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.