Caught up with emotion, the President took the podium that afternoon and claimed he wanted the Cubano flag unfurled someday soon in a free Havana. Kennedy’s hawkish words puzzled both Juan and Alberto. He was not preaching the peace he had just extolled to them minutes earlier on the sidewalk. The next day, the media pressed the President to clarify his administration’s position on Cuba. Refocused, Jack stated that neither he nor his administration favored another rebel invasion. Only peace, that was the type of hope Juan clung to. He thought of his father and reached for his notebook.
* * *
Chapter 42
Finally, after three months of waiting, a letter arrived from their father a week before Alberto’s birthday in February of 1963. It had been almost a year since their mother had first started showing symptoms of the tumor that took her life three months earlier.
Dear Juan and Alberto,
I am deeply aggrieved about your mother. I don’t know what to say or how to comprehend it. I know you are both strong. These are trying times for everyone, especially you two brave souls. Remain a source of hope, for Kennedy has proved how he does not want war. Any other man and this world would have been over with nuclear war. Bless his soul. He has made it possible that we shall see each other again. Soon, I must believe. You must believe too. I have prayed for your mother . . .
Their father went on to explain that he was still working in the refinery in Havana, where he was fortunate to have a flat set up for him in the city by his good friend and former boss, Don Emilio. He described how the principle duty of his servicio at the refinery was pushing cane stalks through a machine that processed them into molasses and sugar. “The heat inside the factory makes me sweat so much that I’ve lost a dozen pounds,” Florencio wrote. “My arms have thinned but turned to solid muscle. My hands are coated with leather calluses. I hope you will recognize me when I see you again.” Then he signed off: “With all the world’s love, Tu Padre.”
Later that afternoon Juan and Alberto walked to the cemetery. The sun shone like a worn out face, sympathetic in its solemn perch in the sky. In the days after their mother’s burial, their grandfather had purchased a granite tombstone, and the brothers decided on the etching for the epitaph.
Mother & Wife
Lucretia Ramos
1918 – 1962
Juan kneeled in the grass and placed a bouquet of a dozen scarlet-red roses at the base of the stone. Over the months since her passing, he had begun to forgive his mother. And on that afternoon, bent on his haunches in the warm grass, he began to sob. With his head bowed, he let go. He made his peace before her grave. He arrived at the conclusion that she possessed a difficult kind of love—a love different than any other. He forgave her.
As Juan knelt, Alberto read their father’s letter. Tears came heavy for both of them. Together they put their arms around each other’s shoulders and walked between the graves, out of the cemetery.
That night Juan’s stomach again began to wrench with pain. Cuca gave him a medicinal tea mixed with bilberry fruit and milk thistle, but he went to bed feeling dismal. Yet in the morning, he felt revived.
Having completed his bachelor’s degree in less than four years, Juan was excited to start law school in the fall. He was still compiling, editing, and “publishing” the newsletter for “Campus for Kennedy,” but the meetings that summer had been infrequent due to Juan’s continual stomach ailments. He dismissed the pains as a product of his extended grieving for his mother and his perpetual worrying about his father. His lack of energy, he thought, was also a result of his anxiety about starting law school in September and his desire to remain an active citizen in Kennedy’s America of the New Frontier.
In the months following the Cuban Missile Crisis, Juan and Alberto watched how Kennedy was forced to turn his focus away from reducing nuclear armaments and towards the domestic issue of racial hatred in America. In mid June, he had to call upon the Alabama National Guard to uphold the court’s decision to desegregate the University of Alabama, and afterwards he went on live television to ask all Americans to examine their own conscience as he announced his intention to initiate legislation for the country’s first ever Civil Rights bill. Two weeks later the president had to travel to Germany, and while delivering an address in Frankfurt, he asked every nation in the world to embrace “an age of interdependence.” The very next day, June 26, he flew to the divided city of Berlin and declared “Ich bin ein Berliner” to a half million East Germans barely able to contain their elation.
Juan chronicled these momentous events as precursors, he believed, to an upcoming peace with Cuba. But as he held on to hope, his stomach continued to ail. His appetite came and went. His weight dropped, and fatigue flagged him. Then the reverse, he’d be bolstered again by another Kennedy announcement—the Limited Test Ban Treaty in late July, a gigantic step towards peace.
Longing to be part of the momentousness of history as it unfolded in the latter half of ‘63, Juan told his brother in August that they needed to travel to Washington to partake in the peaceful Civil Rights march planned for later that month. As Juan read passages to Alberto from his “I Trust JFK” notebook, Alberto listened to his brother’s passion for wanting to be part of something larger than himself, but he reminded Juan that his stomach problems acted up so often these days that he didn’t think it was wise to travel that far from home. Juan agreed but persuaded Alberto that he could do it, that they had to lend their support to the Civil Rights Movement because, as Kennedy made them understand, it was the right thing to do. Once some semblance of peace was established in the states, Kennedy could then work on negotiating a truce with Cuba. Alberto realized his brother was taking the president’s call to sacrifice deep into his heart, and when Juan was determined to do something, it had to be undertaken. Just like the time they fled with Benito to the Sierra Maestra in hopes of joining Fidel, now Juan wanted to join in the pivotal fight of America’s future, and Alberto knew he had to be there for his brother.
So they went to their grandparents with their plan of heading to the capital by the twenty-eighth to listen to Dr. King speak and be part of the call for freedom in Kennedy’s New Frontier. Huberto and Evelina agreed that the boys should follow their conscience, and that it would be good for them to experience the magnitude of the changing times, to be part of the moment, just as Kennedy had convinced Juan and Alberto that they needed to do. So Huberto handed over the keys to his Coupe DeVille, and the brothers prepared for their thousand-mile trip north to D.C.
On the morning of the twenty-fifth, they headed out. They took Interstate 195 north along Miami Beach and merged onto the Florida Turnpike, which shot them directly up the coast of the eastern panhandle towards Daytona Beach. On their first night they slept in a Motel 6 where they called their grandparents, and later Alberto talked for half an hour on the phone with Guadalupe. The next morning Juan’s stomach started to play havoc. Alberto immediately voiced how the trip was a bad idea and that they should turn back now. Juan refused and after having a breakfast of toast and orange juice, he declared that the pain was a brief spell and that he was ready to continue. As Alberto got them back on the turnpike, he worried they should be heading home instead of north. But Juan was fine for several hours. Then another phase of pain and fatigue hit him by the afternoon. They had to stop early and check in at a roadside lodge where Juan collapsed on the bed and fell asleep until the following morning. After showering, brushing his teeth, and having a donut at the mini-mart across the street, he again declared himself ready to go, this time against Alberto’s wishes. Juan’s insistence, however, put them back on the road towards Jacksonville. They were behind schedule when they crossed the state line and entered Georgia. At that point, Juan’s stomach pain started to become unbearable.
“I told you, we should’ve gone back yesterday,” begged Alberto.
“No, I’m fine. I’ll make it. Keep going,” pleaded his brother.
By late afternoon, they reached Savannah, be
hind on their itinerary, which should have put them in Columbia for the night. But Juan couldn’t take the pain, so they again had to find a travel lodge on the highway for him to rest for the night. That evening they argued again about whether to continue the trip. Alberto pointed out how they had lost too much time to cover the distance to arrive in Washington by the twenty-eighth. Juan insisted they just drive without stopping. Alberto said he couldn’t stay on the road that many hours straight without the risk of falling asleep at the wheel. Juan began to cry because he knew there was no way he could drive in his condition, and so he finally agreed that they turn back in the morning.
That night in Savannah, Juan dreamed of the past. He saw himself as a Confederate soldier of defeat. Sherman’s Union army had marched through the Carolinas and Georgia a hundred years ago and ravished one Confederate city after another. So much blood had been shed to save the Union during the war. And a century later, blood was still being shed on city streets across the nation. The great battle for equality was still unachieved, and that’s why he wanted to be in Washington on the twenty-eighth, to partake in the historic effort to accelerate the necessary changes to ensure freedom and justice for all citizens. A hundred years ago, slavery had ended, and still blacks were not free. Juan began crying in his dream and when he woke, the same tears stung his eyes because he knew he wouldn’t be able to carry through with his mission to play a role in that need for change.
Juan was somber and quiet the next morning as Alberto took the I-95 headed south on their way home. By noon Juan’s stomach pain became so intense that Alberto had to find a medical clinic on the outskirts of Jacksonville. The doctor checked him and dismissed his ailment as a bacterial infection, and advised him to rest and drink plenty of fluids.
Crouched in the passenger seat holding his stomach, Juan said nothing as Alberto drove through the afternoon and evening to arrive back at their grandparents’ house on 30th Avenue by midnight. Alberto had called in advance, so Cuca waited up with Huberto and Evelina. She had Juan’s bed prepared and a special medicinal drink ready for him. He took the concoction and felt instantly better, wondering why Cuca had not supplied him with such an antidote earlier.
She told him, “I’ve been working on the right ingredients.”
He could have been angry, but chose not to because by the morning of the twenty-eighth the pains came back, not as bad, though they still bothered him. Watching the peaceful march and Dr. King’s “I Have a Dream” speech on television made Juan sad with the knowledge that he and Alberto could have been there. In fact, they had made it halfway. But he knew it was best that he gain his health in order to start law school in just a few weeks. He needed all his energy to plow forward with his dream to be a lawyer.
Cuca continued to concoct medicines with an assortment of herbal and leafy substances to attack Juan’s stomach pain, and for the most part she succeeded, although she was concerned she hadn’t yet found the cure. Even without one, Juan was well enough to start law school in the fall at the University of Miami as part of the International Law program. With human rights at the core of the program’s focus, Juan was excited and determined to become a lawyer with a cause.
That fall, Alberto and Guadalupe also transferred to the University of Miami after a year of classes at Dade Community College. Similar to his brother—after his mother’s passing, the drama of the missile crisis, and the ongoing separation from his father—Alberto looked at what he had in life and asked himself: what do I want to do, and what do I want to have? He decided that majoring in business management suited his needs. He loved the guitar, but did not see himself performing in front of large crowds, becoming a star. He had a plan to open his own music shop someday. He imagined a more simple life with Guadalupe by his side. One evening in mid November, as Juan was studying for an exam, Alberto told his brother he wanted to ask Guadalupe to marry him.
“Why are you telling me? Ask her,” Juan grinned at his brother. “I’m busy.”
“It just helps to ease my nerves if I tell someone else first.”
“Well, now you’re ready, so ask her.”
“Juan, I’m trying to talk to you.”
“I told you. Tell Guadalupe.”
“What would father think?”
“He’d be happy. Now, I need to study.”
They smiled at each other.
* * *
Chapter 43
With Cuca’s medicinal drinks settling his stomach for several weeks in a row, Juan had been feeling fine. He had adjusted to the pace and workload of law school, and decided in late November to restart up meetings for “Campus for Kennedy.” On the afternoon of the twenty-second he was preparing to facilitate a discussion, which was to focus on topics that included Kennedy’s Nuclear Test-Ban Treaty and his recent speech titled “The Family of Man.”
As Juan went over his notes while sitting on the concrete rim of the mermaid fountain, he heard commotion from a group of students exiting a lecture hall across the courtyard. He saw a girl stumble and nearly collapse as she covered her mouth with her hands, trying to force back unearthly cries. He watched another boy grab at his chest, as though stabbed through the heart. He yelled incoherently at no one in sight. Other students had their hands on their heads. Still others were wandering around aimlessly—stunned, disoriented, incredulous.
Juan stood and heard the sounds of someone running. He spotted his brother sprinting towards the courtyard from across one of the green lawns in the distance. When he reached Juan, he was out of breath and panting heavily, his eyes full of alarm.
Hardly able to speak, Alberto said, “Mi hermano, I didn’t want anyone else to break the news to you, if you haven’t already heard.”
“What? What?”
Alberto opened his arms and fell upon his brother. In the next second, Alberto’s eyes gushed with inconsolable tears. He choked up, which made him mumble his words.
“Alberto! What is it?” pleaded Juan.
His brother gained himself and looked Juan in the eyes: “Kennedy was . . . shot and . . . killed . . . today in Dallas.”
Juan was speechless as his heart began to palpitate. All at once, he felt dizzy and nauseous. He needed to take big breaths to keep from passing out. Alberto was now trying to hold up his older brother. Juan’s stomach began to gnarl with the ham and turkey sandwich he had finished for lunch a half hour earlier. He turned away from Alberto, gripped at his stomach, and lunged over in one violent retch and heaved up his lunch into the fountain’s pool.
When Alberto got Juan to the hospital, the doctors were clueless about how to diagnose him. Shock? Flu? Pneumonia?
A week later, he showed no signs of recovery. His eyes sank hollow in their sockets, and his lymph nodes began to swell. His skin turned a shade lighter than pallor. Juan wanted to believe his condition had more to do with the tragedy of the President’s death than to the strange illness attacking his stomach over the previous months. Over the next few days, he couldn’t keep food down, and he started to lose weight.
After two weeks of deteriorating health, the doctors didn’t know what to think. When fever kicked in and nausea started, followed quickly by vomiting, they thought pneumonia and put him on penicillin and IVs. Then after Alberto and his grandparents described that some of Juan’s symptoms seemed similar to his mother’s, the doctors gave in and took X-rays of his brain. The results came back negative, no signs of a tumor.
When rashes appeared on his body and daily bouts of diarrhea started, the doctors took blood tests. What they saw under the microscope made no sense. It was something they had never seen before: a severely weakened immune defense system due to the destruction of the patient’s lymphocytes—his T-cells, the white blood cells—which served as the agents of combat against viral, bacterial, and germ infections. No medical book could pinpoint this corrosion of Juan’s immunity. His body was as vulnerable as a rodent with nowhere to hide while a hawk circled overhead. A simple cold seemed to have triggered his decline. The
opportunistic infection was thriving on his body’s inability to fight back. It was as though his body had been ambushed.
With tears in his eyes, Juan was haunted by images: Jack and Jackie waving from the open convertible in Dealey Plaza, his head a target, taken in a lens by a twenty-four year old madman, and blown up along with all the peace stored so beautifully inside. Juan wept, his energy flagged. His weight continued to plummet from his pudgy figure—four pounds the first week, three the next.
He wondered whether death was better in a flash like the president, because what was happening to his flesh was hell. Something was eating him up from the inside. His body refused to function. He was coughing more, the deep throaty kind that made the lungs burn, a bullet burn, he thought. He was haunted again. Did Kennedy feel anything? The reports said the first bullet tore through his trachea. Did he try to cough? Did he swallow blood? How long did he think he had until he thought he would die? Then the next bullet fragmented the right side of his head—an explosion of blood, bone, and brain—and it was over. He fell lifeless into Jackie’s lap, her pink suit and stockings along with her white gloves flecked with her husband’s viscera, her face splashed with his death. So could this rotting away of his flesh be worse, Juan considered? He craved food, he craved life, but everything he ate either vomited back up or ran out his colon. He was embarrassed. He felt like a crumbling statue, like the glass table shattered that day in Cuba when the thugs came into their home in La Vibora and ransacked it to pieces. He felt his life evaporating, a drop of water in the desert. Bruises mottled his skin from the many blood tests and injections. The doctors gave him a transfusion. Nothing showed signs of progress. He kept losing weight. Chunks of himself were stolen from his body every night as he dreamed of dying. He wanted to be a lawyer. He cried in his dreams and woke with the same tears in his eyes. His clothes began to hang on him. He became a skeleton readying for a coffin. He was the sarcophagi he saw when he and his brother and father visited the ruins in Mexico. Oh, my dear papá. Where are you? Maybe I should have believed in God more, he thought? But even Fidel didn’t believe, and he seemed to have nine lives. No one could kill him, but now Kennedy was dead. He wondered if Fidel shed a tear. When the assassination occurred, reports indicated that Fidel had been meeting with a French journalist, who had ironically spoken with Kennedy only days earlier. Juan cried again, and he didn’t know for whom? Himself? Kennedy? Castro? His papá? His mamá? I love you all, he thought.
The Ramos Brothers Trust Castro and Kennedy Page 31
