The Quakers Wore Guayaberas

Like most stories about the Quakers, this is a story full of minutia, dates, and people not normally discussed around the dinner table or during a baseball game. When I told my fifteen-year-old daughter to read it, she rebelled and told me that it was boring. But, if you want a better understanding of the society and environment in which my father’s family lived in Cuba, up until the mid 1960’s the information here will be enlightening. Most importantly, it will answer the question: “Why did these people leave Cuba.”

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Cuban Quakers? You must be kidding! Is the response I get from both Americans and Cubans, when I mention that I come from a Cuban Quaker family. Cubans tend to add the “what’s a Quaker?” question, which then forces me to explain the profound differences in outlook and religious practices that Quakers have compared to Catholics and most other Christians. This lack of familiarity with the Quaker experience in Cuba is normal given the lack of information that exists on Quakers in general, and the fact that average people have never had any direct political, or economic interest in this trivial detail. Furthermore, Cubans are ignorant of this issue because they have always enjoyed the self-deception of thinking that somehow by magic, everyone in the island was the same. In religious matters this meant that everyone was, in one flavor or another, considered Catholic. But, prior to 1959, Cuba had more religious, ethnic, and cultural diversity than most countries of the Western Hemisphere. Its Jewish population was one of the largest in Latin America, with a vibrant and growing Baptist, Methodist, Presbyterian, and Adventist population as well. Cuban blacks who composed more than 40% of the population, practiced the Santeria and Palo Monte religions with their African roots, and many in the Cuban Chinese community who had been in Cuba since the early 19th century still practiced Buddhism. And, there were large numbers of Masons, Odd Fellows, and Rotarians, as well as countless other ethnic and secular organizations throughout the island.

Cuba also had, like most countries, a significant number of atheists and agnostics. Jose Marti, the great poet and the father of the Cuban nation was a Mason and an agnostic who viewed religion with disinterest. The romantic reinvention of Marti as the “Apostle” of the nation reflects the dependence of average Cubans on Catholic symbolism, without concern, or in ignorance of the fact that such a title would have been considered an insult to Marti, the rational intellectual.

Because of this “we are all the same innocence”, there was never a Christian fundamentalist movement with the fervor that has often manifested itself in the United States. In general terms, Cuba was never a very religious society. The heritage of the Spanish Empire made the Catholic Church the institution of the elite’s by default. And, given the sensuality of the tropics, the average person chose a day at the beach, or a roasted pig party, to a morning in Church.

The Quakers have never been famous as a religion obsessed with converting others. Quakers are a stealthy people who believe others may come to know about Quaker beliefs, and join them, by simple exposure to “Friendly” ideas, and by being attracted by the good deeds and lives of practicing Quakers. Upon this gentle exposure, interested individuals are supposed to “convince themselves” that this lifestyle is in harmony with their personalities. The person is then supposed to commit to a regimen of study where they learn about Quaker history, religious faith and practices, and acclimatizes himself or herself to a disciplined lifestyle focused on a rational understanding of human relationships and the environment. Quakers do not believe in the trinity, priests, saints, the sacraments, fancy ornate churches, confessions, communion, original sin, or the Pope.

Of all the Protestant religions, the Quakers are the least dogmatic, the most decentralized, and some claim, one of the most focused on work and social equality. Their pacifist efforts are known the world over. This low-key approach to seeking converts and its lack of bombastic rituals has guaranteed that their numbers have always been small.

During the second half of the 19th century many Cubans fled to the United States due to the semi-constant state of war that existed in the island. Some of these emigrants became exposed to Quaker ideals, and became Quakers. The most notable of these people was Don Tomas Estrada Palma, who in 1902 became the first president of the Republic of Cuba. Estrada Palma lived in Happy Valley, New York for many years, and as a “Convinced” Quaker followed the disciplined peaceful lifestyle of the “Quiet” branch of the religion. A member of Jose Marti’s independence movement in exile, he was eventually ousted from office by an insurgency that took advantage of the fact that his “friendly” government lacked the force and authority of a standing Army. Criticized by many as naïve or even incompetent, for his dependency on American advisors, Estrada Palma left an outstanding reputation for financial integrity never repeated thereafter by any Cuban administration until 1959.

But, like Woodrow Wilson, Herbert Hoover, and Richard Nixon, (all Quakers) Don Tomas Estrada Palma showed that even though Quakers often have excellent intentions, when involved with the administration of governments, non-Quakers have proven to have sharper skills. So, the history books show that the first president of the Republic of Cuba was a Quaker, a fact forgotten or ignored by most people today. Cuba has the distinction of being the only country on Earth whose founding father was a poet, and its first president a pacifist. Clearly its claim of being a country full of idealists is well established.

During the 1890’s, the “Evangelical” Quakers were experiencing a burst of energy and creativity, which caused many of the faithful to venture to the Four Corners of the world. Like most Americans of the period, they shared the feeling of “Manifest Destiny” which for good or bad brought American ideas and values to the doors of non Anglo Saxon peoples living in places like Cuba. Because of the timing of their burst of energy, and political events in Cuba, the Quakers were invited and were welcomed in Cuba. Independent of Don Tomas Estrada Palma, they found a fertile environment for their “convincement” process and planted roots that sprouted a new kind of “Friend”. The Quakers are also known as the Religious Society of Friends.

In May of 1900, an American banana boat (the cheapest means of transport during that time) landed in Gibara, northern Oriente province. On board was an unimposing man named Zenas Martin, agent and superintendent of the Iowa based American Friends Board of Foreign Missions, one of the most active Evangelical Quaker movements of that period. After observing the locals, Zenas wrote to his wife that, “this country is delightful, it has been cool and pleasant, the air has such a refreshing feeling about it,” and the people he felt, were charming, graceful, intelligent and, to his surprise, mostly white. “Among them are some of the most beautiful people I ever saw”. Zenas Martin was of course, politically incorrect by today’s standards.

In typical understated Quaker fashion, Zenas’ arrival represented a response to a call for help from one of the first native Cuban Quakers, a man named Francisco Cala, whose reason for conversion to The Religious Society of Friends, and activities prior to this date have always been a mystery. Observant, religious, and industrious, Zenas quickly understood why Mr. Cala had so desperately asked for help. In 1900, Cuba and Oriente province in particular were in ruins. The 30 year long war of independence from Spain, which had ended less than two years before, and the tropical diseases it precipitated, had ravaged the land, and claimed almost 300,000 lives, out of a total population of 1.8 million! Despair, disease and hungers were rampant, and the people were still in shock and spiritually disoriented. For years, the Catholic Church had been indifferent to the needs of the people due to its allegiance to the defeated Spanish colonial government, and at this juncture, lacked the resources or fortitude to do anything beyond offering prayers for those who mostly viewed it with suspicion. Ninety percent of the priests were Spaniards who rarely ventured beyond the walls of their parish churches. Soon, Zenas stopped writing about the beauty of the people and the pleasant air, and sent a report back to Iowa Friends explaining the desperate conditions he found.

On November 14, 1900, two years before Don Tomas Estrada Palma’s inauguration, an army of five Quakers arrived in Gibara and began organizing an international aid program that brought food, medicine, and basic necessities to northern Oriente at a time when there was no effective government in the area. The Quaker arrival also coincided with a massive influx of American land speculators, sugar barons, industrialists, and get rich quick schemes that took advantage of the unstable situation, and laid the foundations for American dominance over the Cuban economy. But, before that type of American dominance had taken hold, Quakers were busy with the unromantic task of feeding the hungry, and saving the sick.

By 1905, Zenas and a handful of hardworking American and Mexican Quakers had established Quaker Meetinghouses, schools, and relief organizations in Puerto Padre, Holguin, Gibara, and Banes, and reported attendance in these organizations in the hundreds. By 1912 there were Meetinghouses in places like Chaparra, Delicias, Velasco, Potrerillo, Los Angeles, Bocas, and Santa Lucia; an incredible accomplishment for a small group of people whose command of the Spanish language was described by observers of the time as “most rudimentary”, and whose first collection for the local treasury was a pitiful six cents. The Quakers established a network of social services where none existed before, with their bare hands and the force of their will.

“Los Amigos”, as they became known in Cuba, established a tradition for running strict high quality schools and helping the poor. Their straight independent talk, rational views on business, and minimal involvement in Cuban politics, gave them great appeal to many people whose temperament or worldviews were different than those of the majority population. By coincidence, Zenas Martin had landed in a region of Oriente province that had a high concentration of Catalan immigrants, traditionally a group known within the Spanish world as industrious, frugal, and independent minded, or as some have said, “ideal minds for Quaker conversion”. So, it came to pass that a large number of the early Cuban Quakers were second or third generation Cuban Catalans, but this detail went unnoticed by the early missionaries.

By the 1920’s the Cuban Quakers had become an independent group functioning with little assistance from American Quakers, and by 1927 there were enough native Cuban Quakers to warrant the formation of the “Cuba Yearly Meeting”, the Quaker equivalent of a Catholic Dioceses. By 1948 there were no American Quakers left in any positions of authority in Cuba. This is how the Quakers took root in tropical Cuba, the land of Cha Cha Cha, Mambo, and Cuba Libres. The mingling of the teachings and cultures of George Fox, Jose Marti, the African Sages, and the Chinese, created a Quaker that sometimes wears colorful clothing, smokes big cigars, and gyrates his/her hips to the sounds of music in a way that makes their religious cousins in Philadelphia, or London faint in disbelief. The Spanish “Creole Quaker” shaped by the tropics had arrived. Bring on the Conga drums!

In general, Cuban culture was ambivalent towards the Quakers, like it was ambivalent towards Protestants and Jews. Fulgencio Batista, a Creole of white, Chinese, Taino, and black heritage, and the last dictator before Castro, was educated in a Quaker school in the city of Banes, but never became a “convinced” Quaker. He joined the Army as a young man, and when he became a politician declared himself a Catholic. Fidel Castro, the son of a Galician emigrant, who was educated by the Jesuits, had his rebel army wear crucifixes to battle, and once he became dictator, announced that he was an atheist, and then tried to abolish religion all together. To complicate this matter, most so called Catholics, were also practicing the Afro-Cuban Santeria religion. This nonchalant religion a-la-Carte attitude was the norm rather than the exception in Cuba. Except it was not a polite issue for discussion.

Because of this natural ambivalence, it was not uncommon for middle class families who professed to be Catholic to send their children to Quaker schools. But, throughout the history of these schools, the vast majority of the students came from poor humble families whose tuition was covered in part or in full by scholarships, or by an intricate system where parents and relatives would barter services to a variety of Quaker organizations or causes.

In the early years of the 20th century, when more than eighty percent of the population of northern Oriente province was illiterate and the Cuban government cared little about it, the Quakers provided the only means of education for many. By the mid 1940’s and early 1950’s there had developed a significant number of second and third generation Cuban “birthright” Quakers (Quakers born to Quaker families, not convinced in adulthood) who had graduated from these schools and were taking leadership roles in the society. These native Cuban Quakers formed on Quaker principles of justice, hard work, discipline, and fair play were generally not well liked by the Cuban upper classes, and were viewed with perplexion by the lower classes.

The group composed mostly of professionals represented a rare meritocracy in the clannish paternalistic Latin society of Oriente province. Its members, from humble origins, were treated as upstarts and often ridiculed for restraining from getting drunk, not having multiple mistresses, or refusing to take or give bribes. Because of these factors, valued by Anglo-Saxon Protestant cultures, large numbers of Cuban Quakers in Oriente were recruited by American companies and given positions of authority, which improved their standard of living relative to their peers, but did little to change their relationships with the Cuban elite’s. In a country where social standing, access to resources, and political power was controlled by a system that dispensed it based on family connections, bribery, and often brute force, the concept of social mobility and merit based on honest hard work and intellectual prowess was revolutionary and threatening.

Family lore says that on his birth, my grandfather’s Catholic family named him after a Catalan saint, Sant Pere Nolasco, the founder of an ancient order devoted to rescuing Christians from Muslim enslavement. But, as events unfurled during his childhood, my grandfather remained within the bosom of the Catholic Church for only a brief period. The religious beliefs, life style, and ideology of the Religious Society of Friends instead shaped his life.

Pedro Nolasco Font e Hidalgo, was the product of the Quaker school in Puerto Padre, Oriente, Cuba. He was one of the first Cuban Quakers and like many of his generation, a man who rose from dire poverty and hunger, to a respected position in his community. From an old Catalan noble family that had settled in Cuba in the late 18th century, and initially supported the Spanish Royalist cause, they had seen their fortune lost during the 30 year long war of independence, and were impoverished by the time of his birth. His life reflects much of the history of the Quakers in Cuba during the 20th century, from his birth in 1892, to his death in 1982.

During the last year of the war with Spain, my grandfather’s father abandoned his family out of desperation and depression after watching many of his relatives’ die of illness and hunger. Later in his life, my grandfather would recall how his mother had to hunt for rats in order for them to eat, and how difficult things got when he was fourteen years old and his mother died, leaving him and his three younger brothers with a poor uncle. So, when Zenas Martin and his unimposing Quakers visited Puerto Padre in 1900, my grandfather and his brothers may have been part of the many destitute hungry children that were begging for scraps in the streets. Little is known of his early activities with the Quakers, or how he and his brothers survived from 1900 to 1910.

From his Catholic family, he was the only one to change religion. We do know that by 1911, he was already calling himself an “Amigo”, whether he was a full member of The Religious Society of Friends, we are not sure, but he had already been attending the “Colegio Los Amigos”, or Quaker school, as well as assisting the American missionaries in their travels. The years during his schooling had to be very difficult as well because they have been described by family members as “the years of desperation”, where my grandfather was the main breadwinner for himself and his three siblings. While attending the “Colegio Los Amigos” in Puerto Padre, and befriending the headmistress Mrs. Martinez; his affinity for numbers became clear, and he was encouraged to study bookkeeping.

He excelled in his studies and also became known as a serious student of the Bible. Somehow, he began to assist Quaker Missionaries with bookkeeping matters, and gained a reputation for efficiency and good work habits, finding bookkeeping work with small businesses that had dealings with the Quakers in northern Oriente.

In 1916 he applied for a bookkeeping job with the Royal Bank of Canada, which had opened a branch in Puerto Padre, but was offered instead the job of “barrendero” - a floor sweeper. This was because the bank manager, a tall blond Englishman, doubted his abilities and mistrusted Cubans, and he thought floor sweeper was a more appropriate job for him. This conclusion may have also been precipitated by the fact that my grandfather still lacked money to buy himself “clothes worthy of a bookkeeper.” After several months, the Canadians realized that Cuban Quakers did not steal, and he was able to convince them that his bookkeeping skills were real, resulting in a promotion to head teller. During his tenure with the Canadians he became a full accountant by studying part time, and when he left the Royal Bank of Canada in the early 1930’s he had become branch manager, and head of the business development group.

When he moved to his next job during the depression, he was recruited by the Cuban-American Sugar Company to head its accounting and personnel departments in the Chaparra and Delicias sugar mills, the largest sugar mills in the world at that time, employing more than 11,000 workers. The job in the sugar mill also allowed him to run an independent accounting and consulting firm, which he and a partner profitably ran for many years.

Moved by the carnage and destruction of World War I, and with memories of the War of Independence still in his mind, my grandfather told his family at that time that he was going to devote his life to Quaker concerns and pacifism. He met my grandmother Maria Ferraz at a Quaker fundraiser for European orphans in 1919. After a long old style courtship, which included never meeting without a chaperone, they were married. Both coming from old Majorcan and Catalan families, they shared similar cultural backgrounds, and although her family was considered well off, they took a liking to him. My grandmother’s strong feminists will, Quaker zeal for taking on controversial social issues, and feistiness endeared her to him. As his social and economic conditions improved later on, she enthusiastically took on a leadership role in the community, and helped him polish off his rough edges. In 1926 my aunt Ruth was born, followed by my father Joel, in 1929. My grandfather, the man who lived in poverty as a child and ate rats in order to survive had pulled himself out of misery and had a decent existence by the time the depression of 1929 hit.

When my father was a boy, he too was sent to Quaker school, and although by then my grandfather could afford it, he made arrangements so that my father was obliged to contribute to his tuition expenses by selling soap and household items door to door throughout Chaparra and the nearby town of Delicias. After school and on weekends, he washed cars, sold sugarcane juice “melao”, and delivered groceries. My father also studied bookkeeping, but later decided to study electronics and never followed in my grandfather’s accounting footsteps. Years later, my father told me that as a youngster he hated selling soap for two cents a bar, but later he realized what a great thing his father had done for him by giving him the opportunity to pay for his education, and that experience had given him a taste of business he always respected. “El Viejo knows about the ups and downs of life,” my father would say, “and no one can look at him in the eye and tell him anything about suffering, because he’s been through it in the worse way.”

There were other men and women like my grandfather in the Cuban Quaker community, leaders who earned the respect of their neighbors by their actions. These people’s very existence in remote Oriente province acted as living proof of their faith, and a magnet that attracted new members. The belief that giving to one’s community was a responsibility for both rich and poor was seriously taken. Giving and helping others was not done from guilt, or because it was mandated, but because of the belief that Quakers should do good things, and helping others is a good thing.

Since the 1930’s when he was able to afford it, and until his retirement, my grandfather gave on average 10% of his wages to Cuba Yearly Meeting, and acted on a pro-bono basis, as the national treasurer of the organization until shortly before his death. He acted as the un-paid pastor of the Puerto Padre Meetinghouse for ten years, and the Chaparra Meetinghouse for more than thirty years. He also taught business, and Quaker studies at the Puerto Padre Quaker School during most of his free time. Consistent in his belief to contribute to society, he advocated for prison and public school reforms in Cuba. His house was considered a meeting place where all kinds of people would visit in search of financial help, spiritual help, and mundane things like what to do with unruly children. Groups of Quaker men wearing the uniform of the day, long sleeved white linen Guayaberas and black pants, seemed to always follow him wherever he went. As Pastor, or “Clerk” of the Chaparra Meetinghouse, he participated in weddings, births, funerals, and had to attend public events representing the Quaker community throughout Cuba.

When people met him, they never knew what a difficult life he had endured, or how committed he was to humanitarian ideals. Tall, fair skinned, well spoken, and impeccably dressed; he always spoke of the future, of ways to live better and how to improve other’s lives. He never dwelled on his past, and shied away from anyone who tried to aggrandize him for it. He believed in simplicity, life long study, and the idea that work was the best therapy to cure all ills, social and personal. He strongly believed in the Quaker concept that every man had that of God in him, and everyone was capable of some mistakes, but with a little guidance, one could return to our “normal good nature”. Almost all non-Quakers that knew him, including some members of his family criticized him for what they used to call his “inability to take advantage of a good situation.” In Cuba that meant that he didn’t take or give bribes. His “incredible” habit of letting petty conflicts just bounce off his daily routine was also misunderstood in a culture not famous for calmness.

By the time of Fidel Castro’s revolution in 1959, the Cuban Quakers were a successful and institutionalized religious order with a bright future in Cuba. They tried their best to remain out of the conflict, never officially joining either side, which indirectly caused both sides to view them with suspicion. But, like most Cubans at that time, they felt concerned about the future of the country and tried, in “the manner of Friends”, to reason with both warring sides sending open letters to Fulgencio Batista and Fidel Castro, asking that the conflict be resolved peacefully.

After Castro’s victory, they protested the public televised executions and excesses of the revolution, but generally supported the new government. When Castro established universal obligatory military conscription in Cuba, the Quakers protested, explaining their pacifist traditions. This appeal was ignored and ridiculed. Soon after, the attitude of ambivalence that had characterized Cuban society’s dealings with the Quakers for the previous fifty-nine years began to change.

As Cuba declared itself communist and atheist, and the Castro regime began to drum up anti-American sentiments, everything that smelled of North America was targeted for destruction. Suddenly, men like my grandfather were suspect, and accused of being stooges of the Americans. The Cuban Quakers, after all, “learned” their religion from the “Yankis”. The decentralized organizational structure of the Quaker faith, and its foreign links became a target for the KGB trained cadres of the new intelligence service and the infamous G.2. Word was sent down to the local “Committees for the Defense of the Revolution”, (the CDR); that they should carefully watch and harass this dangerous group who may at any moment betray the fatherland. Che Guevara’s antipathy towards religion took its toll. Many of the very people, who had been fed and clothed by my grandparents and their co-religionists since childhood, turned against them with vigor. Personal insults, racial slurs, and sexual innuendoes became common practice, along with the defacing of Meetinghouses and other Church properties.

Ignoring the very essence of the Quaker faith, its lack of participation in politics, its refusal to be involved in corrupt practices, its good deeds in Cuba in the last fifty nine years, and its 100% Cuban leadership, the “good socialist patriots” as they were called, put in place a destabilizing program designed to drive away new members, and force its leaders into exile.

By 1961, all Quaker schools were nationalized depriving the Cuba Yearly Meeting of its main social and economic function in the island. Soon after, the government confiscated all private property and small businesses. The entrepreneurial spirit, and the small business culture that was so carefully cultivated and valued by Cuban Quakers, was declared un-patriotic. The new social and political order de-emphasized individualism and demanded that the future of the country and everyone of its people be under the tight control of a central authority. In every way but in name, a new “religion” descended on Cuba, it was the cult of Communism and state sanctioned atheism, a new religion that acted violently towards the slightest expression of criticism or dissent. Under the flag of Socialist Humanism, men and women were forced to replace god, with the state, Jesus with Karl Marx.

This new revolutionary government set out to create a new man in Cuba. “El Nuevo Hombre” which was to be nurtured from the ruins of the “decadent” society of which the Quakers were supposed to be an integral part. Social engineering on a massive scale quickly began, with book burnings, the renaming of every minute thing that may have reminded people of the past, and the re-education of the young based on a “socialist approved” vocabulary, which for example required that “Friends” (Amigos) no longer be addressed as friends, but “Comrades”, or “Companeros”. Laws were passed requiring the militarization of the entire society, the imposition of state policies over those of the family, and the encouragement of wanton sexual behavior, so there would be plenty of “Nuevo Hombres” for the future.

The deconstruction of all the old values, the good ones and the bad ones, took place mostly under the leadership of young political zealots whose experience in life was often an elementary school education, with two years of fighting in the mountains. The gusto and euphoria that these “heroes of the people” brought to the destruction of private property and other “symbols of imperialism” could never be exaggerated, or easily described to those who didn’t witness that period of time. In order to build a new “consciousness” new books were printed, artwork, statues and songs commissioned, plays and television shows produced, toys created and the entire education system revamped from Kindergarten to the Universities.

Veneration of Che Guevara and international guerilla movements took center stage in daily life. The display of pictures of Fidel and Che holding guns was viewed as a sign of loyalty to the “fatherland” and expected of every “good Cuban.” In this environment, many Quakers found themselves hanging these pictures in their living rooms.

During the late 1960’s, when rebellious young Americans were smoking pot, (punishable by death in Cuba) waving communist Vietcong flags, and protesting the unjust involvement of the U.S. in Vietnam, Saint Anthony’s Catholic Church in Chaparra, the most beautiful church in our town was burned to the ground allegedly due to “mysterious circumstances”. Several years after, the Chaparra Quaker Meetinghouse, the place where my family worshiped, and my grandfather was Clerk, also burned to the ground due to “mysterious circumstances”. In the streets we regularly heard the “good revolutionaries” boast of how well Cuba was being “cleansed” of Capitalist influences like religion, and how excited they were that one day soon, the U.S. would lose the war in Vietnam.

Their boasts of “international solidarity with the oppressed people’s of the world,” gave us a chill down our backs. And, every time the U.S. mounted a major bombing campaign in Vietnam, we “Gusanos” in Cuba were made to suffer. Years later in the United States, a college professor asked me why it was that most Cuban exiles supported the US involvement in Vietnam? After looking at him, and realizing that he was of the hippie pot smoking love child generation, I just said: “We saw the war from a different angle. An angle that you will never be able to understand.” And, I left it at that. I know that to this day he believes we exiles are all fascist pigs.

The elimination of the intellectual and economic infrastructure that occurred in Cuba, in the 1960’s and 1970’s, and yielded so much misery years later, was not the result of a foreign plot, or an anti-revolutionary strategy, but the well thought out centrally planned policy of Fidel Castro, and his government to eliminate opposing and alternative economic, political, and religious ideas. Current claims to the contrary by American religious groups and other socialist sympathizers who operate from the safety of the US Constitution, while advocating for totalitarian ideals, are fabrications based on either ignorance, or purposefully created to misinform the innocent and gullible.

Along with the more than one million people who fled Cuba as a result of Fidel Castro’s revolution, more than half of the Quaker population also left. Like the majority of the exiles, they established themselves in Miami, and built “La Iglesia de los Amigos” which stands today, with most of its elders now dead, as a living reminder of a once vibrant past in Cuba.

Fidel Castro’s effort to cleanse Cuba of religion or “the Opium of the people” was effective, and culminated with the abolition of Christmas, which remained outlawed until 1998. By 1965, thousands of religious leaders from the Protestant, Jewish, and Catholic communities had been harassed into exile.

For people like my grandfather who refused to leave his beloved Cuba, because as he said, “Cuba is my country, and I have a responsibility to help my people here,” what Fidel Castro brought was a betrayal of everything he stood for and caused bitterness to his last days.

When my parents, my brother and I saw my grandfather for the last time in 1968, when we were coming to the United States, after a five year torturous wait, he said to us, “go because here there is only conditional freedom, and we live at the whims of a man with a poor character who forces his opinions on the innocent. Go, because up north you can disagree without fear, you can succeed based on your labor, and you can go to sleep knowing that your property will not be confiscated by the state by the time you wake up.”

Now, years after his death, I realize how lucky I am that I haven’t had to eat rats out of desperation, or that I will never have to endure the pain of watching people I considered to be friends and good neighbors, humiliate me, steal from me, and spy against me.

The Quakers who remained in Cuba, and have survived are an admirable group. Many stayed for the same reasons my grandfather did, others were denied the right to leave, and still many stayed because they accommodated themselves with the communist regime in order to live. Many of the new leaders are graduates of a state controlled “religious institute” with questionable authenticity, and affiliations with pro-Castro groups in the US. But, this is all part of the phenomenon of the Cuban experience.

When an American asks me, “why did your family leave Cuba?” I really have a problem answering in a neat well-defined 30 second American style sound byte. Most Americans now days have accepted the leftist story that says that we were all part of the corrupt, racist, mafia infested, inhuman, capitalist, and oppressive white minority that lived to destroy and kill the poor, and keep the workers in chains. When I start by telling them that we were Quakers, and I discuss a few of the things in this story, they question my honesty, and then they hate me. They hate me because my existence challenges their reality.

In Cuba today Quakers no longer wear long sleeve white linen Guayaberas because such a luxury would cost about $75.00 US dollars, and the average Cuban’s monthly salary is now less than $10.00 US dollars a month, less than the average wage people earned when my grandfather took his job as “barrendero” or floor sweeper, for the Royal Bank of Canada, in 1916!

(c) Copyright by Joel Font
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