Teary at LAX

Maribel Vilar took a pill for her high blood pressure, then reached for her cigarettes.

She lighted one, put it out, then reached again for her lighter.

This was going to be the happiest moment of her life, she said Friday night, hours before her mother’s plane arrived from Havana at Los Angeles International Airport. But one thing nagged her: Would she recognize her mother’s face after 23 years? Would her mother know her?

Vilar, 44, left Cuba in a secret, sudden rush in May 1980 with her 4-year-old son and her husband, who was working against Fidel Castro’s government and had to get out of the country.

Although she lived with her parents, she couldn’t even say goodbye because their escape had to be secret.

The Vilars have sometimes struggled, but have achieved a measure of the American dream, with a cozy home in Lakewood and three sons in college or already graduated.

And over the decades, Communism’s power to keep families apart has waned, allowing Vilar and her mother to communicate each month by phone. Yet Vilar and her mother had not held each other, celebrated family milestones or shared a meal together since that warm May morning.

Her mother, Martha Ramirez, 66, who was a supporter of the Communist government, has forgiven Vilar’s husband for the political activities that took her daughter away. The heady political passions of the 1960s and ‘70s have faded.

And now the plane was delayed. Waiting at LAX just after midnight Saturday morning, Vilar paced and smoked. Finally, the Havana flight was announced. She scanned the face of each older woman coming up the ramp.

And for all her worries, she recognized her mother immediately.

Tears streamed down their faces as they held each other for more than five minutes.

“My daughter. My daughter,” Ramirez said, over and over. “Thanks to God.”

She took her daughter’s face in her hands. “You look exactly the same. You are as beautiful as ever.”

“We are together now,” Vilar said, hugging her mother.

Ramirez wiped her eyes. “My blood pressure is up,” she said. “So is mine,” her daughter answered.

The reunion will be brief. Ramirez, who had never before been apart from her husband of 46 years, plans to return in a month. She and her husband don’t want to leave their two sons and their home in Cuba.

But for the next four weeks, mother and daughter have each other.

“You always need your mother,” Vilar said. “You don’t realize how much until you don’t have her.”

Growing up in Havana, Vilar, the only daughter, told her mother everything.

“I need to talk to you,” Vilar would say.

And her mother would answer, “Like a mother or like a friend?”

Ramirez, a retired school dietitian, always offered a sympathetic ear.

But the advice differed, depending on whether she was being mother or friend.

When Vilar was 15, she met Victor Vilar. Twenty-seven years her senior, he had been imprisoned for his activities against the Castro government and now worked with her uncle.

“It was love at first sight,” Vilar said, smiling at Victor, now 71. But Ramirez was not thrilled. And this time, the mother had trouble seeing the situation as a friend. Victor was so much older. And, in a family that supported Castro and believed in the revolution, he was against Communism.

Still, after they were married, the Vilars moved into an apartment behind her parents’ house. When Vilar’s son Duny, now 27, was born a year later, Ramirez was taken with the baby.

Unknown to either mother or daughter, however, Victor Vilar continued to work against Castro’s regime. And one morning in May of 1980, Maribel and Victor were told, “You have to leave now.”

On May 8, the Vilars arrived in Key West, Fla. Then they made their way to Hawaiian Gardens, where Victor Vilar’s sister lived. Life was difficult. They were poor. They felt lonely and isolated, and they did not speak English. Overwhelmed by the profusion of goods in the supermarket, Vilar once bought nearly a dozen cans of cat food, thinking she was getting a deal on tuna. A Spanish-speaking worker saved her by commenting that she must really love her cats.

On top of that, for her first seven months in America, Vilar could not reach her mother.

Every afternoon, she would go into the bedroom and dial Cuba. But she never got through. For three hours, she would dial and redial. Then she would give up and make dinner.

Finally, the phone connected. Mother and daughter could not speak. They just sat at either end of the line, weeping.

After that first call, Vilar and her mother spoke whenever she could get through. As the years passed, phone service improved. Vilar also wrote letters, but they seldom made it to Cuba. And each month, she sent money.

The family prospered in California. Though Victor Vilar suffered a heart attack that made it difficult for him to work, Maribel went to night school and learned English. She trained as a medical assistant and then got a job with a group of doctors in Fountain Valley. On Friday, her co-workers surprised her with more than $400 in cash to give to her mother.

For years, however, it seemed an impossible dream that Martha Ramirez could ever come to the United States.

After she turned 60, the Cuban government gave permission for her to visit her daughter. But the trip was expensive, and her own mother was ill.

Finally, the family submitted the paperwork and raised enough money, with friends from as far away as New York contributing to the $2,500 in travel expenses. Even so, there wasn’t enough money for Vilar’s father to make the trip.

Mother and daughter stayed up all night, holding hands and hugging. Saturday morning, Vilar took her mother to a friend’s beauty salon, and Ramirez emerged with light brown hair, fashionably cut. Neither had their nails done, however. Independently, both women had already painted their nails pink for the occasion. Saturday afternoon, the family filled the house with balloons and had a party to celebrate.

Before the guests arrived, Ramirez looked around her daughter’s house.

She said she was thrilled to be with her grandsons and her daughter. “This feels like home,” she said.

It felt more like a home to her daughter as well.

“I feel like I am in a dream,” Vilar said. “There is nothing more precious than a mother.”