The Ramos Brothers Trust Castro and Kennedy

by Roger Deblanck

  “We would never think otherwise,” said Evelina with joyous tears in her eyes, the blotchy birthmark on her neck nearly disappearing as the brothers surrounded her with their joyful arms.

  “The minute we heard you were coming, we could barely contain ourselves,” said Huberto, his arms encircling the shoulders of his grandsons. “We were worried sick about the conditions after Batista’s fall. We had no idea if we’d ever see you again.”

  “Thank Cuca’s brother for getting us here,” Juan pointed out, with his grandfather’s arm still wrapped around his shoulder.

  “Yes, Florencio has told us how thankful he is to Cuca,” said Evelina, nestling up to the family’s nanny and giving her a hug. “Please know that you are forever part of esta familia.”

  “Gracias, Señora Ramos. It is an honor,” said Cuca, bowing her head with respect.

  “Bien, let’s celebrate,” said Huberto.

  That first evening in their grandparents’ house, they ate roast pork with black beans and rice, followed up with a huge vanilla pound cake drenched with rum syrup. The next day the brothers spent talking about their trip and everything they could think to tell their grandparents about the past several years. Juan talked about his growing interest in law and how he didn’t think Fidel was a bad guy, but rather a determined leader.

  “Well,” said Huberto, “Castro wants to transform the island. Time will tell how he handles un gobierno. If the U.S. doesn’t push him, I think there’s a real possibility for better relations between both countries.”

  “Huberto, por favor, I’d like to request we not talk about these things,” said Lucretia.

  “Well, it’s importante,” said Huberto. “My son is still there.”

  To ease the tension his mother created, Alberto talked about playing his guitar, how he and his friend, Emilia—he called her “mi amiga”—had written songs together for several years, and how he wished he could have brought both his guitar and his “amiga” with him. Juan didn’t say anything about his brother’s mention of Emilia as only a “friend.” He knew his brother missed her dearly. And, indeed, Alberto experienced pangs of longing when he thought of her. He reasoned with himself that perhaps their separation and the separation from his and Juan’s father were temporary, a duration to be endured before everyone was united. He imagined how sweet the reunion would be: he and Emilia exchanging hugs and kisses and then running for his guitar so they could pick up right where they left off with their songs.

  “We’ll have to see about getting you a new guitar. Won’t we, Alberto?” stated his grandfather.

  “Are you serious?” said Alberto, thrown from his brief reverie about reuniting with Emilia.

  “Of course,” said Huberto.

  As their first week in the new country passed, Lucretia, the boys, and Cuca settled into Huberto and Evelina’s house on 30th Avenue, four miles from the DuPont Plaza. The house was made of sheetrock and stucco painted melon green with white tile roofing. A big avocado tree rested to the right of the large living room window, which looked into the small front yard where a planter of orchids and violets flourished. In the backyard, a patio with an awning looked out at a mango tree that bore sizeable fruit each year. The house had been overly spacious for the grandparents with its four bedrooms and two baths, but now every inch was utilized. The brothers had to share a room as Lucretia and Cuca got their own. By the start of their second week in Miami, Lucretia enrolled the boys in La Salle Catholic High School, about three miles away. Later that week, at Huberto’s suggestion, Lucretia took over assistant managerial duties at La Tienda Hotel at the DuPont Plaza.

  The store sat to the left as guests entered off the street to the ground level of the hotel. Next to the store was a barber shop. Directly back from the entrance was an Italian restaurant, and on the right side opposite the store, there was a coffee shop and a small loans office. Each business had sliding glass doors that stayed open all day and a tiny bathroom in back. Huberto’s store was open for patronage from six in the morning until ten at night, Monday through Thursday, and on weekends, Friday through Sunday, six to midnight. It was a busy and profitable business for Huberto and Evelina. They did not have to spend many hours personally in the store, as they had hired a fine staff, but for Huberto the easy bookkeeping of the monthly budget gave him something to do while the extra money—a supplement to his retirement savings from Andurra Azúcar—was nice to have around, especially now that their grandsons, daughter-in-law, and Cuca were living with them.

  Huberto’s store carried everything and anything travelers might need: toothpaste and toothbrushes, combs and brushes, soaps and lotions, bubblebath and shampoo, nail clippers and barrettes, buttons and little sewing kits. It stocked over-the-counter medicines: aspirin and Alka-Seltzer, Pepto and Dramamine, eye drops and flu mix. It had a wide selection of trinkets and toys: decks of cards and a turnstile of postcards, coffee mugs and shot glasses with images of palm trees and beaches printed on the side, Barbie dolls and stuffed-animal dolphins and baby hippos, match cars and trucks, and jump ropes and Hula Hoops. It sold bottles of Coca-Cola, Pepsi, and Cawy, a caffeine-free refreshment similar to 7-Up. It also had snacks for late night munchers: little bags of chips and peanuts, packages of cookies and donuts. But the biggest sellers were rolls of Kodak film and the gargantuan milk chocolate bars, World’s Best Chocolate, sold for the massive price of one dollar, yes a whole buck, in 1959. The store did well, and each week Huberto let the brothers share one of the enormous World’s Best Chocolate.

  Much to Lucretia’s chagrin, she didn’t want the boys eating sweets before dinner, but her complaints were more part of her increasing dissatisfaction with the way Huberto lackadaisically ran his store. She didn’t understand why he hadn’t considered diversifying his products to sell perfumes, jewelry, bottles of beer, and cigars and cigarettes.

  “These will be big sellers. I know it,” she told him after a few weeks working in the store.

  Nodding several times as he listened to her, he said, “Okay. I trust your judgment. You ran a very successful beauty shop in Havana.”

  “Beauty salon, that is. La Hermosa, it was called. The most successful salon in Havana Vieja,” she emphasized. “Until Castro came and ruined it all.”

  “Don’t get yourself down. You’re here with us now, and we’re so happy to have you.” Huberto paused, putting his hand to his lip, and looked at his daughter-in-law. “I’ve been thinking, you know. Since I retired in Cuba, I’ve still been working aquí. Sure it’s easy, only keeping the books. But now with you here, I’m thinking you could take over the store. If you want?”

  “You would do that?” she uttered, a glint in her eyes indicating her heart rate had picked up.

  “It’s what I’m offering,” he said, smiling at her. “I see your excitement already.”

  “We’d need to transfer ownership papers into my name,” she stated.

  “Well, of course . . . yes . . . in time,” he stammered, surprised at her forthrightness. “For now, you can be assured, if you want to, you’ll be sole manager of the store.”

  “That is a grateful gesture,” she said, as though she needed additional time to think her decision over. “I cannot turn it down.”

  “Then, it’s decided,” Huberto said and reached out to pull his daughter-in-law towards him to give her a hug, her petite figure mousy against him.

  * * *

  Chapter 22

  Upon arriving in the states, Juan had less than six months left of high school before graduating, while Alberto would be in the last half of his sophomore year at La Salle Brothers Catholic High School, home of the Royals (short for the beautiful royal palms that thrived everywhere in the cloying humidity of south Florida). The campus of La Salle was a little over three miles from their grandparents’ house on 30th Avenue, and the brothers walked to and from school every day in their uniforms—navy blue slacks, white shirts, and clip-on black ties. When they started at La Salle in February of 1959, it was a boys-o
nly school, but the girls’ campus of Immaculata sat fifty yards away across the tarmac. Both schools also shared some of the sports fields: the soccer goal posts and the track. So before and after school, the teenagers stood under the awnings on the tarmac or out on the grass in the fields and socialized. Later that year, after Juan graduated and by the time Alberto started his junior year in the fall, the administrators combined the campuses and so the high schools of La Salle and Immaculata became coed.

  From their first day at La Salle, the brothers adjusted well. In fact, their acclimation to American life did not go through a traumatic spell. Many of their neighbors in Miami emigrated from islands in the Caribbean or other Central and South America countries. While growing up in Cuba, the brothers had been studying English since kindergarten at their mother’s school. And although they hadn’t yet mastered fluent English when they came to the states, neither had half of their classmates.

  Therefore, nearly everyone the Ramos brothers knew spoke to them in Spanish, and with those who only spoke English, the brothers were ahead of the game because they were bilingual. At home they spoke their native Spanish with Cuca, their mother, and their grandparents, and at school they refined their adoptive English. This allowed them to retain the intimacy of their cultural tongue at home, a valued distinction reminding them where they came from, while at school they exercised the opportunity to feel Americanized—part of the American dream of opportunity—by reading, learning, and studying in formal English.

  As Abuelo Huberto had promised, for his sixteenth birthday in February Alberto got to choose a new acoustic guitar from the music shop on Biscayne Boulevard in downtown Miami. He wasted no time with practicing his chords and writing new songs with a creative combination of English and Spanish lyrics. He immediately began to absorb the influence of some big American music idols: Chuck Berry and Johnny Cash among them. He connected with Chuck’s 12-bar blues hit, “Maybellene.” The song’s chronicle of a tarnished romance reminded him that he was not alone in his feelings of lost love with Emilia. He also admired Chuck’s “Johnny B. Goode” with its message that hard work paid off with the fulfillment of the American dream. Alberto considered how he and Juan were now players in that sweet American landscape. They could hunger for their share of the cake just as soon as they figured out what they wanted and how to slice out their piece. But no artist captured Alberto’s fancy more than Johnny Cash with his grave image and the dark mood swings of his songs. He was a testy and restless figure of Christian leanings, a man looking at all sides of existence. Alberto thought nothing was more compelling and heartbreaking than that one verse from “Folsom Prison Blues”: I shot a man in Reno/ just to watch him die. He strummed his guitar and sang that line over and over again while he sat in the shade of the big mango tree in the backyard of his grandparents’ house and considered how small and fragile the world was. He envisioned the little town in Nevada that Cash made reference to and how even there death couldn’t be escaped. What did it mean to face death? How did anyone know if he had really lived? How did one know what love is? If Alberto got a headache thinking too hard, he turned to another Cash song—such as “I Walk the Line”—to help him know he didn’t have to hide his emotion. Cash’s deep bass baritone voice told him exactly what he was going through: You’ve got a way to keep me on your side/ You give me cause for love that I can’t hide.

  In the coming months Abuelo Huberto’s store became more and more profitable with Lucretia’s decision to stock an assortment of new products: perfume brands; make-up accessories; a selection of jewelry, which included earrings, necklaces, and pendants; a cooler full of beer; and packages of Cubano cigars and cigarettes.

  The boys worked some afternoons after school in the store, but their mother wanted them to focus more on their studies. This satisfied Juan because as a senior in high school, he looked forward to college and the chance to pursue his devoted interest in law, especially after talking with the Venezuelan Consul, Cesar Del Porto. Señor Del Porto stayed at the DuPont Plaza on his diplomatic visits to Florida, and he came into the store for snacks and cigarettes almost daily. He was trying to speed up the U.S. authorities with extraditing the former Venezuelan dictator, Peréz Jiménez, back to his native country to stand trial for embezzling millions from the Venezuelan people before his ouster and fleeing in exile to Miami. Now captured, Jiménez sat in a Miami jail waiting for the paperwork to lumber through the courts. So as Consul Del Porto worked to arrange for the extradition of Jiménez, he booked a suite in the DuPont Plaza for weeks at a time. As a frequent patron in the store, Señor Del Porto struck up a conversation with Juan one day, and Juan became fascinated with the Consul’s sense of duty to uphold the law and bring a criminal to justice.

  “Venezuelans deserve to know that those who have wronged their country will be brought to justice,” said Del Porto.

  “What will happen if the U.S. government doesn’t process the papers?” asked Juan.

  “No, they will be approved. At that point I will take obligation for the prisoner, Jiménez, and transport him, under the auspices of my security handlers, to a Venezuelan prison, whereby he will be given his day in court.”

  “So you have the evidence to convict him?”

  “Of course. Now all I need is the culprit himself.”

  Juan nodded to indicate he understood and then asked, “How did you earn your position?”

  “Hard work and discipline. You must always be working towards something,” Del Porto told Juan. “That is my faith, my advice. Working hard brings abundant rewards.”

  What was interesting about Consul Del Porto was that his son, Carlito—dubbed Sharkey because he feared nothing—shared little in common with his upright father. Not only did Sharkey look nothing like his lean father, who always wore a suit and tie, Sharkey didn’t adhere to the same moral imperatives as his father. Sharkey was a big boy, a fatty, though a smooth and cool talker, a guy who got along with everyone and was good with the girls despite his massive size. Señor Del Porto enrolled Sharkey at LaSalle during their long stays at the DuPont Plaza, and the Ramos brothers befriended Sharkey after Juan got to know Señor Del Porto. Sharkey often let the Ramos brothers up to the suite he and his father stayed in at the hotel, and he wasted no time opening the windows and showing the brothers how he enjoyed aiming his B-B gun at the yachts along the dock located directly behind the hotel where the mouth of Miami Bay intersected with the Miami River. On one occasion, when the brothers visited the top-floor suite, Sharkey was smoking one of his father’s cigarettes and loading his B-B gun. After he let the brothers in, he said, “Hey, come over here and watch this.”

  Sharkey pumped the lever on the gun a half-dozen times to build up the air pressure. He then dropped to a knee and tucked the butt of the toy gun at the notch in his shoulder. He peered down at the yachts and picked one out. He held steady, and then a little pop and whizzing sound could be heard.

  “Sharkey, estás loco. You’re gonna hurt somebody,” Alberto said.

  “Calm down. They’re only B-Bs. I’m not aiming at anyone, only the boat sails. The B-Bs bounce right off. They couldn’t harm a baby. Besides, what’s the matter with having a little fun after school?”

  Alberto refused to listen to Sharkey’s logic. But Juan was oddly intrigued with his antics. After Sharkey successfully hit two sails, Juan inched closer to the window.

  “Think I can do it?” he asked.

  “Of course you can. It’s simple. Here,” said Sharkey, handing Juan the B-B gun. “Just pump the lever a few times. Once you feel the pressure building, it’s ready. Squint through the little aiming glass. Once you got your target in focus, make sure you’re completely still. Then pull the trigger. It’s just a little pop. No one hears it. No one cares.”

  “Juan, what are you doing?” exclaimed Alberto.

  “What’s it look like? I wanna hit one of those nice white sails,” said Juan, accepting the kid’s rifle from Sharkey.

  “That’s somebody’s
boat, somebody’s property,” said Alberto.

  “Some rich son-of-a-bitch. That’s who,” said Sharkey.

  “Juan, one time. Then, no más.”

  “Mira, Alberto. If you don’t wanna have some fun, no one’s forcing you to do anything,” said Sharkey, finishing off his cigarette.

  Juan squeezed off a shot and then handed the rifle back to Sharkey. “Cool, man,” he said. “I just wanted to try it.”

  “Any time,” said Sharkey, taking the rifle back and walking to his bedroom, where he lifted the mattress and tossed the kid’s gun underneath. They sat on the couch for a few minutes, and then they decided to head over to Bayfront Park a few blocks away from the hotel to look for the girls Alberto and Sharkey had been flirting with at school.

  All at once, the brave Juan who had fired B-Bs at yacht sails wasn’t interested in tagging along, so he went back to the store downstairs and waited for his mother to finish up paperwork before driving home. He had checked out from the library several books about the Supreme Court. He’d been waiting all week to crack them open.

  So it was Alberto and Sharkey heading for the park, and Alberto was still a little miffed at the B-B gun incident. After walking a block, Sharkey asked, “Hey man, what’s wrong with your hermano? He likes guns but not girls?”

  “Nothing’s wrong with him,” said Alberto, looking straight ahead as they walked north up Biscayne Boulevard.

  “I mean, every time we want to have fun with girls, he chickens out.”