Learning to Die in Miami

by Carlos Eire

  Later experiences would cast doubt on this feeling of connectedness to Cuba, and on the illusion that I was still in the same dimension as my loved ones back home.

  Bits and pieces of that first day linger in my memory, totally fragmented and mixed with memories from the following two weeks. I’ve blocked out a lot, and I’m sure I’ve consigned most of the emotional memories to my Vault of Oblivion. But I do remember a few of my first experiences at that camp, which speak loudly about the process of death and rebirth.

  Cereal boxes. I’d never seen anything like these boxes. In our mess hall, we could choose from dozens of different cereals, all packaged in single-serving boxes that could be used as bowls. Cardboard boxes with a perforated seam that could be simply ripped open. A foil package within, which could also be easily ripped with your fingers, full of cereal. You could open the box, lengthwise, tear the foil, add milk, and, presto, eat directly from the package with a plastic spoon. It was the most beautiful thing I’d ever seen, I thought. Such simplicity, such pragmatism, all made available through a mysterious economic process I couldn’t comprehend at the time. All I knew was that the Cuba I’d just left behind had no cereals at all—even though it once had them—and that it couldn’t produce anything like these little boxes full of foil-wrapped cereal, let alone plastic spoons with which to eat the contents.

  This is a truly superior country, I thought.

  Then I met some of the children on the other side of the chain-link fence, and I had to adjust my thinking. Kids from the Homestead Air Force Base called us spics, gave us the finger, and told us to go back where we belonged. Even worse, they spoke in a tongue I couldn’t fully understand. I’d been studying English since first grade, so I had some of the basic vocabulary and grammar under my belt. But reading Dick and Jane books doesn’t exactly prepare you for dealing with children your own age who hurl insults at you in English. Some of the other kids at the camp whose English was much better than mine translated the insults for the rest of us. We all left that fence feeling pretty low. Maybe as low as one can get.

  It was 1962, after all, and we were in South Florida. Racial segregation was still legal. And we Cubans tended to be viewed by the locals as non-white intruders, even if we had blond hair and blue eyes. The lower you went on the social scale, the stronger the biases against us tended to be, but prejudices against Hispanics permeated the entire culture, from top to bottom, in a much more open way than nowadays.

  All of my textbooks at school would confirm that fact during the next few years, once I got the chance to go to school with the kids on the other side of the chain-link fence.

  Coins. I loved them, these American coins. I’d seen them all before, in Cuba, when we used them along with our own currency. Before Fidel and Che came along, the Cuban peso was equal to the dollar, and American coins were as common in our hands as Cuban coins. It was so great, once again, to handle these very familiar manifestations of the only universal religion on earth, which always has its local variants. What I had missed the most was the American nickel, with Thomas Jefferson on one side and his home, Monticello, on the other. Once, when I was about five years old, I made a wish on one of them.

  “I hope someday I get to see this building, on this coin.”

  Ha. I’m still laughing. Be careful with your wishing. As divine providence would have it, I’d end up spending fifteen years in Charlottesville, Virginia, former home to Thomas Jefferson, and every time someone came to visit from out of town, the only thing to do was to take them to Monticello. Eventually, I got to see Monticello more times than I could count, and one of my children would break one of Mr. Jefferson’s windows.

  I loved them all, these coins, but they puzzled me then and puzzle me still. Human beings have irrationally concocted some way of placing value on pieces of metal or on strips of paper, and these objects can get you things. It’s a complex belief system, but its complexity can’t hide the fact that it’s based on belief in symbols and their ability to represent something unseen. It’s the only religion all humans share in common.

  Save for communists, of course. I was driven out of my native land by people who hated money and the belief system it represents. Coins are all about the distribution of wealth, and about belief and symbols. If you don’t have them, you’re out of luck. But if you have them, the world can be yours for the asking. We had coins in Cuba, of course. But Che had changed all the currency and seized everyone’s bank accounts, and the new Cuban coins were worth next to nothing in the world market and also at home. Money is kind of useless when everything is rationed and there’s no private enterprise or private property. Che’s plan was to do away with money altogether, and he came damn close to succeeding by making everyone equally poor, save for those who, like him, ran the country. It felt great to once again handle these little symbols of everything hated by Che and Fidel.

  The grocery store. I couldn’t believe my eyes. My house father, Panchitín Angones, took a bunch of us to a small grocery store in downtown Florida City that was jam-packed with produce and merchandise. Where does all of this come from? Why is this store so well stocked, and why is every store in Cuba so empty? What the hell is going on?

  The store left me bewildered. Dizzy, even. For the past two years I’d seen everything vanish from the stores in Cuba, very quickly. I’d also seen lots of stores vanish, for there was nothing to sell. I’d had to stand in line for the simplest things, ration card in hand, and wait hours and hours for nothing at all. If you got in line too late, there’d be nothing left for you, no matter what your ration card entitled you to. The economy in Cuba was entirely in the hands of the government: All production, all supply was tightly controlled from above, and all stores too, along with prices. The result was an immediate collapse of the supply-and-demand system, and endemic shortages.

  The difference between the place I’d just left and the place where I now found myself couldn’t have been starker. Something worked here, something I couldn’t understand. Every kind of fruit and vegetable, piled high. Shelves groaning under the weight of packaged goods. This was no supermarket, mind you. No. This was a rinky-dink store in downtown Florida City, at the very edge of the map. Yet what I saw amazed me, and once more convinced me that I’d died and gone to some other dimension. Surely, such disparities couldn’t be found on planet earth: Aren’t we all rational beings? Can’t we all figure out how to make this happen?

  Surely, yes, I thought. Or maybe not, I also thought.

  And Panchitín Angones had to throw in an extra lesson in the virtues of American culture, as if the store shelves didn’t speak for themselves. As we all piled out of the car, he said: “Look, kids, here in the United States, you don’t even need to lock your car, and you can leave the keys in the ignition.”

  I couldn’t believe my eyes, but this is precisely what Panchitín did. He left his keys in the car with the doors unlocked and walked into that store with all of us, feeling as carefree as a medieval lord surrounded by all of his knights.

  “Damn it. Damn it. It’s not fair. Not fair, at all,” I thought. Why couldn’t this be my place of birth?

  So I decided, right there and then, at that rinky-dink store, that I’d become an American and forget about being Cuban, at least for the time being.

  A fateful decision, but the only one I could have made, given the circumstances.

  Flash back, just a couple of years. My father, the onetime king of France, Louis XVI, has just hauled out his Ouija board from its hiding place. For him this isn’t a Parker Brothers game, but a sacred object. He really believes that he can receive messages from the dead through this very simple contraption: a cardboard chart of all twenty-six letters in the Latin alphabet and all the numbers zero through nine, with a plastic heart-shaped doodad known as a planchette that has three stubby legs and a tiny window of sorts in the middle.

  My father really and truly believes that when he places his hand on the planchette and asks a question, the spirits of the dead
will guide his hand over the board and pause the planchette’s tiny window letter by letter, and that he will receive an answer that can be spelled out and depended on. The Ouija board also has a yes on one corner and a no on another, for simple questions. Of course, most of the questions my dad asks are about the future, and what lies in store for us.

  How it is that he and his entire family have come to take this game so seriously is too long a story to tell. All I need to say at this point is that my father’s family succumbed to that late–nineteenth century religious fad known as Spiritualism, especially that brand of it peddled by the Theosophical Society in America, which had its most successful overseas mission in Cuba, right after the Spanish-American War in 1898.

  My father’s family was truly ecumenical when it came to alternative religions. I suppose that they might be dubbed New Age nowadays. They believed in everything, and never, ever believed that anything actually contradicted the Roman Catholicism that they also observed at the same time. Reincarnation? Sure. Voodoo curses? Watch out, they’re real. Séances? Yes, please, the more the merrier. Transubstantiation? Sure. Papal infallibility? Why not? But wait, let’s add Madame Helena Blavatsky to the list of authorities, right along with the Pope. Protestants? They sure can sing, and they certainly have a legitimate right to complain about Catholicism and the Pope.

  The sacred Ouija board has been opened on my father’s rococo desk, in his study. It’s just me and him, and my adopted brother Ernesto. I don’t know where Tony is at that moment. Probably torturing lizards, or riding his bicycle to Pinar del Rio, forty miles away. He had a habit of disappearing, and of worrying our mother to death.

  My father asks the board some preliminary questions. The planchette moves under his hand, or so he says. I question this proposition.

  “Hey, you’re just making this up.”

  “No, I’m not moving it; it’s guiding me to the right letters. The planchette has a force of its own and you can’t resist it. If you do, the power builds up and you get in trouble. Once, I tried to hold it down and it shot out of my hand like a rocket and crashed into one of my display cases on the other side of the room, breaking one of my Meissen figurines.”

  “No me chives,” I say to him. You’ve got to be joking. I can’t say what I really want to say out loud—no me jodas—because the verb joder is one of those words that can send you to hell. Its equivalent in English is the all-purpose f-word.

  After a few simple questions are “answered,” I venture to test the spirits of the dead.

  “Ask what lies in store for me.”

  So he does, and the planchette under his hand moves ponderously from letter to letter, spelling out a very clear message.

  “Your two sons have a future in another land.”

  “Ask them who I’m going to marry,” I say, thinking that this is too tough a question for any spirit to answer.

  “Your two sons will marry women from another land.”

  Damn. They had an answer. And a vague one at that.

  “Ask how many children I will have,” I say, testing the spirits further.

  “Can’t say,” respond the spirits.

  “Bastards,” I say to myself, in Spanish, risking an eternity in hell. Cabrónes.

  I found it odd that the spirits would predict a future in another land for me and Tony, the two sons of Louis XVI, the Ouija medium, and none for Ernesto, the adopted one. But I chose not to dwell on that, especially given my loathing for Ernesto, who seemed happy enough with these predictions.

  So, you see, the spirits were right—whoever they were, wherever it was they came from, whether from the netherworld or my father’s inexhaustible imagination. I had no choice. My destiny was to end up in a foreign land and to find my soul mate there, across the turquoise sea. Or maybe the spirits planted the seed in my mind about my future being in some other land. Since the spirits spoke when the so-called Revolution was well under way and Cuba was quickly sliding into its long nightmare, I’m not too surprised by their prophetic prowess, or by my father’s deftness with the planchette.

  Seeing all the merchandise at that rinky-dink store in Florida City, and watching Panchitín Angones leave his keys in the ignition as we went into that store just sealed these prophecies for me.

  I had no choice, you see.

  Sure. Just as I had no choice in writing this, or you in reading it.

  Three

  Hard edges, right angles. No curves to speak of, no outrageous colors. Nothing superfluous. No curlicues, no filigree, no gilding. Nothing old. No stifling past. No ghosts. No black magic. Blinding sunshine, but hazier than what you’re used to, less sure of itself.

  The clouds? Just about the same, sure, but more imposing, thanks to the flatness of the landscape and the lack of tall trees.

  I couldn’t help but notice these things. The place felt free from the crushing burdens of the past, free from fear of the unseen, from everything that was unnecessary. All you had here, in this new and very flat land, was the present and the future and billowing cumulus clouds towering overhead. Everything was as simple as the straight lines that defined every building, fence, and street. And just as slightly hazy as the atmosphere.

  I’d never been in a place so new, so free of ghosts, so wide open, so much a proof that less is more and much less is much more.

  Of course, the fact that my father was not there immediately cut down on ghost sightings and tragic stories from the past. This made a big difference. I’m sure he’d have found ghosts there, at that camp, and even remembered a prior life in these glades, probably as a vanquished Indian chieftain or a lost Spanish explorer. He’d always been important, in each of his lives, and all of his deaths had been tragic.

  Exile is not so bad, after all.

  I never expected to find this kind of freedom. For the first time in my life I no longer had shadows to fear at every turn, or someone else’s baggage to mind or haul. Being free of the soul-crushing oppression of Castrolandia was all that I’d expected, and that was great enough. Being free of the past and the spirit world was a wonderful bonus.

  Of course, being at the very edge of the map, in a hastily erected and refurbished military camp, helped a lot. I don’t think I’d have felt the same way if I’d gone directly from Havana to Savannah, New Orleans, or witch-obsessed Salem.

  Many years later I would drive into Savannah with my wife and kids, get the willies, and drive right out, at top speed. “Let’s get outta here,” said Jane, my lovely wife. The old city seemed as plagued by dark spirits as my deeply haunted Havana. The similarity between the names of the two cities had nothing to do with it. It was the vibes, pure and simple, the fallout from the past. Slavery. Human beings bought and sold. African gods driven into hiding. Too much dissembling. Too much cruelty mixed with gentility, too many slighted poets, too many duels and grievous endings. A lost war, and a lost cause. Endemic languor. More ghosts than living residents.

  Florida City had no such baggage, and none of the frills that went with it. And I loved it for that, even though I knew I’d be there for only a short while.

  It was a fast-spinning turnstile, a shuffling machine, the sole purpose of which was to move children as quickly as possible to other places. It was as efficient as all of its buildings, and as brutally simple. All of us there were waiting for an assigned destination that we could neither question nor refuse. They told us where we were going, and we went. Our parents back in Cuba had no say either, and most often no knowledge of the arrangements.

  It was well-organized chaos.

  Some of us went to orphanages, which were then in steep decline and had plenty of room available. Some went to Catholic boarding schools, which at that time were begging for boarders and thus had plenty of empty beds. Some ended up in institutions for troubled youths—“juvenile delinquents,” as such kids were known then. The luckier ones ended up in foster homes, usually with American families who already had children of their own but were willing to take us in, thinking
it would be only a few months until our parents arrived. I suppose many of these families viewed it as a foreign student exchange program. The luckiest ones of all ended up with relatives. But there were damn few of those.

  Colorado, Montana, New York, Texas, Nebraska, Kansas, New Mexico, California, New Jersey, Idaho, Louisiana, Illinois. This place, that place. Here and there, anywhere. We ended up all over the map, like darts thrown by a gang of drunken sailors at an Irish pub ten minutes before closing time. Anyone willing to receive us got us, and the federal government of the United States paid for our upkeep. It was a great deal for many of those who took us in. A fabulous deal. But the turnstile had to spin fast, week in, week out, to keep pace with the arrivals, who only kept increasing in numbers.

  None of us caught in this whirlwind of an airlift had any idea how large it was, or how complex the logistics were. We came and went so quickly, we couldn’t catch a glimpse of the big picture. Years later, when I’d first learn that there had been over fourteen thousand of us, more or less, I found it hard to take in the numbers. I’d always thought that, at most, maybe three thousand of us had been airlifted. Then I learned that there were at least eighty thousand more children waiting to leave who never got the chance, and my head nearly exploded from a volatile mix of rage, grief, and astonishment. Good God. Jesus H. Refugee Christ, rushing down to Egypt, what can one make of such numbers?