Exile Reclaims Childhood in Visit Home

The yellowed family photograph of my grandmother holding a rag doll brings childhood memories flooding back. I see myself as a frightened 5-year-old, lying in bed, clutching that doll in the dark.

My parents are whispering again, whispering about leaving Cuba. Their voices are tinged with sadness.

I remember saying goodbye to my beloved abuela, the Spanish word for grandmother. We are among the lemon and mango trees behind her little stucco home in “El Rosario,” a poor barrio on the outskirts of Havana.

I bravely assure her we will be back soon. A few months, maybe a year or two at most. Castro will be gone soon, Papa says, and we can come back home.

My abuela hugs me tightly. I squirm away and thrust my favorite doll at her. I have an important task for her.

“This is for you to take care of now,” I tell her.

The look of surprise on her face comes back to me now. She insists I take the doll to America. I can carry it with me on the airplane, she says.

“I’ll be back to get it,” I promise her. I turn and run, leaving my rag doll in her arms.

*

Today, I am a 41-year-old woman married to a “gringo.” We are raising three children in Abita Springs, La., a small community on the outskirts of New Orleans, where I work as a reporter for Associated Press.

My father, Orlando Perez, worked for a religious publishing business in El Paso, Texas, for many years. He died four years ago, never seeing his homeland again.

I have asked my mother, Josefa Perez, to return to Cuba with me. My 32-year-old sister, Judy Perez, who was born in America and lives in Palm Bay, Fla., says she will come with us.

I hope this journey together will help me understand my mother as well as recover my own past. I want to know what my mother and father lost when they left Cuba. I want to understand why every New Year’s Eve, my parents solemnly vowed: “Next year in Havana.”

For months, Mama vacillates about returning. I grow increasingly angry at her excuses: Maybe she would get sick, maybe the Cubans would shoot the plane out of the sky, maybe she couldn’t get back out.

And then one day she blurts out the real reason: “I don’t want the nightmares to start again.”

During her first years in exile, she had nightmares every night, she tells me in a quaking voice. Nightmares that she was back in Communist Cuba and couldn’t find a way out.

But the phone calls from family members still on the island tug at Mama. And she is haunted by photographs my grandmother and aunts have sent us over the years.

Among the oldest of the pictures is the one of my grandmother holding the doll, showing me she was still keeping it for me. But in recent pictures, the old women look like starving inmates of a concentration camp. Finally, even Mama cannot resist their pull.

My maternal grandfather, Francisco Mari, a poor fisherman, died in 1975. But as we start the long process of getting permission for our visit from the Cuban government, I am happy that Mama will see her mother one last time.

The political fallout from Cuba’s downing of two refugee planes slows the visa approval. For five months, we wait.

My grandmother--already frail from malnutrition and the lack of scarce medicines--dies in late March before the visas finally come.

*

Two haggard old women rush out of the family home in El Rosario. It is the house my grandfather built, the home of my earliest childhood memories.

The old women are strangers to me, but Mama kisses and hugs her sisters joyfully. My sister Judy and I hang back, waiting to be introduced.

“This is Roxanita?” Mercedes Cao Mari asks in Spanish as she holds me at arms’ length and slowly looks me over. I feel like a shy little girl again when she crushes me to her chest and kisses me on the cheek.

It is hard to believe this wrinkled woman is just two years older than my own 66-year-old mother. Mercedes weighs about 100 pounds. The hot Cuban sun has turned her thin arms a deep brown. Deep creases mark the passage of time on her long face. Her gnarled, arthritic hands, two fingernails black with infection, tell of years of hard work.

Her 74-year-old sister is even more frail. The years have turned Antonia Aguilar Mari’s hair nearly white. She is even thinner than her sister and speaks little, seemingly overwhelmed by all the people. Antonia, I am told, hasn’t left the house for years.

It is Mama who first asks about the doll: “It would make Roxana very happy if it is still around.”

I am embarrassed.

Here I am--a grown woman with a home and children of my own--and my mother is asking my poor relations if they still have my rag doll.

The Communist revolution has torn families apart. The fleeing refugees left behind homes and businesses. Corporations have lost millions. And I want my doll.

Nobody can remember ever seeing the doll. It doesn’t really matter, I mumble.

That evening we meet Manolo Cao, the man Mercedes married. He was the one who kept part of the family in Cuba long after everyone else had fled, Mama tells me bitterly. He was a Castro supporter who spurned family pleas and refused to let his two young daughters leave. Mercedes wouldn’t leave without them.

I find it impossible to dislike this old man, who can do little more now than walk a few blocks every day to pick up the family ration of bread at the neighborhood bakery before dizziness drives him to a rocking chair. I can only pity him.

All he has left of the family business he stayed to save, a print shop founded in 1909, is the sign rescued out of a pile of garbage. Nobody speaks to him of that anymore, and I respect my mother’s wishes not to talk to him about politics now.

One of the daughters that Manolo would not allow to leave Cuba died years ago in an automobile accident. It is his other daughter, Margarita, who keeps the family fed and clothed. Just 2 years old when I left Cuba, she is 38 now and works as a computer programmer for the government agency that runs the country’s tourist hotels.

In the days ahead, Margarita will become my passport to the reality of my extended family’s life in Cuba today.

*

Mama takes my sister and me to her old haunts in Havana. We walk arm-in-arm along “El Malecon,” the winding walkway alongside Havana Bay.

Mama points out the spot where my grandfather always moored his wooden fishing boat, the Mari. She shows me the bench where her own parents once sat and talked while she roller-skated for hours. We enter the famous Havana cathedral, where I was baptized.

Next door is the building where Mama grew up before the family moved to El Rosario. We take pictures of Mama in front of the old family home. She laughs merrily as she describes how her old boyfriends stood on this very spot and called to her when they came courting.

We continue down the narrow, crumbling streets of Old Havana. This used to be your uncle’s drugstore. This was his meat market. Over there is the apartment house he owned.

Castro took everything, Mama whispers.

She tries to help us understand about her last days in Cuba. Fleeing refugees were not allowed to keep anything, she says. She could not even take her wedding gifts.

As the days pass, we climb the steps of El Morro, the famous Havana lighthouse. We watch the ceremony surrounding the nightly firing of the harbor cannon, swim in the Caribbean and drive along elegant Fifth Avenue in Miramar, where old plantation-style houses suggest an opulent past. Together, we place flowers on my grandmother’s grave.

Margarita tries to help us blend in, mostly to fend off the beggars who trail every tourist. Leave your fanny pack, she instructs me. Put your camera in this old handbag. Don’t dress so well.

But she does not know how to make my portly mother look Cuban. “There are no fat Cubans here,” she explains.

Mounds of stinking garbage tower over Havana’s neighborhoods. Gasoline shortages make garbage pickup erratic at best. Raw sewage spewing from broken septic pipes runs along the gutters of many neighborhoods. A sheen of oil covers the waters of Havana Bay. Black, oily goop covers the rocks anchoring the historic lighthouse.

*

Margarita serves us Cuban-made colas at her flat in Old Havana.

Here, ornate ceilings and marble staircases remind of past wealth, but the water heater broke down long ago. Margarita’s niece, who also lives in this house, grew up never knowing the simple pleasure of a hot shower.

Margarita purchased the colas with scarce U.S. dollars in anticipation of our visit.

Her monthly income of 340 Cuban pesos is well above the Cuban average. Still, it amounts to little more than $13 per month. With it, she supports her elderly parents, her ailing aunt and a niece studying for her pharmacy degree.

In Cuba today, essentials are rationed--even sugar, the country’s biggest export. Milk rations are cut off when a child reaches 7. My elderly aunts each are limited to a fist-sized ration of bread daily.

If you want more from the sparsely stocked stores, you need U.S. dollars. It’s the only currency accepted at the clothing and shoe stores too.

“How do you survive earning only Cuban pesos?” I ask Margarita.

She shrugs. “With what money you all have sent us,” she answers.

Guilt, mixed with anger, churns inside me. My family sent only a few hundred dollars to our relations in Cuba over the years. We had been reluctant to pay the exorbitant fees charged by the cash runners who bleed the Cuban American community in the United States.

Later that night, I ask Mama if she is sorry she has come back to Cuba.

“No,” she says. “Don’t ever tell the family I hadn’t wanted to come.”

For my sister, Judy, our 10-day stay has been more difficult.

“There is nothing here for me,” she says. “I don’t know what I expected to find since I wasn’t born here. But I don’t blame Mom and Dad for leaving. My American citizenship was the greatest gift they could have given me.”

*

Mama has found a sealed box in grandmother’s house.

It is a cardboard box that Mama had packed with baby clothes before she left for the United States.

Could it contain anything else? Mama shakes her head and says she does not remember.

“You didn’t open it?”

“No,” Mama says. “I left it for you to open.”

Trying to keep my voice casual, I ask Mama if she could have put my doll inside the box.

“No,” she says, reminding me I had left it with my grandmother.

The years have been harsh to the tiny, two-bedroom house where my grandparents lived and died. The yellowed shutters and peeling paints are typical of houses throughout the city. Big spots on the ceiling mark where the roof leaks.

The plumbing deteriorated long ago. Buckets of water are brought in from an outside faucet for bathing. The toilet seat is long gone. Cutup squares of Granma, the official Communist Party newspaper, are kept nearby for use as toilet paper.

The family has crowded into one of the bedrooms. Overgrown grapevines outside the window filter out most of the light. A fan on a battered vanity table provides the only relief from the unrelenting Havana heat.

On the bed where Mama slept before she married is a white, square box like the kind that comes from a department store.

Scrawled across the top of the box is the note my mother left my grandmother almost 36 years ago.

I read it aloud. It says the box contains baby clothes belonging to my brother and me. It asks my grandmother not to give them away.

The family falls quiet. Here is a time capsule no one had expected to find.

The box is fastened with brittle twine. My hands tremble as I fumble with the knot. Inside are tiny baby clothes and knitted booties.

And something else.

Seconds pass. No one speaks.

“My doll!” I scream.

I scoop the rag doll from the box and clutch it to my chest. Tears stream from my eyes. Through them I can see that everyone else in the room is crying too.

My grandmother must have put the doll in the box and retied the string. She must have done it sometime after the yellowed photograph was taken.

I sob as I try to make the others understand all that this doll means to me. The childhood pact with my grandmother. The lost years. My grandparents’ death. The broken ties to family and culture.

I understand now that for all the hardships of Castro’s Cuba, the family members who stayed behind held on to something of infinite value: their homeland.

And I also realize why so many Cuban exiles in the United States still hang on to the old ways as tightly as old property titles.

But that is a story for other journalists to write.

For me, it is enough for now to be a little girl again, cradling a musty rag doll with a torn blue dress and a dirty face.