Looking for Snow in Miami. Passing Through Harlem

As we walked down the tarmac, I looked around for some sign of Winter. Perhaps some ice attached to the trees, like I had seen on post cards, or a policeman wearing a long coat and galoshes, but the air was actually warm. Looking back towards the plane, I noticed that my father, along with several other men, had dropped to his knees, and in a Pope like fashion had kissed the ground. My mother, my brother, and I just looked at him in astonishment, as he got up and said, “don’t worry we will be back in Cuba by early next year.” He then looked at me and pronounced, “it is now time to cry out of happiness.” But, instead of happy tears, I could only muster astonishment at the sights around me. Miami in January of 1968 did not have snowstorms, and I could not see any skyscrapers anywhere. Would I see the Empire State building if we took a taxi and drove north for a while, towards New York? I wondered.

Our first day in exile was very long, but sunny and beautiful. After all the paperwork and medical exams were done, we were taken to “La Torre de la Libertad”, Liberty Tower, where we were shown to our room, a tiny closet like space with four bunk beds, which became our home during our first three days in the United States. In “La Torre de la Libertad”, we were given new underwear, socks, a toothbrush, toothpaste, soap, and shampoo, and my parents were allowed to make two phone calls. After the phone calls, a group of us newly arrived “exilados” were taken to the commissary, where we were told, “you can eat as much as you want, and you can go back as many times as you like.” Coming from a country were coffee was rationed and scarce, my mother asked, “and coffee, can we have two cups of coffee too?” The tour guide, apparently a Cuban-American, looked at my mother, and with a smile said, “senora, ahora usted se puede tomar todo el café que le de la gana!”. Meaning, “Lady, now you can drink all the coffee your heart desires.” “What a wonderful country”, I heard a voice say from the back of our group. Then I got in line and waited to see what American food was all about. I had heard vague stories about it, but now I was there, and about to experience it myself. Mayonnaise, the real thing! And, nice fresh ham, with cool lettuce, and a slice of American cheese on two perfectly sliced pieces of white bread. My God! There was no doubt, this was not Cuba. As I moved forward on the food line, I noticed a huge refrigerator with glass doors, and to my astonishment, the thing was full of Coca Cola bottles! If deliverance has a description, for us it had to be that day in “La Torre de la Libertad”. No more Castro, no more persecution, and no more fear, with all the ham and cheese sandwiches you could eat! At eleven years old, my life was about to begin anew.

Soon, friends and relatives came to visit us at “La Torre de la Libertad”, and we were taken for a ride around Miami. Everyone we saw seemed well fed, well dressed, and happy. The cars were all agile and colorful, and the houses were nicely painted. The streets looked very clean, and there were no signs of starving, homeless, or rioting Cuban exiles anywhere to be found, as Castro’s propaganda had made everyone in Cuba believe. Everything that we had believed in for years was confirmed in one day in Miami. The entire Socialist ideology, its followers, and the results of that ideology seemed so inferior to Capitalism and the free market, that to compare the two was like comparing a plate of manure, to a plate of “Ropa Vieja”.

The warmth and generosity extended to us by the exiled community in Miami, from newly arrived, as well as established exiles, was unexpected and unforgettable. They knew the hardships we had endured, and needed no qualifications to help us. Again, Fidel Castro’s claim that we would die of hunger and poverty in the United States proved to be just another flagrant lie. In two days we received new clothes, new shoes, and even money. My parents received several invitations to work in Miami, and people even offered to put us up in their homes until we got settled. But, our destination was New York City, where my aunt, Ana Pupo-Corella, awaited for us in Sheepshead Bay, Brooklyn. For us exile was to have a New York flavor. So, as soon as I had discovered the wonders of mayonnaise, and had seen a few Flamingos, we headed for New York City.

As we walked into Kennedy Airport from our arrival gate we heard another Cuban from our group say, “Cono, esta a cinco bajo zero compadre.” Meaning, “Damm it, compadre it’s five below zero.” As I looked out the airport windows I noticed parts of the airfield were covered with snow, and everyone was wearing big coats, boots, scarves, and hats. This is more like it, I thought to myself. This is what “El Norte” should look like! Then my mother with tremendous joy in her voice said, “mira, alli estan. Ahi dios mio, no lo puedo creer.” Look there they are. Oh my god, I can’t believe it. Looking at her sister Ana whom she had not seen in ten years, and her brothers Jose and Eduardo, whom she had not seen in nine, my mother began to cry out of joy, sadness, nervousness, and love all at once and the urge to cry spilled over to my brother and I, and we found tears running down our faces. Along with my aunt and uncles were other friends of my parents whom they had not seen in years. In tears my mother turned to them and said, “Yo pensaba que nunca hibamos a salir de hesa pesadilla, y nunca los hiba a ver de nuevo”, or I thought we would never leave that nightmare, and I would never see you again. Moved by her words, some of the people who came to welcome us broke into tears and there, in the middle of Kennedy Airport, on January 13th 1968, while it was five degrees below zero outside, we all hugged and cried as strange voices speaking English were amplified over the loudspeakers.

During our first week in Sheepshead Bay, Brooklyn, there were winter blizzard conditions, with several feet of snow accumulated on the ground, and my aunt Ana felt that the shock of going out in such extreme cold would give us pneumonia. During this week, we ate better than we had during the previous eight years in Cuba, and we received several visitors, who slowly helped us patch together a picture of life in exile, and New York City. Things were generally described as good, but quickly my father concluded that his career opportunities in New York did not lay in entrepreneurial pursuits, electronics, or bookkeeping, because of his lack of English, and because his educational credentials were not recognized in the United States.

My uncle Fernando Corella, summarized it for him. “Look, you’re going to have to start from the bottom, and work your way up the ladder.” “So, where is the bottom of the ladder here?” Asked my father. Counting with his fingers, Fernando explained, dishwasher, floor sweeper, handyman, superintendent in a building, watchman, taxi driver, doorman, deliveryman, or factory worker. “Well then, since the three cents Fidel allowed me to take out of Cuba will not buy much, I will have to improvise.” Said my father. “Which of these jobs is the most promising for us as a family, and which one will give me the most freedom, with the least humiliation?” “Probably superintendent in a building.” Said my uncle Fernando. “But, in order to get a job as a superintendent, you first have to learn about building maintenance, plumbing, heating, and basic English. You will have to first get a job as a handyman in a building and apprentice for a year, then you have to join the union.” “And, how do I get started”, asked my father. Fernando said that he knew some people who could probably find him a handyman job quickly, and he would call them right away. Uncomfortable with the idea of staying in my aunt and uncle’s home without contributing financially, my father suggested to uncle Fernando that while he waited for the handyman job, he should take a job as a dishwasher in any nearby restaurant that would take him, “so that I can contribute to our expenses while we stay in your house.”

And so it was, that during the two months we stayed in my aunt and uncle’s house, my father worked as a dishwasher for Lundy’s, the famous Italian seafood restaurant in Sheepshead Bay. My uncle Fernando knowing how out of place my father must have felt as a dishwasher, said to him, “you don’t have to wash dishes while you’re in my house”. My father’s response was, “when I get old I don’t want to think back to this time, and remember that I got my start in this country by taking handouts”. Thanks to Fidel Castro, my father went from successful businessman, to black market bribery expert, to dishwasher in America.

During our first critical few months in the United States, neither my parents, my relatives, or any of our Cuban acquaintances ever consider, or even mentioned to us any form of public assistance, welfare, or charity, as a means of survival. For my parents, acceptance of any form of public assistance would have been tantamount to stealing from the government that was providing us with a safe haven, and an act of laziness. Worse than that they felt it would be a shameful way of handing Fidel Castro a victory, since he claimed that we would live like beggars in exile.

As we began to become accustomed to Sheepshead Bay, a friend of the family found my father a job as a handyman at a building in Manhattan, or to be precise, Harlem. During 1968, race relations between blacks and whites in the United States were not at their best. Riots, looting, civil disobedience, and mass demonstrations were taking place all over the country, but we were oblivious to it. When these things were mentioned to us, my parents discounted them as exaggerations. We thought little about the fact that we were white Cubans, and were moving to 116th. street and Saint Nicholas Avenue. At the time, there was a Cuban community along Broadway between 135th street and 150th street, called “El Escambray” and we thought being close to it would be a good thing. But, the distance between 116th street and 135th street turned out to be significant. We found ourselves in the minority in our building, a six-story apartment building with perhaps forty or fifty families, where most of our neighbors were black and New York Ricans. I was enrolled in a public school a few blocks from the building where we lived, and soon began to notice that in America the racial issue was very different than anything we had previously experienced. Slowly we began to realize that there was a problem. In Cuba we lived in a multiracial environment, but we were never exposed to the type of bigotry and racism we encountered in this place during this time. In school, not knowing that I was Cuban, the Puerto Rican kids taunted me in Spanglish, “hey blanquito”, they used to say followed by other things I couldn’t decipher. Not accustomed to being called a whittie, by kids who looked white and similar to me, I wondered: “what do these kids consider themselves?” Not speaking any English, I found it awkward to spontaneously meet and talk to other kids. Some of the kids I thought spoke Spanish, would respond to me in English. The black kids ignored me completely. My classes during the first month were focused on getting me accustomed to English, and were taught by bilingual teachers. I was placed in a class with other kids who did not speak English, where the teachers were very nice and took great care in teaching me the English alphabet, verbs, composition and pronunciation, but most of the time everyone spoke Spanish with one another.

As I became more aware of the school dynamics, I noticed that most kids in the school were there to play and hang out, instead of academics. Coming from a very strict educational environment, and a regimented society like Cuba, I was stunned to see kids hanging out in front of the school, wearing messed up ruffled clothes, and sometimes arguing with a teacher. “In Cuba”, I told my parents, “these kids would be sent to the sugarcane fields to cut cane on their second day of classes”. (A typical punishment for enemies of the revolution, homosexuals and unruly young people). My parents were not impressed with my observations. My mother worried for my little brother and I, decided to check out the school, and came back with a report of what she had observed. “There is absolutely no discipline in that school,” she said to my father, “its like a huge circus”. My father could not understand how the parents of these kids who had so much given to them for free, and lived in a country with so many opportunities could allow their kids to squander education so carelessly. My mother in a philosophical way pointed her finger at me and said; “when everything has been taken from you, and you are naked in the middle of the jungle, the only thing of value that will allow you to survive is the education inside your head.” I looked at her and instinctively knew she was right. I also knew what that conversation meant in terms of our likelihood of remaining in that building and that neighborhood.

Soon after settling into our one bedroom apartment, where my brother and I slept in cots, and my mother cooked everything in one pot and one skillet because we still didn’t have money to buy cooking utensils, we began to wonder if all apartment buildings in America were populated by people who yelled obscenities out their windows, where the police regularly made arrests, where loud music played all the time, and where women screamed for help in Spanglish while crashing sounds were heard during the middle of the night.

About a month after we had our discussion on the quality of the local school, my father found a middle aged black man laying on the lobby floor of our building, drunk and apparently recovering from a beating. None of the tenants walking by showed any compassion for the man, and went about their businesses unmoved. Responsible for the upkeep of the building, my father helped the poor man to the street, and then cleaned his vomit from the lobby. From that moment onward we began to feel uneasy about our safety, and wondered how it was possible for people to walk by someone in pain, without blinking an eye.

My mother, a Galician looking woman with light brown hair, gray eyes, and pale white skin started to notice how in the supermarket and sometimes when she walked home, many of the local men looked at her with anger and sometimes said things in English she could not understand, but felt were directed at her. As time passed we felt more and more tension and more unwelcome by our neighbors. Then, one day two recently arrived middle aged Cuban exiled women, one of them black, came to visit us in our new apartment, and were harassed in front of our building by a group of black kids. One of the women had to fight off one of the kids who tried to steal her purse. The first hour of their visit was spent in a tense discussion of how disappointed and afraid they were at the sights they had seen on their way to our building. “Never, anywhere in Cuba did we feel as threatened as we did walking here today”, they said. When their visit was over, in the middle of the afternoon, my father had to walk them back to the subway station, because the women were in fear of walking the streets by themselves. The feeling of “we don’t belong here” was intensified and we never invited anyone else to visit us while we were there.

My father, in an effort to better understand the environment we were in, and the people around us, attempted to befriend some of the Puerto Rican men who lived in the building and sometimes hung out in front of our building in the afternoons. They were very curious about life in Cuba and how we made it to New York. After my father explained life under socialism, and the lack of freedoms in Cuba, one of them told him “things are not very different here in New York.” Then, they explained that there was police brutality and discrimination against blacks and Puerto Ricans all over New York in a way that paled the problems we had experienced in Cuba. While this conversation was going on, a bunch of kids approached one of the men, paid him some money and received in exchange a green bag of what my father concluded was Marijuana. In Cuba drug trafficking was punishable by death, and that very interchange had it taken place in Cuba would have meant the firing squad for the dealers and ten to fifteen years for those witnessing the transaction without reporting it to the secret police. Appalled by this exchange, my father returned home in raged and commented to my mother, “these people around here are communists and drug dealers. They should all be sent to Cuba for six months so Fidel can straighten them out. If they hate this country so much, why don’t they just get out.”

From that moment on whenever my father heard anyone complain about the United States, he would coldly say; “Mira, a nosotros no nos gusto el socialismo de Fidel Castro, y por eso nos fuimos de Cuba dejando todo por detras. Si a ustedes no les gustan este pais, porque estan aqui chupando del sistema.?” Meaning, look we didn’t like socialism and Fidel Castro, and because of that we left Cuba and everything we owned behind. If you dislike this country so much, why are you here sucking off the system?

These types of things made us aware, and forced us to see the differences between us Cuban exiles who arrived in the US penniless, who did not have the benefits of US citizenship, spoke no English, and could not return to Cuba, and many of our neighbors who were almost all US citizens, spoke English, regularly flew back to their home towns, and received the fruits of Capitalism, but seemed to disdain it.

We became convinced that in America a large segment of the population had figured out how to live off the fat of the land. Having lived for years under a totalitarian dictatorship that did not respect basic freedoms, it bothered us to see how almost always it was the people who exploited the capitalist system the most, the ones who took every opportunity to insult its leaders, criticize its institutions, and complained about discrimination. My father said once, “the energy invested in complaining, if used for self improvement would make all these people rich and happy. But, they are all hypnotized into whining and complaining.” Because of these experiences we thought for a long time, that most Americans were in their hearts, complainers. “If you put them in heaven, they will complain,” my father would say.

By the end of our second month in Harlem my parents were looking to move, and my father was looking for another job. By the sixth month we managed to move. Living at 116th street and Saint Nicholas Avenue in Manhattan for six months in 1968 seemed like a long time, and given the social and racial tensions of the period, and our naïveté it probably was. For us 116th street presented two lessons. First, that in America, like everywhere else in the world, it matters very much where you live. Where you live can brand you for years after you decide to move because a place’s political habits, prejudices, social relationships, and economic limitations are psychologically absorbed whether we like it or not, and somehow my parents knew this. Secondly, that in America racism goes both ways. And, we saw that racism against whites can be manifested with the same hatred and vigor, as whites have been known to practice it against blacks. This was a lesson that was unexpected for us.

The innocent Cuban attitude of “we are all the same” did not translate very well in the Harlem of that period, especially after dark. The particular realities of North American history are different from ours, and I suppose every other immigrant group in the US has to go through some “right of passage” where you hit your face on the brick of the new culture.

Had it not been that we always had black Cuban friends, that our culture is a culture that springs from both Europe and Africa, that these things are undeniable, we would have been scarred into a hateful attitude against many good people in the future. Thanks to family and friends our next stop in America was to be far away from Harlem and the racial tensions of 1968.

(c) Copyright by Joel Font
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