My grandmother Nieves was a strong woman. She had the courage to leave Spain for a better life in Cuba. She had even more courage to be the one to stay behind with us in Cuba when my parents had to escape to avoid Castro’s retribution. With my sister and me in tow, she traveled with us throughout Central America until we legally entered the U.S. Since my mom was a working mom, she was the one who took care of us when we weren’t in school and whatever my grandmother said, we did. She sounds tough, but she was also had great stories to tell and was an amazing cook. She was also a voracious reader which I guess is where I got to be such a big reader. I’m actually named after my grandmother since my real first name is Caridad de las Nieves. I had to change it when I became a citizen. I have to mention that my grandmother could not have done all those things without my grandfather who was truly a saint and a very loving and caring man.
#ThrowbackThursday Time to Leave . . .
I’ve always thought that you can’t know where you’re going, if you don’t acknowledge where you’ve been. For good or bad, every step in your life leaves a mark. Like in this picture. I’m pretty sure this is a photo of me for my passport when we were leaving Cuba. I must have been about 3 or so. My parents were already in the U.S. and my maternal grandparents were watching my sister and me. We were stuck in Cuba because the Castro regime had taken away our passports because my parents had left. Soldiers would come and harass the family regularly. My parents finally found a way to get us out and to get us in the U.S. It was a scary time in my life and I think it shows in this photo. I think inside of me there is still that scared little girl at times until the woman I’ve become rises up and reminds me that surviving all that has made me strong.
RIP Jose Fernandez
The shocking news came on while we were watching the Mets game last night. Cuban-American Jose Fernandez, who we feared as a competitor for the Miami Marlins, was dead at 24 in a boating accident.
Yoenis Cespedes, a fellow Cuban and Mets outfielder, hung up a Mets jersey with Fernandez’s name and number in tribute. Others followed suit all around the league.
Fernandez was voted the 2013 National League Rookie of the Year award. His was a promising life cut short, but it was a life of inspiration and as a fellow Cuban-American, it pained me to hear of his loss.
A Cuban-American sportscaster from Miami spoke about what Fernandez meant to the Cuban community, much like each and every successful Cuban resonates with Cubans all across the U.S.
We came here for freedom and to live the American dream. Fernandez embodied that spirit and attaining the dream.
At 14 he attempted to defect, but was caught and sent to prison. He tried again three other times and for each failure, he went to prison. During the successful attempt, Fernandez’s mother fell overboard and Fernandez had to rescue her, risking his own life to do so.
While Fernandez, his mother, and sister attained freedom here in the U.S. in 2007, his grandmother was left behind and it took six years before she could join her family in 2013. In 2015, Fernandez became a U.S. citizen.
Freedom was that important to Fernandez as it is to so many Cuban refugees who risked so much to get here. I understand. I lived it and have had the ability to attain the American Dream.
It’s why I stand and place my hand over my heart for the national anthem even when I’m at home and watching a game.
RIP Jose Fernandez. My sympathies to his family on their loss and to the families of the two other men killed in the boating accident.
#ThrowbackThursday Me and My Curls
I think this photo was taken in Cuba before we escaped to the U.S. Those years in Cuba were tough times for my family. My parents and brother were already in America, my brother to avoid being conscripted into the militia and my parents to avoid jail for turning against Castro. It took my parents nearly two years to get us out of Cuba. During that time, Castro’s men would regularly come by the house and toss it. My grandmother would hide us under the bed while that happened.
I’m told that for years I was afraid of anyone in a uniform, but I don’t really remember much about those years. My first memories are of being in the United States, my new home. Of being both sad, but happy to finally be with my family.
When you think of booking a trip to Cuba, please think about the decades of misery heaped on others by the Castros who will be the ones benefiting from your trip.
My hair was a lot lighter in this photo and I only have a little bit of blonde left in the front. The curls are gone, although I still have wavy hair when it’s a little longer.
#ThrowbackThursday My Mom and Brother in Cuba
Cuba has been in the news a lot lately and for many of us who left, it’s been an emotional upheaval. People ask me all the time if I will go back and I have to explain how difficult the Cuban government makes it for us to visit. Besides, the Castros made my family’s life miserable, so why would I go back so long as they’re alive?
But, I thought I’d share this photo of my mom and brother in Cuba before the Castro dictatorship took hold and created the diasporo that exiled so many Cubans all around the world and in the United States.
#ThrowbackThursday My Mom & Old Time Grace
Whenever I see this picture, I think of how more formal people used to be and how the photos they took were filled with what I call “old time grace.” Of course, you didn’t just snap off a selfie back then. I’m sure having a photograph taken was expensive and quite an event, so you wanted to look your best.
This is a photo taken of my mom in Spain, I think. My grandparents had gone back to visit family before they returned to Cuba. My grandparents had plans to return to Spain to live, but the Spanish Civil War broke out and my grandparents just never got back there.
Many many years later, we would all have to flee Cuba and come to the U.S. and my grandfather would never see his native land again. My family finally visited Spain in 1973 to see where my grandparents had come from in Galicia and to find the family that had gotten lost over the years.
Anyway, my beautiful and adorable mother! Isn’t she lovely?
My Writer’s Journey Part 2 #amwriting
A few weeks ago I shared with you the start of my writer’s journey and although I got the writing bug in the fifth grade, it wasn’t until high school that I once again sat down to think about writing something longer than a short story or class assignment.
As some of you may know, I was born in Cuba and left when I was quite young. That story is a long one and filled with adventure in many ways, but the story of what came before was what inspired my first book.
Throughout my life I’d heard bits and pieces about how my parents had worked with the Civic Resistance in Havana to help bring about change on the island. I’d also heard how they realized that the change they had wrought, namely putting Fidel Castro in power, was totally not what they had expected. Because of that, they had started working with many of the same people to bring about change again. Of course, that’s what prompted my parents’ precipitous escape from Cuba and started a nearly two year struggle to get the rest of the family out of the country.
But the “after” part is for another time. It’s the “before” part that inspired the first novel I wanted to write, a romantic adventure about a wealthy Philadelphia Main Line woman who goes down to Cuba and falls in love with a handsome doctor who is involved in the rebellion. In real life, it was my mother who was the rebel and briefly engaged to a rich Main Line man. His family didn’t approve and so that romance ended not-so-happily, but in my books there is always a happily-ever-after.
I gleaned what info I could from family and friends and books so I could write that romance set during the Cuban revolution. Off and on during my high school days, I did that work and built the story in my head. I asked for a typewriter (no computers in my day!) and desk for high school graduation and pictured myself slaving away to write that novel.
I’m not sure my mom approved on many levels. For starters, she rarely talked about Cuba and what had happened. I know it had hurt her deeply to be so wrong and bring about such horrific change to the country she loved. Once we came here, we became American and moved away from all that, I think in part because remembering was too painful for her.
I’m not sure she approved of my thinking of writing as a possible career choice. I’d already been accepted to a few colleges and in her mind there were only a few professions that would allow her daughters to prosper, law and medicine being at the top of the list. Writer, not so much.
I didn’t get that typewriter or desk for high school graduation, but that didn’t stop me from collecting all my notes and research so I could start writing my novel during the summer before college. That decision shocked my mother I’m sure, but she went along with it.
Her office was getting rid of this awful pink paper and so she brought some home for me to type my first draft on. We weren’t well off so things like reams of paper were not in the budget.
Somehow the pink fit the romantic undertones in the novel. LOL!
I didn’t finish that novel that summer, but I got at least a hundred or more pages done. I kept at it during free time in college while I was a Science Major with my eye set on a career as a doctor. That’s my hubby and I in the summer after our freshman year of college.
I figured, doctors read and doctors write. I could always do the writing in my spare time and finish my novel.
By the time college was done, I was a little closer to having a finished work, but life has a funny way of throwing a curve your way just when you think you know where you are going.
I graduated magna cum laude, but I didn’t get into medical school. My mom had left her job to join a new law firm and I went to work with her while I decided what to do. But even though there was some hesitation about my future as a doctor, I was sure of one thing: I was going to finish my novel.