Читать книгу We Carry Our Homes With Us - Marisella Veiga - Страница 9

My father, Miguel Veiga, watched the rural landscape roll by from the window of a station wagon, disturbed by what he saw. The architecture of midwestern farming was new to him—big red barns, silver silos, tightly planted cornfields rolling for acres toward the sky. And now, thanks to his American hosts, the Lauer farm in Mendota Heights, Minnesota, was where his next home, though temporary, would be. In a week’s time my mother and siblings and I would join him.

A few short years before, he and my mother had chosen the fishing village of Cojímar for their home. In fifteen minutes, they could be in cosmopolitan Havana. My father loved the city, especially for its architectural elegance.

That was before. This was now.

Cubans are familiar with sugarcane fields, banana plantations, and citrus groves. In addition to those, my father knew coastal landmarks, especially docks, fishing fleets, and warehouses storing natural sponges. His father had worked in that industry on both the southern and northern coasts of Cuba.

At thirty-nine, he and my mother, Maria González de Veiga, thirty-six, had decided to move from Miami, their initial place of exile, to the Upper Midwest. The move to Minnesota was miles from the subtropics and even farther from a past that remained hidden in their minds and hearts. The enormous loss of homeland had left them speechless, unable to speak about what they’d left behind. Thinking, talking, or crying about it was a luxury.

The need for survival demanded they focus on the present. By doing so, they would begin to lay a foundation to ensure a good future for themselves and, more importantly, for their children.

I am one of those children, their oldest daughter. I have an older and a younger brother and younger sister. My sister was conceived in Miami and born in St. Paul, a few months after we resettled there.

The move north was risky—our exile community was largely in Miami. However, considering Miami’s economic conditions in the early 1960s and the large numbers of Cubans fleeing the island, resettlement away from South Florida (in our case to Minnesota) was a better choice in many ways. In a 1963 report on the Cuban Refugee Program, John F. Thomas writes, “The difficulties which refugees face in Miami and the importance of the resettlement program are highlighted by the fact that about 58 percent of the refugees in Miami require financial assistance compared with less than 5 percent of those resettled [elsewhere].” Economic independence was key.

“Even the grass is different here,” my father thought as Al Lauer drove to a church reception. My father didn’t share the observation with his hosts.

He was remembering Cojímar, the fishing village where he and my mother had bought property on a hilltop. His cousin Raul had designed the modern house that overlooked the bay. The constant breezes onto Cuba’s north coast were delicious. The house benefited from them. When my parents bought the property, they believed there was no better place in the world to live. They planned to be buried there.

That place was gone.

More specifically, they had left it. They opted for freedoms for themselves and for their children, freedoms that would be denied under the new regime.

Forty-five minutes after our initial flight out of the country, we landed in Miami. In many ways, though work was scarce, Miami was comfortable as far as identifying culturally and politically. Its climate was similar to Cuba’s. The beaches were good. Thousands like us flew into town every month. The Spanish language returned to Florida. Most of the familiar tropical fruits and root vegetables were available. Native Miamians and retired Northerners in South Florida began adjusting to our arrival. If they couldn’t, they listed their homes and moved to Broward County or even farther north.

When we relocated to Minnesota we would be seen as aliens, outsiders—our first experience with this in exile.

After five years in Minnesota, my father had become comfortable with wool outerwear. He owned a black coat, a forest-green short-brimmed hat, a plaid scarf, and deerskin gloves with a double wool lining. Every weekday for work he wore a suit and tie, though sometimes he picked a clip bow tie. He looked the part of a company comptroller. The weekday commute from Roseville to downtown St. Paul took fifteen minutes, about the same time it took to commute from Cojímar to Havana. By that time, he’d learned that some mornings it took longer than that to shovel the driveway.

One particular morning, he remembers, it wasn’t so cold in the garage. He started the car to warm the engine and went back to lift the garage door. He faced a wall of snow. He stood before it, so he said, and thought, “What am I, a Cuban, doing here? Nothing in my life has prepared me for this.”

In the Caribbean, people don’t receive instruction on survival skills for cold climates. There is no need for it. The tropics have their lessons: hurricane preparedness, shark bite avoidance, malaria and dengue fever treatments. Moreover, during my parents’ last years in Cuba they became quick studies in dealing with annoying, then menacing revolutionaries.

He turned for the snow shovel and imagined a future evolving for his family in a place farther south.

Like many of the other Cubans who resettled in Minnesota, my parents weren’t prepared for drastic climate and cultural changes or extended exile. They adjusted to some ways and raised their eyebrows at others. They watched their children adopt these American ways—some questionable. While they accepted that changes were inevitable, I am sure they found some of our new ways painful, especially regarding family relationships.

For one thing, my siblings and I moved across the United States for better educational and job opportunities, especially as young adults. Such dispersal of family members is not as common in Cuba. While a family member might move to other provinces, the country is small enough to facilitate regular contact. The size of the United States makes frequent visits difficult to manage. Unfortunately, this dispersal, along with the money and time needed to overcome it, has resulted in less familiarity with my nieces and nephews.

Furthermore, my brothers and I married outside of our original Roman Catholic faith, uncommon for our family back in Cuba. Luis Gustavo, my older brother, is now Pastor Lou, an ordained Presbyterian minister with a Houston-based church. His wife and children are Presbyterian. My younger brother, Juan Carlos, now John, attends a nondenominational mega-church in McLean, Virginia, with his wife and children; his wife is a former Presbyterian. Meanwhile, I attend a Catholic Mass on Sunday while my husband attends a Presbyterian service. I sometimes join him there.

People learn to live in exile—no matter where one sets up housekeeping—by experiencing it. Exile is a state of being that continues for most Cubans who live outside their country if they have left for political, not economic, reasons. It ends when Cuba embraces democracy. If and when this transpires, the number of exiles who will return to the island remains to be seen.

With two exceptions, my family members who came to the United States were born in Cuba and raised in households with its customs. Therefore, it is natural for us to self-identify as Cubans who are U.S. citizens.

However, other differences exist.

Over the more than fifty years our family has lived in the United States, family members have assimilated at different rates. Each person has adopted norms that ease the way in the larger culture. Still the fact remains: we have dual identities. That is one way of beginning to describe what it means to be a Cuban raised in the United States, part of what it is to be bicultural.

My older brother, Luis Gustavo, was born in 1955. I was born in 1957. Our younger brother Juan Carlos was born in 1959. That year, Fidel Castro took control of the government from a former Cuban president who’d returned to the island from Daytona Beach, Florida, to become a dictator: Fulgencio Batista.

Since my earliest memories are from Cuba, my natural home, they are precious to me and I’ve kept them alive by reviewing them. Most are set on the grounds of our family’s house in Cojímar. To date, it is the only brand-new house I’ve lived in.

Ernest Hemingway kept his boat in Cojímar. Santiago, the protagonist in The Old Man and the Sea, is based on a Cuban fisherman who lived near the bay; from a humble home there, he set out in a skiff to make a living from the sea, as the fishermen there still do.

I lived in Cojímar from the time I came home from the Havana clinic until my mother and two brothers and I boarded a flight to Miami on December 30, 1960.

I have eight-by-ten black-and-white photographs of my first home. Although it is high on a hill, the midcentury modern house sits on stilts, like many of the houses in the Florida Keys. It weathers flooding due to hurricane rains and winds. It withstands high winds since it is made of poured, reinforced concrete with a monolithic roof of the same material. My father’s first cousin, Raul Arcia, designed it to last.

Three bedrooms, a bathroom, dining room, kitchen, and living room are upstairs. A double garage is on the ground level. Next to it is a bedroom with a full bathroom reserved for guests or a live-in helper. In those days, my parents employed a housekeeper who often stayed the night rather than take a bus back to her town only to return to work by bus the following morning.

Six properties sat at the top of the hill. Jaime Rabel and his wife and son lived to the west of our house. He was a hardware salesman who traveled the island. The neighbor to the east has attracted more interest. Fidel Castro lived next door and, as of this writing, still does so occasionally. His is a large house with about two acres of land, a property that once belonged to Tinito Cruz-Fernández, a senator, and his wife. They were killed in an accident while vacationing in Spain.

A few weeks after the revolutionaries took control of the government, a guardhouse and a chain were installed at the head of our short street. Guards were posted. They searched vehicles leaving and entering the street. My father’s car was not exempt. They searched his 1956 Chevrolet Bel Air when he left for work in the morning and when he returned in the afternoon.

One day, my father remembered, as he waited for the guards to finish a routine search, he noticed Jaime Rabel’s car stopped behind his. Behind Rabel’s car was another vehicle with a well-known passenger: Che Guevara. My father drove home after being cleared. Che’s car stopped in front of Rabel’s house. Che signaled for my father to join them.

“What I’ve just seen, that shouldn’t be,” said Che. “This wasn’t the purpose of the revolution.”

My father explained such searches were common practice.

“I’m going to give orders so this doesn’t happen,” Che said.

“Look, Commandante, I appreciate your concern, but it’s not going to work. Fidel has given orders for everyone to be searched, and that’s how it’s going to be,” my father said.

“I’m going to change it. This shouldn’t be happening.”

“Will you give me your phone number so I can call you right after we’re searched again?” my father asked.

The next day, Rabel and my father joked about Che’s belief that he would alter Fidel’s order. The search order wasn’t revoked.

The backyard of our house faced north and had a gentle slope. Luis Gustavo and I often played there on our swing set. A dirt road was at the northern edge. That path was forbidden. One day, I chased Luis Gustavo. Other children had caught his attention on that dirt road. He was about five years old and had more freedom. After a hard run, I stopped at the end of our yard where the grass met the dirt road. I looked to my left. A group of boys was hanging on a jeep or a cart. They were dressed in green military clothing. Luis ran to play with them. I returned to the yard where my grandmother Manuela waited, annoyed with my disobedience and maybe even with herself for the lapse in supervision.

The other memory is a scene, not a full story: I’m playing in a fountain with a limestone rock in the center that was in the cool patio area under the stilts of the house. My brother is nearby. I like to think we have an appreciation for one another born during those years, the cherished ones when we were playmates who lived in our own country and spoke only Spanish. Our younger brother Juan Carlos didn’t walk yet, was still a baby.

The two memories don’t reveal much. I have scanned them for clues to who I was back then, for hints of the person I was supposed to become. Once, I believed I would be satisfied if I could get in touch with the essence of that monolingual child with one set of customs. I would be complete, whole. In other words, I would be the person I was intended to be when I was born, a Cuban at home, not an outsider to people in two countries.

Life would be easier! I would cease evaluating and reconciling two halves, two cultures, two languages. My status as a child of two nations and not completely of either would evaporate.

Yet these are the adult musings of a person who moved from innocence to experience by age three. I long for a little more time in the former state. It would have been nice, I think. The nostalgia is born from a state of innocence cut short.

In December 1960, as Luis and I ran through the backyards and beaches during our last days on the island, the Cuban Refugee Emergency Center, called El Refugio by the newcomers, was set up in Miami inside the Freedom Tower on Biscayne Boulevard. The $1 million funds for the center came from President Eisenhower’s contingency fund under the Mutual Security Act of 1954. With this help from the U.S. government and from friends who opened their crowded home to give us shelter, we had a soft landing in Miami, our first, temporary U.S. home.

Two years before arriving in Minnesota, my father lived the saddest day of his life: December 30, 1960. That day he watched his wife, Maria, thirty-four, and my brothers and me board a KLM Royal Dutch Airlines airplane at the José Martí International Airport in Havana. Juan Carlos remembers standing on the tarmac, holding our mother’s hand and crying. This is his first childhood memory. He was fifteen months old.

That was my last day in Cuba for fifty years. That same day, my brothers and I took our first steps in the United States. We were on the wide and often lonely road to a bicultural life.

The Cuban influx was different from other migrations to the United States. For one, we were not previously screened by the U.S. government in our country of origin. Furthermore, we lacked sponsors to vouch for us. Like most Cubans who were leaving at this time, we simply boarded an airplane with our one suitcase apiece—we said we were going to a wedding—and in less than an hour we were in a new city as refugees. Between January 1959 and January 1961, some fifty thousand Cubans had left for the United States. More than thirty-seven thousand arrived in Miami Dade County. Like most of our compatriots, my parents hoped the stay wouldn’t be long.

Fairly quickly, a dual identity for Cubans like us was formalized by U.S. law. In his book Americans at the Gate: The United States and Refugees during the Cold War, Carl J. Bon Tempo writes, “Most remarkably, the Cuban Status Adjustment Act led politicians, refugee advocates, and Cuban refugees themselves to endorse a bifurcated citizenship in which Cubans might become permanent residents or citizens while still planning to return to the island. Status normalization, in the case of Cuban refugees, condoned divided loyalties. No previous refugee group, or immigrant group for that matter, had been granted such leeway.”

From Miami International Airport, we went to Southwest Twelfth Street to stay with Celia and Paco Vasquez and their two daughters, Delsa and Nora. They were my mother’s lifelong friends from Punta San Juan, the location of the Punta Alegre Sugar Mill in Camaguey, Cuba. They hosted us for a little more than a week.

In January 1961, my mother, who spoke some English, rented a small one-bedroom house with a den in northwest Miami, on Northwest 54th Street and Seventh Avenue. She lacked a telephone. Thankfully, the American landlord took messages and relayed them. His telephone remained available for vital calls.

Great-aunt Carmen Ballesteros Echevarria and her husband, Great-uncle Epifanio Echevarria, moved with us. Their exile had begun a month earlier. Soon, crowded conditions forced Epifanio to move temporarily to Kankakee, Illinois, with his son and daughter-in-law, Orlando and Carol Echevarria.

The United States broke off diplomatic relations with Cuba on January 3, 1961. The following month, with a valid travel visa, my mother returned to the island to join my father. A Cuban can always return to the island. My siblings and I stayed in Miami with Great-aunt Carmen.

My mother traveled with empty suitcases in order to pack more clothes, a few books, and some photographs. We care for these portable relics. I store two dresses made for me by my maternal grandfather’s sister Rosa in Caibarién, Cuba. My mother’s Larousse Spanish dictionary is on my bookshelf. There are a few other things. However, and I am most grateful for this, our family’s greatest treasures are intangible. Our biggest inheritances are faith in God, strength of family, and commitment to education.

One of the benefits of exile is that I pack and travel lightly. I am not burdened by needing to house quality furniture that has been passed down and is now antique. My dining room chairs aren’t mahogany but cherry. I don’t care for my parents’ wedding china. A cousin keeps it safe in her cabinets in Cuba. I was fifty-three years old before I saw it. I have no desire to own it.

Before leaving the island, my mother stored a few goods with her aunt in Caibarién, including her wedding dress. Long ago, it was cut apart, its fabric meeting other people’s need for clothing.

The last day my parents stood in their native land was February 24, 1961. My father had the foresight to buy tickets on the twice-weekly KLM flight, shunning the popular twice-daily Pan American airlines in case the countries severed diplomatic relations. He wasn’t taking chances on having to stay. He also bought KLM tickets for his parents, Miguel and Evangelina Veiga, who left for Miami the same year. Although diplomatic relations with the United States no longer existed, Cubans could travel into and out of the island with appropriate visas. By October 1962, civilian flights to the United States were banned in Cuba.

In 2015, the United States reestablished diplomatic relations with Cuba, opening an embassy there. In 2010 and 2011, I traveled to the island, along with thousands of other Cubans and Americans who live in the United States. Then and now, a visa is required.

My father left his Spanish classical guitar on top of his bed in Cojímar. My mother’s first cousin Alfredo drove my parents to the airport in a Chevrolet Bel Air, a green-and-white four-door sedan. My father implored my mother not to look back.

“We’re going to die in another country. It will take fifty to sixty years for the revolution to run its course,” he said.

He had read about Poland, Yugoslavia, Hungary, and Russia.

In their grief, they agreed to focus on the future in order to ensure our family’s survival in a new land.

Alfredo would care for the house and car until there was a real possibility of returning. Officially, he was the new owner of both, as the titles had been transferred to him. Alfredo had his own house in Havana, so ours would be a second home. If the political situation changed, we’d return to the house.

When Alfredo arrived from the airport to the house, he put the key in the front door and turned it. Then a few guards stepped toward him.

“You have to leave this place,” they said, taking the keys to the house and car. When we last spoke, Alfredo was eighty-one; he described the experience as traumatic.

Eventually, Alfredo became a political prisoner. He was arrested and jailed twice; once for counterrevolutionary activity, another time for having contraband in the form of U.S. dollars and gold coins. In 1979, he went into exile in the United States.

As Alfredo was dealing with the guards at the house on the hill, my mother boarded the KLM flight without suitcases, which had to be searched. My father brought the suitcases. He was detained for two hours and the flight waited. The guards suspected my father of carrying Fernández family money out of the country. At the time, my father was the general manager for his uncle’s business, a lumber company called José Fernández e Hijos.

Besides clothes and photographs, my parents packed accounting textbooks and other reference books. My father used the English-language accounting textbooks at the University of Havana. They remain on the bookshelves in his Miami house.

One by one, the guards paged through the books to see if any money was hidden among the pages. Finally, my father appealed to the guards’ reasoning. If he were taking money out of the country, wouldn’t it be foolish to hide it in the suitcases? They agreed. He boarded the airplane without being strip-searched.

My father carried a total of fourteen U.S. cents in his pocket, a dime and four brown pennies.

When my parents arrived in Miami, they went to the little rented house on Northwest 54th Street. For three months, they kept us sheltered with a $100 monthly stipend from the U.S. government. Surplus food was distributed to refugees. They welcomed the protein—powdered milk and powdered eggs, peanut butter, and canned meat.

From there, my parents rented a larger house with two bedrooms. It was on Northwest 79th Street and Sixth Avenue. My great-aunt and uncle moved with us.

Meanwhile, the U.S. government had a view about our presence—temporary. In Havana, U.S.A.: Cuban Exiles and Cuban Americans in South Florida, Maria Cristina Garcia explains how the Eisenhower administration viewed the Cuban influx. She writes,

This was the first time the United States had served as the country of first asylum for a group of refugees, he [Eisenhower] argued, and the Cubans’ plight deserved a generous response. In reality, however, the administration simply regarded the Cubans as temporary visitors. In March 1960, on the advice of Vice President Richard M. Nixon, Eisenhower approved a CIA plan to train a military invasion force that would ‘resolve the Cuban crisis’ once and for all. Thus, elaborate relief programs and strict quotas were unnecessary. The Cubans were not to be assimilated but rather assisted until they could resume their normal lives back in Cuba.

That plan was inherited by the new administration of John F. Kennedy in 1962; however, some changes ensued. When the Bay of Pigs invasion failed on April 17, 1961, my parents had to admit that returning to Cuba was impossible, as my father had predicted. To survive, they repressed or ignored their sadness over the loss. Survival trumped all.

Meanwhile, every month, Orlando and Carol Echevarria mailed his parents a check for $100. Orlando’s mother, my great-aunt Carmen, was a proud Spaniard. She had refused the $100 monthly government stipend because, as she said, “My son is a doctor.” Indeed, Orlando was a medical doctor, a graduate of the medical school at the Universidad Complutense de Madrid in Spain. However, he was unlicensed in the United States and completing his residency at a psychiatric hospital in Ohio; he and Carol were awaiting the birth of their first child, Orlando Jr.

In our little house in Miami, I burned the inside of my left arm on an iron. Juan Carlos cut his finger on a razor blade while reaching for something on a dresser. The noise of the Goodyear blimp stimulated the neighborhood dogs to incessant barking. Juan Carlos cried with the racket they made.

In that same house, despite our great-aunt’s warnings, Luis Gustavo continued to play with a ball inside. Once, he threw it up to the living room ceiling, where it hit the square glass lighting fixture. I watched it unwind from its screw and crash on his head.

One of my most vivid memories of our early days in Miami involves a trip to a department store, probably a Woolworth’s, with my mother and great-aunt. We passed a toy section where I was drawn to a black plastic doll. I wanted it so badly I threw a tantrum. My mother pulled me along, saying no. There was no money for a doll.

Since it is one of my few early memories, I have replayed it countless times to make sense of the incident. Clearly, I wanted a new doll. Over the years, my adult desire to understand a memory from a crucial time period resulted in many questions. I layered the incident with conjecture. Did I want the black doll because the plastic pink ones with yellow hair were so ugly? Was I drawn to the black doll because of my own complexion—olive skin, brown eyes and hair? Did I just want a new doll? Was I a spoiled child?

In 2010, on my first trip to Cuba after fifty years, those questions were answered. At the José Martí International Airport, I waited for the chartered flight back to the United States. I had a few Cuban dollars left so I was browsing the merchandise on tables outside of the cigar and alcohol store. There, I spotted a book by the beloved patriot and writer José Martí. The Black Doll is a Cuban classic. Without a doubt, the story of the girl and her love for her black doll was one that had been read to me as a child. I paid very little for a copy of the book. Fifty years of guesswork was resolved by an accidental discovery.

Luis Gustavo’s first experience with cultural misunderstandings occurred in this same Miami house. As the oldest child, he was a scout venturing into the English-speaking world of Little River Elementary School. He started first grade, where he learned how George Washington confessed to chopping down a family cherry tree. Luis was impressed.

One day, Luis played a game in the backyard, alone. He ran full tilt toward a metal T-pole that held clotheslines. He’d grab the pole with one hand and spin around it until he tumbled to the ground. It was great fun, he remembers, until he brought the pole down. The clotheslines were loaded with clean laundry.

He feared our mother’s discipline but took a chance on being forgiven, since George Washington had received a reprieve. Luis went inside the house to confess. Our mother ran to the window and wailed. Clean laundry on a sandy yard! The work it took to wash, wring, and hang it!

Cubans didn’t care about Washington as much as their laundry, he concluded.

From this same house we walked under I-95 to visit our paternal grandparents, Miguel and Evangelina Veiga, who lived nearby in a rented house. They stayed in Miami when we resettled to Minnesota.

Years ago, the house on Northwest 79th Street and a few others next to it were demolished. A hotel replaced them. It has changed hands several times but remains in business, though I wouldn’t rent a room there today.

I pass it when I drive south to the end of I-95 when I visit my parents in southwest Miami. I look to the right when the signs announce Northwest 79th Street. I like to note the place where my U.S. life began.

“That’s where we lived when we came from Cuba,” I think. “When we came from Cuba.”

If there are passengers, I point to the hotel and say the words aloud.

From this house, my parents went to work. My mother, a licensed optometrist and pharmacist in Cuba, found part-time work at Woolworth’s. I can see her behind the counter, flipping hamburgers, happy to see her aunt and children who’d come to visit.

My father found work at the Deauville Hotel on Miami Beach as a night auditor. On May 1, when the tourist season ended, the proprietors announced they were going north to the mountains in the Carolinas where they operated another hotel. They invited my father to join them.

However, my father didn’t want to relocate us for the summer. Instead, he took a temporary job with a friend who had opened a warehouse. He moved boxes, sorted beans—in short, did whatever was required to keep a regular paycheck.

Jobs were scarce in Miami as a result of the flood of refugees, about eighteen hundred a week. Employers with jobs for unskilled labor found many applicants to be English-speaking, professional Cubans eager to work. The competition for these jobs was keen.

My parents had registered at the Cuban Refugee Center, though doing so was not required. After the failure of the Bay of Pigs invasion my parents evaluated Miami’s economic situation and tallied the number of refugees. They returned to the center, registering for resettlement with Catholic Relief Services.

At the time President John F. Kennedy gave the Cuban Refugee Program with the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare funds to help refugees. Monies were provided for assisting volunteer relief agencies, obtaining help from private and public sectors to find jobs, giving funds for resettlement, and giving financial help to cover basic human needs, including health services.

The U.S. federal government also pumped money into Miami public schools, which were racially segregated at the time. Training and educational opportunities were created. Unaccompanied children received financial aid, and surplus food distribution was enhanced.

Four national agencies joined efforts with the federal government to help with the resettlement process: Catholic Relief Services of the National Catholic Welfare Conference, Church World Service of the National Conference of Churches, a Protestant organization, United Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society, and the nonsectarian International Rescue Committee. On a statewide level, civic organizations worked with religious ones.

During the summer of 1962, the U.S. Governors’ Conference met in Hershey, Pennsylvania. In the proceedings from that meeting, the governors acknowledged Florida’s welcoming of about eighteen hundred Cubans each week. They thanked Florida for its hospitality and resolved to urge the people of all states to help in resettlement efforts.

Through Catholic Relief Services, my father learned there were opportunities for employment in the Midwest, specifically Cincinnati, Ohio, Grand Rapids, Michigan, and St. Paul, Minnesota. Three viable jobs opened in Minnesota. Meanwhile, the Lauers, a Roman Catholic family, had read the dossier about our family that Catholic Relief Services provided their church. They decided to sponsor us. Resettlement, in the end, was by invitation only. We were blessed.

As my father made arrangements to move to Minnesota, Luis Gustavo was being treated for Bell’s palsy, a form of temporary facial paralysis resulting from damage or trauma to one of two facial nerves. The treatment, he remembers, was to apply electricity to the nerve in order to activate it. The final treatment was given about a week after my father went north. Then, we went for an airplane ride again and joined him at the Lauers.

About this time, and probably as a result of my brother’s twisted mouth, I remember a porcelain statue of the Divine Infant Jesus of Prague appeared in our living room. I don’t know who bought it, either Great-aunt Carmen or my mother, but it was dedicated to Luis. This is my first recollection of religious statuary in our home. My brothers and I wore gold chains with holy medals; mine bore the image of the Sacred Heart of Jesus. My aunt and grandmothers were dedicated to the meditative practice of praying the rosary, so rosaries were familiar.

Meanwhile, other Cuban families who would be on the flight to Minnesota were preparing to move again.

Roberto and Noris Beruvides and their two children, José and Ariana, arrived in Miami from Havana on June 27, 1962. Initially, they moved into an apartment with one of Roberto’s sisters, but it was crowded as other in-laws were living with her too. The Beruvides family transferred to an efficiency apartment on Flagler Avenue. Like most other refugees, they received a government subsidy and surplus food. Not long after their arrival, they understood Miami’s predicament and therefore their own. Resettlement was the best option.

Consequently, the Beruvides family registered for relocation with Catholic Relief Services. San Francisco was Roberto’s first choice. He hoped for opportunities in his profession: he was an actor. However, another family went. There were more willing sponsors with the Protestant congregations. Soon, a Presbyterian church in Philadelphia found sponsors. Everyone agreed to a September resettlement. But then Catholic Relief Services reported sponsorship available in St. Paul.

When Roberto brought home news of having found sponsorship in Minnesota, Noris agreed to resettle there. In a week’s time they would leave the Miami apartment for the Twin Cities.

With a new destination in mind, Roberto went to the Cuban Refugee Center to select winter coats for his family. There, he met Hector San Domingo doing the same thing. They exchanged information about their families and their resettlement plans as they sifted through winter garments at the Refugio. Roberto said his wife, Noris, was petite so he was having trouble finding the right size coat. Hector said his wife, Manola, was also small. They kept sorting through garments. Finally, each man decided on a coat for his wife, then lifted it to show one another the treasure. It was the exact same coat!

My father went to Miami International Airport to catch a Northwest Orient flight to the Twin Cities on August 30, 1962.

Besides being high season for hurricanes, late summer and early fall is a time of scorching heat in Miami. While waiting for the flight to board, my father met three other Cuban families who’d found sponsorship in Minnesota. They were Roberto and Noris Beruvides and their children José and Ariana. Hector and Manola San Domingo were ready with their daughter Ruth. Luis and Virginia Padilla had three boys, Luis, Eddie, and two-month-old Miami-born Miguel.

Luis Padilla was a lawyer in Havana, his wife, Virginia, a home economics teacher. They left Cuba for Miami in 1961 by way of a flight that stopped in Jamaica before coming to the United States. Virginia came a day before her husband. For one night, she stayed with an uncle in an apartment on Southwest Eighth Street. The following day, with help from the Catholic agency, she rented an apartment in the same building. Luis Padilla brought their two sons and soon found a job as a hotel bellboy, earning $30 a week.

The U.S. government had proposed resettlement to Minnesota. Sponsors were available in White Bear Lake. The Padillas had not considered resettlement. Today, Virginia (now Virginia Odio) is a snowbird who enjoys Miami winters and cooler Minnesota summers.

As these Cuban families waited to leave Miami, curious to learn more about his future home, my father approached an agent behind the airline counter. He asked about the current temperature in the Twin Cities.

“He said it was fifty-seven degrees. I went back to the group and said, ‘You have sweated all you’ve sweated in your lives. You will never sweat again,’” my father said.

While everyone chuckled at his comments, I imagine the laughs were nervous ones.

The anecdote is an example of the belief system my father adopted: the past is over. It will never be again. Don’t waste your time thinking about it. Don’t talk about it, either. Why not? Because it doesn’t exist.

How very Zen.

In her book In the Land of Mirrors: Cuban Exile Politics in the United States, Maria de los Angeles Torres writes about exiles and their relationship to memory. “Memory, remembering and re-creating become individual and collective rituals, as does forgetting.”

Beyond the vital winter coats, I suspect staying warm was low on the Cuban list of concerns. At least initially. Employment, English skills, and good schools for the children were crucial.

There are many ways to process the traumatic loss of homeland, like the various ways people mourn a death. I know of a Cuban man who was practicing as a physician in Havana. After many years in exile in the Midwest, he lost the ability to speak Spanish, though comprehension remained. Some exiles were Creoles, that is, the first generation of Cubans born to Spaniards. They may have or do identify more closely with Spain. Many Cubans who resettled outside Miami encouraged their children to Anglicize their names to ease their way in the United States. Some people did not insist on their children speaking Spanish at home.

I don’t know when it happened, but my mother became devoted to St. Jude, the patron of hopeless causes. Our family was silent. Lips were sealed. Only when my maternal grandmother Manuela visited from Venezuela, always staying for several months, did I hear laments. Understandably, my parents were annoyed with her voicing them. Keyed for survival, my parents couldn’t invest time or energy in what they considered the luxury of mourning.

Cuban children had an easier time adapting to the new climate, though they struggled with restrictions arising from their parents’ fears. Many resettled Cubans lacked familiarity with so many American behaviors. For example, my mother called my brother inside the apartment the first time it snowed; she feared he’d get sick.

I was too young to make comparisons about the weather or our housing. I believed life was lived in numerous houses in various climates because that’s how we had lived. I didn’t know any other way.

Surely, the Cuban adults in Minnesota must have talked among themselves. Were they sad when the days shortened and the temperatures dropped below zero? Were they amazed with their new wardrobes, which included unfamiliar items—long underwear, boots, coats, scarves, hats, and gloves? Salting and sanding sidewalks and entrances was a new practice. For those who lived in houses with yards, what about that leaf raking and burning?

I remember watching my father shovel the driveway. An afternoon snow had fallen. It was dark. My mother’s Buick was inside the garage. He wore a wool coat, brim hat, and leather gloves. I don’t remember him laughing.

The adults in exile may have learned quickly what took me many years and moves to learn. For one, the homeland is never forgotten, though many other places will be loved as home. A place is called home, no matter where the dwelling is situated, for one reason: the sanctuary of home is carried within each person. The material manifestation of home—trailer, apartment, or mansion—is secondary.

The extended family is essential to Cubans. My mother’s maternal aunt, Great-aunt Carmen, and her husband, Great-uncle Epifanio Echevarria, were with us from the beginning of exile. They moved from Miami to Minnesota and settled in the Sibley Manor Apartments in West St. Paul.

Their son, Dr. Orlando Echevarria, was my mother’s first cousin, which in Spanish is primo hermano. The literal translation is brother-cousin, reminding everyone of the closeness of their relationship. When someone is identified as a first cousin, that person is announced as being loved in the same way we love our brothers and sisters. This love is a natural result of the love our parents had for their siblings. My mother’s mother and Orlando’s mother were the Spanish sisters.

Orlando, my mother, and her brother Homero were born and raised in Punta San Juan, Central Punta Alegre, Camaguey, a few houses from one another.

Starting in 1948, Orlando was in medical school at the University of Havana. However, in March 1952, the university closed as a consequence of a military coup d’état by a former Cuban president (1940–44) who had been living in Daytona Beach, Florida. Fulgencio Batista wanted to come back to Cuba in a big way. The 1952 elections were canceled. The United States supported this regime.

Consequently, in October 1953, Orlando left Cuba to finish medical school in Madrid, Spain. Two years later, he was in Ohio, working at a psychiatric hospital and studying for the U.S. medical boards. He married Carol Good, and eventually they had four children: Orlando Jr., Lisa, Victor, and Gina. Orlando obtained a license to practice medicine in the United States in 1966. The rest of his professional life was spent in Kankakee and Bourbonnais, Illinois.

My maternal grandmother Manuela Ballesteros González went into exile in May 1961 to Valencia, Venezuela. Her son Homero González was about to be married to an Italian-born immigrant to Venezuela, Antonietta Legrottaglie. In 1956, Homero had graduated as an electrical engineer from the University of Miami in Coral Gables, Florida. He traveled to New York City and attended a job fair where he learned Termec, S.A., had a position in Maracaibo, Venezuela. The company made an excellent offer and he moved.

Their three children are my first cousins, Patricia, Homero Alejandro, and Fabiola. Homero and Antonietta remained in Venezuela until they retired to Miami, Florida, in 2009.

From Venezuela, Grandmother Manuela visited Minnesota, as did my paternal grandparents Miguel and Evangelina Veiga. My maternal grandfather Severiano González stayed in Cuba and died there. No one in exile saw him again.

My father’s only sibling, Rosita Veiga de Alvarez, and her husband, Rafael Alvarez, went into exile early in 1960 to Mexico City with their three children, my first cousins Rafael, Bernardo, and Lourdes.

Without a doubt, one impact of our resettlement in Minnesota was the family’s faster rate of assimilation, especially on the part of the children. Due to the small numbers of Cubans in the Twin Cities, I suspect our assimilation was faster than for our counterparts who remained in Miami. There, Cuban cultural norms and Spanish language remained intact. The number of refugees in the community and waves of new ones reinforced Cuban traditions.

Our family was among the estimated 35 percent of the 165,000 Cubans who had registered at the Cuban Refugee Center who found new homes and work in places outside Miami by June 1963.

The experience of exile, especially during one’s formative years, leaves an imprint. The constant moving to find a place to live then claiming many places as home does not let me forget that an exile is much of who I am.

“Once a refugee, always a refugee,” writes Carlos Eire in his second book, Learning to Die in Miami: Confessions of a Refugee Boy, on his early exile as an unaccompanied child, one of more than fourteen thousand who were part of Operation Pedro Pan. While it is a hard truth, I like it. It’s a bit of an affirmation.

“Where are you from?” I am asked, especially when I am north of Miami. To date, I have lived in Minnesota, Ohio, Virginia, Puerto Rico, and, briefly, in the Dominican Republic. My Florida homes include Miami, Coconut Grove, Homestead, and St. Augustine.

The question trying to place me typically surfaces after my first name has been said. Sometimes, we have pronunciation practice. I watch as people scan me physically for more information. There’s confusion. My first answer is simple.

“It’s a long story.”

“What do you mean?”

“I’m a Cuban raised in Minnesota and Miami. I’m Cuban.”

It’s a long story. Do you have time?

Typically, people want to know more about Fidel or, in more recent years, about Raul Castro. Sometimes our information concerning what’s transpiring in Cuba differs from what is gleaned from mainstream U.S. media reports. Cuban exiles listen to both English and Spanish media; news coverage of the island is crucial in Miami.

Besides, Cubans on both sides of the Florida Straits make and receive telephone calls, send letters and emails, and travel to and, more frequently now, from the island. The communication flows and recedes according to decrees by both countries.

My family’s story, like that of many exiles, contains the elements of extraordinary loss—a severing from one’s personal and collective history and homeland and the accompanying, often suppressed, grief. It is followed by some recovery—the increasing knowledge of different customs and the chance to participate as citizens of our adopted country. The story is laced with continuous ambiguity and high flexibility, states that, in time, become easier to tolerate. They are second nature to a person who is bicultural.

When we left Cuba, we weren’t donning space suits or thinking ourselves explorers to the New World. Both of my parents had traveled to the United States before they married. My maternal grandfather, Severiano González, studied English and radio communications in Poughkeepsie, New York. One reason he didn’t leave the island was because he didn’t like the way of life he had known in the United States. He didn’t want to join his only son and his family in Venezuela, either.

Bicultural lives are lived in the most unexpected places. It is my hope that native-born people of any country who have welcomed foreigners will benefit from the telling of the story of my family’s early years in exile. Perhaps refugees, exiles, and immigrants—in spite of strange languages, foods, and customs—will not be such scary people. I hope more people will be moved to include them. I wish our hosts, now fellow citizens, would more vocally express what we brought and continue to bring to work sites, schools, churches and temples, and the larger U.S. culture. And they won’t have to name a celebrity like Gloria Estefan or Marco Rubio to do so.

When I idealize Cuba, I think of it as a place where my origins are never questioned. It’s where my family, and therefore I, had a history. There, I would not fall under suspicion after an introduction or be invited to join something in order to fill a minority quota. In Cuba, people knew both sets of grandparents and maybe even their parents as decent, hardworking, family-oriented people. They had integrity. Most importantly, they were people with faith in God.

Unfortunately, an uninterrupted trajectory of relationships, generations of relationships with other families from birth to death, is impossible when one is in exile. In addition, the importance of place and one’s relationship to it is corrupted. These are two of my major losses.

I would have liked to have known a life with continuity. The desire lingers from a natural flow’s severance.

Many times when I’ve shared these longings, people shake their heads. They wonder if I’ve ignored the demographic changes that have transpired in the United States since World War II. Am I stuck watching reruns of Ozzie and Harriet?

The migratory pattern in the United States—from rural to urban, small town to big city, south to north, east to far west—is not news to me. Nomadic people and migration existed way before Europeans got on their boats and sailed west.

In Goodhue County, Minnesota, Fredrick L. Johnson writes about immigration to the United States during modern times. During the 156-year period from 1820 to 1975, at least 47 million immigrants reached America from countries around the world. About 13 million migrants between the years 1820 and 1950 returned to their native countries or moved to other nations. The percentage of returnees varied, with higher rates, for example, from Mediterranean Europe and lower ones for Scandinavia.

Those who returned to their country of origin were typically urban dwellers who did not own property or land.

In contrast to immigrants, political exiles lack choice about returning home. The expression of differing political beliefs might land them in jail. Unless they are crazy, why would they return to live in a place where dissidents are often silenced for expressing their views?

Minnesota is another home to me. If I hear a Minnesota accent in someone’s English, it won’t be long before I inquire about his or her relationship to the state.

I’ve had the pleasure of meeting three people who, unbeknownst to me, were sociolinguists. Their trained ears were working during chit-chat at an airport or banquet table. After a few minutes, they gingerly revealed conclusions: I’m a Latina from Minnesota. Amazing: I didn’t have to explain a thing.

To this day, I am drawn to the quiet of the deep forests of northern Minnesota, where our family vacationed in lakeside cabins. I appreciate the freedom of playing and roaming outdoors without adult supervision. It has translated to my adult ability to explore wilderness areas for hours or to travel alone. I am blinded by the light of a cloudless winter day. I loved swimming in the river at Taylors Falls. These places are homes too, for they have provided me with beauty and comfort in various stages of my life.

In Minnesota, exposure to Norwegians and Germans was part of my formative years; as a result, it was natural to marry a man with both heritages. My husband is Richard Rettig of Seattle, Washington, whose mother, Mildred Januara Hegdahl, was a first-generation Norwegian Lutheran. His father, Roy Edward Rettig, was of German descent. Both of my brothers married midwestern women: Suzanne Barber and Marjorie MacArthur hail from Michigan.

Perhaps one cannot go home again, though often, in my mind and in my moves and travels, I kept trying.

It was a foolish practice. Which one would I return to, anyway?

Like hermit crabs, we exiles carry our homes with us. That is one of the major lessons of exile.