As far as I can tell about myself, back then, I hardly cared about anything except some vague notion of being a creative sort. Lord knows how much my mother had to put up with: When some family from down the street moved out and left an upright piano on the sidewalk, I somehow persuaded the superintendent of that building, Mr. Sullivan, and one of my sturdier friends, a certain Provinzano, to help me bring it up the hill and carry it into the apartment. (I don’t know how we managed, but at one point, the piano slipped and, coming down hard, cracked the lip of one of the marble stairs in the entryway — go check, it’s still there.) I began to play that piano (badly) and, at one point, putting thumbtacks into its felt hammers, and fooling around while plucking on its strings inside the harp, came up with strange compositions à la John Cage, which I would commemorate for posterity on a cassette recorder.
My pop didn’t seem to mind and seemed only vaguely aware of my aesthetic leanings, if they could be called that. On one of those nights when he was hanging around with one of his friends from the hotel, this Haitian fellow, as I recall, he asked me to play something for them (“algo en español, eh?”—“something in Spanish, huh? ”) and when all I could come up with were a few chords along the lines of “La Bamba,” he listened for a moment and, with a disappointed expression on his face, poured himself and his friend another drink, shrugging and moving on. I didn’t brood about it: If I’d played a Beatles tune for him, it wouldn’t have meant a thing; as far as I was concerned, both my parents were really from some other planet. (My brother, on the other hand, who had come home from his air force stint in England and had stayed briefly with us in 1966 while he studied for his GED diploma before he moved out to live in Queens with a young woman, later to become his wife, seemed interested in what I was doing: I think we sometimes talked about my showing him how to play a little guitar, and while, years later, we would often lament the fact that we hadn’t tried speaking Spanish with each other back when, it was nothing that ever occurred to us at the time.) No, sir, whatever I was about, a work in progress, as it were, I might have been aspiring to many things but none that had to do with Cuba.
That I was so American, or to put it in the way I prefer, so New Yorkish, didn’t bother me much at all, until, as it happened, my wonderful aunt Cheo arrived to live with us from Cuba. She and her daughters and their husbands had come in 1967, thanks to some arrangement that Lyndon Johnson had made with Fidel to allow more Cubans to leave the island legally, of course for money — with which my pop, working his extra job, had helped them out. They were exhausted, of course, after the ordeal, but the reunion between my mother and her sister, whom she had not seen since our visit to Holguín in the 1950s, was joyous. I am not sure what they made of our apartment — I think they were a little disappointed — but whatever might be said about the drabness of our digs, it was surely a big improvement over what they had been reduced to back in Cuba.
“No había comida,” I remember my gentle aunt saying, “y olvídate de trabajo — nos trataron como perritos.” (“There was no food, and forget about work — we were treated no better than little dogs.”)
Theirs was a story that is fairly common to most exiles. Mercita’s husband, Angel Tamayo, had run a car repair shop, which had been nationalized some years back during one of Fidel’s sweeping reforms, while Eduardo Arocena, married to Miriam, and a most quiet fellow, had been, as far as I know, in the trucking business and harassed by the government for his strong feelings against Fidel. Though it’s a cliché by now to mention that they arrived with only the clothes on their back and what they could manage to bring along in a few suitcases, it was, in fact, the truth. I can’t imagine how daunting it must have been for them. Still, all of us made do. We had a spare bedroom next to mine — that’s where I think Mercita and Angel stayed, while Cheo, Miriam, and Eduardo were settled into the living room, on cots, I believe. (Though now and then, coming into the apartment after school, I’d sometimes hear my mother and her sister whispering to each other as they lay, much as they probably did as children, alongside each other in bed.)
At first, they naturally assumed I could speak Spanish as well as my brother, who came to visit them often, though once it became clear that my repertoire mainly consisted of nods of assent and understanding as to what they were saying—“Remember, my love, when you stayed with us in Holguín?”—our methods of communication, harkening back to my mother and “la muda,” often came down to gestures, though Angel, who spoke some English, didn’t mind practicing it with me. (One of the first things he said, while noticing my guitar: “You know Elvis? I love Elvis Presley.”) Thank goodness, however, that Cheo, despite the displacement she must have been feeling, remained such a tolerant souclass="underline" She’d often sit next to me in the kitchen and, taking hold of my hand, recount those delicious days when we were together in Cuba, and in more than a few religious asides, always urged me not to lose my faith in God. (“Tienes que confiarte en Dios,” she’d say.) I recall my mother apologizing about my Spanish to my cousins — I think she made the effort to remind them about my year in the hospital, though given what they’d gone through, it was hardly a number one concern. What seemed to matter the most, at least to my aunt, was that we were together, and as far as I seemed to be turning out, it made no difference to her, for, as I will always say, she was nothing less than pure affection.
For his part, my father, despite the inconveniences, didn’t seem to feel any imposition on his comforts, such as they were. He happily provided them with whatever they needed — walking-around money, advice, got people to drive them to where they had to go, offered to get Angel and Eduardo jobs at the Biltmore, and, of course, fed them to death with that hotel food, and good stuff too. Oddly, he abandoned his bad habits during those three months or so — I don’t recall his having much to drink; I think having people around made him happy, and, if anything, when they finally got resettled over in Union City, New Jersey, where there was a big Cuban community, he seemed a little sad to see them go. For once they left, it was back to my mother and father’s old patterns; along the way my mother, hearing of how the government and exile agencies had helped them out — Angel, working odd jobs, was soon driving a Chevy, and it wasn’t long before they’d made a down payment on a house — couldn’t help but feel some jealousy, though I know she truly wished them well.
As for myself? I felt a little relieved to have some relative privacy again, and while I missed them, I welcomed a release from the daily strains — and perhaps shame — I had been feeling about not being Cuban enough to hold a conversation with my own cousins.