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…