Letters From My Father
by Jose Alvarez
My father’s side of the family was a complete mystery to me until I was nearly thirty years old. My father, Baldomero, was the third of nine brothers and sisters born to my grandparents Santos and Vicenta in Luces, a small village on the rugged coast of Asturias in northern Spain. He was the only one of the nine siblings to emigrate; the rest of them lived the rest of their lives within walking distance from the place where they were born. In 1924, at age seventeen my father sailed across the Atlantic on the Reina Maria Cristina to seek fame and fortune in Cuba, leaving Luces and the rest of his family behind. He settled in Havana, where he met my mother Isel. They married in 1940 and had two children. I was born in 1943 and my brother, Raul, in 1947.
We enjoyed an idyllic childhood growing up in a closely knit family centered on my mother and her relatives. We spent our summers and weekends at the house my parents built on a hill overlooking a beautiful beach in Santa Maria del Mar. On Sundays the house, “La Casa de la Playa,” was full of friends and relatives who came to spend a day at the beach and to enjoy the afternoon meal my grandmother Panchita, an excellent cook, prepared every Sunday. Yet we knew very little about my father’s side of the family, only what we could glean from occasional conversations at the dinner table about news received in the infrequent letters arriving from across the Atlantic. At the dinner table my father referred to Luces as La Aldea, The Village.
The triumph of Fidel Castro´s Revolution on January 1st, 1959 changed everything. A few months later the family split up and we would not see each other for several years. On August 12th, 1960, when I was seventeen, I left Havana for college in the US. On March 20th 1961, a few weeks before the Bay of Pigs invasion on April 17th, my brother sailed in the steamship Guadalupe for Spain to live with our father’s side of the family and wait for the Revolution to run its course. He was fourteen years old. Our idyllic existence had been shattered. My parents stayed behind thinking that Fidel Castro would not last long. Little did they know.
During the next few years I seldom spoke with my relatives. Phone calls were very expensive and difficult to arrange. Calls to my parent’s house in Cuba had to be scheduled days in advance, and often could not be completed. My relatives in Luces had no phones in their houses so I had to call El Espacio, the local pub, to ask someone to pass the word to my brother for him to call back. But he also had scarce means so we did not call each other, we used the mail.
After 1964, my parents had lost their business, confiscated by the Revolution. They realized the Revolution was there to stay and decided to leave Cuba. But by then it was difficult to escape. After college I started working and tried –unsuccessfully- to get visas for my parents to enter the United States. The only country willing to accept my parents was Spain, because my father was born there. They flew to Spain in 1967 to stay with Laureano and Lola, my father’s brother and sister in law, in their tiny house in Luces. While spending a year in Spain they obtained US visas. They flew to New York in April 1968, arriving in the United States shortly after Martin Luther King’s assassination in April of that year. They settled in Red Bank, NJ, near where I lived. My maternal grandparents and great aunt arrived in the United States shortly thereafter reuniting the matriarchy once again. In a few years my parents became citizens of the United States.
Still, I knew very little of my relatives in Spain. I finally took my first trip to Spain in May 1971 when I went to visit my brother and meet my father’s side of the family. When I met them I had trouble remembering the names of so many cousins, uncles and aunts. We stayed at Laureano and Lola’s house. The kitchen was the largest and warmest room in the house, with a wood burning stove that Lola kept going all day long. A string of home-made sausages hung from the ceiling inviting everyone to eat. The meals were plentiful, earthy, hearty and long.
The street where they lived was not paved. My relatives wore traditional Asturian wooden shoes with three tiny feet, called madreñas, to walk in the muddy fields and streets. I was invited to walk on them and found them incredibly uncomfortable. The family lived off the land. They grew some vegetables and raised a few cows to sell the milk. They also had several chickens and a couple of pigs. Laureano walked his cows every morning to lush local pastures “prados” to feed on the plentiful grass, and he walked them back home in the evening to sleep in the barn adjoining the house. He told me the body heat from the cows helped to warm up their house. That night, I kept waking up when I heard the cows stumping their hoofs in the barn next to the house. In the morning I woke up to the sound of Laureano sharpening his scythe.
Once I had met my cousins and my aunts and uncles. I thought I would visit them again frequently, but I found many reasons to keep postponing my next trip. I was raising a family, my parents were living in the US close to where I lived, and crossing the Atlantic by plane was expensive. I did not return for another fifteen years.
After medical school in Salamanca, my brother settled in Gijon, the largest city in Asturias, nearly an hour away from La Aldea via a hilly country road full of curves that was often covered by dense fog. For the next thirty years I visited my brother in Spain half a dozen times, always spending a day at La Aldea to visit the relatives.
After my wife Ana and I moved to Europe in 2004 we visited the family more often. My brother, his wife Pilar, and a couple of the cousins, Agustin and Isel, also visited us in The Hague. Over time, the stories my cousins told me about my father’s generation gave me a good idea of Baldomero’s life before he sailed to Cuba. But the stories of why he left Spain were still shrouded in mystery.
My brother knew that our father had been working in another village –La Isla– when he left for Cuba. Agustin had heard that my grandmother Vicenta had sent my father to work with relatives in La Isla who needed help with their farm. Cousin Isel thought that it was tio Jose who encouraged him to emigrate. She even showed me the house in La Isla where Jose’s family lived at the time.
Michael, my son, was very close to my father. He also became interested in searching for Baldomero’s family history and I relayed to him many of the stories my cousins had told me. We wanted to find out why my father had settled in Cuba and decided to plan a trip with my brother to La Aldea the next time we were together in Spain. We wanted to dispel the mystery and search for the real story.
We did not have long to wait. Last Spring my cousin Manolo, the son of Laureano and Lola, invited Ana and me to the wedding of his youngest daughter Marta, on September 11 2010, in Asturias. I called him during the summer to ask him if my son, Michael, could come too. He was delighted and told me that Michael would be more than welcome.
Ana and I were very happy to go to Marta’s wedding. We had met her during one of our previous trips to Spain when we ate a wonderful meal at Isel’s house in Luces. Manolo contributed “pulpo a la gallega,” a delicious snack he had prepared with an octopus Marta had pulled out of the water earlier that morning at a rocky beach near their house.
At the wedding reception we sat at a table with several of the cousins. One of them suggested we meet with a distant relative -Pepin el de La Isla- who was sure to have some knowledge about my father and his travel to Cuba. My brother made a few phone calls and arranged a meeting with Pepin the following weekend in Colunga, where he lived.
On Saturday, Ana and I drove to Colunga with my brother and Pilar, to meet Pepin. The roads are better now and the drive only took us fifteen minutes. Michael drove back from Bilbao, where he had met some friends, and met us there. Agustin, the self-appointed family historian, also came to Colunga. While Ana and Pilar went off to do some shopping, the rest of us met at a local bar to dig into the past, armed with sketches of the family tree.
Over a couple of beers Pepin told us that, as far as he knew, the uncle who had encouraged Baldomero to go to Cuba was Casimiro, not Jose like we had thought. He also told us that Casimiro´s son Javier, who also lived in Colunga, could provide us with more first-hand details about Baldomero´s immigration to Cuba. Someone had told my brother that Javier´s health had been failing and his memory of events from eighty years ago was not very reliable, but Pepin assured us that Javier was lucid enough to talk to us. He said, “I talked with Javier earlier this week and, while he may forget some things, he still remembers many details and will be able to tell you more about the events from that period than anyone else alive today.” We decided it was worth a try.
Raul called Javier and arranged a visit to his apartment in about thirty minutes. Michael, Raul and I finished our beers and walked a couple of blocks to Javier’s apartment on the second floor of a building still showing signs of damage dating back to the Civil War. Javier and his wife Teresa received us gladly. She offered us some wine and we sat at the dining room table to hear Javier’s stories about Casimiro and Baldomero.
He confirmed that by 1920, when my father was working in La Isla, some relatives of Casimiro had already lived in Cuba for several years and that it was his father who had encouraged my father to go to Cuba. I remembered then that my father had spoken occasionally, while we still lived in Cuba, about some relatives who lived in Oriente province, at the eastern end of the island miles away from Havana.
We asked Javier many questions and he provided us with as much information as he could remember. His memory had been stretched as far as it could go and the conversation was winding down when suddenly he said: “Perhaps you’d be interested in some of the correspondence between Casimiro and Baldomero. I think we have a stack of letters here in one of the drawers.” “Yes, of course,” said my brother. We became very excited as Teresa went searching for the letters. She looked in a couple of drawers and finally found a folder full of old letters in one of the dining room cabinets. She gave Javier the folder. He glanced at a few of the letters and said “yes these are the letters” as he gave the folder to Raul.
Immediately we began reading some of the letters from the small treasure trove we had stumbled upon. The letters were dated from 1937 through 1957, a span that included the last couple of years of the Spanish Civil War, World War II, and reached nearly to the Cuban Revolution.
There were letters including medical prescriptions my father was sending for his relatives. There were letters itemizing the contents of his shipments of clothing and food for individual relatives. Reading these letters I became aware that my father in Cuba had become a bulwark against hunger and poverty for his family in Spain during a very difficult period.
There were letters talking about the ups and downs of the clothing store my mother and father owned in Cuba. There were letters expressing their desire to travel to Spain to visit the family, but facing the grim reality that crossing the Atlantic in time of war was unsafe and undesirable.
I found a letter from April 1940 announcing the forthcoming wedding, on May 17th, of my mother and father. Raul started reading a letter from early December 1947, but suddenly he stopped. In the letter, my father quaintly says “the stork is coming to deliver us a package later this month.”My brother, holding back some tears, said “He is talking about me. I am that package.” Raul was born on Christmas day 1947. We had to stop. It was more than we could handle in just one afternoon.
Javier gave us the letters for us to keep. He also gave us some pictures that made us laugh; especially a picture of my father, his cousin Angel, my godfather Pepe, and Raul’s godfather Antonio taken in the 1930’s. The clothes they wore made them look like extras from The Untouchables.
My father’s letters rekindled memories of my happy childhood. I felt closer to him. They opened my eyes to an aspect of his life as an immigrant that was new to me. I was surprised how he remained so close to his family in spite of the years and the distance that separated them.
In 1995, in deteriorating health and afraid of the exorbitant costs of American health care, my parents settled in Gijon to be near my brother and under his medical care. My father died three years later at age ninety one. We scattered his ashes into the sea off a cliff by El Faro de Lastres, a lighthouse overlooking the Bay of Biscay, less than half a mile from the house where he was born. Thomas Wolfe says “You can’t go home again.” Yet, after searching for his roots and finding his letters, I think that my father, who lived most of his life far from the place where he was born, did not yearn to go home again. He had never left.
I had the letters and photographs scanned, and made copies for Michael, Raul and me. Each of us has a set of letters and pictures. Raul is coming to visit us in March along with Pilar and Isel. We plan to sit here at our house in South Texas and call Michael in California to enjoy reading together the letters from my father.
Jose Alvarez grew up in Havana, Cuba. He left in 1960, shortly after the Cuban revolution, to attend college in the United States, planning to return for his summer vacations. But that was not to be. Upon his first return to Cuba after nearly forty years he began writing short stories.
He has lived in the midst of different cultures in the United States, Spain, the Netherlands, Israel, Mexico, Brazil, and Puerto Rico. Recently, he moved to South Texas and joined the Narciso Martínez Cultural Arts Center Writer’s Forum in San Benito, Texas, and the Valley Byliners in Harlingen, Texas where he has contributed and read stories from his collection.
Listen to the interview at Corazon Bilingue>>
