My mother was Herminia Rodriguez (Ferrera?), born 1920 in New York City. My father was born Elisee Reclus Pérez in Tampa, Florida in 1911. I know little of my father’s parents, except that my grandmother was also named Herminia, and my grandfather Elisee. Both were born in Cuba. My mother’s parents were Marina (born in Cuba of Spanish or Cuban parents) and Mateo, born near Havana in the late 1890′s. I dimly remember other names and faces but I hesitate to bring them up, I just don’t know enough about them. I do know there was a branch of the family in Camaguey, Cuba, but again, I can tell you little about it. It is enough to say that the maternal side was based in America, while the paternal side still had representatives in the old country. My father had family in Havana, and although born an American, spent much of his youth there. He spoke English with an accent for all of his life. My mother spoke with an accent also, but it was a New York Yiddish accent, a gift of the neighborhood where she grew up.

Both of my grandfathers emigrated to Key West, Florida in the early decades of the twentieth century. In those days, the Cuban cigar industry had relocated to the USA, fleeing war and progressive labor laws for the more business-friendly atmosphere to the north. Both men were professional lectores who earned their living by reading to the workers in the cigar factories while they handrolled ‘the finest tobacco in the world’. Later, they both moved to Tampa, where a deep water port and a railroad completed an ideal union-free environment for the growth of the industry. At the height of the cigar manufactory in Tampa there were over a hundred cigar factories, each employing several hundred workers, mostly Cuban and Spanish, but with a substantial fraction of Italians as well. This community of immigrants transformed the sleepy little fishing village of Tampa into a major industrial center based on the fragrant smoke of Cuban leaf. The cigar workers were highly skilled workers and well-paid, by the standards of their day. They were a cultured, urban people who demanded the traditional amenities associated with their profession, including having skilled orators who provided them with entertainment and education while they worked. Both of my grandfathers, men of some education themselves, thrived in this environment and began raising families in the new country. The cigar culture of the Ybor City district is well documented elsewhere so I need not delve into it too deeply here. But it should be noted that this environment, which nurtured both my parents and myself, gave me an opportunity to grow up bilingual and bicultural even though I was a second generation American. Long after the Depression and the cigar-making machines had put an end to the glory days of the factories and the lectores, I was born into a city where it was still possible for an individual to earn a living and raise a family with only the most rudimentary knowledge of the national language. The only thing like it today is the Hispanic community of Miami, but without its reactionary politics. Coming into the world in this environment was a profound influence in my life. There is something schizophrenic about growing up urban Cuban in the heart of rural Dixie, but I will have more to say about that later.

My grandfather Mateo not only had a major influence on me, but is also the only one of my grandparents who survived into my adulthood. He was a remarkable man who had dropped out of medical school in Havana (some say due to politics, others say because of a woman) and joined a theatrical troupe where he polished his classical Spanish and learned the art of projecting and modulating his voice to a crowd without benefit of amplification. During his life he worked as a stage actor, newspaper columnist, reader, film dubber, radio broadcaster, and Bronx candy store owner. He was extremely well read, and could understand, read and write English perfectly, although he never quite got the hang of speaking it. Mateo married several times, had many children, and moved back and forth between Tampa, Key West, Havana and New York where he enjoyed minor celebrity status among his transplanted countrymen. Both his father and at least one of his brothers worked as a lector, a profession that at one time made him ‘the highest paid working man in Tampa’. His friendship with one of his colleagues led their two families to unite in marriage, just prior to the start of World War II.

My father Elisee was a kind and introspective man who worked as a sheet metal worker when he married my mother. After the war started, he was drafted into the Army and saw duty in Burma, where he served at a remote airfield maintaining aircraft flying over the Hump. I can barely remember my father, who died when I was only four years old; but many years after his death my grandfather gave me a yellowed typewritten manuscript which he had written during a separation from my mother and which he had given Mateo for safekeeping. It was the only legacy my father left me, but a priceless one. This long letter to posterity was composed shortly after I was born, when he was forced to move to New York to escape my mother and the asthma which plagued him only in Florida and Cuba, the only two places where she was willing to live. Elisee and Herminia were eventually reconciled and he returned to Tampa, where the asthma finally killed him. I eventually forgave my mother, although I don’t think she ever forgave herself.

My mother was an elemental force, like gravity. Widowed with a young child, she attended night courses and taught herself to be a bilingual stenographer, expert in business Spanish and the now obsolete arts of shorthand and typing. She managed to earn a living and raise her family by herself, and even achieved a certain amount of middle class respectability in a working environment which, to put it mildly, was not kind to a single Latin woman without formal education. Her idol was Scarlett O’Hara, because she had experienced deep hunger during the Depression. Without ever abandoning her family obligations, she bitterly resented my father’s lack of ambition (“I can’t help that the Army trained me to work on the wrong kind of airplane”), and her father’s charming but irresponsible lifestyle. She never forgave Mateo for divorcing her mother and abandoning his wife and children in the early ’30s. I can’t really blame her, but then again, I only heard one side of the story; I was young then and refused to think ill of grandfather regardless of the evidence before my eyes. Herminia was a strong and passionate woman, but she never fully trusted men, not even her son. I was her second child, my sister Blanche was conceived shortly after Elisee was mustered out of the Army and died soon after birth. Herminia died of a stroke in 1992 only months after her younger brother Manny, while my wife and I were living with her the year I was unemployed. I suppose, in the end, I let her down as well.

I can remember several trips with my parents during WWII and shortly thereafter. I remember them is little segments, not the beginning, middle or end.

Once, on a train with my mother, I remember her cutting an apple in half with a string. I’ve tried that myself and never been able to do it. Must have been a strong thread, and maybe she used a pencil or something to tighten it up.

On another my dad told me how when he was a kid they would catch coyotes and turn them inside out – reach down their throats, grab the base of the tail, and pull hard. Offered to show me on the very next coyote we saw. We didn’t see another coyote the entire way. Oh, I did, but we didn’t. Very frustrating.

On that same trip we stopped at a gas station, I believe in the Nevada desert. There was a post with an iron pipe nailed to it. Look through the pipe and see Mt. Whitney, the highest point in the lower 48 states. It didn’t occur to me that I’d hike up that mountain 5 times, and sleep on top 4 of those.

I think kids can become bored easily, and forget that which bores them. “Are we there yet?” is a common plaint.

Like you, there is so much more I wish I remembered, a lot of it the people. My sisters, my parents, relatives, but apparently the neurons were needed for something else.