As the Ramos brothers grew up, they knew their nanny, Cuca Rivera, better than their own mother. A nurturing creature with an infirm leg and a sad soul, Cuca’s life changed when she responded to a job advertisement for a nanny in the Havana Daily and showed up for an interview with Lucretia at the La Vibora home a week before Juan was born in April of 1941. Lucretia may not have known how to be a mother, but she knew how to pick one out, and Cuca became the Ramos brothers’ surrogate.
Cuca came from a poor peasant background. Her parents still lived in a small village south of Guardalavaca on the northeastern coast of the island, where they worked on the estate of Angel Castro, Fidel’s father. Cuca’s padre worked the cane fields, while her mother did cooking and laundry for wealthy households. The Riveras spent their whole lives in servicio of others, and their children’s fate proved no different. Cuca’s two older brothers both served in the Cubano armed forces—the oldest, Tomás, in the army; the younger, Joaquin, in the navy, where he rose to Rear Admiral and earned a steady salary and a two-bedroom flat in Havana.
As a youngster in Guardalavaca, Cuca either helped her mother with chores or she followed her father to the fields once a week and hauled jugs of water from the well to the thirsty men as they chopped the cane with their machetes and then bundled them with twine. One year while she retrieved water from the well, she ran into Marlena the Milagro, a miracle woman who had arrived one day in Guardalavaca with no memory of where she’d come from. Simple tasks of taking care of herself proved a challenge, while taking care of others became no burden for Marlena. Whenever someone suffered with an illness or ailment, Marlena stepped in. For complaints of parasites, she gave her patients Echinacea stirred in cranberry juice and a half-piece of burnt bread sprinkled with flaxseed and sugar. She mixed aloe gel with the crushed, moist strands of palm fronds to rub as ointment on bites and cuts. She chopped up tiny chunks of mango, squashed them to a pulp, and added yarrow and eucalyptus with sprinkles of ginger to make the fevers and coughs of babies go away. When someone came down with the spooks, she calmed their nerves with kava root and lemon wedges soaked in warm chicken broth with a dab of St. John’s wort and clove stirred in. For muscle aches and back pain, she ordered fresh cut guava in green tea stirred with rosemary and thyme. For burns, she applied minted aloe and primrose oil. And in the case of a poisonous snakebite, she gave her patients crushed coconut rind with grape seed extract and bilberry fruit as an antidote against the venom. Throughout the entire summer that Cuca knew Marlena, she took note of the numinous recipes in a little cloth-covered diary, and later on Cuca earned respect as Cuca the Curandera.
Cuca had a wizened leg since birth, an ailment that forced her to walk with a funny limp, slightly dragging her left foot behind. The disability became painfully obvious in her teens with the realization that her leg made her undesirable. By the time she entered womanhood, she stayed with her younger brother Joaquin in Havana. Still, she did not appeal to the young men, and so she developed a mindset of never finding a suitor. Although she cried herself to sleep at night, she did not allow self-pity to consume her soul. Besides, Joaquin adored her and never made her feel inferior. He promised that the right path in life would appear to her, if she so envisioned it and believed. At night she whispered pleas to God, imploring him for a child of her own someday. She began to lose hope after her first year of living with Joaquin in Havana. Just as she contemplated a move back to Guardalavaca to be closer to her parents, she answered at random one of the dozens of advertisements in the paper about a nanny job. At twenty-four, Cuca was the same age as Lucretia, and although Cuca knew nothing about children when she showed up for an interview at the Ramos’s home, a quickening instinct in Lucretia’s heart told her that Cuca must be the primary caretaker of her first born. Indeed, raising the Ramos brothers, first Juan and two years later Alberto, became Cuca’s fulfillment, her solace, her resolver.
The day after Lucretia hired her, Cuca moved in with the Ramos family in La Vibora and was given her own room, adjacent to the nursery. When Juan was born a week later, she maneuvered her bed into the nursery next to his crib. She swaddled him in a thin cotton blanket the first day and gently rocked him and whispered “Shhhhhh” in his ear until his crying stopped and a giant smile spanned his tiny, pinkish face. She took Juan into her love and envisaged that he had come from her own womb. Taking care of him from the first week of his birth, Cuca’s body reacted to her motherly nurturing, and her hormones went haywire as though she had actually carried and birthed the child from her own body. Her gut wrenched, her back ached, her neck stiffened, her ankles swelled, and her breasts began to lactate.
“Filled with leche! Yes, milk! This cannot be!” said Lucretia, astonished at what Cuca told her after two weeks with Juan. “We’ll have to see the doctor!”
With Lucretia never considering the chore of breastfeeding, she welcomed Cuca’s extraordinary bodily transformation as something divine. When Florencio became aware of the strange circumstances of their nanny’s body, he too thought they should consult Dr. Manu Muñoz, the family physician. Dr. Muñoz was a stout fellow with a mountain of dark curly hair and extremely hairy arms like a wolf-man. Already in his fifties, he was still full of perpetual energy and his full cheekbones and round face were often pink and sweaty due to his constant ebullience. After conducting a routine check of Cuca’s condition, the doctor admitted the rarity of her case.
“It may seem like un milagro, but it’s more consistent with the hormonal yearnings of a woman immersed in the actual stimuli to make the manifestation of motherhood possible,” the doctor spoke in rapid fashion. “In Cuca’s case, she has taken over primary duties of the child’s most basic day-to-day needs, and the love she feels has triggered an acute bodily response producing hormonal capabilities, similar to what an actual birth mother goes through. Vea, you see, science has an explanation for everything.”
“Hardly,” said Lucretia when they returned home from the doctor’s office with Cuca holding baby Juan.
“We have been blessed,” Lucretia continued. “Gracias, to our dear Lord, for bringing Cuca into our lives.”
“Sí, we are grateful we have you,” said a sincere Florencio to their nanny.
Juan giggled as his father tickled his chin from Cuca’s cradled arms. She smiled at baby Juan, waiting until they got back to the room before she gave him her leche.
For Lucretia’s part, she saw Cuca’s extraordinary circumstances as both proof of God’s miraculous work and also evidence that such a blessing was possible because she modeled a perfect Catholic, unwavering in her worship of the Lord Jesus Christ, her savior, her creator and deliverer, her sword and shield. Lucretia believed that her daily prayers, offered morning and night, had put her under God’s watchtower, in the circumference of His Kingdom. She became convinced that she could act as proud as she wanted because her tantrums ranked as less of a transgression than those of sinful individuals who fought, stole, lied, and hurt others. And with Cuca now delivered to her, Lucretia now believed that God was telling her to present herself as one of the chosen. So every Sunday morning she spent two hours preparing for church. She set curlers overnight, and in the morning went about setting her hair to look just right. She used pastel greens and blues to paint her fingernails and toenails before spending countless minutes in front of the mirror applying eyeliner, mascara, lipstick, and blush. The ordeal was exhausting but necessary in Lucretia’s mind, for she needed to make a grand appearance at the church of Jesus de Miramar in the Marianao district of Havana. When Lucretia finally faced the parishioners and priest every Sunday, she needed to feel that she gave them her best and most beautiful self. They needed to see in what ways God blessed the devout.
As soon as Juan was old enough to witness his mother’s pampering ritual, he experienced pangs of disgust and shame. All he wanted was for her to pay more attention to him, and so during the long morning waits every Sunday as his mother dolled herself up, he wanted to go outside and play. Cuca pl
eaded with him against it: “No, no, no, you cannot get dirty before church. You don’t want to upset tu madre, do you?” For years he didn’t want to provoke her, choosing instead to allow Cuca to read to him and Alberto. Then, finally they would leave for la iglesia, where Lucretia begged for everyone to lavish notice on her. She relished the suggestive comments on her appearance, always seeking more. She was always cordial, but only after they arrived home would the boys know whether she had received ample enough compliments. If plenty, Lucretia may choose to fix sandwiches for the boys for lunch. If unsatisfied with the amount of praise, she often resorted to throwing tantrums, blaming the sun and the heat for ruining her hair and make-up, an act Juan detested. This forced him out to the backyard to witness the balmy sun layering every house, tree, and bird in the neighborhood in a coat of bronze. His anger stemmed, he sought out Alberto who was usually huddled in the corner of his bedroom, the late afternoon shadows concealing his face, tears in his eyes as he twanged the strings of his banjo. He and Alberto both wished: if only their mother may someday love them like Cuca did.
* * *
Chapter 5
If Florencio failed at anything as a father, it was his inability to free himself from work, just as his boss Don Emilio had warned him against. Juan and Alberto rarely saw their father outside of an occasional Sunday afternoon when he played baseball with them in the park or during a weeknight at the dinner table. He worked too much and dreaded it. Even as he knew he shouldn’t allow his career to wrest valuable time away from his boys, he let the separation happen and could never extricate himself fully from his trabajo. He convinced himself that he could make up the time later.
The Ramos brothers spent their primary years of education learning under the teachers at El Colegio Nuestra Señora de Fatima, where Juan quickly developed a crush on Señorita Silvia with her long brown hair pulled tight in a single braided ponytail swaying down her back. Before school every day, he pleaded with her to touch the dangling strand of hair.
“Juan, this is the last day,” Señorita Silvia would say, and then for a few seconds she would let him run his fingers through the loose ends at the bottom of the braid.
“Gracias,” he said after she tossed the strand over her shoulder and allowed it to bounce against her back. She then ordered him to class and took her own students to her classroom.
Juan didn’t know what he felt about Señorita Silvia because he also had an attraction for the only male teacher on the staff at his mother’s school. Lucretia hired the young man, Señor Pablo, at the start of Juan’s final year at Nuestra Señora de Fatima. Señor Pablo became one of Juan’s second grade teachers, and Juan’s feelings went beyond admiration. He became increasingly aware of his heart’s urge towards Señor Pablo every time the teacher took the class out to the backyard lawn for calisthenics, part of the school’s curriculum for physical education requirements. Pablo was a lean and muscular young man with a thick, floppy mop of black hair. At the onset of sweat on Pablo’s face and arms, as the teacher led the class in a series of jumping jacks or cherry-pickers, Juan riveted his focus on Pablo and felt the stirrings of fondness, unlike the crush he had on Señorita Silvia. When Juan spoke to Señor Pablo face-to-face, his nerves went aflutter like a hummingbird, and he often had to reach at his crotch to suppress his bulging.
“Juan, are you okay?” asked a puzzled Señor Pablo as he observed Juan’s peculiar behavior.
“I need to use el baño,” declared Juan.
“By all means, go now. Not in your pantelones!”
He would run off to the bathroom, his heart racing, his vision blurry. He often slid down on the cool tile floor for a minute and placed his cheek on the cold marble side of the bathtub to relax his tumescence and stop his dizzying from working his stomach into nausea.
In the future as Juan became more aware of his desires for both boys and girls, he wondered whether his attractions ranged to beautiful people in general. He would recall his first crushes, both on Señorita Silvia and Señor Pablo, and he would note that both teachers were easy on los ojos. All the boys used to talk about Señorita Silvia as muy bonita, and Juan fit right in, fantasizing about kissing her. When Alberto started kindergarten at age five, he too took a liking towards Señorita Silvia, and she took more of an interest in the younger brother’s docility.
“You and your brother are very differente,” she told him. “Both of you are good boys, don’t misunderstand me, but you have patience, Alberto. That is a good trait to have. You see things more clearly than your brother. You don’t overreact.”
Alberto smiled and dreamed about the day he would be old enough to stroke a woman’s hair as gorgeous as Señorita Silvia.
By the time the brothers reached third grade, Lucretia enrolled them in La Santa Dominicana, a Catholic elementary school with the highest standards. In his preteen years, Juan excelled in the social sciences: history, civics, and geography. He took keen interest in maps and studying the colonizing effects of the European nations on indigenous cultures. He plowed through atlases and traced the boundary lines of countries with his index finger. In his mind, he saw the shape of the countries and imagined how people struggled all over the world. He looked at the tapestry of rivers, the outlines of lakes, and the ranges of mountains and wondered why colonizing nations believed they had a mandate to take over entire portions of the globe. Built upon the unease he felt, he developed compassion for the brutalized peoples all over the world who suffered under the imposition of force and the clamp of injustice thrust upon them by colonizing powers and cruel dictators. He had an inclination for wanting to confront such exploitation by means other than rebellion. So from his early age, Juan saw the legal quest for human rights as a possible calling.
As for Alberto, besides his liking for baseball, he had an affinity for music. After his father bought him a banjo on his fifth birthday, Alberto strummed the strings and hummed lyrics to himself before and after school. Alberto’s introversion began to reveal itself through the medium of sound. What seemed like his lack of emotion became an exposition of feeling in his songs. By age eight, he penned a notebook full of lyrics, such as “I walk home and feel alone/ But the world is big and I have much to give.” By age ten, Alberto told anyone who asked about his musical prowess that he had written “a dozen great songs.”
The boys found mutual interest in baseball. Once a month, Florencio made time to take them to Parque Central, where he threw pitch after pitch to his sons. Juan developed a decent swing, but Alberto clearly had the better talent, especially in pitching. When he reared forth his best fastball, few muchachos in the neighborhood could swing fast enough to make contact with his “best stuff.” Juan always boasted about his younger brother’s talent, but Alberto’s main interest remained music.
Lucretia was glad to see the boys embrace interests that kept them busy. That way she had plenty of time to run her school and think about herself. By her early thirties, she worried about her weight and the diminishing quality of her appearance. When she detected how worrying made her look older, she decided she needed more opportunity to shop and have her hair styled, which made her happy and feel young again. But more time for herself meant less time for her sons. Nothing could change the way she needed to be, and the boys learned that early on in their lives.
But everything in Cuba changed in the early fifties. After decades of corruption and one dictator ousting another, many Cubanos grew weary of the instability in the country and the pervasive debauchery endorsed by the regime of Fulgencio Batista. A former military general elected president in 1940, Batista’s four-year term ran rampant with abuse of power. After his term ended in 1944, he left Havana for Miami only to witness ensuing replacements plunge Cuba into deeper scandals. Batista returned in 1952 and headed a successful military coup—dubbed el madrugazo, “the dawn”—to displace the widely unpopular Carlos Prío Socarrás, who subsequently fled to Florida. But Batista only picked up where Prío left off. He perpetuated the woes of Cuba’s
social standing. He looked the other way as the police took bribes. He did nothing to crack down on prostitution, illegal gambling, and drug rings. After declaring himself head of state, Batista also began censoring the media, banning elections, and restricting party politics. To top off his corruption, he made friends with Mob bosses Meyer Lansky and Lucky Luciano, who exploited Cuba’s lax enforcement of the law to carry out their own money-laundering schemes. Anyone who tried to oppose Batista’s power landed in prison without recourse to a trial. Torture often ensued at the hands of one of Batista’s cronies, Eduardo Vasquez, a man rumored as unforgettable for both his cruelty and his ridiculously large ears. A running joke among Juan, Alberto, and the boys at school was guessing who might become “the next víctima of Vasquez.” Who would be flogged “by the ears of Vasquez, ha, ha!”
During Batista’s second reign of power, between 1952-1958, Cubanos with financial means began leaving the island to relocate in Miami. Florencio’s parents, Huberto and Evelina Ramos, joined the emigrants who left Cuba in the early fifties to find new homes in America. Evelina did not see any way to reverse the corruption of Cuba’s government. “The island has become a disgrace,” she said, the expansive birthmark on her neck darkening. “It is too low a country to respect anymore. Those in power graft money from the state. Batista is just another tyrant, and we will not stand for his antics.” For his part, Huberto, too, was fed up with the instability, but he also wanted to leave Cuba because he admired the United States as a great nation. He had always dreamed of living out his later years in the states, and Evelina’s desire to leave made his decision to pack up and resettle an easy choice. In the spring of 1952, shortly after Batista took control of Cuba for a second time, the Ramos brothers’ paternal grandparents, Huberto and Evelina, boarded a ferry and set off for Florida.
The Ramos Brothers Trust Castro and Kennedy Page 3
