Searching for a Piece of Home in Havana

Every Sunday night in Miami, mis abuelos on my mother’s side would come over to our house and talk to Pops about home, about Cuba. We’d spend those Miami nights of my childhood sitting outside as the humidity made the plastic chairs stick to our skin, as they’d tell stories about the Garden of Eden of their youth. Abuela often talked about the beaches and the trees, how the trees gave fruit better than anything we had here. Abuelo talked about the Universidad de La Habana, about how beautiful it was, about hearing speeches echo through the halls. Pops sometimes showed the photo of his old house, all the color and lines faded from being stuck in the humid plastic of a dusty photo album.

When tucking me into bed, Pops would tell me about how as a child, he’d fall asleep to the mystical waves of El Malecón crashing against the shore. He’d say how his father, Pompilio, would tell him every night, “Sueñen con los angelitos.” Dream with the angels. On many of those nights, I dreamed of Pops and me in Cuba, with my mother and sister and all of mis abuelos who have passed or have never been back, together. A family. A home. And I loved those dreams. For I wanted to see the place where all my angels lived and breathed and played. I wanted to see my angels at home, whole.

But when the dreams ended, the stories never felt whole. For no matter how vivid the vision, I couldn’t taste the fruit from Abuela’s trees, I couldn’t read in Abuelo’s Universidad de La Habana, I couldn’t dream with the waves crashing against El Malecón. There was still a gulf between where I listened and dreamed and the place they called “home.” The trauma that blocks these stories is the kind of thing that makes it hard to ask questions to complete the picture of home, of our family history. For what son wants to ask questions that pick at the scar deep enough that it once could have ended his father?

To fill in more of the story, for Pops, and for me, I knew I needed to go to Cuba, to see home for all of us. To see where the angels I dreamed with lived.

*

In December of 2016, a month after the death of Fidel Castro, I was preparing to fly from Miami to Cuba. I was the first member of my family to go to Cuba since mis abuelos and Pops were exiled. For Abuela, she had decided she’d never go back, that she would just hold on to the stories. For Abuelo, he swore he was blacklisted from the island. For Pops, he felt he couldn’t go back, that it’d be a betrayal to his father, to his mother, to everything that his family had lost. I was distant enough from this pain where I could go, when my family couldn’t.

The night before I flew to La Habana, it was the anniversary of the passing of mi abuelo, Pompilio, Pops’s father. My dad and I cracked open some rum and poured each other a glass.

We paced and talked about my trip, about the route we’d take to the airport, about my ritual of ordering a pastelito de guayaba y queso, an empanada de carne, and a cortadito con azucar at the Versailles in Miami International Airport. We didn’t talk about how his mother passed when he was just a child on the island, about the death threats Pompilio faced after speaking out against every regime, about how Pops was a child exile in the US, part of Operation Pedro Pan, where fourteen thousand Cuban kids were held in camps in South Florida, or about how Pops spent more than a year in those camps.

On the plane, I felt the tension of visiting so many unspoken truths. I didn’t know where I was going or how to fill in the gaps of Pops’s stories while alone in Cuba.

When I saw the airport and the campo outside of La Habana, I thought of how that echoed Pops’s last image of his country before flying away. Pompilio told him he’d bring him back in thirty days. Those thirty days never ended. How Pops didn’t think he could go back to Cuba without knowing where his mother was buried. Some talk about burying the past, but what do you do when you don’t even know where that past is buried?

My first full night in Cuba, I wandered the streets of La Habana aimlessly. I didn’t know where to begin. I needed to find a home in the land my family was born in, the land where my family was uprooted from. I walked through the streets, looking at the old buildings that tourists call the “museo del mundo,” the same buildings that fall and kill so many Cubans a year. I walked through the humid night away from the big street where old car exhaust pipes choked the sky and then the people.

I was walking this night when I heard some drumming in the distance. The drumming reminded me of Miami, where the pulse of every party came from where you or your ancestors were uprooted from. Blocks away, the drumming came from the only light I could see. As I got closer, silhouettes morphed into people who spilled out of the house like a river into a gulf. The house was candlelit, the light glowed through the windows, and it was there that I met Felix.

Felix was an afrocubano who wore a dirty shirt and a faded, broken-stitched New York Yankees cap. His ashy voice betrayed years of smoke. Felix was the gatekeeper of this party and my first night in Cuba.

“Where are you from?” he asked in Spanish.

“I was born in the United States,” I responded in Spanish.

He looked at me suspiciously.

“My father is a habanero.” He’s from Havana.

Felix nodded with his whole body in approval, and he gestured for me to enter. It was December 17. Día de San Lázaro. This was a party for Babalú-Ayé.

The house was small and packed. With percussionists by every wall, people danced into any open space that emerged. I merengued through the crowded room to get to the altar of Babalú-Ayé. Pops could fit right in the corner here, with his drink, happy, next to the San Lázaro statues that had the dogs trailing him, that had him resting on crutches. Felix’s uncle stood by the altar proudly. He nodded at me. Felix introduced me to his uncle, then poured some rum in his cup, then some in Babalú’s cup, then some straight into my mouth.

That night, Felix’s uncle was just Tío to me. The beginning of family. I wanted to stop and write this moment, but I was afraid stopping would only let the moment be lost forever, like trying to fall back asleep into the same dream.

The rest of the night, Felix and I walked up and down the Paseo de Martí. We drank rum from my flask and smoked whatever Felix rolled. We walked through the paseo, under the trees that undulated above us, looking like they could sweep us away at any moment; I smelled the sea. I listened to the waves in the background. We talked politics. His mama was part of Las Damas de Blanco, a group of women that protested the regime by wearing white during Mass, by protesting up and down the streets silently. She and the rest of the family got arrested often. Often they didn’t know where the family or they themselves were being taken. I thought about Pops’s frustration with politics in the US. He had called me distraught just months before, the day after Trump won the presidency. I thought about what it would feel like for prisons to separate us.

It was past midnight, and I asked Felix if he knew how to get online. Back in 2016, internet had become more accessible in Cuba, but one still needed to buy a card to log on for an hour or so at a time, the cards costing more than most Cubans could reasonably afford. He took me to a park near a Wi-Fi zone. At that park, I felt the tension of being watched, of being surveyed. Soldiers patrolled; nondescript solid-colored vans with heavy tints rumbled while parked nearby. The voices hushed whenever someone in uniform or someone unknown walked by—a reminder that we were in a police state.

Felix introduced me to two drug dealers that sat on a bench, the shadows of ceibas covering them from the streetlights. They had a hookup (or had otherwise acquired) Wi-Fi cards from the government meant for hotels. I bought a card for me and a card for Felix. When my phone loaded the messages, I got the one I needed from my sister, with the address of Pops’s house in Vedado.

When I got to the hostel that night, I wanted to write, but I was too rum-drenched. Instead I thought about how I had been to parties like that all my life, had nights and walks like that all my life, in Miami, in New Orleans, but never in La Habana, where my family was from. Before that night, I knew that no matter how Cuban or “other” I was viewed as in the United States, no matter how many times I had to check the “Hispanic” or “Latino” box, I’d still be an outsider in Cuba too. That I’d always be checking the box of the “other,” no matter which home I was in. What I hadn’t known was whether I’d be accepted or viewed as a dissident, a traitor, a tourist, a gringo while on the island. But that night, I was accepted, no labels, no questions. It was like my dreams, the feeling of home, the feeling of being whole.

*

The next day, I called my friend’s parents, the ones who lived near my father’s old house. We made a plan to meet up at their house and have coffee, like good Cubans.

I got there early and waited outside the door of the apartment building. I waited and I wondered what the conversation would be like. Should I have brought coffee? Would I come off puro American gringo? Would I offend?

When the mother came down, I saw her, short hair, big glasses. I had met her once before in New Orleans, at my friend’s (her daughter’s) birthday party. She looked frailer than I remembered, but also more at home, like a viejita who had walked down these steps and taken guests up to her house for as long as anyone could remember. She gave me a hug and a kiss on the cheek. She grabbed my arm and led me up the stairs, like I needed guidance. I didn’t stop her.

When I got to their apartment, I met the father for the first time. He asked me to sit down, by the glass sliding door that overlooked the rest of Vedado, Pops’s old neighborhood. The mother then brought out the café in tacitos that reminded me of mi abuela. They asked about Pops, and I explained how my father was a Pedro Pan kid, which intrigued them. When they asked where Pops’s mother was, I mentioned how she had passed. The father clicked his tongue in an understanding. He said, “Cuban mothers don’t let go of their sons.” He hugged himself as he said it, as if he remembered his mother’s hold and was trying to hang on to that hold still. It was the same hold that Pops had been separated from since his childhood in Cuba.

That moment gripped me long past the coffee and the conversation. This house, this moment, reflected a parallel universe. Could I have grown up in this house with Pops and our family? Would Pops be retired, instead of still fighting through fifty-plus-hour workweeks in Miami, if things were just a little different? Would Pops be living and loving in the same neighborhood he was born in, being the one to make coffees for the lost boys of the lost boys of Cuba’s latest revolution?

When I left, I walked down the blocks in silence. The noise and smoke of old cars surrounded me until I got off the main road. And then I saw it for the first time, Pops’s old house.

It took me a moment to process what the building looked like in person. To process what it looked like when not a sunburned memory of a place. White curtains were hanging down from the window; silhouettes stirred from within the house. Someone still lived a life there. I watched the silhouettes move. I saw the patio, so much smaller than in Pops’s stories, than in my dreams, but I saw the patio, and it was real, so much more real for me than it had been just that morning.

I closed my eyes; I daydreamed. I could hear Pops skating on that patio, could hear a record playing with Pops’s mother clapping her hands and him racing over to dance with her. I could hear the day quiet into a night, could hear the tide tune out everything else in the city, in Pops’s young mind and, now, my mind.

I took a photo, to print out for Pops when I got home. Maybe the photo would reverse some of the fading, some of the blocking, some of the erasure. Maybe then the stories of his father could have a little bit more of a real place to play; maybe then he could feel the hug of his mother a little more. I sipped some rum from my flask, then I poured some out. I wasn’t tired, for I knew I had more to do, had more people to meet, for I wouldn’t have found a home without Felix and the tío, without San Lázaro, without the dealers in the park, or without my friend’s father and mother. I wasn’t tired, but I couldn’t wait for when I passed out, to dream with my angels, to see more of where they lived, and to see and build a home where we could all live together again.

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