An American Son: A Memoir (8 page)

He was very slender, and never had much of an appetite. He was taller than he appeared when he walked with his cane. His hair was thin on top and thick on the sides, and he had a pronounced bump on the back of his head, where he had been struck by a rock his brother had thrown at him when they were boys. He had narrow eyes, which made him look slightly Asian, an ethnic heritage he occasionally falsely claimed. Despite his stooped posture and slight frame, he had a very dignified air about him, a stateliness in his dress and manner, which seemed to be a conscious effort to appear cultured and successful.

Papá was proud of his education, and resentful that his against-the-odds rise to middle-class prosperity in Cuba had been lost to the depredations of others. He was an adherent of the “great man” school of history,
and admired historical figures whose will and accomplishments had singularly influenced their times. He believed the United States was destined to be the defender of human progress, the only power capable of preventing tyranny from dominating the world. He revered Franklin Roosevelt and Harry Truman. He had detested communism even before Castro came to power. He accused John F. Kennedy of betraying the Cuban exiles who had fought at the Bay of Pigs, but loved Bobby Kennedy for plotting to kill Castro. And despite his Latin heritage, he strongly supported Britain’s military expedition to recover the Falkland Islands. He told me he thought Margaret Thatcher should have ordered an invasion of Argentina itself.

He had few hobbies in his later years. He liked to play bingo at the casinos. He smoked his cigars. He read voraciously, and never stopped trying to master English. And he talked to us, especially to me.

Our relationship was more than a natural family attachment. I think we recognized and respected each other as fellow autodidacts. He was the son of farmers whose love of newspapers and history books helped him rise above the low station to which he had been born. I was the grandson whose enthusiasm for learning wasn’t apparent in school but was obvious to him.

The summers of my Vegas childhood were carefree. I went to a public swimming pool around midday. Veronica and I watched reruns of sitcoms in the late afternoons. When the temperature dropped a little, we went outside to play with neighborhood friends until dark. But two hours or more of each morning were dedicated to Papá’s tutorials. Before he consented to answer my questions on the subject that preoccupied me at the moment, he had me read to him from a copy of
Diario Las Américas
, the Spanish-language daily newspaper published in Miami that our relatives mailed to us. He would have already read the paper by then, but insisted I read it to him again so I would learn to speak his native language correctly.

He nodded to indicate when I had read enough, and he was ready to expound on any issue I cared to raise. My questions were often related to some fanciful ambition I had at the time. When I told him I wanted to be a farmer, he recounted his childhood on his family’s farm: the crops they had raised; the care and feeding of the animals they had kept; the harsh nature of the work and the meager living it provided; the tools and techniques they had employed to overcome the challenges of weather, climate and soil.

When I shared that I was interested in the military, he discussed how
American soldiers had helped liberate Cuba from the Spanish and Europe from the Nazis. He chronicled the history of the conflicts. He explained their causes, the politics that had led to them, influenced their direction and been shaped by their conclusion. He recounted the actions and motives of the wars’ central figures. He described important battles, and commended the virtues of the military leaders who had won them; Generals MacArthur and Patton were his favorites.

When I boasted I would someday lead an army of exiles to overthrow Fidel Castro and become president of a free Cuba, he narrated the life of José Martí and the heroics of the Mambises, who had won Cuba’s independence. He identified the virtues and flaws of postindependence leaders such as Carlos Prío Socarrás, Ramón Grau and Eduardo Chibás.

Papá seemed to know something about almost everything, or everything that interested me anyway. He was a gifted storyteller, the talent he had learned as a cigar factory lector. His accounts were exciting and forceful, rich in imagery and telling anecdotes. They held me spellbound.

My interest in politics began around the time we moved to Vegas, and by 1980 politics was a preoccupation second only to football. Two events had captured my attention that year: Senator Edward Kennedy’s challenge to President Carter for the Democratic presidential nomination and the Iran hostage crisis. I was a Kennedy supporter. With rapt attention I watched the Democratic convention in New York, and was crushed by the outcome of what seemed an excruciatingly slow delegate count that gave the nomination to President Carter. I was inspired by Senator Kennedy’s concession speech.

My grandfather didn’t admire either of them. Ronald Reagan was his man. He despised President Carter because of the Iran hostage crisis, a humiliation Papá seemed to feel personally. America must be a strong country, he constantly preached, or the world would succumb to darkness, and a strong country requires a strong leader. He thought the world didn’t respect or fear Carter. He was weak, he said, and other countries preyed on his weakness. That’s why the Soviets had invaded Afghanistan and the Iranians had seized our embassy. He blamed the failed attempt to rescue the hostages on cuts to defense spending Carter had made. Ronald Reagan would restore our strength, he assured me. He would confront communism. Our allies would follow him and our enemies would respect him.

When Reagan was elected and Iran released our hostages on his inauguration, Papá made certain to point out to me that it confirmed everything he had been telling me. Reagan had barely been sworn into office, and our enemies were already capitulating to him. Reagan’s election and my grandfather’s allegiance to him were defining influences on me politically. I’ve been a Republican ever since. More than just help me develop a political identity, my grandfather instilled in me the importance of strong leadership and conviction. He urged me to study and learn but, more important, to do something useful with the knowledge I acquired.

I wrote a paper in the fifth grade praising President Reagan for restoring the U.S. military after it had been demoralized and allowed to decay in the years before his presidency. I recently found it in a red suitcase that had belonged to my grandfather, and still contains some of his possessions.

Papá was an unwavering supporter of President Reagan for the remainder of his life. He loved Reagan’s anti-Soviet and prodemocracy rhetoric, and he staunchly defended the more controversial Reagan policies. I particularly remember his outspoken support for Reagan’s development of the MX missile, and support for the Contras in Nicaragua and the government of El Salvador.

My grandfather’s talks weren’t always about history or current events. Neither were they scrupulously objective. He wasn’t an admirer of our new church. He was never a religious man, although I know he believed in God, and openly acknowledged Him. But I never saw him attend any religious service except on the single occasion when he agreed to accompany us to Sunday services at the Mormon Church. After we came home and ate lunch, he went to smoke his cigar on the porch and I followed him. I asked him what he had thought of the services, and he told me he would never go back because he hadn’t seen a single African American in attendance. He wasn’t entirely accurate. There was a biracial family in the congregation at the time. But the argument didn’t impress my grandfather, and true to his word, he kept his distance from our church.

He could be quite sharp in his criticism of people, even people close to him, of whose behavior he disapproved. He frequently found fault with some of my Miami cousins who he believed lacked direction and ambition. When the Culinary Workers Union staged a strike at my father’s place of employment, which my father, as a member of the union, was obliged to
join, he told my father he hoped Reagan would fire them all as he did the striking air traffic controllers.

For reasons he never shared with me, Papá didn’t like my friends, the Thiriots. When they called the house and asked for me, he would hang up the phone. When they came to the door, he would tell them I wasn’t at home. Some of my behavior frustrated him. He couldn’t abide my passion for football and resented my refusal to play baseball. He loved Tommy Lasorda and the LA Dodgers and was hurt when I wouldn’t agree to watch their games with him.

He had odd quirks. He liked to call my sister by an invented nickname that scrambled the letters of her name, “Canirove.” He constantly drummed his knuckles on a table or the arm of a chair in a specific and unvarying rhythmic pattern, a tic I now possess. He claimed to be part Chinese, which he was not. He boasted he was directly related to José Martí, whom he slightly resembled, but who is not, according to any known records, one of our ancestors. In his last years, he insisted he was born an American citizen around the turn of the century in Tampa, Florida, where Martí had lived in exile for a time. We kept an old Universal weight-lifting machine that I used to train for football in the rec room in our house that also served as his bedroom. He frequently complained that the contraption wasted electricity. When I explained that it didn’t use electricity, he ignored me.

My father liked to tease my grandfather about little things, his quirks and some of his opinions. Most of it was good-natured kidding, and it didn’t anger my grandfather. It might have annoyed him a little at times, but he never showed it. “Okay, Mario. Whatever you say, Mario,” was usually the only response he would give. My mother, on the other hand, would get angry at my father. She thought his teasing was disrespectful, and would scold him for it.

My father probably shared my grandfather’s political views, but he rarely discussed politics with my grandfather or with me when I was young, or with anyone as far as I know. He was consumed by the business of making a living and raising his children, and showed little interest in much else. He shared the family’s antipathy to communism and visceral dislike for talk about redistributing wealth. Like my grandfather, he believed such schemes led only to entrenching the power of the regime at the expense of
the powerless, who lost jobs and opportunities because their employers had fled the regime that had confiscated their property.

My father and grandfather were different in many respects. They had different personalities, and neither was given to effusive expressions of affection. But they loved each other. My grandfather admired how committed my father was to our family, how hard he worked to give us a decent home, how carefully he protected us. To my father, the young refugee from an unhappy home, my grandfather and grandmother were his first experience with two loving parents since his mother had died.

My father regarded Papá as his father. Papá lived with or near us for most of his life in the United States. My father never complained about having to support him. Every house he owned had a room for my grandfather. My father never considered buying a house that couldn’t accommodate his father in law. The second and last time I saw my father cry was when Papá died.

My grandfather was my mentor and my closest boyhood friend. I learned at his feet, relied on his counsel and craved his respect. I still do. He constantly urged me to study hard and go to college. He wanted Veronica and me to live accomplished lives when we grew up. He wanted us to have not just jobs, but distinguished careers that would give our lives purpose and the social status he had always wanted for himself. He would scold me for performing poorly in school, but he never let me believe I was incapable of being successful. He knew I could be, and he helped me prepare for it. His dreams for us were his legacy.

He taught me many things, but none more important than the conviction that I must not waste the opportunities my parents had sacrificed to give us and our country made available to us. I’ve always believed, even when I was an inattentive and undisciplined student, that the time would arrive for me to become serious and do something important with my life, and I would be ready for it. I believed it because Papá taught me to believe it. And that, more than the wealth of knowledge he shared with me, more than the epics of history he evoked so powerfully for me, more than his opinions and passions and eccentricities, has made all the difference in the world to me.

B
Y THE TIME I ENTERED THE SIXTH GRADE, I WAS ACCUStomed to living in an ethnically diverse community, unlike the Cuban enclave where we had lived in Miami. Las Vegas was no longer a peculiar-looking desert town. It was my home. I was comfortable and happy there. I had no reason to feel otherwise.

Our neighborhood was predominantly white. Along with our neighbors from Mexico, we were one of the few Hispanic families who lived there. But I went to school, played football and became friends with African American and Mexican American kids. I had felt part of a majority in Miami; I was a minority of a minority in Vegas. Yet I rarely felt out of place in the community that had, for the most part, welcomed us warmly. I was a Vegas kid, and content to be one, even after my first exposure to racial prejudice.