Cubans like to play with nicknames. During the first years of the revolution, Fidel Castro was, admiringly, “El Caballo,” or “the Horse”–young, studly, Numero Uno. Today, he’s a far more familiar “Fifo,” like some guy down the street.
Around 1960, Cubans began fleeing the island, a trickle that was to become a human flood pouring into Miami. Cubans dubbed Havana airport’s waiting room, that final bit of homeland before exile, “la pecera,” or “the fish tank.”
Not a bad nickname. It was a hot, glass-walled room where passengers leaving for Miami would wait eight or nine hours. Just a parting bit of humiliation for those the government called “worms.”
By 1962, the fish tank had become the scene of a daily melodrama of anguished goodbyes, particularly for middle-class parents–including my own–who were sending their children to the U.S. alone. A heartbreaking gamble, the parents figured, but far preferable to compulsory military service or communist indoctrination.
My turn to leave Cuba and sit in the fish tank came on Feb. 7, 1962, two months after my 14th birthday. There must have been at least a dozen other teenagers making the trip north alone that day, all thrilled about the imminent adventure.
Outside the fish tank, though, parents and relatives were tearful and apprehensive, tapping the glass periodically to mime one last bit of advice or affection to their departing guppies.
When my PanAm flight began to taxi, my dad ran to a balcony upstairs to try to catch a last glimpse of his only child peering from one of the plane’s windows. He didn’t see anything.
Standard luggage on these flights was a homemade duffel bag, about a yard long and nicknamed a “sausage” or, appropriately enough, a “worm.” Light and flexible, they held practically anything you could cram into them. It was when I was called to have my bag inspected on a crude wooden bench that I realized my mother really had no idea where I was going.
She had packed an odd collection of supplies–talcum powder, pajamas, slippers, tubes of toothpaste, a hairbrush.
Exile or a long camping trip?
Impossible to tell, except she clearly worried I might be cold: A thick blanket and a sweater were included.
The first hint this might be a less-than-excellent adventure came about 20 minutes into the flight when the pilot announced we had left Cuban territory. Kids in the plane cheered, as if we had broken away from Earth’s gravity and entered a thrilling outer space. But out of the corner of my eye I caught the 50ish woman next to me looking angry and tearful.
“I don’t know what you are cheering about,” she scolded me. “Don’t you know we are never going to go home again?”
Figuring her age, that prediction probably came true. It may for me too.
My arrival in Miami is a blur. I couldn’t make out any of the signs at the airport. “Me no esspeek eengliss,” the only phrase I had practiced in Cuba, was going to come in handy. A van then took us to Matecumbe Key, one of several refugee camps for unaccompanied Cuban children near Miami.
Mom was right: It was cold. And desolate, in the Army barracks surrounded by mangroves and scrub that didn’t look anything like my lush Cuba. There were several hundred teenage boys at this camp, and we slept in wobbly triple bunks in warehouse-like buildings.
From the start, Matecumbe didn’t look right. Hadn’t my mother promised I would be going to a “fine American school” on scholarship, to learn perfect English? Matecumbe was cold, boring, pointless. Crushingly lonely, too, as each of us realized we were in a strange country, cut off from our families, our futures uncertain and scary.
Most disappointing to me was the lack of English classes. After four months in Matecumbe Key, I still “no esspeek eengliss.” Not a word.
Apprehension mounted daily as a few guys would depart, not for the fine American schools of our fantasies but for orphanages in weird places. Montana, North Dakota, Colorado. Gotta get out of here, many of us concluded, and we began writing plaintive letters to long-lost or completely unknown relatives in the U.S.
Get me out of here. Please.
My ticket out of Matecumbe was a supposedly rich uncle in New York. My mother had told me his home even had thick wool carpeting, which in tropical Cuba sounded a little weird. I wrote to my parents, asking for my uncle’s address and for them to plead my case with him.
Uncle comes through
To my relief–and amazement–Uncle Heriberto responded with a train ticket to New York. The trip there took at least 36 hours. A kind waiter on the train, tired of my “me no esspeek eengliss,” would just take some of my money and hand me whatever he imagined I would like.
My uncle took me to his “mansion” via a dingy subway, not a good sign. Small placards in the subway said “No” followed by words I didn’t understand.
Uncle lived in a two-room apartment with his wife and daughter at 90th and Amsterdam, long before the days of the fashionable Upper West Side. He worked as a janitor. No carpeting. Only a large patch of plaster missing from the living room ceiling. A Puerto Rican transvestite living upstairs had let the bathtub overflow, sending the wet plaster crashing.
But schooling finally materialized, at Joan of Arc Junior High School, a behemoth of a public school. Its student body of at least a couple of thousand was half Hispanic and half African-American, neither bunch particularly fond of the other.
At Joan of Arc I encountered one of those teachers you remember for as long as you live: Miss Virginia Mazzaro.
She presided with great dignity and skill over a “bilingual homeroom” that was really a chaotic assemblage of recent immigrants, races and languages. She practically adopted me, tutoring me and turning my eengliss into English. She bought me a small English-Spanish dictionary that let me decipher those mysterious signs in the subway: “No littering. No spitting.”
Uncle gets weary
Life at my uncle’s became increasingly tense. How long before my parents come over? We thought Castro would be gone by now, and Alfredito would be back home. Couldn’t your parents send some money? We can’t keep you forever, you know.
After the October 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis, impatience became an ultimatum–all flights from Cuba were suspended indefinitely. No mom and dad coming soon. My temporary adventure became permanent.
My uncle finally announced that my stay with him was over. Miss Mazzaro went to work and–I don’t know how–found me a foster home in Long Island, where I moved in December. My foster parents, immigrants from Northern Ireland, embraced me as their own.
My parents arrived in 1965.
I have often thought about the strange twists and turns of my–in retrospect–excellent adventure. Did my parents do the right thing, sending me to a strange land with no directions or instructions? Did they know what they were doing? Were the 14,000 unaccompanied kids shipped from Cuba unwitting pawns in some sort of Cold War propaganda game? Was my uncle a creep to kick me out, or did he simply have no choice?
I never found answers to any of these ponderous questions. I don’t even think about them much anymore. I just wish I could find Miss Mazzaro, so I could thank her for her kindness.
