The Exiles
My Family left Cuba and never stopped missing it.
by Fernanda Uriegas Fabian
I grew up in Mexico, but was raised by a Cuban family. Whenever my family got together they would talk about the time when they lived in Cuba. They would pour these stories like water into a flower pot, and I grew up as the flower.
In this photo, as in many of the old photos I sometimes find in my house in Mexico, there is a group of people, half of whom I recognize: they are my family. The other half are interchangeable friends (depending on the period in time) who would stick around my ordinary family. Here they are in Varadero, the most beautiful beach in Cuba, hours away from Havana, where they lived.
The picture was taken in 1991, three days after the dissolution of the Soviet Union. The preceding years were a time of deep economic crisis in Cuba, which was loosing the support of the decaying Soviet Union.The country lost more than three quarters of its imports and exports, which led to shortages of food, medicine and oil. Transport and food were so scare everyone lost weight by cycling more and eating less. “One could watch television and see how the TV hosts and artists were slowly becoming skulls,” my mother’s cousin told me. The government called this “the special period in time of peace.” Special, because they presented it as a temporary condition, a sacrifice for the country, which had finally found peace and would soon recover.
It is hard to imagine such difficult times looking at this picture. My aunt Elsita, the woman on the left, had moved out of the country ten years earlier with her son Rainer, whom she is hugging. She also has a daughter, the little girl on the right, who was born when my aunt was living in the United States. The 5-year-old was visiting her mother’s country for the first time. Behind her is my mother, who had also left Cuba, to go to Mexico. You can see the joy in their faces. The only family members who are not laughing are the ones who still lived on the island: my uncle (behind Rainer’s hand) and my grandmother, who hated to be photographed, were caught by the camera with an uncomfortable expression. She is wearing a sailor hat I have the impression of having seen years later, in the cardboard box we kept our Halloween costumes in.
I had heard the stories about the years of scarcity in Cuba through my family’s storytelling, but in their stories that scarcity does not seem to affect their quality of life. Instead, it forces them to get creative. Like when there were no shoes, my aunt made their own sandals using a carpet and nails she stole from under the seats in school. The only sad stories I would ever hear about Cuba were those about people who left the country, or who had died. I often wondered why, then, every member of my family except my grandmother eventually decided to leave.
This is the reason why this picture is important to me. It was taken at the very time the country was suffering through a crisis worse that those that had compelled them to migrate. But the very people who had left are the ones who seem happiest to be back. It was this I had in mind as I started learning about their lives before they left Cuba.
My grandmother was three months pregnant with my mother when, in 1959, rebels led by Fidel Castro ousted the US-backed dictator Fulgecio Batista. She was married to my grandfather and they were both revolutionaries. The couple had had to move houses regularly because they were afraid of being pursued by the Batista government. My grandmother, who in addition to being a doctor loved art and painted beautifully, used to make pamphlets, drawing the hammer and sickle over Batista’s head. Her oldest daughter, my aunt Elsa, was born in 1957, four years after the revolutionary fight began. She was named Elsita, after my grandmother’s first name Elsa. My mother was named Marisol, which in Spanish means sea and sun, although as a kid she insisted she be called sand and moon instead.
After the triumph of the revolution, my grandfather became the head of international relations in the new government’s education department. My grandmother continued to support the revolutionary forces as part of the militia. When my mother was 16 years old, she tried to join the Young Communist League. She was rejected after they learned that she had friends who played in rock bands.
With Batista’s overthrow, a first wave of Cubans left for the United States. These were mainly the Cuban elite, business owners, many of whom had properties and business outside the country. Many of my family’s friends left. My family stayed. Whoever left, could not come back. My grandfather used to say “No Fabian (our last name) leaves Cuba” because he saw people who left the country as gusanos, or traitors of the revolution.
Half a century later, my grandparents would be dead and the rest of their family far away from Cuba. When Castro died at the end of 2016, they would all celebrate.
My grandmother was a revolutionary woman. She studied medicine and became the first woman in her family to get a degree. She was also the first woman in her family to get a divorce, from my grandfather. He was a workaholic whose devotion to Communist politics bordered on the irritating. He was the sort of man who was forced to take holidays because he hadn’t done it for decades. Years later, my grandmother accidentally became pregnant by someone she barely knew, a blue-eyed man everyone called Gallego (the Galician) because he was originally from Spain.
My grandmother didn’t want another child but at the time abortion was prohibited and doctors caught doing it could be imprisoned. She asked a doctor friend of hers to do the procedure and offered him her car in exchange. He agreed, but as he was about to perform the procedure, he noticed a bruise on my grandmothers thigh. He backed out, afraid that the bruise might be a symptom of blood circulation problems that could complicate the abortion. As soon as she stepped out of the clinic, my grandmother felt joy. She had had a choice of rejecting or embracing her pregnancy and given the circumstances, she chose the latter.
At the time having a child without a husband was not a socially acceptable option, so she had to marry Gallego. They named the child Eugenio, after Gallego’s mother. They moved together and according to my grandmother, maintained a relationship a few years before getting divorced. “I never loved him” she once told me.
My grandmother had a brother who had been working as a doctor in the United States when Castro took power, and he could never go back to Cuba. Her mother (my great grandmother) would impatiently wait for her son’s letters to arrive from across the Atlantic Ocean. My mother remembers how much her grandmother treasured them, putting them in a beautiful box that she kept at the top of a closet. Once, when she was a child, my mother climbed to the top of that closet, looking for that box, believing that because of the way her grandmother treated it, it must have contained a treasure. Her grandmother, she told me, eventually died of severe depression because she never got to see her son again. “I feel bad because I never saw her laughing,” my mother said.
My grandmother was not yet suffering the fate of her mother. She still had her family with her — her husband Gallego, my mother, and my uncle. There was also my aunt, and in time, her son.
My aunt had wanted to be a ballerina and when she was eight years old she was accepted into the prestigious Escuela Nacional de Arte, whose students danced in Ballet Nacional de Cuba. My aunt was one of the 16 girls from across Cuba chosen for the school that year. What my grandmother didn’t know before agreeing to take her to the auditions was that the Escuela Nacional de Arte was a boarding school. She could not bear the thought of being away from her children, and visits were not allowed during the week. My grandmother could not deny her daughter’s wishes but set one condition: my grandmother would come to the school every day after work, right before my aunt went to sleep. My aunt would come to the window and reach out her hand for my grandmother to touch.The window was too tall for them to hug, but this way my grandmother would know her daughter was fine.
It was at the school that my aunt met Roberto, a tall athletic man with blond hair who taught acrobatics and who all the girls fell for. Roberto was 24 years old and my aunt was 14, and my mother says, considered by many to be the most beautiful woman in Havana. A romance blossomed. They were together almost two years before deciding to get married. My grandfather’s initial fury gave way to acceptance of the marriage, even though Roberto could no longer teach at the school. My aunt, however, was not expelled.
All of Roberto’s family had already left for the United States. He lived by himself and my aunt believes he persuaded her to marry him because besides all the love he had for her, he didn’t want to be alone in the huge house his family had left behind. Soon after my aunt turned 18, their son Rainer was born.
The relationship didn’t last long. My aunt loved and admired Roberto, but her feelings towards him were those similar to the ones a sister has for his older brother. They divorced two years after they had Rainer and my aunt went back to my grandmother’s house, taking her son.
My grandmother had divorced Gallego, and tired of the city life, had moved to a house in the outskirts of Havana with a garden where she planted mango and guava trees. Rainer was two years old when he came to live with my grandmother, my 17-year-old mother and my uncle, who was 11. It was as if Rainer had three mothers to spoil him and a brother to play with.
The house was always full of people. My mother was a blossoming extroverted teenager who brought friends home almost every day. Many came to see my ingenious grandmother as well, a doctor and single mother whom everyone in the neighborhood respected. My grandmother would cook for them, and they would play music.
My aunt never pursued a dancing career. She decided she wanted to study architecture, but she did not get a place because it was reserved for the children of the military. The family, like so many others, was feeling the repressive ways of the government that rewarded loyalty to the party and punished dissenters and critics. My aunt agreed with some aspects of the system and disagreed with others, but felt like she could not share her opinion.
“We had the basic things with that system, things were alright, but it is human nature to want more and if you wanted more you had to get into the system,” she said. “You had to have two faces. You were either intensely revolutionary to gain access or you had to act hypocritically.”
The Committees for the Defense of the Revolution were in every neighborhood and monitored what people said. If you criticized the government in the least, you could be accused of having ‘ideological problems’, as they called them. Some were even imprisoned. My mother and aunt couldn’t even share their opinions with their father without causing a fight, and they both believe their relationship was hurt because he was such a fanatic. Even now my mother is wary of criticizing the Cuban government, even when she is talking in Mexico. It would be a long time before anyone in my family left because they all knew that they could not come back.
My aunt did not want to leave forever and yet did not like the ideological repression and saw few opportunities for her in the country. The only way she could get a permit to go in and out of the country is if she married a foreigner. The first time she met my uncle, a Mexican diplomat working in Cuba at the time, she was sweeping the terrace of the house. His name was also Roberto. She found him very intelligent and well positioned. She agreed to go out with him and they ended up marrying.
Roberto was transferred to Mexico, which meant my aunt and Rainer would go with him. It was 1982 and Rainer was nine years old. He had spent seven years living in my grandmother’s house, and the family could not imagine life without him. My mother clearly remembers the small squared shirt and blue jeans Rainer was wearing the day he left. After they said goodbye, my mother and grandmother sat on the couch silently for several minutes. “It was one of the saddest moments of my life” my mother said.
My mother eventually migrated to Mexico as well. She got a visa to visit my aunt and in one of those trips, she met my father, married, and decided to move. She tried to convince my grandmother to move as well, but she refused.
My aunt and my mother did come back to Cuba every few months to visit. And it was on and in one of those trips they decided to go to the beach in Varadero, where the picture that led me to write this story was taken.
“My greatest excitement was to go back to my country,” my aunt told me. “But every time I went I saw it worse and worse.” At the very moment when the picture was taken, you can see the excitement she talks about on her face. Rainer was back in Cuba, living with my grandmother because he did not like Mexico and missed his home country. My aunt was visiting his son in the place where he raised him, remembering that time he lived with her siblings and mother.
The picture represents a wonderful moment for my family — a reunion. But there are few things worth remembering from that trip. They were having such a good time that they wanted to stay for longer than planned, but the rooms at the hotel were full. Nestor, my mother’s boyfriend at the time (who is all the way to the right in the picture) managed to convince a local family to let them stay at their house. They agreed, and my uncle didn’t pay only with money, he also paid them with four chickens and two bottles of cooking oil.
They had a fun trip, but the deterioration of the country could not be hidden and made my aunt extremely sad and melancholic. The scarcity made the buildings fall apart, people were stealing at their jobs, and ideological repression was still present. Every time, more and more friends would manage to leave the country and more people who stayed behind wanted to leave as well.
On the plain back from that trip, my aunt promised herself she would not go back until Fidel Castro died. It had become too painful. She almost kept that promise because she only went back 25 years after, only two months before his death.
During all those years, my grandmother never wanted to leave her country, even though all of her children had left. I remember going to the supermarket in Mexico as a child to buy blanks for her shotgun because you could not find them in Cuba. My grandmother needed them so she could fire away whenever she heard someone around the house. But thieves still broke in and stole paintings and furniture while she slept. Her children paid someone to take care of her, but caregivers were unreliable and stole from her as well.
When I was 11 years old, I flew from Mexico with my dad to visit my grandmother. He dropped me off at her house and went to Islas Caimanes, an island near by, to attend to some business, or now that I think about it, maybe to meet a Cuban lover. I ended up staying with my grandmother for a week. It was ten years after she started to live by herself. I didn’t know her well because I visited Cuba only every few years. By this time her health, both physical and mental, was deteriorating. I remember she couldn’t cook, and when she did, I felt truly sad and worried about my health with every bite I ate to please her.
I remember that even though there were many beds in the house and we could have slept in separate rooms, she slept on the floor next to me so we wouldn’t be apart. She let me sleep on her bed, which was not that much more comfortable. Most beds in Cuba are old. Even now, there are still people who work repairing mattresses.
Every night before going to bed we would spend some time with the lights off, talking about life. I remember how one night she said “I am going to tell you something but you have to promise you won’t tell anyone. It is a secret.” She confessed she had not intended to have my uncle or to marry Gallego. She told me the whole story with the honesty of life long friends. Amazed, I asked if my mom knew. No, she said, “You, Gallego and myself are the only people in the world who know about this.” Only later did I learn that everyone in the family already knew this. Anyhow, I was pleased she wanted to take me into her confidence. I considered that “secret” like a gift, an act of trust that made me feel, maybe for the first time, like someone worthy of trusted.
Eventually my grandmother did leave Cuba. We had to bring her to Mexico because she could not live by herself anymore, but she hated it. By this time I was studying abroad and I barely saw her, but the woman they brought to the house was not the grandmother I got to know on my trip as an 11-year-old. She had dementia and barely knew who we were. When my grandmother died three years ago, I remember my mother feeling guilty, telling me she got sick so fast because she was lonely for so many years in Cuba.
When I see this picture in Varadero, as much as when I go to Havana and see my grandmother’s deteriorating house, I think of a time I only lived through my family’s storytelling. I picture my family spending time together at the terrace. I mentally fix the cracks in the mirrors and the water leakage on the roof.
Whenever my mother visited Cuba for the first time after my grandmother died, she would desperately clean, set rat tramps, spray insecticide, water the plants. I would help her, scrubbing the bathtub, washing every clothing item in the house and sweating like crazy during the Caribbean summer. We would exhaust ourselves, trying to bring the house back to the way it was so long ago, before everyone left.
Exhausted, we would finally sit at the terrace to drink espresso (“one must always drink coffee sitting down” my grandma and my mother would always say). My mother would rock back and forth in the rocking chair, realizing as much as I did that there was no way we could fix the enormous house, as much as there was no way we could go back in time, when the house was full of life, the time the picture evokes.
“I miss my mom so much,” she would tell me as tears would peacefully go down her cheeks.
