As a preemie, Lucretia fought through the first weeks of her life, but afterwards the more worrisome ailment became the shrillness of her incessant bawling. Teresa blamed the early birth on her daughter’s irritability. Lucretia never ceased with shrieking and wailing until she got what she wanted: to suckle more milk, to be cradled and rocked for one more hour, and to be put in a new outfit after breakfast, lunch, and dinner. It was as though the child conditioned herself for spoiling even before the parents had a chance to choose otherwise.
Nevertheless, as a child, Lucretia proved extremely analytical and curious. She raked through books with a fine eye, studying the shapes of letters. She learned to read and write at the age of three, and started memorizing where accent marks went before she knew how to stress Spanish vowels. She excelled in school and learned to use her honor-roll grades as leverage to demand of her parents that her top-of-the-class accomplishments entitled her to shiny new dresses and dangling earrings. However, if Gabriel and Teresa had not had the wealth to provide Lucretia with a constant rotation of designer clothes and jewelry, and also an opportunity for a variety of singing, acting, and piano lessons in her adolescence, they wondered whether their daughter might have turned out differently. They blamed their spoiling of her as the chief cause of her frequent tantrums, which made them raise their voices at her and often send her blubbering to her room to reflect on her undignified mood swings.
Although Lucretia demonstrated aptitude at everything she tried, she grew bored and quickly wanted to move to the next big idea once she wore out interest in something else. She mellowed in her teens, but she never lost her tendency for hysterics when things didn’t go her way. She had never shown interest in children until the day she received her diploma from la universidad, which distinguished her as the top English student in her class. Her excellence in learning a foreign language sparked the idea that if she could acquire another lengua so well, she surely must have the requisite skill to pass on her ability to others. And so the impetus for a school was born.
By the time Lucretia earned her bachillerato in English from la Universidad de Havana in 1938, she and her mother—both proficient in English—decided to open a school, right there in the expansive La Vibora house, which Gabriel had purchased in 1916 after he married Teresa.
Their home was a substantial dwelling with eight suite-size rooms and three oversized bathrooms in addition to an enormous dining hall and a separate living quarters out back. El portal had the entrance to a school house with its six concrete steps leading up to the large oaken double doors that were checkered with light by the awning held up by slender columns. The front doors opened into el paseo, the hallway, which led to the suite-sized bedrooms. At the end of the hall, a library with big bay windows completed the house. In the library, a small spiral staircase rose to a cubbyhole garret, where the school’s bus driver had his bed and dresser. The driveway to the house was shaped in an arc, allowing the bus to pull up sideways in front of el portal to let the students out every morning.
Converting four of the massive bedrooms into classrooms proved easy, while the four-bedroom guest house out back would serve as residence for the additional staff needed to run an educational facility, which is what Teresa and Lucretia both wanted Gabriel to approve. He had financial stability, and he had already spent the restless years of his youth sailing the world, nearly losing his life in the Solomon Islands. Gabriel’s story of survival would one day captivate the imagination of his beloved grandsons, Juan and Alberto.
Gabriel had expended his adventurous urgings and decided that Teresa satisfied the greatest of his desires. So when she and Lucretia requested funds to start an elementary school in their La Vibora home, he took a big sigh after thinking the plan over for only a few minutes and then said, “Whatever makes the two ladies of my life contento, I will support the plan.”
After Gabriel’s approval, preparations began in earnest. He negotiated a contract with a local carpenter for the construction of 105 desks with chairs for children between the ages of five and seven. The contract also included that the carpenter build ten large book shelves for the school library and an assortment of tables and cabinets designed for storing files. He next paid a visit to a prominent auto salesman in Havana and worked out a deal for the transfer, by way of ferry, of an American-made school bus from Miami to Havana.
Meanwhile, Teresa and Lucretia had responsibility for hiring the staff. They needed three other teachers: one each for science, mathematics, and geography. Teresa would teach history, and Lucretia, with her newly-awarded distinction as top language student in her university’s graduating class, would handle the curriculum for English and grammar.
After they selected their additional teachers, Teresa and Lucretia, accompanied by Gabriel, began to hand out fliers at church or during walks along the Malecón—the iconic concrete wall that arced for three miles along Havana’s seascape on the Caribbean. They also ran an advertisement in the Havana Daily. Within six weeks, they had registered the maximum enrollment they wanted: one-hundred students at 110 pesos per student each month to attend their school.
Located at the family home in La Vibora on 507 Santa Cantalina between los calles of Delgado Goi and Curia, the school opened its doors in the fall of 1938. It was named El Colegio de la Nuestra Señora de Fatima.
The weekend before the school opened, Lucretia and her mother hit the shopping district that stretched from Calle San Rafal to Calle Nuttuno in Havana Vieja. For two days, restraint in purchasing never entered Lucretia’s mind. She needed hours in both of the city’s major department stores: El Encanto and Fin de Siglo. She spent hundreds of her father’s pesos on silk and linen flower-printed dresses and others with stripes and polka dots. For shoes, she kept buying until she had enough for each day of the week, one pair for teaching in and another for after the students went home. She was ready, listo.
And so the school excelled. For two years Lucretia seemed happy with teaching, just as long as she had her chance to shop for new clothes every few months. But by the start of the third year, she got short with the students. They often annoyed her, and she decided she disliked teaching other people’s children. During these years, Lucretia also entertained the idea of a husband. She craved the attention of others her age, and teaching youngsters became a burden instead of a pleasure. With the slow encroach of burnout building in her mind, she set her sights on finding un esposo.
At exactly five feet, Lucretia needed heels to make her stand out beside her voluptuous mother, la bonita Teresa, because Lucretia did not receive the blessings of a fleshy body that could turn any man’s head when she walked into a room the way her mother could. But in her youth Lucretia had perfect petiteness: a dollop nose, full lips, perky little breasts, a plump backside, everything adequately proportioned and spaced, height with weight. So when she dressed up and prepped her hair, she certainly radiated desirability.
* * *
Chapter 3
Florencio was born in 1916, and both his parents traced ties to their Spanish heritage. His father, Huberto Ramos, identified his ancestors back to a middle-class family on the outskirts of Madrid, and his mother, Evelina Garcia, linked her heritage to a peasant farm outside of Barcelona. The families of Huberto and Evelina constituted the generation of Spaniards who traversed the Atlantic to solidify the Spanish colony of Cuba and ended up acclimated with the native culture on the island more so than with the inherent cruelty of colonialism, making them unsupportive of Spain’s empire.
When Teddy Roosevelt led the Rough Riders up Kettle Hill to San Juan Heights in the Spanish-American War in 1898, Huberto and Evelina grew up hearing the courageous tale of the future American president helping the Cubano insurrectos to victory over the oppressive Spaniards. But similar to so many second-generation Cubanos, they longed for their island’s complete independencia, an ideal epitomized through the iconic hero of José Martí, the famed apostle of Cubano revolutionaries, the brave young leader and poet gunned down
while he charged atop his white horse into battle against the Spaniards in 1895. After the Spanish-American war, Cubanos wanted nothing to do with the Platt Amendment, which gave the U.S. government convenience to interfere in Cubano affairs, but libertad wasn’t to happen until Fidel Castro put an end to U.S. meddling in 1959. Viva Cuba! Viva Fidel!
In Huberto’s early adulthood, he spent the summers with his cousins cutting sugarcane in one of magnate Don Emilio Aguilar’s fields in Sancti Spíritus province. During the summer of 1906, as Huberto swung and slashed his machete through the sweet, sticky stalks of the cane, one of the field’s foremen asked him to add up the figures for the sum weight of the wagonloads headed for Andurra Mill in Camaguey. After the foreman watched Huberto glance at the figures before promptly calculating them, he knew Don Emilio could use the young obrero for a more important task in his sugar business. The next week Don Emilio showed up at the field and called Huberto aside to read off numbers to him. Emilio was amazed how Huberto totaled the sums with breathless effort, and he immediately wanted to position the young laborer in his corporate office in Havana.
Don Emilio had tremendous assets. He traded in New York stocks and bought a new Cadillac every January. When he headed to the aeropuerto, his secretary called ahead for his plane to be fueled up and waiting. Emilio’s main administrative office for Andurra Azúcar spanned the fourth floor of the Royal Bank building situated in central Havana. And it was there for the next thirty-three years that Huberto worked as an accountant helping make a profit for Don Emilio’s sugar empire. Then, when Huberto’s only son, Florencio, turned twenty-two years old—as one of the expertise mathematicians in his class at la Universidad de Havana—he took over Huberto’s position at Andurra Azúcar.
A slender man with a thin face, Huberto had veiny hands and feet. With above average height and a perfectly-trimmed and filled-in goatee, Huberto looked quite the aristocrat. He married Evelina Garcia, a seamstress, una costurera, after meeting her in a tailor shop in downtown Havana. Although she had a svelte figure and the most gorgeous shine in her black hair, Evelina’s eyes sat a little far apart, and she had a blotchy brown birthmark like a water stain that covered from her lower right cheek across her upper neck. Often the first sight people noticed when they looked at her, the mark made Evelina self-conscious and pitiable. Huberto, however, fell in love with the oblong shape. It turned him on, he told her. But, moreover, it reminded him of the relaxing shade under a ceiba tree, he said, a calmness he embraced his entire life.
Sixteen months after his parents’ nuptials, Florencio bounded into the world. Evelina knew the boy had his father’s gift for numbers when he began counting out, one by one, the needles in her pin cushion. The same as his father, Florencio benefited from his mother’s fine talents at sewing. She put together the sharpest pin-striped suits and ties, first for her husband and then her son.
Slightly taller than his father and more muscular, as soon as Florencio could grow a goatee, he wore one to imitate his father, and he also chose to slick his hair back with pomade, the way his old man did. Florencio’s lofty forehead and chiseled limbs made him look Olympian, features which could have allowed him to make his pick of Havana’s finest young women, las mujeres lindas, but it was Lucretia he fell for, she not as striking a bonita as her mother, Teresa.
Florencio’s boss, Don Emilio, had been married three times. His refusal to limit his workload in his earlier years had led to few hours at home and consequently to divorce in his first two matrimonies, both of which cost him in his pocketbook and in his relationships with his four children, two from each wife. His third marriage, however, seemed on course for success, partly because Don Emilio was working up in years and his current wife was thirty-eight years younger. She had given him his third and final shot at a successful familia, and Emilio was determined, at age seventy-five, to make it work. Although nearly four decades older than his third wife, Emilio had few wrinkles or liver spots on his tanned, smooth face, and his wide smile and belt-shaking laugh made you believe he was younger than his years. Only his substantial paunch, which protruded more because he wore his pants high and tucked in his shirts, made him look older.
With people he trusted, such as Huberto and then Florencio holding top positions in his company, Emilio didn’t need to spend the bulk of his days overseeing his sugar empire. With his free time, he experienced a boon to life at home for the first time. Having now fathered two children in his seventies with his third wife, he had great grandchildren the same age as his youngest children. But Emilio finally saw life in perspective, and he wanted Florencio, his chief accountant, also to have a familia without the similar burdens Emilio had put on himself for over forty years.
As it so happened, Don Emilio’s youngest son attended El Colegio de Nuestra Señora de Fatima in La Vibora. With simple matchmaking, Emilio introduced Florencio to Lucretia. The next weekend he handed Florencio the keys to one of his Cadillacs, and Florencio picked up Lucretia as the sun’s blaze extinguished into the sea one Sunday evening in the late spring of 1940. They headed to a restaurante italiano nestled in a nook off the storefront of a barococo building, only a few blocks from the marina of the arcing Malecón wall. They ordered the finest angel-thin pasta with zesty tomato sauce and drank the most expensive ruby-red wine. Afterwards, he strolled with her along the oceanfront. They watched habaneros in their tattered swimming trunks cast their fishing poles into the restless spray of the blue-green Caribbean waters that slashed with commotion against the seaside wall. He grasped for her tiny hand, which she immediately conceded, while the waves crashed and the mist drizzled over them with saline sprinkles of Cubano romance. The sky ranged in layered colors from slices of mango orange to capes of mariner gray. Then they drove to a nearby park and talked the rest of the night away.
As darkness neared midnight, he drove her home to La Vibora and leaned over for un primer beso, a first kiss, which she readily returned. They both burned to meet again the next night, and over the course of the next two weeks, they met every day. They took dinners at the most distinguished restaurants and visited la Casa de la Música and Bar Monserate, where they relaxed to the best classical orchestras and drum solos, respectively. One night at Club Tropicana they did a little mambo and then the cha cha cha as they felt wild. Another night a little slow dance, el son o danzón, as the rhythm of the notes and melodies swayed around them like cohetes, little fireworks. By the end of the second week, salsa sounds and conga beats fueled the hot night air between them, a hustled and furious jostle in the back seat of Don Emilio’s Cadillac. At the end of the fortnight, Florencio fell in love. Lucretia plotted her future and fell in love as much as she was capable. The wedding bells chimed in June of 1940, and Florencio moved into the home of Gabriel and Teresa Stradford in La Vibora a week later.
In the months leading up to the wedding, Gabriel talked about a trip to his native England for the first time in nearly twenty-five years, with Teresa at his side. Upon their return to Cuba, Gabriel noted that he and Teresa would find residence elsewhere because he wanted to transfer ownership of the La Vibora home and the auspices of the school to the newlyweds, Lucretia and Florencio Ramos.
* * *
Chapter 4
After two successful years, El Colegio de Nuestra Señora de Fatima had earned reputability as one of the city’s most admired primary schools for kindergarten through second grade. During that time Lucretia kept her outbursts tamed. She had found some reward in teaching, but by the time she married Florencio her priorities flipped. She grew tired of tending to children not her own. At that point, she believed the only way to stay in the teaching profession was by overseeing the administrative duties of the school and not by preparing lessons, grading tests, and disciplining the unruly behavior of other people’s children.
In Florencio’s mind, he never questioned why Lucretia wanted her own children before they had them. A nagging doubt, however, raced through his mind in the months before Juan’s birth in April of 194
1, but he believed his notions of Lucretia’s strange behavior resulted from her not yet having what she wanted. With children of her own, he thought, she would finally recognize what was más importante in life, not the fashion of her clothes, the coiffure of her hair, or whether she looked more stunning than every woman at una fiesta. After Juan’s birth, Florencio wondered why she had insisted on motherhood only to pass the boy onto their nanny, Cuca Rivera. What started as a pebble of suspicion became a mountain of worry for Florencio: that his wife wanted little to do with raising first Juan and then Alberto two years later.
“Lucretia, when will you decide to be a mother, first and foremost?” he asked her after Alberto was born in February of 1943.
“I’m doing the best I can,” she said and tumbled to the floor, crying until Florencio put a gentle hand on her back to stem her tears.
And Florencio believed her: that she did her best. He wanted to believe things would be fine, and for the most part they were. The family had financial means to handle their wants and needs, and if that meant always having a nanny for the boys to make Lucretia happy and keep the family together, Florencio obliged. He refused to think too hard about what was happening inside Lucretia’s corazón y mente, her heart and mind. He knew she loved the boys in some capacity because she made great efforts to dress them in the finest linen clothes and keep them enrolled in the best schools. But whatever amount of time and effort she gave to the boys, she doubled for herself. Everything revolved around her, and as long as she got what she wanted, she was a decent wife. Only when she whined and screamed did Florencio wonder, “Qué mundo! What world was she from?”
The Ramos Brothers Trust Castro and Kennedy Page 2
