Читать книгу Miami Transformed - Manny Diaz - Страница 11
ОглавлениеChapter 1 July 21, 1961
IT BEGAN AS a fairly typical morning for me—a typical morning for any six-year-old child in Cuba. I awoke to the beautiful sunny skies of Havana, “La Habana,” and sat down for a breakfast of “café con leche”—coffee with milk—and bread. At the table sat my mother, Elisa, and maternal grandparents, Benigno and Hortensia Galnares, as the traditional Cuban home very often included several generations under the same roof.
But this was not to be a typical morning.
My father, Manolo, would start his day as a political prisoner in possibly the worst Cuban prison of its time: “La Cabaña.” Several of his friends had been executed at the “Paredón,” a massive wall covered in the blood of those killed, and my father’s fate was yet to be decided. That day we were joined by my paternal grandparents, Manolo, Sr., and Lucía, who also dropped in for breakfast. My grandfather would not stop crying and I had no idea why. It would be the last time I ever saw him. It would also be my last day on Cuban soil. Mom told me that because Dad was in prison, it was probably best if I spent the summer vacationing in Miami with aunt Aida, uncle Benigno, and cousins Lena, Julio, and Alex Galnares. So, after breakfast, we drove to José Martí Airport for my first plane ride, a late morning Pan Am flight to Miami.
At the airport, my mother was approached by one of Fidel Castro’s militia members, a miliciano, and was told that my seat on the flight had been sold for $500 to another passenger. My mother now believed we would never be allowed to leave Cuba. The miliciano ordered us to wait in a glass-enclosed area of the airport known as “La Pecera,” the Fishbowl. While I sat there, I could see my grandparents on the other side of the glass, crying. They cried, my mom cried, I cried. Finally, the miliciano returned to tell my mom that we could board the plane, but I would have to sit on her lap during the flight. We were the last to board.
When our plane finally took off, my mother started to cry again. She cried the entire flight. She would never again set foot in her country of birth. I can only now imagine the worries she felt, separated from her husband and family, wondering if she would ever see them again. And what fears, starting a new life with her six-year-old son in a foreign country, only a dime in her pocket (so she could phone my uncle when we landed), and enough clothes to last a few days.
We landed in Miami in mid-afternoon. My uncle met us at the airport and drove us to his small apartment in Little Havana. (Forty years later, I would open the headquarters for my mayoral campaign just two blocks from my first home in America.) We all had some more café con leche and bread—now called Cuban bread in Miami—and the eight of us went to sleep, not knowing the fate that awaited us all.
It was indeed a typical day that July 21, 1961: a day I will never forget. It changed the course of my family. Like other Cuban families in exile, we were bound by the hope that one day soon, we would return to celebrate true freedom and independence for our homeland. Every single year since, my mom calls me on July 21 to remind me that this is the day we left Cuba to start our new lives in our new country. It would be a year and a half before I saw my father again.
MY FATHER’S FAMILY was very poor.
Fulgencio Batista, Castro’s predecessor, is credited with investing a tremendous amount of money in infrastructure and education. In the late 1930s, Batista built vocational boarding schools for poor children throughout Cuba. For the inaugural class, the government chose 250 of the poorest students on the island to attend. My dad was one of them. After graduating from the vocational school, he worked as a physical education instructor at a school where the administrator’s daughter taught first grade. That’s how my mom and dad met.
I was born in Havana a year later in a clinic. Cuba had the precursor of what we now know as Health Maintenance Organizations, or HMOs. My parents would pay a flat rate of approximately $2.50 a month for services, from the delivery of a child to brain surgery.
In 1959 our lives changed dramatically when Fidel Castro came down from the hills and ousted Batista. My mom and dad were not political—although, in a way, every Cuban is political. They love to talk about politics and are very passionate about it, but they were not active in any political party or cause.
My dad, however, quickly ended up in prison as an enemy of the state. After Castro nationalized the electric utility, my dad, an employee of the utility and a member of the electrical workers union, formed part of a group that organized and conducted a strike, refusing to work for Castro. He also secretly helped several friends find safe haven in foreign embassies, facilitating their escape from Cuba. For these activities, he was thrown in jail as a political prisoner.
His prison term was served in “La Cabaña,” within the Morro Castle, and possibly the worst prison of its time in Cuba. My dad was lucky: after nearly two years, a friend “paid” the authorities to release him. Most of his union colleagues were not so lucky—they were executed at the Paredón.
Mom would regularly take dad food. On her way to see him, the guards would purposely escort her through the Paredón, where she would be forced to walk over the fresh blood of those who had recently been executed. Often, as she walked past the Paredón, the guards would carry out a mock execution, shooting blanks at the men lined up against the wall. In an effort to further humiliate her, they would randomly strip-search her. The guards would keep whatever they wanted from the care packages she intended for my dad. After the failed Bay of Pigs invasion in 1961, my mom was no longer allowed to enter the prison during her visits. She could only speak to my dad from outside the prison fence.
My dad begged my mother to take me out of Cuba. Rumors had begun to spread that the government was taking kids from families to work camps to cut sugarcane. It is important to understand that under the Cuban constitution as revised by Castro, parental rights are nonexistent. Children are wards of the state, and the state can determine where they go. This concept is difficult to understand, and almost impossible to relate to, by those of us who have been raised in America. As such, its real significance was lost on many in America during the Elián González debate (something I will address later in this book).
My father wanted me out of Cuba. Understandably, my mom did not want to leave her husband’s side, not knowing if she would ever see him again, not knowing if he would end up executed like so many of his friends. This difficult conflict, common to so many Cuban parents, even led my dad to threaten her with divorce if his wish (perhaps his last) for his son was not honored. My mother honored my father’s wish. This is why I left Cuba to join my uncle’s family for a “summer vacation” in Miami.
MY AUNT AND UNCLE, my three cousins, and my uncle’s mother-in-law all lived in a small apartment in Little Havana. There were only two bedrooms, so my mom and I had to sleep on the sofa in the living room. During this time there was one day I will never forget. In those early years, there were no Spanish language radio or television stations, a fact that may seem hard to believe for some today. However, one local radio station broadcast in Spanish for a couple of hours every afternoon. Much of the broadcast was dedicated to reading the names of the Cuban prisoners who had been executed by the Castro government. One day, while playing outside with my cousins, we heard screaming and crying from within the apartment. Obviously something was terribly wrong, and watching our parents cry we too began to cry, not really knowing why. It turned out that one of the names announced that afternoon was Manuel Diaz. We believed my father had been executed. Fortunately, after much effort and despair, my mother was able to place a call to family in Cuba who confirmed he had not been executed.
Thankfully, my father joined us at the end of 1962. Because of his “counter-revolutionary” activities, Castro’s government refused to issue him an exit visa. Nevertheless, my mother was able to secure a “fake” visa. Apparently, someone in the family had a relationship with a Cuban government official, and probably paid to obtain the visa that allowed him to enter the United States. I was also able to be reunited with my grandparents. In fact, my grandparents always lived with us, maintaining the long-standing tradition of multiple generations living in the same home. With my parents forced to hold several jobs at a time to make ends meet, my grandparents played a major role in my formative years.
I became very close to my grandfather. He had a huge influence on my life. While not a political person, as an educator he was very active in promoting educational opportunities for all Cubans. To this day, I am regularly approached by so many people in Miami whose lives he had touched in his beloved town of Regla, always eager to share with me just how much they loved and admired him. I truly enjoyed hearing his stories and understanding his perspective on life, politics, and his beloved country. I was particularly impressed with his ability to keep an open mind on issues. That was especially noteworthy growing up the way I did in a community of people who had just received the shock—and what greater shock can there be other than death?—of being uprooted completely from your way of life. It was important for him that I use his life’s experience not to become bitter or angry, but rather to fully understand the underlying reasons for the events that would shape my own future. No doubt he was sad; no doubt he had plenty of reason to be bitter and angry; but now, looking back on those years, it is clear to me that he wanted something more for his first grandchild.
He was an idealist who opposed all forms of dictatorship. He was never a Batista supporter, and resented the multiple coups and the corruption so prevalent in Cuban politics. He was intensely honest and a strong advocate for providing educational opportunities and human rights for all people.
We continued to live with my uncle’s family until my dad arrived. We then moved into an even smaller apartment just a couple of blocks away in Little Havana. The apartment is still there and I often drive by to see it, by myself or with my family, as a reminder about where it all started. One of those visits occurred during my mayoral campaign; this time I introduced myself to the current tenants and explained that this is where I had first lived in Miami. They were, of course, an immigrant family, but not Cuban. Little Havana has become the “Little” capital for a number of Latin American and Caribbean countries. Because Miami continues to be the entry point for so many in search of the American Dream, immigrants from all over the Americas, not just Cuba, now call Miami home.
Immediately after his arrival, my dad went to work. He parked cars and worked as a busboy and a dishwasher. A proud man, I remember vividly the stories of how he would have to run in the pouring rain to retrieve a car only to be tipped a nickel—a tip he would refuse. Though very poor (and soaking wet), his sense of integrity would not be compromised by others who held him in such low regard. Few things would anger him more than to see a person treated with anything other than the respect any human being deserved, rich or poor. He would later find work at a bed manufacturing company, where he accidentally cut off a portion of one of his fingers, and spent the balance of his years working in a series of factories and warehouses.
When we first arrived in Miami, my mom could only find work cleaning houses. Subsequently, she worked in a wholesale book warehouse in Liberty City in Miami. She would ride a bus to and from work every day. Practically all her coworkers were black, and to this day she reminds me of how fond she was of them. They befriended her, walking her to the bus stop and waiting for her bus to arrive. For years, she maintained a very close personal relationship with one of them. Despite the efforts of many in the community, including the media, to foster divisions between blacks and new immigrants, I have always found very little division when there is person-to-person contact. For it is not color or language that divides us, but economic status and dreams for our families that unite us.
After some time, my dad secured a job at an auto parts factory. Because they could only afford one car, my mom also got a job at the same factory doing clerical work.
I grew up in Little Havana and began my education at my neighborhood school, Shenandoah Elementary. In Cuba, I had been enrolled in a bilingual school. Morning classes were taught in English, afternoon classes in Spanish, or vice versa. Regrettably, we have a very parochial notion about language in our country—how we’re all supposed to forget whatever language we (or our ancestors) used to speak, and speak only English. When you travel the world, it’s often different; people are encouraged to learn the language not just of their country but of others as well. But we Americans expect everyone to speak English.
Shenandoah was not predominantly Cuban. My memories of recess involved a ritual: fighting with the American kids. We would go out to the school yard; the Cuban kids would form one line and the American kids would form another line. For reasons yet unknown, we would fight during the entire recess (or until someone stopped the fight). We did not need a reason. It was just simply a ritual.
Elementary school was fairly uneventful. I did well, picking up English rather quickly; in fact, most of us did. It would bother some of the American kids that we would win spelling bees. “You just got off the boat, what are you doing winning a spelling bee?” they would ask incredulously. Our parents taught us to work hard, study hard, learn English, and that in the United States everything is possible. My focus during my elementary school years, however, was baseball. I would wake up in the morning and fall asleep at night with a ball in my hand. It was my love.
IN 1967, as sixth grade was ending, I was selected to play on a baseball team that had been invited to participate in the Bronco division of the Boys’ League World Championship. Our team, made up exclusively of young Cubans, would be called Miami Cuba Libre (Free Cuba). No one had given us much of a chance to win. Because the tournaments were double elimination (if you lose two games, you are eliminated), most people thought we would be back in Miami quickly. As a result, my parents packed two sets of everything for me: a couple of pairs of underwear, a couple of t-shirts. They gave me five dollars, kissed me goodbye, and expected me to return home in two days. Much to everyone’s surprise, we were away practically the entire month of August. We had to keep calling for more underwear, and a little more money.
The games took us from Alabama to Texas. It was the first time I was truly exposed to the rest of America. Up to that point, I lived mainly in an immigrant environment, surrounded by the smells of Cuban food and listening to the beat of Cuban music. Clearly, I was dealing with kids in school who were not Cuban—even though I was apparently fighting them most of the time! Some of my non-Cuban classmates did live in the same neighborhood, but I wasn’t being invited over to Johnny’s house for meatloaf and mashed potatoes. So the baseball tour exposed me to a larger view of America. When I look back, I’m struck that it was 1967 and there I was in Birmingham, Alabama, playing baseball in close proximity to Dr. King’s march for justice and equality.
We stayed at the homes of our host teams. As a result, I learned that Americans had eggs and ham or bacon and muffins for breakfast. This was a real culture shock. In my family, breakfast consisted of just coffee with milk and Cuban toast—that’s it. What I was eating for breakfast in those homes in Alabama was what we would be lucky to have for dinner at my house. I remember laughing with my parents afterward, saying, “I love these Americans, they sure know how to eat breakfast.” Little did I know that I was putting them in an awkward spot. “Well son, we’d love to feed you that way too, but we just can’t afford it.” To this day, breakfast continues to be my favorite meal. It still consists of café con leche and Cuban toast, but it also includes eggs and ham, the best of both worlds.
Traveling with my team did a lot to expand my horizons, not just when it came to food. After playing and winning in Birmingham, we went to Kingsville, Texas, for the finals. Kingsville had a large Mexican American population that welcomed us with open arms. Because we spoke Spanish and had a strong sense of pride in our shared cultural heritage, they absolutely fell in love with us and we with them: we became “their” team. They would show up at our games, and invite us for barbecues after the game. For us, it was like, “Hey, they are just like us!”
These are the kinds of experiences that helped shape who I am today. I learned that too often people will hold opinions of others on the basis of something they have heard or read. They allow themselves to become critical of others because they sound or look different. We are all products of our own experiences in life. Regrettably, those experiences generally do not include personal exposure to other people and cultures. Traveling to Alabama and Texas did that for me, making me a better person. It also led to my future involvement in the fight for civil rights, the rights of farmworkers, and the plight of all immigrants.
By the time we reached the finals in Kingsville, our games were being broadcast in Miami in Spanish, and the local Spanish newspaper even sent a reporter to cover the finals. The games had become so popular with the local community that some estimated attendance at 10,000. Included among those attending were professional baseball scouts. We ended up undefeated, and in the process became world champions. Incidentally, in the final series game, with our team trailing 1 to 0, I hit a game-winning two-run homer.
Back home in Little Havana, our team became the rallying cry for a community desperate for some good news. On our return from Texas, thousands at Miami International Airport welcomed us. We left the airport in used Cadillac convertibles (the father of one the players ran a used car lot), and were given a ticker tape parade through Little Havana. We rode up and down Southwest Eighth Street and Flagler Street several times. During the weeks that followed, we were honored by almost every Cuban exile organization of its day, were given a key to the City of Miami, and appeared on local English language television stations. It was the Cuban community’s proudest moment during the early exile years.
This was 1967. Most of us had only been here five, six, seven years. Many in the community were still washing dishes, still struggling. There was no good news from Cuba, no prospect for a quick return, until suddenly this group of kids out of nowhere became world champions. I continued to play baseball in high school, both for the school team and for summer and evening leagues. I dreamed of playing baseball professionally; to become the Cuban Mickey Mantle. But this was very difficult for Cuban kids in my era. We had two obstacles. One was economic. Most of us had to start working at an early age in order to help our parents. The other obstacle that set back many young people during those years was drugs. It was one or the other. As I grew older and still played ball, you could begin to see a difference with the next wave of young Cuban Americans. Although younger, this group was close enough in age that we were in the same field together. Many of them went on to play college and professional baseball. Why? One reason was time. I would go to a park and see them practicing with their fathers. We were not so lucky. Our fathers were working two or three jobs and we were working too. If your father can spare the afternoon and go out with you to a park, you can continue to develop your skills. None of us had that opportunity. It was: I have to go to school and then I’m going to work. Either I dedicate myself to school and make sure that I have the grades to get into college, or I take a chance and hope to pitch in the Major Leagues someday. I chose college and law school.
We did, of course, have time for fun. My dad was very social; he loved to have people over at our house all the time. There was always some sort of gathering, a party, a barbecue on weekends. In those days, as a host, you simply couldn’t afford to supply steaks or hamburgers for everyone. Instead, guests would show up with their meal in a package and place it on the grill.
We also spent a lot of time on the beach. The beach is free. That’s one of the true benefits of living in a place like Miami: nature is free. All you had to do is pack yourself a ham sandwich, a Cawy (Cuban soda) and make a whole day out of it. Parks were important too. Because of baseball, I spent all my spare time in parks: all day Saturday, Sunday, and after school when I was finished my homework. Of course, my grandfather would drive me to and from the park. Parks were my second home, and kept me out of trouble. Had that outlet not been available, who knows? When you’re a kid and you’re idle, you’re influenced by your peers, and many of mine ended up taking the wrong road. My best friend in elementary school, who also happened to live across the street from me, would go on to become one of the most infamous drug dealers in America. Still, growing up in my type of environment, you have to learn to live and protect yourself on the streets.
MONEY WAS A RECURRING issue for my family. While growing up, we were forced to move several times, all within Little Havana. I remember the dinnertime conversation: “They’ve just raised our rent twenty-five dollars a month, so we have to find another place.” Imagine that: a twenty-five-dollar increase and we had to pack up. It was more than they could afford. With a very limited income, any increase was hard. Fortunately, our landlords were decent people; they understood my parents’ plight and tried to work with them as much as possible. They were not trying to take advantage of my parents, but increases are inevitable: taxes go up; the cost of living goes up. This is why, a year after I graduated from law school, I bought my parents their first house. I surprised my mother on her birthday with a warranty deed to the new house. Thirty years later, she still lives in the same house. She has never had to move again.
Although we were poor, poverty was not a status that dominated my formative years. In fact, I never really understood the fact that I was poor. We had a very happy home life. We were proud of what little we had and took great care to protect it. We blamed no one for our circumstance and believed that being poor was not a lifelong condition, but one of life’s challenges that we or anyone in America could overcome. I never heard my parents complain.
Through all this, my parents always emphasized education. My dad especially would drive this point home to me when I worked with him at the auto parts warehouse. We would fill orders for auto parts retailers, who were buying alternators and carburetors—nearly any car part you can imagine—and pack those parts in boxes, many of which were extremely heavy. This did not present a challenge for me. I was young, playing sports and in good physical shape. I enjoyed the additional exercise. But my father? There he was, every day, packing and picking up these boxes. He would always say to me, “You don’t want to do this the rest of your life; it’s not where you want to be. You have got to stay in school. The only way you’re going to move ahead in America is through education. No one will ever be able to take that away from you.” He understood the value of education. All our parents did.
This is why I am so annoyed and frustrated by much of the debate on immigration. It is absurd to hear statements like “immigrants don’t want to assimilate,” or “immigrants don’t want to become part of America, learn English.” On the contrary, when you are a recent immigrant, your love for America is possibly stronger than anybody else’s. You chose to come to America. You are not here because your parents, grandparents, or great-grandparents preceded you. It is the classic immigrant story, true just as much for Cuban Americans, Mexican Americans, Salvadoran Americans, as it was for Irish, Germans, Italians or any of the many other immigrant groups that have helped build this country. You choose America, you choose to leave your home because something went wrong. This country opens its arms to you, and you want to fight for your country. This is your country now; you belong to it, it belongs to you, equally as much as it does to your neighbor. Those who argue to the contrary should perhaps take a trip like mine to Alabama and Texas. There is much they can learn from such an experience.
Over 60 percent of Miami’s residents are foreign born. Our success can largely be attributed to this diversity. In fact, American cities with strong immigrant populations continue to outpace other cities in terms of economic growth. It is these cities that continue to serve as the economic engines of America. In my travels throughout the United States, I have been blessed with the opportunity to meet numerous immigrant families from all over the world. I have never heard any of them suggest that they want anything less than to be proud to be Americans, learning the English language, studying hard, and working to achieve the American Dream. And that’s the way it should be for all first generation Americans.
My parents were no different. Sure, they always wanted me to retain Spanish, to not lose other aspects of my culture, but they very much wanted me to become an American: to speak English better than anyone else, to win the spelling bees. If you believe otherwise, you are suggesting that these immigrant parents do not want the best for their children or that they do not want them to succeed, because in America if you tell your child not to bother with learning English, with education, with any of that stuff, just stay in your enclave—then you’re holding that child back. You’re not pushing that child to take advantage of all the opportunities America offers. The notion of a parent taking that position is ludicrous.
There is no doubt that the process of assimilation can be tough. When we first arrived in Miami, we went to “El Refugio,” the Cuban Refugee Center. The building, now called the Freedom Tower, is in public hands and has recently been designated a national historic landmark, two actions I led as mayor. It is Miami’s version of Ellis Island. At the Center, we were given army rations that included huge blocks of cheese. Not individual, Kraft-sized American cheese slices: these were huge, bigger than a brick. We were also given powdered milk, powdered eggs, and Spam. To this day, many Cubans refuse to eat Spam because of the connotation that “this is what we had to eat.” Of course, my mom, one of the greatest cooks in history, learned to make all kinds of dishes from Spam. It was our meat substitute. Instead of beef or pork chops, it was Spam. So we adjusted and were grateful that we had something to eat. By the way, I am one of the few who will still eat Spam.
When I was in second or third grade, my teacher, as part of the assimilation process, must have believed that every good American must like cottage cheese, celery, and biscuits. I could deal with the biscuits. The cottage cheese didn’t taste like much to me. The celery: forget it. The Cuban diet doesn’t include a lot of vegetables to begin with, let alone celery. The teacher, however, went around the class and instructed us to eat a stalk of celery. I refused. She grabbed the back of my head, stuck the celery stalk in my mouth, and said, “Bite!” So finally, I bit the crunchy stalk. I then ran to the bathroom and vomited. I was sent to the principal’s office since, of course, I was not being cooperative. To this day, I will not eat celery. If you cut it in tiny pieces and put it in a tuna sandwich, I will find it. I have built in radar that goes off anytime I’m within five miles of it.
The process of assimilation should not include the stripping away of your customs and your culture. Rather, it should welcome them.
CONCERNED ABOUT MY environment and my peers, my parents forced me to sit for an entrance exam at a private middle school: Belen Jesuit Prep School. The school, run by Jesuit priests, is the oldest Cuban school, having received its charter from Queen Isabella of Spain in 1854. It is Cuba’s equivalent of Exeter or Choate. Belen is very well known in the Cuban community, and today is one of Miami’s finest schools. Regrettably, one of our better-known graduates is Fidel Castro. Castro expelled the Jesuits from Cuba, causing them to relocate the school to a one classroom facility in downtown Miami.
I did my best to flunk the entrance exam.
Belen is an all-boy’s school. I really didn’t want to go to a school that did not have any girls—are you kidding me? Plus, there was the lure of the streets, and now they’re going to send me where? To a school run by priests? All-boys, too? No way. Yet somehow I was admitted.
By the time I enrolled, the school had moved to an old warehouse that had, among other things, been used as a dance studio. It was also rumored that Al Capone stored wines and liquor at the warehouse during Prohibition. Three hundred students were enrolled from grades seven through twelve, in a building that had no windows. Today Belen is located in the western end of Miami-Dade County in facilities that resemble a small college campus. Not quite the physical structure it had in Cuba, an imposing, Pentagon-like structure, but an excellent facility nevertheless, with far more amenities than when I attended.
Today’s students at Belen are obviously in a much better financial position than those who attended during my years. These students now include my children’s generation. For one thing, my generation can afford to buy our children cars. When I was growing up, a giant group of us would try to squeeze into an old Volkswagen. Only a handful of us, at most, had parents who could afford a car. In fact, I used to go out on dates in a dairy and produce truck that a friend would use during the day to make deliveries.
While at Belen, at age fourteen, I landed my first job through CETA, the Comprehensive Employment Training Act. This was a program designed to provide jobs for youngsters from families at or below the poverty level. I remember the threshold was really high, but I met it. I earned $1.10 an hour, working as a janitor after school at Belen. Every day, I would start immediately after school to clean and do some of my assigned homework before practice (I had practice every day after school year-round since I was playing sports every season) or I would return to clean after practice. Throughout high school, I worked as a janitor, including weekends and in some cases during the summer as well. I also worked as a stock boy at the auto parts factory where my parents worked because the pay was a little better, helping the family out with the money I earned.
The student population at Belen was very small. Each grade was divided into an A class and a B class. I am not sure if it was by design, but during my six years at Belen, the A class seemed to perform better academically. Many of their parents came from a professional class. Many had been doctors or lawyers in Cuba. Although they too were struggling during those early years, they at least had a foundation that would serve them well in ultimately returning to financial success in America. As a result, their children had been exposed to more and often had more resources.
As you might expect, the B class housed the sports jocks, who also had a more rounded street education. I started out in seventh and eighth grades as part of the B class, which included a friend who had played baseball with me since we were kids. We both were still lured by the streets, being troublemakers and getting into fights. Going into ninth grade, my coach, Mariano Loret de Mola, one of my dad’s oldest friends, took the two of us out of the B class and put us in the A class. I wasn’t happy about the transfer since all my friends were in the B class. I really felt more at ease with the sports crowd than I did with the smart kids.
But an interesting thing happened when I went into the A class: peer competition. My athletic competitiveness was transferred to the classroom and I improved my grades dramatically. The coach knew that. That’s why he pulled me out. Getting into Belen in the first place was a defining moment in my life; being transferred to the A group was another.
People ask me today how I keep my crazy schedule. It started at Belen. I would finish class, do my janitorial work either before or after practice, finish practice at 7:00 P.M., go home, shower, eat—somewhere in between visit my girlfriend—then, probably after 9:00 P.M. start my school work. At Belen you couldn’t survive by simply cramming at the last minute. We had tests every week, several times a week. Basically, you were cramming every day. We would do our homework and projects as part of study groups. My classmates would come over to my house to study or I would go to their house. At midnight my parents, or their parents if I was at another student’s house, would prepare café con leche so we could stay awake and study. That was my regular schedule then. And it continues today.
At Belen, it was assumed that you were going to college. There was no question about that; the only question was the career you would choose. But yes, you were going to college and you were going to be a professional, any profession.
My career path was also heavily influenced by my ninth-grade government teacher, Patrick Collins (who is still at Belen). On the first day of class, he gave us a challenge, “Ok, you guys are driving down some old country road in Alabama and a big sheriff comes over and arrests you because you look Hispanic or he just doesn’t like you. What would you do? Do you know what your rights are?”
I wanted to know the answer, and it is at this the point that I began to focus on a legal career. There is also no doubt that my own personal experience of being uprooted from my country of birth, having a system fail because of the lack of the rule of law, and wondering how that was possible also played a significant role in my career decision. How can a country fail like this? Something must be structurally wrong with its institutions for that to happen. The pursuit of a legal career went hand in hand with a commitment to public service and social activism. The Jesuit education emphasizes the principles of always giving back; of remembering where you came from; and reaching out to help those who come after you, especially those less fortunate. That life should not be measured by the material riches one is able to secure, but rather by the value one adds to enhance the life of others. Our school’s motto: Men for Others.
My classmates and I did well academically at Belen. There were forty students in our graduating class. I believe twelve would go on to become doctors. Another significant group would become lawyers, and many others succeeded in engineering, business, and other professions. We are all still friends. Sending me to Belen was one of the best things my parents ever did for me. I will forever be grateful for the sacrifices they made to make that possible.
