Toward the end, abuelo wasn’t abuelo.
A stroke five years ago had shriveled my grandfather’s brain and body.
Once a conversationalist who relished talking to anyone about anything, lately he would sit quietly on his recliner, watching hours of whatever was put on TV for him. He walked in tiny shuffles. He needed help shaving. He barely spoke.
The abuelo I knew, the one who helped raised my brother and me, was a different person.
My grandfather, Dionisio Rossie, was born in Matanzas, Cuba, took over his father’s sugar-packing company in Havana and built a small home to raise his family in Cojimar (later made famous as the home of the grizzled fisherman in Ernest Hemingway’s “The Old Man and the Sea”).
When the “Viva Fidel” signs started popping up in his neighborhood, he came to the United States. I knew him as the old man with boundless energy who never left his bedroom in our Miami home if not dressed in slacks, shirt and tie.
He was the one who drove to Cochinito Supermarket on Bird Road first thing every morning so we would have hot pan cubano before school. He was the man who worked 12-hour shifts as shoe manager of Zayre department store every night for 17 years, but always had enough left when he got home to toss around a baseball.
So his recent death, in some ways, was merciful.
He had slipped in his living room and broken his right femur. A successful 20-minute surgery bolted the bone together, but he had a small heart attack wading out of the anesthesia, which in turn filled his lungs with fluid and collapsed his kidneys. He died quietly four days later.
He was 88.
We buried him on a sweltering Thursday afternoon, with temperatures ramping up to 96 degrees.
Even the priest wept.
My grandfather’s passing affected my family more than I imagined. He was the patriarch, the leader who planned the family’s departure from Castro’s Cuba. He resettled the family from a beach town in Cuba to the suburbs of Miami. Like thousands of others, he thought he would return someday, but he died waiting.
Around 400,000 “historic exiles”–the early wave of Cubans who fled the island mostly for political reasons–left Cuba between 1959, the year Fidel Castro took power, and 1980. About 300,000 remain alive today.
The Cuban exile community, still bunched predominantly in South Florida, has accordingly been changing as the older generation ages and dies and the newer one turns 30. Its members are younger, less extremist, more open-minded. The majority still would like to see a Castro-less Cuba, but their interests expand beyond Cuba: schools, jobs, the Florida Marlins.
With the presidential election looming, the press has begun focusing on the changing face of Florida’s Cuban exile voter. Recent polls show historic exiles continue to vote Republican, Cuban-Americans tend to be Democratic, and everyone wants Castro to go.
But the legacy passed on from one generation to the next in Miami runs deeper than politics.
“What’s being passed on is not so much the politics, it’s the culture,” said Joe Garcia, executive director of the Cuban American National Foundation, an exile organization run by its founder’s son.
“It’s that sense that you don’t have to re-create yourself, your self is fine. That’s what our fathers left us.”
My grandfather taught me to speak Spanish.
I learned how to steer a car sitting on his lap in his old Dodge and, when I was tall enough, he taught me the pedals, too.
In my 30 years of memory, I never once heard him raise his voice. In that same period, I only saw him drink one cup of beer at a Thanksgiving party. He didn’t smoke. And he never broke the speed limit, frustrating me and my brother on car trips to Disney World.
Once, when I was expelled for getting into a fistfight with a high school nemesis, abuelo was called in to take me home. When the student I had just fought couldn’t get home because his mother couldn’t leave work, he offered to take him home, too. It took me months to explain my way out of why I was seen getting into the same car with my grandfather and the nemesis.
When I was old enough to care, I peppered him with questions about Cuba.
His eyes would ignite as he recounted stories of taking my grandmother to see 20-piece orchestra sets at Cabaret Sans Souci outside Havana or watch “Casablanca” at Teatro Payret. Every outing ended with a late-night breakfast of cafe con leche and tostadas cubanas at the “12 y 23” cafe in old town Havana.
And through the timbre of his voice, I could close my eyes and see him, pleated slacks, white shirt rolled up to the elbows, walking those warm streets.
I still imagine him that way, slim, suave and tackling the world.
When I got the phone call that he was dying, I took the first flight from Chicago to Miami.
On the ride over, my panicked mind found peace in all that he was leaving me: the memories, the values, the indescribable love for an island I don’t really know, and the unique ability to be as much as him as possible. I resolved to do just that.
The night he died, my grandmother chased all the relatives out of his hospital room and called in me, my brother and my cousin’s husband–the men in the family.
Still holding his tiny, lifeless wrist, her voice quivering with sobs, she made us promise, there in front of him, that we would do our best to emulate him, to live our lives according to his example.
It was a clear, powerful moment amid the chaos of our sorrow.
But I was way ahead of her.
