Jubana! (5 page)

“Ees true,” Mami says. “We
were
stoopeed to go. But joor johng an' joo don' theenk. We were fool of energy an' wanted to see what was goheengh on. Papi deedn't want to go an' we forc-ed heem. Papi
nació viejito.”

Papi was born a little old man.

 

Another girl, a sweet little redhead, was born to Mami on June 6, 1960, a year and a half after the hypocritical Castro & Co. had overthrown the hypocritical Batista & Co. My new sister's name was Cecilia. Cecilia lived for only two days, dying of a congenital heart problem. Mami had had German measles during the pregnancy. Losing Ceci was the first major blow to my mother's otherwise charmed life, and she never recovered from it. She left the maternity ward like a ghost and locked herself in her bedroom for a week or a month or a year—it was all the same to me—and refused to talk or eat. All Mami wanted to do was sleep. Zeide Boris had always told her there'd be plenty of time for sleep later on
(after death), but Mami slept and slept. I tried turning the faceted cut-crystal doorknob of the door to her bedroom, but it wouldn't open. Sometimes Mami's gorgeous blond friend Anitica came over; she was the only person allowed inside the sanctum. I pressed my ear up against the door lots of times but I never heard anything. Perhaps there was nothing to say.

My parents have almost never spoken of Cecilia, a person whose memory instantly turned taboo. There was no funeral. On the anniversary of her death, June 8, my parents do not light a yartzeit candle, as they do for other dead family members we honor and remember. I myself was able to fully remember the experience of Cecilia only when I got into psychoanalysis three decades later. My brain's hard drive finally recovered the buried file and it came back up intact, crystal doorknob and all. I told Mami about it. She was horrified. She was mad. She couldn't understand how I could possibly remember something that happened when I was so tiny. Mami decided she was suddenly ambivalent about Gramps (my nickname for my psychoanalyst, Dr. Adland), whom she'd originally liked. She accused me of having “too much memory.” I said there's no such thing.

In 1970, ten years after Cecilia's death, in another country, Simon & Garfunkel's
Bridge over Troubled Water
LP came out. I was still just a little kid, but I'd play the Latin-flavored song “Cecilia” over and over, just to hear my sister's name: “Cecilia, you're breaking my heart…Oh, Cecilia, I'm down on my knees/I'm begging you please to come home/Come on home.”

I loved how the singers drew out the second syllable, that long, lovely “ee” sound, Cec
iii
lia. Even now, whenever I miss my Ceci, or the idea of a sister whom I'll never have, I play the song. I know it's about a prostitute but it comforts me all the same. If I ever have a daughter, Cecilia will be her name.

 

On my second birthday, in December 1959, Mami went out to buy party supplies, leaving me home alone with our cook, Carmen. (Panchita and Candita had the day off.) Carmen made me the typical Cuban child's
merienda,
snack, of a
café con leche
and a
galleta Cubana con queso crema y guayaba,
a Cuban cracker with cream cheese and a slice of guava paste. She turned on the radio. This time there was no Elvis, El Rey; it was an angry man's voice yammering and yawping in Spanish.

“El Caballo,” Carmen explained, with a surrendering, dreamy sigh. The Stallion, Castro's nom de guerre. She dabbed my cream cheese–covered lips with one of the imported embroidered white linen napkins my parents had received as a wedding gift.

“¿Cuál caballo?”
I asked, licking the sticky
guayaba
off my pearl and rose gold ID bracelet. Which horse?
“Caballitos no hablan.”
Little horses don't talk.

Carmen laughed, quietly and knowingly.

“Vamos, Yiyi,”
she said.
“Tenemos que vestirte para la fiesta. Tengo una sorpresa para tí.”
Let's go, Gigi. We have to get you dressed for the party. I have a surprise for you.

When Mami came home and saw me standing on her bed, modeling my new birthday outfit complete with all the requisite accessories, she screamed (in a bad way). Carmen, whose secret militiaman lover was a Castro convert, had dressed me in a baby guerrilla fighter uniform. Olive-gray camouflage shirt with matching cargo pants, tiny sandals, and a black Ché Guevara–style beret. (Sounds like a hip Gap Kids ad, doesn't it?) Oh, and a toy replica of Castro's beloved rifle with a telescopic sight, the same kind Herbert L. Matthews had described Fidel carrying and being so proud of.

“¡Mi'ja no es una guerrillerita!”
Mami cried, yanking the plas
tic rifle out of my hands and throwing it at Carmen's head. My daughter is no baby guerrilla!
“¡Atrevida! ¡Ahora mismo te vas de mi casa, traidora, o te pongo de patas en la calle!”
You insolent woman! You leave my house right this second, traitor, or I'll kick you to the curb!

“Mi novio es miliciano,”
Carmen said tauntingly. My boyfriend is a member of (Castro's) militia. It was a clear threat.

“¡Pues te vas con tu novio el miliciano a la calle!”
Then you go with your boyfriend the militiaman to the street! Mami maintained her outward bravado, but she instinctively knew this incident was a prologue of dark things to come.

“Á mi no m'importa un carajo,”
Carmen replied, indifferently. I don't give a fuck. She picked up the toy rifle and pointed it at us.
“Ustedes son los traidores. Ustedes son los que se van a arrepentir.”
You guys are the traitors. You guys are the ones who'll regret it.

Years later, Mami would admit, as only she could, “What really freak-ed me out was dat joo look-ed so cute. But I couldn't, like, get behind eet.”

In October 1960 Castro's new revolutionary government confiscated Zeide Boris's Camisetas Perro, Zeide Leon's Cuban American Textiles, and Papi's Centro Médico Nacional. All three men's assets were frozen. My father was still in his twenties, but my grandfathers and grandmothers, whose adopted Eden was sinking, were already well into their late fifties. The same fate befell thousands of others, as well as the owners of companies such as Bacardi, Colgate-Palmolive, Coca-Cola, Pepsi Cola, and ITT. Smelly guerrilla thugs barely old enough to shave arrived unannounced at our beautiful apartment. They had machine guns strapped across their chests. They took inventory of all our belongings and told us we could keep only whatever could fit into two or three suitcases apiece. In passing, they mentioned that they really liked our imported linens and my tiny pearl earrings
and golden baby bracelets. They added that our spacious apartment would make an ideal romantic hideaway for El Caballo and his many lady friends.

April 9, 1961: A bomb explodes in El Encanto. Another bomb explodes near the Pepsi Cola factory.

A newspaper ad from that period refers to El Encanto's five floors and sixty-five departments. “While in Cuba, do not fail to visit El Encanto.” (Mami says El Encanto had seven floors. Let's go with her version. It's not worth the aggravation to contradict her with “fact.”) Mami coped, sort of, with bomb number one. Denial's always good. “Probably some twelve-jear-ol' gohreelah jerk was een der trying to choh off or sometheengh. Stoopeed fohkehr. Dees
guajiros
[peasants] can't appreciate anytheengh goo'. I johs pray eet wasn't een de shoe departmen'.”

April 13, 1961: Another explosion at El Encanto reduces the seven-story building to dust and rubble. Just powder.

When her beloved Encanto was no more, Mami knew we were in real trouble. You just can't stay in a place when your favorite luxury department store isn't there anymore because two rebel bombs blew it up; your father, father-in-law, and husband have become suddenly unemployed and bankrupt; one of your baby daughters is dead; and the other one's dressed to kill, not marry.

P
oor little Cuba. Everybody wants a piece of magical, tiny you. Beautiful hand-tinted picture-postcard place. Ripe and sweet, juicy and soulful. The Cuba my parents knew is gone. But even now, outsiders keep picking at the carcass. The Mafia has been replaced by European tourists who go there on vacation to have sex with hot, soft minors because the hot, soft minors need cold, hard cash to survive. That's a perverse fact for people like my parents, who were considered deserters and called
gusanos.

Worms.

These people were forced out with only the suitcases they could carry.

I also got to keep the little red tricycle that Mami thought would get us all killed.

Mami had asked her friend Georgina to take care of our apartment while we were “away,” and handed her the keys. I was two years old. Nisia, my godmother, drove us to the airport. The tricycle and stuffed lamb were in the car with our luggage.

Hasta luego
to my
tata,
Panchita, who lovingly took care of and played with me, who fastened my pima cotton diapers with 18-karat gold pins and who mashed up black beans for me before I had teeth.
Adiós
to my
criada,
Candita, who carefully washed and polished the cool Spanish tile floor and ironed Papi's linen
guayaberas
and the hand-embroidered linen tablecloths and matching napkins.
Adiós y hasta nunca, puta
Carmen. Good-bye and good riddance, Carmen, you bitch-whore.

We left our spacious apartment on Calle Ocho in Miramar, the elegant northwest suburb of La Habana, for the ten-mile drive to José Martí airport. It was Tuesday, November 15, 1960. When we arrived there, I hoisted my lamb, tucked it under my arm, got on my tricycle, and pedaled furiously all the way to the airplane on the tarmac. The armed guerrilla at the foot of the steps told my mother that I couldn't take the tricycle on board. She nervously asked me in English—presumably so we wouldn't be understood by the guerrilla—to please get off the trike and let the guard have it.

“No!” I screamed. “This is MINE!”

“I'll get joo another one,” she whispered, “a better, preettier one.”

“Nooo!” My mother tried to pull me off the seat, but I wouldn't let go. “This is MY bike!” I roared, more to the guard than Mami. “It's my birthday bike! I'm not leaving it here! I'll kick that man if he tries!”

Miraculously, we were not shot on the spot.

“Okay, okay,
adelante,
” the guerrilla finally said, taking a couple of steps backward and shaking his head, arms bent and palms facing out, as if to say, “I surrender.” My mother carried my tricycle onto the plane. I carried the lamb.

Nisia stayed in Cuba by choice and is still there. She holds a high-ranking government position in the arts. I have a photograph of that last day in Cuba, my most cherished object. I carry
it with me all the time in my Filofax: Holding me in her warm, full arms is a young and glamorous Nisia, her cheek and mine pressed against each other. We have never seen each other again.

 

In Cuba we were beautiful and affluent. In the United States we were beautiful and broke. Like so many other first-wave Cuban exiles, we had lost it all. When we arrived in the United States, we were sure this was a temporary situation. I always say “we” because although I was just a toddler, I felt like the third spouse in my parents' marriage. They were young, in their early twenties, and never talked down to me as though I were an idiot. I was treated, for the most part, like a short adult. So instead of teaching me normal nursery rhymes like whatever the Spanish-language equivalent would be of “The Itsy-Bitsy Spider,” my mom taught me the one about how many long needles and pins I would stick in Fidel's body when he was dead and bloated, stinking on his back in the tropical sun. A subhuman pincushion with an ugly, pornographic beard. That's actually how I learned to count. The lyrics went,
“¿Cuántas agujas vamos a meter en Fidel, m'ija?”
How many needles will we stick into Fidel, my daughter?
“Vamos a meter una, dos, tres…”

I think Mami made it up. Children of the wronged and the imaginative get inculcated early. I don't know how you accept the loss of your beloved home and country and everything and everyone you knew and loved in your life. Maybe you have to imagine that the loss isn't a permanent fact; that it may be real, but not
really
real. Displaced just as my four Ashkenazi grandparents had been a generation before, we became wandering Cuban Jews. Jubanos. My grandparents had lost their parents to pogroms or to the Holocaust. Had they remained in Europe and Russia during Hitler's rise, who knows what might have become of them?

One of my maternal grandmother's brothers, Zalman (the Hebrew transliteration of Solomon) didn't leave the shtetl in Lithuania in time; soon he was rounded up and forced into a cattle car and sent to a concentration camp until the end of the war. He survived. He immigrated to Cuba. He called me
la princesa,
the princess, and when he held me on his lap and stroked my face, I thought I could see little green numbers on his wrist. Tío Salmen (Uncle Zalman in Spanish) had never celebrated a birthday until he came to Cuba as a young man. Behind his deep-set pale watery eyes lay a mystery of an unspeakably sad past.

How much reality can you stand? How much hurt? Where is the grace, humor, and strength to pull you through? How do you let go of everything you love?

Sometimes you have no choice. And so, in America, we started over again.

Most of our relatives stayed in Miami, others went to New York and New Jersey, still others to North Carolina to work in the textile mills. My parents were recruited by officials from St. Elizabeths mental hospital in Southeast Washington, D.C., who had gone to Miami in search of medical professionals among the refugees.

Mami had one black dress, one string of pearls, one pair of pearl earrings, and one pair of black high heels, and she wore that outfit to every job interview she had. It was so cold when we arrived that November that we had to go buy “coats.” Nobody in Cuba ever owned a “coat.” There was no need. Baba Dora, my maternal grandmother, had given Mami her mink stole
para el frio allá,
for the cold up there in the North, and Mami got tired of having to sneak around wearing it, feeling totally out of place in a slummy neighborhood in Southeast Washington. A Jubana anachronism. So we went downtown to Hecht's department store. They had a bakery there, and she'd buy me an elephant ear to quiet me while
she shopped. Mami was always shivering and crying and cursing the weather because she was so homesick and she hated the cold and the snow. We'd warm up in one store, dart out into the freezing street, then run into another store to warm up again.

Mami went to work after about a month, leaving me with a very sweet fellow Cuban refugee, a tall, skinny black woman named Amelia Gutierrez whom we'd met in Miami. We loved her and she lived with us for a year. After my bath Amelia would slather me with Alpha Keri body lotion until I was sticky (which I couldn't stand, which is why I'm so into the baby powder cornstarch attitude now). She'd make us lunch, varying typical Hispanic meals like fried eggs on white rice and fried ripe plantains, with typical American ones like pasta with butter and salt. Amelia was a wonderful seamstress. On Saturdays, after our mailman stopped in for his weekly espresso (he'd become addicted after the first time Mami invited him in for a
cafesito
break), Amelia, Mami, and I would go to
el tehng cehng,
the 5&10-cent store, to buy fabric to make dresses for the three of us. Mami and I were very sad when Amelia decided to go to New York to live with a cousin.

On my fourth birthday, I got a new nanny, a Peruvian kindergarten teacher whose name no one can remember now because she stayed so briefly. This lady was also really nice and talented. She knitted and crocheted me the most delicious winter party dress, my first. It was a little girl's bespoke dream, like wearing spun cotton candy, all pale pink angora, with tiny seed pearls hand-stitched into the bodice. Anastasia Romanov herself couldn't have had a better one.

Because Zeide Boris was Russian-born, I cultivated a fantasy that I
was
Anastasia, cruelly banished from my homeland, wandering the earth, misunderstood and ravaged, English a little rusty, a haunted princess. Yet I still bore that unmistakable
Russian refinement, wreathed in my sole pathetic surviving possessions: tiny pearl earrings and a custom-made pink party dress. I was
poignant.
Of course,
my
royal parents had made it out of the Revolution with me, and that certainly was a consolation. But everything we knew and loved—our riches, our whole old world, the lovely cushioned and cosseted way of life—had been wrenched from us by disgusting, illiterate revolutionary brutes. As our real-life family priest Máximo says, it's much worse to have had everything and lose it than to have never had anything at all. Máximo is a fellow Cuban exile whose fabulously wealthy family left Cuba almost exactly when we did. He is a Catholic priest in Washington, D.C., with a weakness for Neiman Marcus. Ergo, Mami Dearest considers him her brother. He gave her a medallion of St. Joseph of Cupertino (patron saint of air travelers, who levitated while praying), which she keeps in the coin compartment of her Coach wallet. Mami suffers from acute fear of flying—triggered when we flew out of Cuba forever—and unfortunately I inherited that phobia in my late twenties and still have it.

Though I got to keep my lamb and tricycle and we flew safely over an ocean and landed just fine, somewhere a trauma clicked and got locked into place. Maybe it was because someone at the Miami airport managed to steal my beloved little red birthday tricycle while we were being interviewed by immigration officers. Whatever it is, ever since I can remember, I've had the same two recurring nightmares. One is that someone is stealing something from me and I see them doing it and I accuse them and they always get away with the theft, no matter how much I yell and scream about the injustice. I awake hoarse and frustrated and humiliated. The second one—this one scares the bejesus out of me—is that I'm in
cinquecento
Venice, sightseeing. The permeating light is that ancient, thin, transparent yellow light seen in oil paintings from that period. I'm with an older man on a suspen
sion bridge, about a mile above the city, only there are no towers supporting the bridge. It's almost like a bridge made of vines, like from Tarzan movies. The bridge sways and feels very flimsy underfoot. The man and I are crossing it to reach the other side of intricate canals, moldering palaces, and secret Leonardo grottos. The dirty water below is silent but portentous. It's a hazy, murky green-gray, like a lagoon or a swamp, but deep enough to drown in. A black crow shoots across the sky like an arrow, and my companion turns abruptly to look at it, agitating the bridge. I grasp the rails and they're rope. I look down and I'm losing my balance and already feel asphyxiated because I know I'm going to fall into fathoms of mysterious water. I wake up to not drown.

 

But when I was a fearless teenager, I just loved traveling by plane. The more takeoffs and landings, the better. I was sixteen when my parents and I flew to Mexico for a holiday. We stayed with friends in Mexico City. Our hostess, the gorgeous bohemian wife, Nedda, was one of my mother's best friends in Cuba. With her thick blond hair (the kind that could break a hairbrush), green-blue eyes, tawny skin, and perfect figure, Nedda was considered possibly the most beautiful girl on the entire island in the 1950s. Papi dated Nedda when Mami broke up with him during their courtship. Early on in their relationship, my father had come to pick my mother up for a date one night. Mami was seventeen, Papi was twenty-one. Remember, he was a relatively poor boy going out with one of the wealthiest girls in the tiny Cuban Jewish community. When he arrived at her grand house, Papi told Mami that they'd have to take
la guagua,
the bus, because his car was broken. Mami said okay. But then Papi said, “No, I have the car. I was just testing you to see if you'd accept riding
la guagua.”

She dumped him on the spot.

Papi was devastated. He lost a lot of weight. But he eventually got back at Mami by dating her girlfriend: Nedda. When Mami saw them out together she had a sudden change of heart. Papi made her beg for a looong time before he would deign to take her back. Mami called Zeide Leon and asked him to help her. Zeide Leon encouraged Papi to go see Mami. Mami convinced Papi she'd suffered from temporary insanity. Papi said, “Okay. Let's give it a try.” That would be the last time Mami would ever beg Papi for anything.

Nedda's suave Mexican husband, Enrique, was Old World glamorous, like Oscar de la Renta but not bald. Their house smelled of her signature scent, Calandre, and had so much original artwork that paintings were even hung on curtains. We ate roasted
cabrito
(goat) and steamed cactus. Mami admired Nedda's collection of black clay pottery, which Nedda explained was a specialty made in Oaxaca. Naturally, Mami had to have some—partly for herself, a compulsive tchotchkes hoarder, and partly to resell for profit at St. Elizabeths to staff and patients alike, whoever could pay—and insisted we fly down there, which would take less than an hour. Papi, of course, didn't want to go; he's never wanted to go anywhere or do anything. It was a miracle he came with us to Mexico in the first place. He hates having “new experiences” and meeting “new people.”

But
comme d'habitude,
as always, Mami got her way. The following overcast afternoon the three of us were en route to Oaxaca. Everything was fine for about ten minutes. Then the sky went dark and rainy, and we hit some serious turbulence.

 

MAMI
(hysterical):
¡Ay, Dios mio! ¡Ay, Dios mio!