An American Son: A Memoir Read Online Free PDF

limp for the rest of his life.
    One of my mother’s sisters, Dolores, or Lola as she was known, had emigrated to the United States, and reported back that jobs were plentiful there. On May 27, 1956, seven years after they had married, my parents and their son left Cuba for America. It cost around five hundred dollars at thetime to bring someone to the United States. Each family member who arrived in the States paid for the next member to come, and soon my grandparents and most of the family had emigrated. Their timing was fortuitous. That same year, Fidel Castro was busy making camp in the Sierra Maestra Mountains, where he would begin his revolution against the dictatorship of Fulgencio Batista.
    While Cuba descended into violence in the revolution that would eventually replace the corrupt Batista dictatorship with Castro’s communist dictatorship, the United States enjoyed a period of unprecedented growth and prosperity. My family moved first to New York, where my father took whatever small day jobs he could find. The New York winter proved too much for my mother, though, and the following year they moved to Miami, where both my parents found steady work in an assembly plant that built aluminum lawn chairs. My mother still has a visible scar from an accident she suffered at the plant when machinery tore her thumbnail from the root.
    They had very little money, but they had the will to improve their circumstances and the confidence they were in the right place to do it. Life in the United States wasn’t easy for my parents, but it was better than the alternative.
    By the end of the 1950s, my father had begun training as a bar boy, a bartender’s assistant, and was hired by the Roney Plaza Hotel in Miami Beach. But his real dream was to own his own business. Between 1958 and 1965 he opened a succession of small businesses, including a vegetable stand, a dry cleaning store, a discount store and a small supermarket. My mother claims my father never had much of a business mind—he was too generous, she said, and often gave items away to customers who couldn’t afford them. The businesses all failed, and at some point—we can never be quite sure when—he gave up his dream, deciding instead to provide the best living he could for his family by working in the employ of others.
    He worked hard at the hotel bar and was promoted to bartender in 1959. Yet the family was discouraged by the business failures, and they missed Cuba. My grandfather, too, had hated the cold in New York, and his attempt to establish a shoe repair business in Miami had failed. So after the fall of Batista, he returned to Cuba. He intended to stay there for the rest of his life even though his wife and daughters were still in the United States. The immigrant experience is seldom an instantly successful one. In thebeginning it’s usually a tale of hardship, menial labor, sacrifice, scrimping and heartache for the country and family you left behind. My parents’ and grandparents’ experience was no different, and like many Cuban Americans, they believed they might one day return home.
    My sister Barbara was born in the early summer of 1959. By the end of that year my parents began to contemplate doing what my grandfather had already decided to do, return permanently to Cuba. Early on there were few signs that Cuba would soon join the Soviet Bloc. On a visit to the United States in April 1959, Fidel Castro professed his belief in democracy and denied being a communist. He even wore a medal with the image of the Virgin Mary. At the time he was a hero to many working-class Cubans.
    In the summer of 1960, my father and my brother, Mario, took a ferry to Cuba so they could bring my father’s car, which he wanted to show off to his family. My mother and Barbara flew to Havana and met them there. They wanted to see the new Cuba and explore giving life on the island another try. But during their visit they began to comprehend the direction of Castro’s