A 5-Year-Old Cuban Girl’s Memory: Echoes of a Lost Homeland
Witness Family Resilience Through the Eyes of Innocence in Cuba, 1966
My memory of my past is one of the things that I treasure the most. I got this gift not only from my mother but also from her grandmother, who would write well-detailed diaries and take care of her father’s journals as well. Concha, my great-grandmother, had no idea how important she would be in my life.
This story I’m about to share, drawn from Concha’s journals, is vivid in my mom’s memory, as though it happened yesterday. And I’m taking you back to 1966 in Camagüey, Cuba. The island has started to see the real faces of what this new system had promised. The island was engulfed in chaos, manipulation, deaths, threats, and fear. A vast majority of Cubans received notifications that their homes were no longer theirs, with two options: receive a pittance and get out, or leave with nothing at all.
There was no winning there, and it was happening to both influential families and middle-class workers who were surviving. I can confidently say that almost every Cuban immigrant family has its own traumatic story. It’s undeniable that the system has a lot of fans, especially globally, so it’s essential for me to tell you that I’m not here to describe an open wound in a country that has…
