Passenger manifests for transatlantic sailings from northern Spain to Cuba are virtually nonexistent.

Eighty years elapsed from the time Papito entered the world until the time his second youngest daughter gave birth to me. Yet in reality, only one generation – hers – stands as a buffer zone in between the orphan child who plucked berries to keep from starving and his extremely well-fed granddaughter, who has just feasted on a Cuban meal of perníl, arróz con frijoles y boniatos prepared by her son-in-law.

Yet for all its poignancy, Papito’s experience was far from unique. His was the shared narrative of all those españoles who arrived in La Habana by the boatload, believing that their only chance for a future lay in the fields that yielded la azúcar y el tabaco, las naranjas y la yuca. It’s the shared narrative of all who have made crossings; of those who brave the straits on makeshift rafts; of those herded into freight containers; of those who make their way across river and desert, invoking their ancestors’ memories of a time before the border shifted under their feet.

And I wonder, still, about those who didn’t make the crossing – those Montes and Cuervo relatives, the descendants of the pious aunts and uncles who for reasons only they knew didn’t or couldn’t take in the two orphan boys. Where are they? Who are they? Do they have any missing pieces to add to the puzzle? Are they as curious about all or any of this as I am?

Today, the search for them begins in earnest. And heaven only knows what, if anything, will be revealed. But if you’re reading this and you have an inkling, a clue, a direction – or if you happen to be one of those whose branches extend from the trunk of an old family tree that once spread its roots in that little Celtic-Spaniard kingdom-turned-principality-within-a-kingdom where Francisco and Antonio once lived with a father and mother, milking the family cow, and dreaming about a very different future – give a holler.

I’ll be waiting to hear from you.

Set Loose

For almost two years, Padre Santiago and I have been meeting – more or less regularly – in a convent that was once home to women called to be brides of Christ. We sit in the office of one of the few remaining sisters, a veteran of more than 50 years who, on this particular evening, has left behind a large doll dressed in the traditional habit of the order – starched white wimple; black veil and robe; but along the edge, a whisper of scarlet trim, as if to make an ecclesiastical fashion statement. (In an earlier doll incarnation, she must have been one of the sartorial rebels who rolled up her uniform skirt way above her knees as soon as the dismissal bell rang.)

Tonight, with the nun doll as a silent witness, I attempt to tell my witty and wise spiritual director about my decision to enter the blogosphere.

In this safe and welcoming space, where absolution has been granted to sinners and saints alike, is it appropriate to begin with the confession I’ve offered to everyone else who has posed that question?

– Forgive me, Father, for I have…been self-reflective and self-absorbed in equal measures?

After all, it’s not as if these navel-gazing musings contribute to the common good, or liven the civic discourse or cast new light upon big issues.

Perhaps it’s because I’m approaching a not-quite-milestone-ish birthday, but one that’s somewhat symbolic if for no other reason than its association with the national speed limit. Fifty-five is a nice round number, easily divisible, neat, orderly. It’s also a reminder that I am – even taking into account the preternatural longevity of my peasant ancestors – firmly ensconced on the other side of middle age, in an undesirable age demographic, fully cognizant that there are things that I’ve never done; things I still want to do; things I’d like to stop doing.

But a constant throughout this more-than-half-a-lifetime is that whatever else I’ve done, I’ve told stories. In school publications. In magazines read by people in church pews. From the pulpit. In a collection of essays published by J.F.K., Jr. during his brief foray into the publishing world.

Now the storyteller’s fear is that the most precious ones – stories long ignored or listened to half-heartedly; stories from which an intentional distance was kept or those dismissed as insignificant and irrelevant – may become irretrievably lost, and with it a part of myself, and my children and my clan will be gone.

So after more-than-half-a-century of snatching tidbits about the lives of those who came before – their comedies and their tragedies – the task of unearthing the Rosetta Stone that will ensure that their narratives are not lost has taken on an urgency almost beyond reason.

Because those stories aren’t just asking to be told. They’re bursting into song and dance.

When my children were little, they were sung to sleep with lullabies interspersed with show tunes, so that by the time they began stringing words together, the lyrics to songs like I Love You a Bushel and a Peck were as familiar, or more so, than those to The Itsy Bitsy Spider. William, Katherine and Victoria had already seen their first Broadway musicals by the time each of them entered kindergarten. Birthdays and holidays and other rites of passage were celebrated with trips to the theater – Cats on their fifth birthdays; Les Misérables at 13; Rent at 16. They performed in school musicals throughout middle school, high school and college. And when they became members of a blended family, the language of musicals was a common tongue they spoke with their older sisters – amateur thespians as well, whose visits to Port Chester always provide us with a (hardly necessary) excuse for yet another theater outing. Packed into what Angela and Elita recently christened “the singing car” – where cast recordings from my iPod playlist blast over the speakers – we are like a troupe of crazed Method actors, possessed by alter-egos as we sing loudly and lustfully to the music of the latest show to have left us tapping our toes.

There, in the language of song, in a sacred canon where truth is often hidden in plain sight within the chorus of a catchy tune, I hear old friends singing a liturgical call and response that explains the “why” I've been seeking.

Why tell these stories?

Over there is Jean Valjean, his shoulders hunched, his hair white in his last days, forever branded as one of Les Misérables – the wretched of the earth – having sought and found forgiveness, his work done, and as he hands to his daughter Cosette a page on which he has written his last confession, his angelic tenor soars:

"It’s a story of those who always loved you."

Why share the bad along with the good?

We are transported Into the Woods, where a widowed baker cradles his infant son in his arms and wonders how he will ever explain to him the horrible chain of events set in motion by choices made at crucial moments, leading to a disaster that has left the child motherless – until the spirit of his dead wife appears and sings:

"Tell him the story

of how it all happened…

Do not let it grieve you…

You are not alone."

Why tell them over and over again?

From the woods we awaken to a tropical paradise, where peasants who lived Once on This Island tell a tale of love’s triumphant power and admonish us never to forget, as the chorus sings, quite matter-of-factly:

"Life is why (we tell the story)

Pain is why (we tell the story)

Love is why (we tell the story)

Grief is why (we tell the story)

Hope is why (we tell the story)

Faith is why (we tell the story)

You are why."

What will happen when the stories are passed on?

Back on the corner of 181^st Street, where fire escapes are draped with flags from places left behind and longed for, in front of a neighborhood bodega In the Heights stand Abuela Claudia and Usnavi, holding a bag full of lottery winnings and envisioning the future:

"Think of the hundreds of stories we’ll create, you and I!"

Why blog? So that our stories – past, present and yet to be created – can be set loose to sing and dance, that we may not forget.

Dermie & Me

It was at a wedding that I first became aware of Dermie. And a wedding would be the last place we would ever see each other.

The first nuptials were a quiet affair in 1960, with only six people present – the bride and groom; the matron of honor and best man; Dermie; and me, the almost six-year old child of the couple stating vows before God and all present.

My parents’ wedding day nine years earlier in Cuba was captured in a sepia-toned portrait taken in one of La Habana’s most popular portrait studios, Foto Yo. My mother – a dark-haired beauty in a white satin gown that she had sown herself and that would later be worn by three of her five sisters – and my father – distinguished-looking in a dark suit, his hair combed back, his moustache neatly trimmed – stand side by side, gazing into their future.

The future they could never gaze far enough into caused them to leave Cuba only a few years later. By the time I was old enough to begin school in the fall of 1960, they had lived in los Estados Unidos long enough to have concluded that there was no greater horror than the public schools of New York City and went to enroll me in the local parish school instead. There, they were confronted with the mother of all horrors – the news that the Almighty not only frowned upon their civil marriage but dismissed its validity altogether. Consequently, their illegitimate-in-the-eyes-of-God child wouldn’t be able attend school as long as they remained in their unmarried-in-the-eyes-of-God state.

Enter Dermie.

No one would have thought of calling him that then. He was Father McDermott – ordained to the priesthood just a year earlier, tall, young, good-looking, able to carry off a cassock as few men can, with Clark Kent-like horn-rimmed glasses and the ability to speak just enough laughable broken high school Spanish to be considered an asset to a parish with changing demographics. He married my parents – again – in the process making me legitimate enough to attend parochial school for the next 12 years.

 And that’s all that was really wanted.

Although a plaster statue of La Caridad del Cobre, the patron saint of the island, and a brass crucifijo that my mother had taken to the hospital with her when she gave birth – both brought over from Cuba – occupied a makeshift altar on which candles were occasionally lit in our apartment, my family was culturally Catholic at best, not practicing adherents of the faith.

El padrecito saw a field ripe unto harvest.

He began making pastoral visits, trekking up five flights of stairs to our top-floor walk-up on Ninth Avenue and 35th Street. “¡Benigno!” he would call up to my father as he started his ascent, “¿hay cristianos allí arriba?” and continue the climb as my father called down, “No, padre, sólo judíos.” He would lead us in the rosary – just him and the three of us at first, but later on, he started bringing a few other parishioners. Sometimes, he would bring a statue of Mary – encased in dark wood and glass and with a little slot at the base for offerings – turning our living room into a shrine for the Latino faithful of Hell’s Kitchen.

Over the years, he heard my confessions and gave me penance (not yet the post-Vatican II Sacrament of Reconciliation), placed the host on my tongue at my First Communion and was present at my Confirmation. He blessed my throat on the feast of Saint Blaise and imposed ashes on my forehead on Ash Wednesday, and acquiesced to my requests to bless countless items both sacred and profane.

And as I watched him consecrate the Eucharist on Sundays and First Fridays and Holy Days of Obligation, I knew that where he was at that kairos moment was where the Holy One wanted me to be, too.

Father McDermott was transferred to a parish on the Lower East Side the same summer we moved uptown to Washington Heights but we remained in touch. He and my father spoke regularly over the phone. When one of my Cuban tías died, he was the one who said the memorial Mass. One day, as we sat in front of the TV watching the six o’clock news, a report came on about a priest who had created a scandal in his parish with the announcement that he had fallen in love. On the screen was Father McDermott.

We heard that he left the priesthood not long after that. My father became disillusioned and from time to time would talk about el ex-Padre McDermott. I saw him once, in a bookstore in Greenwich Village, during my undergraduate days at NYU.

The second nuptials were a big affair.

In the mid-1990s, I was serving in my third pastorate when a church member asked me to co-officiate at her wedding, which would take place in a Catholic church. Her husband-to-be was a former priest and a colleague of his was to be the other officiant. On the day of the wedding, as we waited for the bride and her party to arrive, groom and priest spoke about all their seminary friends who had come to celebrate the occasion. Feeling left out of their male-dominated ecclesiastical shoptalk, I interrupted to ask the groom where they all had been in seminary together.

“St. Joseph’s. Dunwoodie.”

“When were you ordained?”

“In 1959.”

“Our parish priest when I was a kid went to Dunwoodie and was ordained in 1959.”

“Really? What was his name?”

“Dermot McDermott.”

“DERMIE? You’re kidding me. DERMIE! He’s sitting right out there.”

With that, he pointed out a big, bespectacled gray-haired man, sitting in the pews with his petite wife – decades older, but unambiguously my priest. During the ceremony, I thought I saw the same spark of recognition in him.

We spent time talking at the reception. He remembered climbing up the five flights of stairs. He inquired after my parents, especially my father. He spoke of the work he had done as a community organizer since leaving the priesthood and about a trip he had made to Cuba in the 1970s. He now spoke español effortlessly. I talked about family – my young kids, my aging parents, my new husband – and my work and the long circuitous path that had led there.

It had all started with a wedding.

Mustard seeds were sown on those childhood Sunday mornings when I would follow along in my missal and Father Dermie, facing the altar with his back to the worshipers, would speak the Latin words of consecration over the bread and the wine, holding the elements aloft then genuflecting reverently as the altar boys rang the bells in perfect tempo to his every move. When we stood on the holy ground within the stone walls of the 19th century inner city church – kingdom of heaven in the midst of Hell's Kitchen, smells and bells, ritual and symbol stirring the senses of the congregation – I could almost hear the Spirit whisper my name as She tugged gently on my soul.

Dermie died of cancer the following year. With weddings as bookends to the ordinary time in between, the story had come full circle.

Next Year...

Just about now, my cousin Nelson is probably looking out the window at a lush landscape as his plane begins the descent into José Martí International Airport in the elegant Rancho Boyeros section of La Habana, once home to nightclubs with names like Bambú and Mulgoba and Topeka recommended in 1950s travel guides for their “typical Cuban nightclub” atmosphere and “good music and shows.”

The flight from Miami to La Habana takes less than an hour – about the same duration as shuttle service between New York and Boston or D.C. – and spans the same distance, some 200+ miles (the oft-referenced 90-mile distance across the Florida Straits being the distance between the northernmost point of the island and the Florida Keys). After a two-month visit with relatives in norteamérica, Nelson will be welcomed home by Lucía, his wife and soul mate of 25 years, and as many other relatives as can be rounded up – daughters and sons-in-law and their children and grandchildren; primos hermanos (literally “sibling cousins,” the term reserved for first cousins); primos (those second, third and fourth cousins, once, twice, thrice removed – the generations before us were a fertile bunch); in-laws – all of whom have waited at the airport for hours in anticipation of his return.

Our family didn’t live in Rancho Boyeros or El Vedado or the other upscale, fashionable residential areas of the city (except for one tía who married well in the early 1950s and moved to Miramár). They had migrated in the mid-1930s to La Habana from Pinar del Río, the westernmost province, where our grandparents and their 13 children lived and worked in the Centrál Azucarero Mercedita, a sugar cane plantation and mill owned by the American Sugar Company. When they arrived in the city, they settled in the Lawton district (once described by Ernest Hemingway as a place so depressing it was best experienced while inebriated), in a tiny three-room house on Calle Fonts, where subsequently four generations of the family would live over a period spanning 70 years. There, our grandmother Mamita, who had no formal education and never learned to read or write, reigned supreme over an ever-expanding brood until her death shortly before what would have been her 98th birthday.

Nelson’s father Desiderio, the firstborn child of Mamita and our Asturian grandfather Papito, was born in 1905, six years after the United States and Spain (but not Cuba, which was not represented at the bargaining table) ratified the Treaty of Paris formally ending the Spanish-American-Cuban War, and only three years after cubanos elected their first president, Dr. Tomás Estrada Palma and witnessed the Cuban flag flying over La Habana for the first time – replacing the American flag, which had flown over Cuba because the treaty had ceded the island to the U.S.

Desiderio's sister, my mother Julia, was born a generation later in 1927, the second youngest of the Mamita-Papito offspring. She was 17 when Nelson was born and 19 when he was brought to live in the house on Calle Fonts, where five unmarried aunts doted upon him. A gifted child, he excelled academically and would have entered La Universidad de La Habana at the age of 14 had it not been for the school’s three-year closure in the last years of the Batista dictatorship. By the time the university reopened, his life had taken a different path.

Nelson was almost 11 when I came into la familia as the second oldest of a group of nine primos hermanos born in rapid succession between 1953 and 1963. During the last seven months of my life in Cuba, after my father Benigno had come to the United States and until my mother and I joined him in New York, Nelson and I lived under Mamita's roof along with my mother, two aunts, three uncles and a sprinkling of primos.

And then, in August 1957, our lives parted.


My parents and I returned to Cuba for brief visits in 1959 and 1960, but I confess that my only memories of Nelson come from a picture taken during one of those trips, when the station wagon that nine of us were piled into got a flat, and someone (my father, I believe) took out a camera and had everyone pose by the sidelined vehicle while Nelson – also pictured, but clearly not posing – changed the tire.

For the next 39 years, our paths never intersected. He married, had four daughters, married again – making his living as a bus driver and using his keen intellect and skills to keep his used, well-loved 1954 Plymouth Savoy running to this day. I grew up in New York City, went to college, graduate school, seminary, gave birth to three children – a son and two daughters – and was blessed with more children when I married a man with three daughters. I've been a writer, editor, pastor, preacher. Nelson never strayed far from Lawton, living in the surrounding towns all his life and not once traveling outside the country until now. I've lived in New York City; in three different cities in Massachusetts; and for the last 24 years home has been Westchester County, 25 miles northeast of New York City (or what we used to call “upstate” when I was a child growing up in the city because even though Westchester bordered on the Bronx, it had a different area code). I’ve had opportunities to see many other parts of the world.

By the time we reconnected on a two-week trip that my parents, spouse, kids and I took to Cuba in 1999, Nelson and I were middle-aged adults in our 40s and 50s who hadn't seen each other since childhood. Three years later, when we returned to Cuba, he and I were creeping up on 60 and 50, respectively. After that trip, the last presidential administration made it impossible for most of us Cuban nationals to return to the island by redefining who and what constituted familia in a way that was incomprehensible to those of us being defined. So for the next six and a half years, contact with Nelson was by way of the occasional phone call, or a letter or picture sent via a third-party intermediary. It was Nelson who managed to send me a copy of my birth certificate, finally putting to rest my decades-long insistence that there existed no proof that I had ever been born.

Then, this summer, Nelson arrived on a two-month tourist visa that had taken years to obtain. After a few days with the Dade County branch of the family, he was escorted north by another prima hermana and spent the next six weeks among the northeast relatives, using my mother’s apartment and my home as his bases of operations.

With little more in common than an eccentric gene pool, we began to get to know one another, making our way from the primos part of our relationship to the hermanos part, learning more about who we were, and who our people were and are, filling in the missing information gaps along the way.

And so we, the primos hermanos who had left as children – by 1968, there were seven of us numbered among the Cuban diaspora – were able to confirm that the memory of a birthday cake out of which una lagartija (a small tropical lizard) had crawled was not a figment of the imagination. Nelson had been there, and it was true. Or that vicious, toe-biting ducks that inspired in me a lifetime fear of fowl had indeed wandered through the three little rooms in the house on Calle Fonts. Nelson remembered not only ducks, but also the chickens, pigs, goat and cow that our grandmother, who never really left the country behind, kept in back of the house at one time or another. (The cow was actually kept in a friend’s yard a couple of blocks away; Mamita's was a small yard.) Or that a certain transplanted primo hermano always had to be the one who blew out the candles, no matter whose birthday it was – there, and here. Nelson had witnessed it many times over. We learned stories kept partially hidden by an earlier generation; perhaps to protect us as children from what we couldn't understand, perhaps later to put the best possible face on la familia. We revealed partially hidden stories of our own.

And I concluded that Amy Tan didn't go far enough – it’s not just our mothers who inhabit our bones, but the entire tribe, the clan that birthed us, that helped mold our thoughts, that still gathers together as in generations past around holiday tables, resembling our parents more with each passing season, even when we no longer live in the same house, or in the same apartment building, or on the same city block. They are in our bones, and in our souls. And it is they who make us complete.

I spoke with Nelson last night, his last day in los Estados Unidos before returning to the woman he loves and the home he loves, where he is surrounded by an ever greater circle of lives – a cloud of witnesses past, present and future – who form the connective tissue of our people. And we ended our conversation with the promise: 

El año que viene, en La Habana. 

Next year, in La Habana.