El Flaco was an Entrepreneur

“Oh my god, there’s that car again”, said the peanut vendor. Slowly the green 1947 Buick moved forward covered with all types of placards, advertising posters, and pulling a long rope with half a dozen empty cans making a loud noise as they scraped the road. On the roof, two huge trumpet like loudspeakers blasted the rhythmic sounds of “Los Hermanos Ajo, y su Organo Oriental”. After a few songs, a loud young voice began to deliver an animated message in a generic and well-pronounced Castilian Spanish. “By popular demand, we are back in Chaparra. The most prosperous and happy town in Oriente, where the women are beautiful and the children well behaved. Today’s entertainment and news are brought to you by the great dentist and gentleman, Dr. Ruben Ricardo Rodriguez. When you visit Dr. Rodriguez your teeth will shine, your cavities will disappear, and your wife and girlfriends will love you more. Visit Dr. Rodriguez today at his modern office located at 130 Calle 10.” After two or three minutes of local news, the car moved to the next spot, while playing “Siboney” over the loud speakers, and the cans again scraped the road. Now in front of the post office, the car’s old fashioned and obnoxious horn sounded a few times in case someone had not noticed it. “This has to be the best day of 1953” the voice said. “The men are walking around with money in their pockets, and the women are in the mood to spend. For the best bargains in home appliances, and the best quality, there is no place like “Los Precios Fijos”. When you go to “Los Precios Fijos” you always leave knowing that your money has been well spent. Attention, attention, all young men and women of Chaparra, “El Mocambo” the best bar and restaurant in the city invites you to a night of Mambo next Friday. All “Media Noches” will be half price. Get your tickets today!” After another two or three minutes of music, the car moves on to the next spot. Now in front of a popular department store called “El Escandalo del Polaco” the car honked it’s horn a few times, and then the loud voice started again. “Friends, ladies and gentlemen, children, everyone within the sound of my voice, pay close attention to this most important and timely announcement. It has just come to my attention that the good people from “La Libanesa” department store, just across from this very spot, have decided to reduce the price of all their merchandise by 15% between now and 3:00 o’clock. Don’t miss out on this opportunity, go there now and you won’t be sorry.” This being the last announcement before lunch, the car now sped away making its loud annoying noise, while blasting music over its loud speakers. Looking back with a grin on his face, the driver of the car could see a crowd of people leaving “El Escandalo del Polaco”, heading towards “La Libanesa”.

Stopping for lunch, paid for through a barter arrangement for advertising, at the “Sans Souci” bar and restaurant, the driver of the car and the announcer discussed their strategy for the afternoon. They also joked in anticipation of getting a contract from the owner of “El Escandalo del Polaco” the following week, to do a special promotion in front of “La Libanesa” department store. While they ate lunch, they listened to a rare radio address to the nation by the new president of the republic, Fulgencio Batista, who outlined his plan for a new era of prosperity, honesty, and integrity in Cuba’s history. At the end of the program, other patrons of the bar could be heard in agitated conversations analyzing whether Batista was a “dictador”, or a “presidente”. A policeman sitting nearby, oblivious to the commotion, calmly read a western novel with a picture of John Wayne on the cover.

Two years later these young men had earned enough money from their irregular advertising and promotions business that they had repaid the private loan they had taken to buy the car and public address system, which were the core of their business. They soon hired several employees to expand the business to the surrounding towns, and began to think about bigger things. Nine months after that expansion, the announcer bought out his partner, and diversified by opening a retail radio store, and a year later purchased several taxicabs to form a taxi company. Focused almost exclusively on entrepreneurial schemes and not deterred by the instability of the political and economic environment endemic in Cuba at the time, this young man felt that there was nothing that couldn’t be conquered with hard work.

Although, a bookkeeper by training, he found bookkeeping work boring and contrary to his extroverted personality, and switched to the study of radio and electronics when he realized that as a radio announcer he could make a living while being as crazy and extroverted as he pleased. He then learned that he could make even more money by going into the advertising and promotions business. With an extraordinary amount of energy, and a zeal for engaging the imagination of strangers, by the time this guy was 25 he owned and operated three successful and profitable businesses, and had traveled throughout most of Cuba. This extroverted skinny guy with the loud mouth was my father.

Three things shaped my father’s personality. First, the desire to be a “typical” Cuban, accepted and liked by the people of his generation, and not viewed as a “strange” Quaker. Secondly, the fear of failure and poverty that he knew existed in Cuba and that my grandfather had successfully evaded. And, thirdly, an unwavering belief in frugality, and hard work. Outwardly not very religious, and at times expressing the most un-Quakerly mannerisms, at the end of the day, when he had to analyze the world and find his place in it, he could not help but revert to Quaker ideas and values. Without deeply analyzing his psychological core, I will simply say that his “common sense” was a Cuban Quaker common sense, and not a Cuban Catholic “common sense”.

To my religious grandfather’s dismay, in his youth my father often chased women and got drunk with his friends. He chased women because he believed healthy women liked being chased by healthy men, and this was a natural process of life. After crashing with a locomotive in the outskirts of the nearby town of Delicias, after a night of drinking and partying, destroying his car and breaking several bones in an accident that almost killed him, he realized he “wasn’t made for drinking” and tried to restrain himself from drinking more than two or three shots. Whenever friends gave him a bottle of liquor as a gift, he made a big thing out of it, not because he was thrilled to get the bottle, but because it was the social norm. He always manipulated these situations so he would not be obliged to get drunk, or restrained from going past the two or three shot limit.

But, my fathers’ effort to be “a well liked guy” also meant that he traded some good qualities for bad ones. The Catalan heritage, which was a great source of pride for my grandfather, with its mercantile, and legal traditions was fine, but not the intellectualism, and certainly not the “different-ness” it implied. So, to him claiming his Catalan heritage, and family history stretching back to the middle ages, was considered awkward and even un-Cuban. The Quakerliness, another source of pride for my grandfather, was dealt with a rambunctious behavior. “A man with a very short cultural memory”, was the way some of the old folks in the family referred to him. This strategy may have been unconsciously patched together after he correctly concluded early on in his life, that in old Cuba, a Creole society that over-valued a shallow “simpatico” and “macho” character, the expression of good Quaker, and Catalan social traits would have made him an unpopular person. What outsiders saw when they observed him closely, was a skinny rebellious young man whose religious upbringing, family background, and nature kept him from crossing the line beyond being a prankster, into lawlessness or macho thuggery. Still, he made sure that everywhere he went people became aware of him. Even if it meant ringing bells, sounding horns, or making loud farts. Most of his peers, the real “simpatico” dandies who took their cues from popular street culture, and lived off their parents, did not quite know what to make of him, and called him simply “El Flaco”, the skinny one. To his satisfaction, whenever his peers wanted to have a big party, needed a band, entertainers, and contacts with business or nightclub owners, my father was the first one they called.

For most of his life in Cuba, “El Flaco” had an advantage over most of his friends, and that was that his father was the opposite of what he was. In his youth, this counter balance often had explosive results, and it was not until years of painful experiences that he learned to appreciate the rational level headedness, critical thinking, kind heart, straight talk, and disciplined life style of my grandfather. The amount of patience and perseverance that my grandfather must have exercised while bringing up my father must have been of monumental proportions. The many disappointments experienced by my grandfather in the process were always kept quiet, but became known to me years later. But, in spite of himself, and peer pressure from his dandy friends, the family environment, strict education, and my grandfather’s social contacts eventually had a positive affected on my father, and by his mid 20’s he was what we call today, a successful young entrepreneur - albeit an insecure one. But, as manifested in many great historic figures, for my father insecurity was the engine of his creativity.

After making his first business a success (advertising, promotions and entertainment) and becoming financially secure, my father set out to build another unrelated business (retail radio and electronics store), “just in case that thing goes bad”. After succeeding with the second business, he started another still unrelated business (TaxiCab business), “because my way of running a business makes more money than their way”, even though at the time Chaparra a prosperous town of about 18,000 people already had more than 50 taxicabs. This behavior also meant that he was a generalist by default, without ever consistently focusing on any one thing. Needless to say, after a while his free time was non-existent. Family members who remember him from this period say they don’t have any memories of him ever sitting down.

During the early 1950’s Cuba experienced great social and political instability, which lead many young men to join anarchist, communist, and nationalist groups bent on the radical and often violent re-organization of the entire society. As a believer in non-violence my father channeled his political dissatisfaction in the only creative way he knew. Miguel Sicilia, a good friend of his told me that my father once told him that whenever he drove from Puerto Padre to Holguin, during the “tiempo muerto”, the off season for sugar cane harvesting, and he saw the hundreds of unemployed men walking along the roadsides, a little voice would go on in his head saying, “you have to work harder”. So, instead of picking up a gun, my father went out and got more clients for his businesses.

Because of the time required to nourish a business to maturity, the notorious shortage of working capital in the Cuban economy, and difficulty in finding reliable personnel, all of my fathers enterprises where profitable but “young, aggressive, and growing”, which was the way he liked them. This pattern would have continued, had Fidel Castro not stopped it in 1959. We will never know how this process would have played itself out, under different political circumstances. Had there been a venture capital market within Cuba in the 1950’s (not the loan sharking schemes that existed under the guise of private finance companies), my fathers’ nerdy type “A” personality may have naturally evolved into a startup expert or a mergers and acquisitions man, Cuban style of course.

Getting his work habits and consensus building skills from his Quaker education, and having a natural instinct for organizing small groups of people to undertake challenging tasks by using and mixing both humor and complex financial or technical facts, his “informal” management skills worked well in Oriente. In an environment where many of his peers were poorly educated, he must have hovered as a brainy type. If the issue at hand had to do with legally making money, had some intellectual challenges, and provided a high profile, “El Flaco” was always inspired and found himself involved.

“El Flaco” was at the peak of his entrepreneurial form during his late 20’s, which were the early 1950’s. He ran his three businesses, and worked in the Chaparra sugar mill as payroll manager during the sugar-milling season. Since he had such extensive contacts throughout the region, other business people constantly exposed him to new ventures, and solicited his participation in all kinds of deals. Because my grandfather was considered a solid, conservative, and trustworthy self made man, my father profited by association, and often relied on my grandfather to provide him with the aura of respectability and seriousness he inconsistently projected.

Of all his early businesses, “El Flaco” enjoyed the most producing “Fiestas del Campo”, or country-dance parties. These allowed him to exercise his extroverted personality while managing people, technical equipment, and provided him with a high profit. Here’s how these parties usually worked. On a Saturday morning two squeaky old Ford trucks full of chairs, musical instruments, loud speakers, a modular dance floor, a portable electric generator, and tents, would find their way to an open field flanked by Royal Palm trees near Puerto Padre or Delicias. The Guajiros in charge of setting up for the party normally had everything setup by three o’clock in the afternoon. Ten pits were dug up for roasting the pigs, and the local farmer who sold the pigs was normally in charge of preparing the charcoal and making sure the roasting would go smoothly. Then the liquor and beer was brought in from Chaparra, along with five or six “Muchachonas” or sexy party girls, who also worked as bartenders. The loud speakers where placed high on especially built stilts facing the dance floor, and a midget named “Epifanio”, who coordinated most of these parties, checked them to make sure the dance floor vibrations would not knock them down. Once everyone felt comfortable with the arrangements “Epifanio” got on a car and was driven to the train station where he placed a phone call to “El Flaco”. After explaining that everything was ready, and mentioning that out of the 350 tickets officially distributed, there appeared to be 389 receipts turned in so far, clearly indicating that some of the “bodegueros” had oversold by hand writing “Last Minute” tickets. “Epifanio” asks, “what do you want me to do?” “Buy two more pigs, and four bags of “Casabe”, said “El Flaco”. “I’ll bring an extra 10 bottles of Bacardi, and 25 big bottles of Coca Cola when I come tonight at 6:30 with the band.”

Going back to the field, “Epifanio” gets the pigs, double checks everything and gets ready for 6:30. While everyone waits some Guajiros come by and offer themselves as bouncers or “party helpers”, and the “Muchachonas” flirt with the Guajiros. Around 6:15 PM a navy 1950 Studebaker is seen driving up to the field. Everyone straightens up, the “Muchachonas” quit their flirting, and “Epifanio” tells the Guajiros to get out of site. The car circles around the big tent where the modular dance floor had been set up, honking its horn three or four times, while “El Flaco” laughs at the Guajiros who are running away perplexed at what is going on. The car stops, and out come four musicians with frilly white shirts, red silk fabric wrapped around their waists, and tight black pants. The musicians go directly to where their instruments had been setup and begin to check them. “El Flaco” waving to the “Muchachonas” hands over the car keys to “Epifanio” and asks him to unload the liquor from the trunk. “El Flaco” begins an immediate inspection of the site, and reaches the area where the pigs are soon to be roasted. There, the Guajiro in charge of the food asks him, “Hey Flaco, the extra pigs are $12.50. Are you going to pay me now or later?” “El Flaco”, looks at him and says, “I’ll pay you after the party, and make sure everything goes well.” As he walks off he turns and says to the same Guajiro, “I told all the “Muchachonas” to be nice to you tonight!” The Guajiro shyly smiles with great satisfaction.

After double and triple-checking every minute detail, “El Flaco” goes over to the generator, which had been running since 4:00 o’clock, charging a dozen 12 volt automobile batteries, and tested the charge to assure himself that his most important party making apparatus would work that night. Satisfied with the charge, and now carefully followed by “Epifanio” and one of the “Muchachonas” he makes his way to a table with a record player, a microphone, and a radio like control panel. “El Flaco” turns on the switch, and a loud high-pitched squishing noise comes out of all the loudspeakers requiring that he adjust the control knobs until the high pitched noise disappears. Bringing the microphone to his mouth he repeats a few times, “Radio Ocho Jovenes Felices, en prueba, CM8JF, Oriente, Tierra Caliente”. (Radio Eight Happy Young Men, testing, CM8JF, Oriente, the Hot Land). Since “El Flaco” was a Ham Radio operator, he always used his call letters when testing his equipment. Satisfied that the public address system was working well, he turned to the others and put on a big grin while making a victorious fist. “Listen Epifanio” he says, “tell one of the tall guys to setup another loudspeaker over there pointing out towards the train station, then start playing records at full blast until I return at 7:30”. All of “El Flacos” parties started at 8:00 PM.

The object of these parties was simple. Stay sober, play lots of music, sell lots of liquor and food, and earn a profit the equivalent of at least three to four months worth of an average office workers salary. At that time the average monthly wage of an office worker was about $280.00.

In his retail radio shop my father sold and repaired Emerson, Phillips, and General Electric radios, and record players. He also custom built two-way Ham radios. With his two employees he later developed his own private label line of AM radios called “Los Vociferosos” which became very popular, and were sold mostly on credit to both city people and the Guajiros of the region. In order to “relax” when at home, my father converted a room in our house into an “electronics” laboratory. During his rare moments at home, my father would grab a quick bite from the kitchen, exchange five or six words with my mother, and then he would float into his laboratory where all the switches always seemed to go on automatically when he entered. My earliest memories of our house are not visual but acoustic. Most evenings and weekends our house was full of the sounds of Morse code, strange foreign languages that emanated from quadraphonic loudspeakers, and that weird Martian like sound that comes out of a Ham radio when it slides between frequencies. My father took tremendous pride in building the most complex, exotic, and powerful Ham radios technology allowed at that time. He kept meticulous logs of his international radio contacts and kept memorized the call letters of perhaps hundreds of Amateur Ham Radio operators, who like him judged the quality of a man not by mortal standards, but by whether they communicated via the 20 meter range of the radio spectrum, or the 40 meter range, while using a double key high frequency non undulating oscillator. The guys who used the 2-meter or 10-meter bands were considered wimps. My father belonged to a group of about six or seven men who were, as my mother used to say in frustration, thoroughly addicted to technology and gadgetry. This group was considered by the virtue of their work and “Nerdyness” or “Geekness”, the technology elite of our region. All business entrepreneurs like my father, these “Radio Aficionados” always gave the impression that if they had to choose between having sex with a gorgeous willing naked woman and building a new Ham radio, the naked woman stood no chance. As a little boy, I recall how my father and his friends overjoyed the day a small package arrived from Havana with two-dozen transistors, representing according to them, the first transistors to ever arrive in Oriente. They spent half the day reading the accompanying technical manuals, and theorizing how this new technology was going to transform the electronics industry. Then they rolled up their sleeves and built a variable frequency Ham radio that ended up being one quarter the size of the typical radios they used to build using old clunky transformers and tubes. After making contact with a Ham radio operator from Bogota, Colombia, one of the guys promptly got a bottle of rum, and they all toasted to, “the New World of transistors.”

My father’s taxi company comprised of five cars, and I never quite understood all the details of how that business worked, aside from remembering my mother say that if my father was not managing a party, or tinkering with radios at the store, he was probably lost in some obscure town while training a new taxi driver. Family friends told me that my father used the taxi business to promote his radio shop and everyone who rode on one of those taxis always got some kind of flyer or discount coupon for some new electronic gadget he was trying to sell. I also remember that the cars were mostly Chevrolets and always looked very big to me.

During the late 1950’s, the Cuban revolution did not stop my father from working and following his workaholic behavior. After closing shop for a week after the triumph of the revolution, he reopened for business as usual. His plans for 1960 were to expand his Taxi business by acquiring more cars. His expectations were that after years of turmoil, Cuba would finally enter a period of tranquility and economic growth.

Late In 1960, while the fever of revolutionary enthusiasm was still high, and the streets were filled with crowds chanting, “Cuba si, Yanki no,” we received a surprising visit by Mr. Hiram Hilty, and a delegation of four American Quakers mostly from North Carolina. Hilty, a loved figure among Cuban Quakers, had acted as a liaison between Cuban Quakers and American Quakers since he was a young man in the late 1930’s. Following a long established tradition among traveling Quakers, the visitors were given accommodations in the home of the “weightiest Friend” in town (the person whose home had the space, and whose material resources would not be strained by the act of charity). His official reason for the visit was to, “evaluate the conditions of Friends in Cuba, in light of recent changes.” One of the Quakers traveling with Mr. Hilty was an elderly woman whose dress, demeanor, and gentleness created the impression that she was a Quaker angel. She was introduced to my family as “the Aunt of the former Vice President of the United States, senor Richard Nixon.” As word spread among the Quaker community that Hilty and his delegation was staying in our house, people began to arrive from the surrounding towns hoping to speak to him. According to my father during his three days in Chaparra, Hilty met several hundred people, and asked them the following questions. “Do you feel comfortable with the recent changes that have taken place in Cuba?”. “If Cuba becomes communist do you think your life here as a Quaker is likely to change very much?”. And, “Do you feel the need to leave Cuba and start a new life in another country?” During this period most Cubans, including us Quakers, could not imagine that the new idealistic government of Fidel Castro would turn into the nightmare it later became. So, out of the several hundred Quakers Mr. Hilty met while in Chaparra, about 20 expressed a desire to leave the country, while the majority, including my family, expressed no sense of discomfort with the changes taking place, and had few concerns for the future. As Mr. Hilty prepared to leave our house he told my father and grandparents, “if you ever want to go to the United States, just let me know.” Then, Richard Nixon’s aunt kissed my seven month old brother Jose Luis on the head, said something in English and got into one of my father’s Taxis for a drive to Banes where they were to visit the famous Quaker school before returning to the US.

A year and a half after Mr. Hilty’s visit, Fidel Castro’s government had changed the political and economic structure of Cuba to the extent that entrepreneurs like my father could no longer operate their independent small businesses. The government viewed people like my father as avaricious capitalists whose practices went against socialist ideals and the welfare of the Cuban people. All bank accounts and private businesses were confiscated. By the time of the Cuban Missile Crisis my father’s only means of earning money was reduced to his seasonal job as payroll manager at the sugar mill. The fact that my father was an apolitical person, had never supported the government of Fulgencio Batista, and his workaholic behavior was actually creating jobs and wealth for the Cuban economy, had no significance. Castro’s government, in its socialist program to make everyone equal, immediately lowered our standard of living, and made it clear that the inspiration to succeed in life, based on profit, private property, or entrepreneurial work was considered anti-revolutionary. Soon after this political policy became clear, my father said to us during dinner, “this government, with the excuse that it is getting rid of all the rich people in the name of equality, is going to make us all equally poor.”

For the simple reason that my father was a Ham Radio operator, a nerd, and an electronics technician, he was arrested early in 1962 and charged with conspiring against the government and assisting the CIA in some unknown covert operations. During his arrest, all electrical engineers and communications workers in Oriente province were also arrested and sent to prison for almost two weeks, charged with “suspicion to harm the fatherland by utilizing covert communications systems whose complex operations can only be managed by individuals with high levels of technical skills.” Several days after his release, our house was surrounded by armed soldiers with machine guns, who came in without warrant or explanation, and smashed every radio in the house and tore down our TV and radio antennas. Then they went to my fathers’ electronics lab and took every transformer, battery, soldering stick, nut, cable, and bulb they could find, loaded it on a truck and told my father that all his radio equipment had been confiscated by order of the “State”. My father’s once neat laboratory and his source of pride was left in shambles and wrecked. As the truck with the soldiers left, one of our neighbors walked by the front of our house and shouted towards us, “Viva la Revolucion, abajo con los Yankis” meaning Long live the revolution, down with the Yankees. After sitting in a swinging chair in the veranda of our house for several silent hours, my father told my mother that the only way for us to survive was to either become communists ourselves, or leave the country.

Although, my father never felt comfortable with Fidel Castro’s government, he was never involved in anything illegal to oppose the government, and was never involved in anything like the CIA plot he had been accused of participating in. His only guilt was distaste for the government manipulation and the brainwashing of the people, which he clearly saw take place on a daily basis. The regular jailing of people who expressed this discomfort, simply increased the sense of disappointment in most who could have instead been won over to the revolution, had their undecided views been nourished by positive experiences.

When the ferocious winds and rains of Cyclone Flora hit eastern Cuba in 1962, it left a dark shadow of death, flooding, hunger, and diseases. The town of Chaparra was flooded and our house was under water for eight days. We took refuge in the giant Chaparra sugar mill, which was located on high ground, and from where our neighbors and we sadly watched a sea of mud cover everything we held dear. When the rains stopped, we descended from the sugar mill only to find the streets littered with dead bloated animals, overturned cars, large trees ripped from their roots, pieces of furniture and mattresses on rooftops, and a terrible rotten stench emanating from everywhere. There was no drinking water, or electricity, and the only food available were cans of condensed milk and crackers that where stockpiled in the sugar mill. Couples with children walked the muddy streets crying aimlessly, old people sat in front of their ruined houses staring into space. The shock was so intense that even soldiers walked the streets in anguish and perplexed at not knowing how and when to begin helping people. Many people’s homes were irreparably damaged, so when we saw our house standing we were overjoyed. But, when we entered our house we found the watermark at six feet. After days under water and mud, our mattresses, furniture, books, family pictures, clothes, electrical appliances, and food were all destroyed. A trunk containing letters, documents, and family memorabilia dating back to the 18th century when the Font’s arrived in Cuba from Catalonia, was found in our yard. When we opened it muddy water gushed out, and all the documents inside were either destroyed or had partially disintegrated. When word of the loss of the family trunk reached my grandfather Pedro in Velasco, my grandmother said he went to his office, sat down and quietly wept.

In the midst of this disaster, people came together and helped each other regardless of political, religious, or racial background. It was spontaneous and non-coordinated by the government, it was strangely methodical, and there was no looting, vandalism, or expressions of collective despair. The old Cuban character, which came together in the face of adversity, and was challenged by hard work and the need to beat the odds, expressed itself magically during this time. This grass root self help effort let us survive during the first few days after the disaster, but it wasn’t enough in light of the overwhelming devastation. In the weeks that followed, international aid began to arrive in Cuba from Europe, the socialist countries, and even the United States. Then the Cuban government took control of the aid distribution process, and the military stepped in to enforce “socialist discipline”. The few supplies and medicines that became available, where rationed off to members of the Communist Party, members of the Committee for the Defense of the Revolution, and the militia. Whatever supplies were left were sold in a government store, where people had to stand in line and wait five or six hours to buy a bottle of Aspirin or Milk of Magnesia. Soon the grass root efforts of neighbors helping neighbors gave way to a centrally planned distribution system designed to reward “people with a socialist conscience”, and give less “priority” to those with different points of view. This condition enticed many greedy socialists to set themselves up in business creating a black market in much needed products that sold at exorbitant prices.

The American Quakers collected tons of medical supplies for Cuba, and Mr. Hilty was selected to be among those bringing the supplies by ship directly to Oriente province. Word reached us that Hilty was once again coming to Cuba, and that those of us who wanted to leave the country could do so with him. We were ecstatic. But, it never happened. Hilty’s ship was never allowed to land in Cuba. Cuban authorities stopped it as it crossed territorial waters, it was unloaded of its precious cargo, and the captain was told he did not have permission to land. We found out about this event weeks after the ship had returned to the US and all kinds of rumors circulated in Cuba about the why and how’s of this “Yankee imperialist ship.” None of the stories we heard were true, along with most of the clearly fabricated reports put out by the government, which basically said that Cuba had been saved from disaster and famine, by the good will and generosity of the “communist proletariats from around the world”. Nothing about American “imperialist Yankee Quakers” bringing food and medicines as an act of charity, ever appeared in the news.

By hard work and improvisation, which took more than a year and a half, my parents managed to rebuild, barter, or buy from the black market enough household items to re-establish a semblance of a normal house. We slept on the floor for months, suffered from stomach problems repeatedly, lost weight due to lack of food, and wore ripped clothes and shoes with holes on the soles. Cyclone Flora left us with misery, and a clear sense that Cuba was not heading towards a socialist paradise full of equality as promised by Fidel and the communists. The experience showed us without doubt that the system was a farce. Keywords like, the “interests of the people,” “the equality of the masses,” “the fight against exploitation,” and “the need for unselfish hard work for the future of the fatherland”, were all double talk designed to brainwash docile people into unquestionable loyalty by calling on their most primal of human fears and desires. My parents clearly realized that by not having freedom of speech, freedom of the press, freedom to have private property and by lacking the freedom to travel overseas, Cubans were in essence prisoners in a huge island penitentiary. Cuba had indeed reached a high level of equality, but the equality was among socialists, not the rest of the people.

As a family we tried to make the best of the constant harassment we began to encounter wherever we went. It became clear that we where blacklisted, and the list had wide circulation. The simple fact that we were Quakers, my father was a businessman, an Amateur Radio Operator, and my grandfather Pedro Font had held a high position in the old American Sugar Mill, made us clear targets. Social and political harassment against us started early every day. My mother was harassed when she went to the store; my father was harassed when he walked to work, at work, and on his way back home. I was harassed on the way to school, in school, and on the way back home. My brother was spared because he was too young. The harassment was consistent and on message. The black Cubans accused us of being racist pigs, and threw sexual innuendoes at my mother, the white Cubans accused us of being capitalist imperialist pigs, and together they accused us of being traitors, enemies of the people, and worms (Gusanos). Sometimes when we entered a public building, or a gathering of people, someone would point us out and all eyes would focus on us. On the weekends, when I played in the park I often had to run home because groups of kids would pick fights with me while calling me a “traitor”, or a “white faggot”.

During this time, there was great insecurity in the air, and most people were afraid to speak their minds about politics and the government. It was well known that the government was setting people up, and manipulating circumstances in order to entice frustrated individuals into expressing disapproval of communism. Once this took place, the individual was harassed, their ration cards slashed, and eventually they’d be fired from their jobs. Others were actually imprisoned, or sent to hard labor camps. Each neighborhood had its spies, or “chivatos”, who reported every move made by young and old to the dreaded Committee for the Defense of the Revolution, or the CDR. I remember hearing a visitor to my house, whom my parents did not know very well, say while having coffee, “now that Socialism has managed to make Cuba into a paradise for the poor, it will soon make it into a paradise for idiots who can’t think for themselves. If this keeps going, in the future the grandchildren of these docile mulattos will beg the rich capitalists to return, so they can bring back the ideas needed to run a successful country. In the mean time, we will have to become well acquainted with misery.” My mother clearly in agreement with his comments, but in fear that he was a government informer, instead lied and said, “you’re crazy, socialism is the only way to move ahead, what we are experiencing now is a short period of adjustment. You’ll see how in due time things reach a good balance.” The visitor laughed, but it was not clear if he laughed from frustration, anger, or surprise. Soon, he left our house and we never saw him again. Unplanned, my mother’s survival instincts, and her peculiar family background made her adept at lying to communists, with a serious believable face.

My father brought up with the Quaker belief that one should always tell the truth, found it frustrating and difficult to keep his mouth shut, to publicly agree with what he didn’t believe, to straight out lie if needed, and to applaud speeches he felt were idiotic and manipulative. So, because of my father’s virtues, or weakness, our attempt to maintain a low profile was unsuccessful. When asked what he thought of socialism, even by strangers, my father’s response was, “Esto es una mierda”, or “Esto no sirve para nada”, which means, “this system is a piece of shit”, or “this system is good for nothing.” Needless to say, my mother’s second biggest fear during this time was my father’s mouth, or as she more accurately described it, “his uncontrolled mouth.” Thanks to his honesty during this time, my father landed in jail about five times. It was always the same, he would be arrested by heavily armed militia while walking home from visiting a friend or relative, held for one to three days on “suspicion to aid the counter-revolutionaries”, given a talk on the virtues of socialism, or the need to develop a socialist consciousness, and then he was released. The strategy of harassing people like my father was sometimes crude. Once, a young militiaman decided to arrest him for a day, for wearing his pants too baggy, saying that baggy pants were worn by counter-revolutionaries who used them to smuggle contraband. My father would come home and say to us, “if socialism is so good, why do they have to arrest me, to give me a speech on how good it is?”

As a result of these experiences my father began to view the Quaker belief in unblemished honesty with less fervor than before. In an argument with my grandfather he said, “viejo, in Cuba to survive, the Polacos (Jews) will have to eat pork, and we will have to learn to lie!”

In 1963 my father traveled a thousand kilometers to Havana with the excuse that he had to visit his sick Uncle Juan Ferraz. His trip was really to inquire whether a family friend who had a contact in the Swiss Embassy could help us leave the country. The hope was to somehow obtain visas to leave Cuba. The destination was insignificant, but it was expected that it would be Mexico, or Spain. His attempt was not successful, and he returned to Oriente depressed. In 1964 word reached us that a friend had made contact with a man who for a fee, could smuggle us out of Cuba via the Guantanamo Naval base. Two weeks before we were supposed to meet with this man to find out the details of how this escape could happen, we learned that he had been captured and shot by the G.2 (the secret service) while preparing a boat to smuggle another family out of the country. The news of this mans’ death shook us, and clearly indicated to my parents that our chances of leaving Cuba as a family were slim, and that the risk of death was too high to pay for trying to do it illegally. If the man had been captured and interrogated after meeting with my father, he may have been tortured into giving out the names of people he planned to smuggle out in the coming months. This would have landed both my parents in jail since evidence of any involvement in an illegal attempt to leave the “socialist paradise” carried an automatic jail sentence of five years. My brother and I would have been sent to a government work camp away from our relatives for the same period of time. This is the closest my parents ever came to contemplating leaving Cuba in a boat.

My father continued working at the sugar mill, but it became increasingly difficult especially when he was asked to join the voluntary work brigades, and the militia. Every weekend without exception, a member of the CDR and a militiaman would knock in our door and inform my parents that they were there to “invite” them to perform “voluntary” work for the “betterment of society, and the Cuban people”. Or they would say that my father should come along and learn about the “positive role of the militia in our society.” Each time my parents would decline the invitation with a variety of excuses. Each time, the good socialists would enter the date, the request, and the excuse for non-compliance in a little ledger book. After their ledger entries they would say, “we’ll see you next week. Patria o Muerte” (Fatherland or Death), and they’d leave with serious looks on their faces. In school I faced a similar environment. I was asked to join the young Pioneers, which was supposed to be the communist version of the Boy Scouts, but has always been the first point of indoctrination for the “New Cuban Man” which then leads to full membership in the “Union de Jovenes Communistas”, or the UJC. (The Union of Young Communists). Like my parents, I became very creative at finding excuses for not joining these organizations. By this point, we hated Fidel and socialism so much that it gave us pleasure to irritate them in whatever little ways we could. During this time I also became aware of my parents concern for me regarding compulsory military enrollment. Although, I was not of age yet, all fourteen year olds had to register, and upon registration the young person was denied the right to leave the country.

In 1965 the Camarioca boat lift took place and my parents learned that my aunt Anna Pupo (then living in Brooklyn, New York) had made arrangements for us to sail to Miami. When the list of names indicating the families from our town who had been petitioned to leave became public, and we were on it, it changed our status from “potential enemies of the fatherland”, to “confirmed enemies of the fatherland”. My father was fired from his job the same day the list appeared, and by the third day, soldiers and officials from the Ministry of Defense surrounded our house. A soldier went through each room in the house and inventoried every item and possession we had, informing us that these things now belonged to the State, and we had no rights to remove, sell, or give them away. He said, “when your permission to leave is granted, you will have to account for every item inventoried today. If there are any discrepancies, you will not be allowed to leave!” Hearing this announcement made my mother erroneously believe that our departure from Cuba was immanent. A few days later we learned that the Camarioca boatlift had been cancelled, and new flights out of Cuba had been arranged with the United States. Those who could not leave from Camarioca were to leave this way. These were called the “Freedom Flights”. Several months later we received official documents, including our petition numbers. Again, my mother rejoiced at the hope of a quick departure, until my father pointed out that our petition numbers were 214,186, 214,187, 214,188, and 214,189. Meaning that, 214,185 people needed to be processed and had to leave Cuba before we could!

This dilemma made my father step up to the plate and transform himself from a middle of the road Quaker capitalist entrepreneur, to an expert and highly successful Black Market entrepreneur under socialism. Communism showed us that pure unadulterated religion, ethical living, and respect for others with differing points of view, is a luxury that is best practiced when conditions allow. When conditions don’t allow, survival sets the rules.

Knowing that Fidel Castro was only allowing several hundred people to leave the country each week, we quickly figured that it was going to take us years before we actually left for exile. This posed a problem. The dilemma, the question, and the tension in the minds of people like my parents was, how to eat, support young children, and survive in a hostile society for two to five years without the hope of receiving much help from anyone. No welfare, no social security, no insurance, no unemployment checks, no charity, no food stamps, and if you had an uncle Pepe, he’d probably not help because his wife, or daughters were likely communists, or he didn’t want to be viewed as a collaborator! This problem caused many people to attempt suicide, leave the country floating on an inner tube towards the shark infested Bermuda Triangle, or publicly declare that after consideration they had realized communism was the best social, political, and economic system in the world! For my parents there was little to consider. Socialism, Communism, the people’s democracy, or liberal humanism, which were labels freely interchanged by the same zealots whose harassment we had to endure, was a system whose heart was controlled by a tyrant. A government whose maintenance depended on fear, brute force, and lies, and whose supporters were generally less astute, more close-minded, less industrious, and less educated than those, who like us, were waiting to leave the country.

My parents took stock of the few things we could do to survive. It was simple. Barter was allowed, personal services were allowed, and due to its inefficiencies, socialism opened the door to a Black Market economy. Thanks to my father’s personality, now fully challenged by the circumstances, we ended up doing very well. Miraculously, in a relatively short time we quietly but joyously surpassed the depressed and rationed dietary standards by then achieved by the good communists, who on a daily basis tormented us. While we ate steak, they had to endure rationed cans of Russian mutton. Whenever we had a bad day due to some humiliation or harassment, my father at the table, looking at our nice fresh black market food, would say, “don’t worry, just remember that tonight they’re eating platefuls of Karl Marx, with Che Guevara for desert.”

Within the first three months of being out of the closet “Gusanos”, my parents setup a home-based Tamale factory. All four of us made tamales from corn my father purchased from nearby farmers. We used to make about one hundred tamales per day, which my father then sold to government restaurants whose menus had dwindled to three or four items, due to rationing. This business was good for about four months, until one day he came home to tell us that no one was buying any tamales from him because the CDR had forbidden it. For about three months we lived from the money my mother made as a clandestine seamstress, and my father bartered his technical skills, like fixing radios, in exchange for food, usually a chicken, a pound of beans, some rice, or coffee. While fixing someone’s record player and radio, he asked to be compensated with an old broken down refrigerator instead of the chicken originally offered. So one morning, he brought the old refrigerator into our backyard while my mother criticized him for bringing junk in the house. But, my father had an idea. He had noticed that all the old American appliances left in Cuba were breaking down, and no one had any spare parts or repair skills to maintain them. When these things broke down, people were abandoning them. Without any decent replacements from the socialist countries whose governments viewed such “luxuries” as frivolous, Cubans would soon run out of these domestic necessities. My father crudely fixed the old refrigerator, and quietly let word out that he had a refrigerator for sale. To everyone’s amazement the head of the local CDR showed up at our door asking to see the refrigerator. My father showed it to him, then the guy turned to my father and said, “I can only give you $550.00, will that be OK with you?” Thinking for a second, my father said, “look I’ll give it to you for $300.00 if you promise to find me a buyer for the next one I fix?” With great satisfaction, the guy shook my father’s hand and said, “just let me know when you have another one ready.” Thus, my father entered the world of bribery and socialist deal making. Within a few days my father teamed up with another “Gusano” who had refrigeration repair skills, and experience working with Freon gas, and both setup a small refrigeration repair shop in our back yard. Word soon spread from Puerto Padre to Holguin that my father’s shop was the only place where old refrigerators could be fixed, sold, or exchanged. Within a month, my father’s new semi clandestine business had a huge backlog of orders, with most clients being staunch communists. Government trucks would drive up to our house to drop off broken refrigerators, and soon my father was making five times more money this way than had he remained as a government employee at the sugar mill. The routine for success was simple and based on Cuban tradition. Every month, when a canister of Freon needed to be refilled, my father would send six black market steaks to the wife of the head of the CDR, and another six to the wife of the head of the militia. The steaks always carried the message; “these steaks are a symbol of appreciation for the hard work your husband continues to do on behalf of Cuban workers.”

The very protectors of communist purity, the defenders of socialist egalitarianism, the watchdogs against counter-revolutionaries, the followers of Che Guevara’s struggle against Yankee imperialism, were eating our “capitalist” steaks, and creating bureaucratic loopholes so my “degenerate Gusano” father could provide them with a simple service they could not organize themselves.

At a time when the average person lived on a monthly ration of four pounds of rice, ten ounces of beans, three pounds of sugar, four ounces of coffee, three fourths of a pound of beef or pork, bones included, two pounds of chicken, carcass included, half a pound of oil, three small cans of evaporated milk, and one pack of cigarettes, women began sleeping with men for one steak. Our bribes were very generous. My father became so adept at manipulating the system that by the time we left in 1968, I felt that every communist functionary in our region had received, or was receiving bribes from our “capitalist anti-revolutionary” business. So, although we were harassed and humiliated regularly, for three years we thrived economically thanks to the rigidity of socialist central planning, and Fidel Castro’s corrupt “companeros”.

On the last day we were in Chaparra, one of the nephews of the head of the CDR, who was a “Gusano” like us, came by to say goodbye. He told my parents that his uncle thought my father was so slick, he often referred to him as, “Ese Joel se le escapo al Diablo”, or that Joel escaped from the Devil’s grip!

From a survival and business point of view, “El Flaco” did the right thing. He kept the family together, we ate well, wore the best clothes and shoes available under communism, we felt a sense of pride in having outwitted our tormentors, and in the end we achieved our goal, which was to leave the country together. But, from a moral, religious, and ethical perspective, my father received deep wounds from which he has never been able to recover. That creative happy young Quaker entrepreneur who believed in the intrinsic good nature of people, and held the belief that the road to success was always found in honest hard work, died in Cuba sometime between 1963 and 1968.

Today, the Chaparra sugar mill, the largest and most technologically advanced in the world in 1959, lies in ruins and no longer produces sugar, and Cuba is no longer a major sugar producer. The town of Chaparra, now renamed Jesus Menendez, in honor of a socialist hero, cannot lift itself from a chronic state of economic depression and high, but unofficial unemployment. The beautiful wooden houses that once graced its spacious tree lined streets and park, are falling down and have not been painted or repaired in more than forty years. Today, all the entrepreneurs who once thrived there and made it a dynamic place are gone. Socialism has triumphed; everyone now is equally poor.

(c) Copyright by Joel Font
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