An American Son: A Memoir (16 page)

I would have to get permission from two people before I could officially commit to the race: Al Cardenas and Jeanette. I hadn’t mentioned my intentions to either of them yet, and I wasn’t looking forward to it now. The
conversation with Jeanette turned out to be easier than I’d expected. She had always assumed politics would eventually play a big part in our lives. This was a little sooner than she had expected, she said, but if that was what I wanted to do, it was fine with her.

Al would be a harder sell. I expected that rather than tell me he didn’t want me to do it, he would tell me the other partners would object. I decided to preempt the argument and go straight to the firm’s senior partner, Tom Tew. I explained that the commission met only four hours a month and wouldn’t interfere with my cases. Nor did I anticipate any conflict of interest between city commission work and the interests of our clients. It would be no bigger a commitment than serving on a condominium board, I assured him. He wasn’t enthusiastic about the idea, but he didn’t object. He had been involved in litigation concerning the 1997 Miami mayoral elections, and, I suspected, had been a little bitten by the political bug himself.

I met with Al next, and as I expected, he expressed concern that the other partners would be displeased. I told him I had already received Tom’s permission. There wasn’t anything he could say to discourage me after that. I know he was worried that in a few months, when he became the state party chairman, his partners would complain he was spending too much time on politics at the firm’s expense. Now he would worry I couldn’t be relied on to pick up the slack in his absence. But he let me do it anyway, and I was grateful.

I would run for my first political office in 1998 and, with a little luck, win it. I would also get married to the woman I loved, who would eventually have cause to wonder if the major events of my political career and our life together would always coincide.

T
HE CAMPAIGN BEGAN WITH THE START OF THE NEW year. With the election scheduled for early April, I had just three months to introduce myself to voters and persuade them to support me. West Miami has only five thousand residents, and even in a high-turnout election, only a little more than eight hundred people vote. You reach them by walking the streets of their neighborhoods and knocking on their doors.

I knew the mechanics of that kind of campaign well from my time volunteering for Lincoln Diaz-Balart in 1992 and for Senator Dole in 1996. I needed good walk lists, lists of registered voters organized the way courier routes are laid out for mail delivery.

I needed a message, something to say to voters when they opened their door that would make a good first impression. And I needed literature to hand them that included my name, picture and the office I was running for to remind them on Election Day that they had met me and I had seemed like a nice enough fellow.

I started knocking on doors the first week of January. I calculated it would take twelve weeks to visit every voting household and speak personally to a voter. I rarely walked alone. Rebeca Sosa introduced me to a local activist, Gerardo Ramos, who usually walked with me. Rebeca often accompanied me, too, and personally introduced me to voters. She was immensely popular in West Miami, and her support gave me instant credibility.

I had another frequent companion on my walks: my father. He was a natural at it. Personable and helpful, he impressed voters, especially elderly voters. West Miami has a large elderly population. Many voters were reluctant to open their door to a stranger, especially a young male stranger. But an appeal from a friendly seventy-one-year-old Cuban American who wanted to visit with them about his son, the aspiring politician, was a disarming and welcome request. After decades of friendly interaction with people across a bar in the hope his affability would encourage a generous tip, my father knew how to charm people.

He was never happier than when he was helping his children. He enjoyed campaigning and working for a purpose that was dear to him: his children’s success. And I enjoyed the gratifying sense that I had made him proud of me, as my brother had done on the football field three decades earlier.

He was particularly adept at helping supporters who didn’t drive or who, for other reasons, couldn’t vote on Election Day. We gave their names to my dad, and he would pay them another visit and help them fill out a request for an absentee ballot. His visits often took a long time. Many of the voters he helped lived alone. Their children were gone and starting families of their own. Those who didn’t drive spent most of their days inside their homes, and ventured into the world only for an occasional visit to the doctor. They were lonely.

They offered him coffee, and began to talk about personal matters. They discussed their children and grandchildren. They shared recollections of their lives in Cuba, and the years of striving in America to make a better life for their families. He always left his telephone number with them. When they received their ballots in the mail, many of them called and asked him back to help them fill out the ballots.

The home visits I made during the campaign had a profound effect on me. I had grown up in a Cuban American home, but I don’t think I had understood the community and my place in it until this experience. I don’t think I really knew where I was from and who I was until I spent hundreds of hours in the company of the people who claimed me as one of their own.

To maximize the number of voters we contacted, we knocked on the doors of younger voters between six and eight at night. They greeted you at the door, listened to your pitch and then sent you on your way. They were
tired after a long day of work, and had to make dinner and help their kids with homework. Sometimes I encountered them in their driveways as they were arriving home from work or returning from an errand. They would give me only a few minutes to make an impression. Older voters were different.

I met as many widows as married couples. Grandchildren often roamed their homes after day care and school had finished for the day and before their parents came home from work. They were usually reluctant to open their door to me. I might have been some young hood or con artist who preyed on the elderly, trying to trap them in an elaborate hoax or get them to open their door to an intruder posing as a politician. The first few minutes of conversation were through a screen door and sometimes a closed one. More often than not, though, I was eventually invited into their homes to discuss my candidacy over the inevitable cup of Cuban coffee.

The coffee is prepared in a metal Italian-made coffeepot. The first few percolated drops are poured into a measuring cup partially filled with sugar to make a syrupy substance called
espumita
. After the rest of the coffee is percolated, it is poured into the
espumita
to sweeten it and give it a light foam. While the coffee brewed, they aired their grievances and asked my views about them. Did I think the cost of living was too high? Why had their auto insurance premiums increased when they had never had an accident, and their property insurance premiums, too, when they had never filed a claim? Why had gas prices doubled? Did I think crime in West Miami was becoming a big problem?

When the coffee was served, my hosts would steer the conversation away from the campaign and begin to talk of more personal things. I always noticed the pictures first: the decade-old high school graduation photos of their now grown and absent children, the pictures of their grandchildren’s christenings and graduations and inductions into the military.

They told me the stories of their lives. They were, most of the time, stories of loss. It often seemed as if they were recalling it for their own as much as my benefit, as if seeking their own affirmation—not another’s—that their lives had virtue and meaning and importance.

They reminded me that they had lived in Cuba when they were my age, and had once had plans to become a doctor or lawyer or business owner. And then they had to leave. They came to Miami or New York, expecting
to return to Cuba in a few months or a few years. Cuba had fallen into the hands of dictators before, but it never lasted more than a few years at most. They could wait it out. They took whatever work they could find: at a factory, a janitor’s job at a hotel or apartment building, loading trucks. Then they started looking for ways to make a little more money. They were going to be here for only a little while, but why not make the most of it. So they opened a side business. They sold car parts from the trunk of their car. They rented a small storefront and opened a business. They bought some brushes and painted houses. Or they were promoted at work. They became a supervisor at the factory or head custodian at a Miami Beach hotel. Nothing had changed yet in Cuba, but still they believed the regime would end.

But it never did end, and the years passed so quickly. So they saved their money and bought a house. The kids were growing up now, speaking more English than Spanish. And then the children were gone, and grandchildren arrived. Now here they still were, some of them alone, readying to leave the world and knowing they would die having never seen their homeland again.

They had made their lives here in the houses where I visited them, different lives than they had expected to lead. Here they had realized they would never do the things they had dreamed of when they were young. Here was where they had relinquished those dreams and dedicated their lives to their children’s happiness. Here they lived vicariously through their children’s achievements. Here, on every wall and shelf, were diplomas and certificates and other tokens of achievement and success they revered, often well out of proportion to their real-world significance. All parents are proud of their children; this was more than pride. This was affirmation. Their lives had purpose. They had lived for a reason. They had made their mark.

I found heartache, too: anguish over adult offsprings’ unwillingness to make something of their lives; pain over a son or daughter’s recent divorce; the loneliness of separation from loved ones who had died or moved away, and from busy children who paid them less attention than they deserved.

When it was time for me to go and they walked me to the door, many would remark they were pleased to see a new face in politics. They were glad there were young people interested in running for elective office. The desire for change is common in American politics. We’re an often dissatisfied people, and we often have cause to be. But I sensed they meant more than
that. Many told me I reminded them of their son Carlos, or their grandson Ernesto, or any number of other children and grandchildren. My ambitions, too, they wanted me to know, affirmed their sacrifice.

They had lost everything: their youth, their culture, their country. They had to settle for something other than their dreams. They had built a new life, often a good life, but different than the life they had once wanted. Now, in their final years, they wanted to be sure of the purpose of it all. Who were they? What did they do? What would they leave behind? What difference had they made?

Who was I really to them? Someone who bore a physical resemblance to a son or grandson? No. I represented their children and grandchildren’s generation. My success, and the success of any Cuban American of my generation, was their answer. Our lives, accomplishments and contributions were a lasting tribute to theirs. Even as a boy, I had grasped that my family’s emotional investment in my happiness and success was as great as their investment of time, work and self-denial. Now I recognized that an entire generation of Cuban exiles had the same emotional investment in my success.

On the streets of the small city of West Miami, in the early months of 1998, I discovered who I was. I was an heir to two generations of unfulfilled dreams. I was the end of their story.

I raised about $10,000 for the campaign—enough to pay for a couple of mailings, some campaign signs and handouts for Election Day. We didn’t do any polling, and I didn’t know if I would win or lose. I badly wanted not to lose my first race but tried to prepare myself emotionally in the event that I did. As it turned out, the election wasn’t close. I, and another candidate Rebeca had supported, finished well ahead of the other two candidates running for the two open seats. The results were announced by the city clerk just outside city hall. I celebrated my victory in the courtyard of a nearby community center with my family, friends from the Dole campaign and supporters. At one point in the party, I noticed my mother sitting in a chair with her head down, weeping. My mother is an emotional person. It isn’t hard to make her cry. But my first political victory moved my parents more deeply than anything I had accomplished before. They had never pushed me toward one profession or another. They had never encouraged me to be an attorney or a politician. They wanted me to dream my own dreams, and live them, as they had never been allowed to do.

My political career began that night. But something more important had happened. That night I realized that whatever I did with the opportunity I had just been given would reflect on my parents as well. They wanted me to succeed—they
needed
me to succeed. For in my success, they could find their rest, assured they had lived for something. My dreams were theirs, and my success as well.