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.