Some Relatives Don't Eat Pork

My fathers’ third job in the U.S.A. after our stint in Harlem, turned out to be back in Sheepshead Bay, Brooklyn. My uncle Fernando learned that a superintendent’s position had opened up a block away from his house, and was able to convince the landlord to give my father a chance at the job, even though he lacked some of the required qualifications. Fernando also arranged for several Cuban superintendents whom he knew from different parts of Brooklyn, to meet him so they could help him in the event of an emergency.

My father enthusiastically took the job, which paid $310.00 per month, and we moved back to Brooklyn during the winter of 1968. Although this represented a great leap forward for us, it was still significantly lower than the income he had been earning in Capitalist Cuba during the 1950’s and even later in the early and mid 1960’s during Socialism when he was involved in the black market.

The corner of Ocean Avenue and Voorhees Avenue was in a clean neighborhood with shady trees, and well dressed people who strolled around the neighborhood in the afternoons and evenings, without fear of crime, politely greeting one another as they ended up by the Bay where they took the sea air and chatted as they watched the fishing boats rhythmically ride the waves in their dockings.

Sheepshead Bay was a middle class Jewish, Italian, and Irish neighborhood, where Jewish mothers babysat Italian and Irish kids, and Irish men took Jewish and Italian kids to baseball games. Our building reflected this mixture of people, and we later learned that my aunt and uncle were the only other Hispanics in the area, with the next nearest Spanish speakers, a Puerto Rican family, living about four miles away in Coney Island Avenue. This was the genteel New York of Nelson Rockefeller, the City of John Lindsey, the big apple that few now remember prior to the large influx of South Americans, Dominicans, West Indians, Russians, Mexicans, Indians and Asians that later changed its social and political face during the 1980’s. From the early 1960’s to the early 1980’s the Puerto Ricans and us Cubans were the only Hispanics of consequence in the city, and prior to our exodus to Miami in the late 1980’s, more than half of all the Hispanic owned businesses in New York City were Cuban. This is the New York in which I grew up, where my parents tried to rebuild their lives, and my brother and I tried to assimilate.

A week after we moved to our spacious two-bedroom apartment, which had been sparsely furnished with second hand furniture, a strange elderly woman named Mrs. Winthrop, who had strange numbers tattooed on her left arm, visited us. Since we spoke no English, and Mrs. Winthrop spoke no Spanish, we had no idea what she said to us. But, she seemed friendly and looked at my brother and I with great interest. Mrs. Winthrop returned the following day with two shopping bags with clothes, and underwear for my brother and I, and communicated to us via signs, grunts, and strange words, that we should try our new clothes on. As we modeled for Mrs. Winthrop in a state of disbelief at what was going on, it became clear how happy she was that her gifts fitted us. She then sat down in our living room, and proceeded to give us all an English lesson. Pointing to every physical object in the room she made us repeat its English name a few times, asking afterwards to tell her the Spanish name for the object. “Ein Espanishe” she would ask. When Mrs. Winthrop finally left, we weren’t sure if she had given us a lesson in English, or we had given her a lesson in Spanish, but her good heart and incredible gesture needed no translation.

For the next six months Mrs. Winthrop came by our house once a week to teach my parents English, and help my brother and I with our homework until we gained control of the English language. We later learned that Mrs. Winthrop was a Holocaust survivor who had lost all her close relatives in Auschwitz and lived alone with two cats in our building. After a short period of time, my brother and I adopted Mrs. Winthrop as our stand in grandmother, and created many good memories with her as she took us to libraries, museums, the beach, parks, and introduced us to the old folks in the neighborhood. Thanks to the kindness of this old Jewish woman my parents learned to communicate in English, and our transition to American culture became less traumatic.

Arriving in Sheepshead Bay during the summer time, school was out. So, I had a few weeks to learn the neighborhood, and with Mrs. Winthrop’s help I met a few kids from the building and the nearby houses. Although, my parents were still concerned about safety, in light of the Harlem experience, they quickly realized Sheepshead Bay was not unsafe, and I was allowed to play with my new friends, although I did not yet understand them. Two kids invited me to their homes, Kevin O’Brien, whose mother introduced me to the pleasures of Oreo Cookies and a glass of cold milk, and Luigi Turano, whose father was a cabinet maker and used to explain to me, in Italian, how to cut Formica. I have no idea what Mr. Turano used to tell me in Italian, and I never learned to cut Formica, but the man loved his work and probably thought that since Spanish is so close to Italian, I would catch some of his instructions. The fact that I listened attentively and was impressed by his many tools seemed to be appreciated and I was often rewarded with snacks of Prosciutto ham, olives and Ricotta cheese.

Kevin used to have posters of the Beatles, the Monkeys, and the Archies in his room, and loved listening to “Sugar, Sugar” over and over again. Kevin’s father worked in the post office and was home from work everyday by 3:30 in the afternoon. After changing his clothes, he would take Kevin’s little sister for walks around the neighborhood, where everyone knew him and stopped him for little chats. Kevin seemed to come from a very big extended Irish family, since on weekends their house swelled with visiting skinny blond and freckled face kids who looked like him. It was amazing that these eleven and twelve year old kids befriended me, and their parents allowed me in their homes, given the fact that I could hardly communicate with them, and we had so few cultural links.

By the time school was ready to start my brother Jose Luis and I felt good about the new surroundings and we looked forward to the challenge. A few days before the first day of school, uncle Fernando arranged to have a friend of my aunt, Mrs. Schiffton who spoke broken Spanish, and was a member of the Parents Teacher Association, to enroll us at Public School 254. Mrs. Schiffton was an aristocratic looking woman whose family owned a furniture store in the neighborhood and had a son named Mitchell. On the first day of school, Mrs. Schiffton, my brother and I, and Mitchell walked to PS 254 where I found a very different school to the one I had known in Harlem. Here, the kids looked neat, and did not seem to gather in aggressive gang like groups, but a big surprise awaited me after registration.

Not having any transcripts, or academic records from Cuba indicating our grade levels or educational achievements, and not having concluded the semester in the Harlem school, PS 254 officials placed my brother and I at the grade levels they thought we belonged, based on our ages. But, there was a twist. In 1968 PS 254 did not have any bilingual teachers, and there were only three Spanish-speaking kids in the whole school. Myself, my brother and a Puerto Rican kid I later met named Freddy. Although, I had picked up some English by this time, I was still shy about holding a conversation with adults. So, the school did what it could to accommodate me. I was placed in a class with mentally retarded and handicapped children. First, I thought I was placed in that particular class for a few hours, while some issues were ironed out with my records. I felt that any minute another teacher would come in to the room, and take me to another classroom. Unfortunately, the kids in the classroom, about fifteen of them, did not act, or look normal. The first few hours in class, on that first day of school at PS 254 felt strange, then scary, and eventually I felt angry at the thought that this was going to be my regular class. I soon realized that my lack of English had put me there, and probably the only way out was to learn English as quickly as possible.

The fact that I had been promoted to the sixth grade in Cuba, was an over achieving A student, loved reading and writing, and felt positively challenged by most academic pursuits, became irrelevant. Within a period of nine months I went from being a model student in Cuba, to a class with retarded students at PS 254. My first impressions of the American education system were not good, an impression that did not change throughout my High School and college years, and remains today.

On that first day of school I returned home full of anxiety, and described the situation to my parents, who called my aunt Ana for advice. After speaking to Mrs. Schiffton my aunt stopped by our apartment and informed us that indeed, my tenure with the retarded children was to be temporary and due to the school not having any other way to accommodate foreign children. My aunt looked at me and said, “tienes que aprender Ingles rapido, para que te saquen de hesa classe de locos.” Or, “you have to learn English quickly so they can get you out of that class full of crazies”. My immediate goal in life had just been clearly set.

That afternoon, my parents, my aunt and I strategized on ways I could quickly learn to hold conversations in English. It was decided that my aunt would buy me comic books, that I should watch daily cartoons, the Three Stooges, the Bowery Boys, and the Little Rascals on TV, and that I should be very diligent with my schoolwork. It was also agreed that playing with my new American friends was going to be a great help. Used to a methodical way of studying I quickly found studying English to be easy, and the comic books, cartoons, slapstick TV shows and socializing with my new friends became a regimen I welcomed. I learned conversational English with a humorous twist, and with a tremendous fear that if I did not, I’d be condemned to stay in a class with retarded kids forever.

After a few weeks of diligent study, I built enough courage to hold a broken but understandable conversation in English, and I planted myself by the school principal’s office and told her, “I speak English now, I don’t belong in that class with the crazy kids.” Perplexed by my presence, and my comments, the principal said something about an exam, my teacher, and next week. I went away feeling that next week I’d leave the crazy class. I went home and told my mother, who was so happy she made a special “Arroz con Pollo” that night in my honor. But, by the following Wednesday, nothing had happened, and I was still in the crazy class. So, Thursday morning I again planted myself by the principal’s office. “I speak English now, I don’t belong in that class anymore”. Without saying anything to me, the principal called someone on the phone, and a few minutes later a teacher came by the office and an animated conversation ensued. Then the teacher left, and returned five minutes later with a skinny black haired boy. “This is Freddy”, said the teacher in English to me. “He speaks Spanish.” Turning to Freddy she instructed, “tell him he can’t keep coming to the principal’s office like this. That we will take him out of his special class when he learns English.” Freddy began to tell me in Spanish what was just said, when I turned to the teacher and said in English, “I’m ready to leave that class now, I don’t belong in that class, if you don’t take me out of that class I’m going to come back here every day.” Finally, their ears opened. The two women who did not expect to hear clear English uttered from my mouth realized that although choppy, the sounds coming out of my mouth were not in Spanish. Then I heard what I wanted to hear from the Principal. “OK, we’ll give you a test this coming Friday to see if you are ready for regular classes.”

The test was easy, since it contained other subjects besides English. The math and social studies were at a lower level than I had studied in Cuba, and the English reading and writing was manageable. My pronunciation however was bad. But overall, I managed to pass the test and the following Monday my teacher, in the crazy class, told me to go see the Principal. With lots of tension, I went to see the Principal, who with a smile told me “you did very well”. She then called someone on the phone, and a very tall and muscular blond woman who looked like a Viking came and was instructed to take me to my new class.

My new class was composed of about thirty boys and girls. The teacher after chatting for a minute with the tall blond Viking, told me where to sit, then asked the class to pay attention because she had an announcement. “Class, please pay attention. We have a new student in class. His name is Joel, and he comes from Cuba. Joel is learning to speak English and you should speak slowly to him. OK?” Most of the students were unimpressed with the announcement and went about normally as if nothing had happened. The class seemed to be very casual and the teacher was discussing social studies. I could pick out most of the information in the back and forth discussions that were ensuing and I felt satisfied at the realization that I was finally at a level where I belonged. I spent the rest of the day watching, listening to the teacher, taking notes, and admiring the cute American girls.

After several weeks I made friends with most of the kids in my class, and became friendly with many others I met in the school playground. Freddy, the Puerto Rican kid and I became good friends, and I learned his real name was Fernando Enrique Maldonado, and his family came from a place called Rio Piedras. I found most of my school acquaintances to be happy, relaxed, and friendly, with a variety of interests outside the school environment. Generally, my new friends in Sheepshead Bay were good kids, whose parents adored them, were proud of them, and the entire neighborhood cared and looked after them. Conspicuously missing where the tensions of childhood in Cuba, the political risks, the neighborhood spies, the scarcity of food, clothes, and toys, and the fear of having your parents unexpectedly arrested by the Committee for the Defense of the Revolution, for some minute digression.

Walking around the neighborhood without hearing people accuse me of being a “Gusano” was refreshing, as well as knowing the fact that if someone bothered me, I could now fight back without worrying that the incident could ruin my family’s possibilities of leaving the country. I remember saying to myself, “aqui no ahi comunistas, y la gente ni saben lo que es un comunista,” meaning here there are no communists, and the people don’t even know what a communist is! Although in Harlem we knew we were in America, the racial tensions prevented us from fully absorbing the impact of freedom, and we temporarily replaced the tensions of Cuba, with the tensions of the Ghetto. Sheepshead Bay was on the other hand, the America we expected. No communists, and no racial tensions.

After a year at PS 254 my command of English was pretty good, and I graduated. From PS 254 I went to Shell Bank Junior High School on Batchelder Street, and loved it. Shell Bank was full of great looking girls who appreciated my accent, and were impressed with my ability to hug and kiss them. And, I did a lot of hugging and kissing. How wonderful it was to be the only Cuban boy in a school full of young beautiful healthy girls just discovering the effects of their estrogen. Soon, I had a new Irish girlfriend, followed by an Austrian girlfriend, who in turn introduced me to an Italian girl named Roberta who after punching me in the chest told me she wanted me to be her boyfriend. Compared to the more reserved Cuban girls I used to know, these Brooklyn girls knew what they wanted, and they knew how to get it.

In the academic area I did well, and began to enjoy my family’s visits to the Batista family (no relation to Fulgencio), my parents friends from Cuba whose son Felix Batista had an Encyclopedia Britannica, and we both quizzed each other on scientific trivia and memorized entire chapters on esoteric subjects just for the fun of it, something my American friends did not seem to understand. My instinctual thirst for history and geography was satisfied by that Encyclopedia like no teacher could have ever done. The disciplined study methods brought from Cuba and the desire to excel in order to make up for what I perceived as a disadvantage due to having come from another country, eventually put me ahead of most of my peers in school. Something I did not realize until later, and something that created a habit of self-teaching and the pursuit of intellectual minutia as a sport. A trait now considered “typical” of Cuban exiled children of my generation.

As my brother and I adjusted to the new culture and language, my parents tried as best they could to understand it, while maintaining a little bit of Cuba within our apartment. Soon we became aware of every Cuban enclave within the metropolitan New York region, and every weekend my parents would make trips to Queens, Manhattan, and Union City, to purchase Cuban food, music, and of special interest to my father, white cotton Guayaberas which he would occasionally send to Cuba, along with razor blades, shaving cream, B-12 vitamins, condoms, men’s and women’s undergarments, Milk of Magnesia, Alka-Seltzer, bandages, iodine, and Aspirin. All items that had disappeared from Cuba, and our relatives would regularly request from us, via sad heartbreaking letters. It became common knowledge that the Cuban government stole more than half of the parcels sent to relatives, and ninety percent of our letters were opened and read prior to arriving at their destinations. All the letters we used to receive asking for basic necessities were always signed; “Viva la Revolucion”, or “Con Fidel asta la Muerte”, (With Fidel until Death), and the ever present “Desde Cuba, Territorio Libre De America” (From Cuba, The Only Free Territory in the Americas). Our parcels to relatives had to be shipped to Canada first, where someone would then re-ship them to Cuba because direct shipments from the United States to Cuba were not allowed.

One day during a stroll under the Roosevelt Avenue El, in Jackson Heights, Queens we found a Cuban Domino set at a Bodega called “Los Cubanitos”, and we felt like we had discovered America. Jackson Heights during that time was a Cuban neighborhood, and my father found a Cuban Chinese Restaurant near a Cuban sandwich take out place called “La Lechonera,” and he was so happy that he got on the phone and called all the other Cubans we knew in Brooklyn to let them know. The following weekend about eight families trekked from Brooklyn to Jackson Heights to meet a very happy, “Alberto, el Chino Cubano,” who to our delight made us the most delicious “Tostones”, or fried bananas and beef fried rice we had ever tasted. Our visits to Alberto’s restaurant were usually concluded after a typical Chinese fare, with flan, Cuban pastries, and Cuban coffee, while everyone listened to Alberto’s father tell stories of Havana during the 1930’s. Often, as the old man went over some special memories, he would pause, and in a heavily accented Chinese Spanish, he would say, “me cago en Fidel, cono.” Or, I shit on Fidel, damn it. The most impressive thing about Alberto, aside from his love of Beny More and Celia Cruz, whose music often echoed from the back kitchen, was indeed his family, who like us had escaped Fidel’s communist paradise penniless and had through hard work, prospered. Alberto’s restaurant was regularly full of white, black and Chinese exiled Cuban’s dreaming that we were all back some where in Havana, Oriente, or Las Villas.

During one of our happy trips to “Alberto, el Chino Cubano,” we invited Mrs. Winthrop who was curious to meet these strange Chinese people who spoke Spanish. After my parents and Alberto concluded their discussions explaining to one another why we would all be back in Cuba within two years due to the collapse of Socialism, the food came out. Unfortunately Mrs. Winthrop was only able to eat “Yucca con Mojo”. We had forgotten that pork chops and Kosher people, did not mix. When Alberto’s father came to greet us he saw Mrs. Winthrop’s tattoos and said in Spanish “Sefardita?” Mrs. Winthrop thinking for a minute responded with “No, Askenazi”. We all looked at each other as if we knew the difference. In Oriente province, when someone talked about the “Judios”, most thought it was a reference to a breed of crows that were numerous in the mountains! We knew the Jews existed, and they did not eat pork, but we did not know what Kosher was.

Years later my father explained to me that there were many Jews in Cuba, but people referred to them and most Eastern Europeans simply as “Polacos” or Polacks. He recollected that in our town several stores were owned by “Polacos” but in Cuba no one ever paid much attention to religious categories. If you where white, spoke a little strange, ate weird food, did not enjoy rum, and did not seem to be Catholic, you were “Polaco”. What about if you were Muslim, I asked my father. He corrected me. In Cuba he said, we’ve never had any Muslims, but Moors, Moors we’ve always had. Did the “Polacos” get along with the Moors in Cuba? “Who knows” he said, “we never paid any attention to that stuff. In Cuba, everyone was Cuban!”

Due to our Harlem experience, in Brooklyn, and as we gained a better knowledge of the English language and American culture, we began to see how American’s categorize other people and foreigners. We realized that five minutes after explaining to people that we where Cubans, the Americans would describe us as “Hispanic” or “Latins.” We were not familiar with these labels. To us, other Spanish speakers were “Colombians”, “Spaniards”, “Argentineans”, “Mexicans”, “Puerto Ricans”, and so on. That is, identity based on national origin. We realized that Americans ignore how we see ourselves, and how we define ourselves.

One day a group of visiting Cuban Quakers talked about the Latino and Hispanic labels with my parents and they realized that we Cubans were guilty of doing something similar to the Eastern Europeans and Jews in Cuba, when we categorized them all as “Polacos”. It was laziness, ignorance, and in some ways a method that erased or de-emphasized the past in an attempt to create a new identity we felt comfortable with. But, perhaps because of other positive traits in the Cuban character, the “Polacos” in Cuba became as Cuban as the rest of us, and there were never any American style social animosities.

I have met many Cuban “Polacos” in the United States, my best friend of over thirty years, Rebecca Rosenfeld is one, and none say this label was considered derogatory, realizing that the informal nature of Cuban culture did not transform the label into a hateful term. But, that it would have been nice if people really acknowledged who they were.

Questions of identity have always interested me, and my life as a Cuban exile, the way we started life in America and the racial conflicts experienced left me with a strong need to learn my own family’s lost past. Remnants of which, were forever lost in the family trunk destroyed during Cyclone Flora in the early 1960’s.

And, so it was that fifteen years after the interesting get together with Mrs. Winthrop in Alberto’s restaurant, I visited the Royal Archives of the Kingdom of Aragon, in Barcelona, Spain with my Italian fiancé, with the goal of methodically researching my father’s family history, whose records I knew went back over a thousand years.

During the Inquisition, the family was listed as having Jewish origins; other documents indicate a Moorish link via the Island of Majorca. Intermarriage with Celts and Goths from Provence is also in the pot. In the late Middle Ages when Aragon was the dominant trading power of the Western Mediterranean, a branch of the family moved to Ireland and established a merchant dynasty in Galway. The family is recognized today as one of the “Fourteen Tribes of Galway”, the founding families of the region. From the 13th to the 16th century the family was part of the Catalan nobility, serving the King of Aragon throughout the Mediterranean, and southern Italy until Aragon was absorbed by Spain, and Catalan culture fell into decline.

In the late 1740’s when the Catalans where allowed by the Spanish monarchy to integrate themselves in their American colonies, many of our ancestors began trading textiles with Cuba and some went on to live in Mexico. In 1775 a friar named Pedro Font (also my Quaker grandfather’s name), walked with a train of donkeys and a troop of Catalan Volunteers headed by Lieutenant Colonel Don Juan Bautista de Anza, from northern Mexico to what is today Arizona and New Mexico, leaving behind a diary and map recording the first European exploration of the American Southwest. A year later he participated in the great expeditions of Father Junipero Serra, in California, and went on to discover San Francisco Bay, taking part in the founding of what is today called the city of San Francisco. And, to my surprise, I learned that in the early 19th century, a branch of the family in Havana was established as one of the leading Rum and slave merchants of Cuba. Good thing that by then my branch of the family was in Oriente province, and not Havana. Interesting how all these things mix over time. To these we now have to ad our experiences as Cuban exiles in North America!

Hiking through the Camino Real and Turquoise Way in New Mexico, I once stopped to see the magnificent beauty and uplifting spirit of the people at the Santuario de Chimayo, and then visited the Pueblo de Taos, by the Sacred River of the Pueblo people. In a moment of awe, holding my daughter's hand, I thought to myself: If Pedro Font made it all the way out here, thought these mountains, valleys and deserts, on foot with a few Donkeys, all the way from Mexico, and prior to that on a Carrabelle from Spain, on the other side of the world, then my experiences and challenges in life have all been puny. Life is not so bad. There's just lots of surprises along the way.

My first friends in the United States, Kevin O’Brien, Luigi Turano, Mrs. Winthrop, and Fernando Enrique Maldonado, may have all been long lost relatives!

(c) Copyright by Joel Font
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