Beans and Rice: Growing up Cuban

By Martha M. Russ

The author has taken a semi-humorous look at a tragic chapter in history: She survived the Cuban Revolution, leaving her country, and being raised in a different countrybut she's still not sure of what she is

• Language: English
• Publisher: iUniverse
• Release date: Apr 2, 2001
• ISBN: 9781469710280

Martha M. Russ

Martha Russ is a Cuban national who came to the US in 1961. Her hero is Marvin the Martian: Like Marvin, she's a misunderstood alien. Martha lives in North Carolina, in tiny Ocean Isle Beach, which faces south toward her beloved island.

Book preview

Chapter 1

¿Por Que?

I was stunned at the emotions I felt flying over my country after being gone over thirty five years. My father had raised me to not be too patriotic. One piece of land was as good as another. I had lived in Cuba merely a fourth of my life. Having heard many horror stories about returning to the Communist country I had thought I would be frightened. I wasn’t ready for the elation I felt when I looked out the airplane window and saw the neat, clearly outlined farms. I smiled, yet a sob gripped my throat. It was part disbelief, since I always assumed I would never return to my beloved island. Part of it was the kind of elation one feels when one runs into a childhood friend one hasn’t seen in years. This was my country, the place I thought I would never see again. As Ralph Waldo Emerson had said, I’m going home.¹

I left Cuba when I was eleven years old, and I have made my home in the United States for the last thirty nine years. My life in Cuba was a mere page in the book of my life. I thought all I had left, was a few anecdotes of a short childhood lived in a foreign country. I had stopped using my Hispanic last name, I didn’t use my Spanish, although I could still speak it fluently, nor did I teach Spanish to my children. I submerged myself in American life until all traces of my Cuban culture were lost. Or so I thought until my sixteen-year-old son made a comment about being raised in a Cuban household.

How can you say that? I asked him, shocked, since we don’t even speak Spanish at home.

Oh, come on, Mom, he explained patiently and condescendingly, as teenagers do when speaking to their parents.

You try not to show it, but you’re truly Cuban, he continued. I knew he was talking about something deeper than just my Cuban nationality.

Teenagers’ arrogance leads them to believe that they’re smarter than their parents. The old joke, Leave home now that you’re a teenager, while you still know everything, says it all. What we parents don’t always realize is how much insight teenagers have. My son Esteban knew, even when I didn’t, that deep inside I was still Cuban.

This will be a trip back in time to show Esteban that he was right. I cannot shed the alienness in me. Maybe after reading this, my family will be able to understand just how alien I am, and why.

Chapter 2

Hablando de comidas…

The 1950’s was the decade that saw the Cold War, the Korean Conflict, bomb shelters, space flight and the fear of Russians. But those were just stories in the newspapers, or news watched on our newly acquired television sets. To many American children, the real world meant living in the suburbs, coming home from school to a snack prepared by an aproned mother who didn’t work. I’m sure mothers didn’t wear pearls like Mrs. Cleaver of TV’s Leave it to Beaver did, but the cookies they served were probably fresh from the oven. Our generation had it good. We were dubbed baby boomers due to the large increase in the birth rate in the fifties. An American was being born every seven seconds. Between 1950 and 1959, thirty million Americans had come into the world.²

I was not one of those thirty million Americans. I was born in 1950 in a tiny island ninety miles south of the United States. Columbus had said of the island he named Hispaniola, that it was the most beautiful land that human eyes had ever seen. It was nicknamed The Pearl of the Antilles. This beautiful land was a vacation dream, with its white beaches, crystal clear waters, and gambling casinos.

By the mid fifties I was already aware of American tourists, the Cold War and the Russians, but my real world, like that of those American children, also meant living in the suburbs and coming home from school to a snack prepared by an aproned mother who didn’t work.

No, actually, my mother didn’t wear an apron, nor did she fix me my after school snack. My American counterparts were having their after school milk and cookies (I don’t even know how real this sort of thing was. All I have to go by are old black and white reruns of Father Knows Best and The Ozzie and Harriet Show. I do know that my Cuban-raised, American children still like their Oreos dipped in milk. I wouldn’t be caught dead…) I, on the other hand, waited for the street vendor to go by. Around four thirty every afternoon, the street vendor would walk down the road with a pole slung across his shoulders, with a gallon can hanging at either end. In one can he kept tamales, and in the other he kept mariq-uitas—fried plantain chips. These were home made, probably by the man’s wife, and put in little, brown lunch bags. The tamales came wrapped in their own corn husks. I have eaten tamales in California, but they were the Mexican kind, quite unlike a Cuban tamale.

Sometimes, instead of the chips and tamales, I would have some guayaba con queso—guava paste and white cheese. Other times it would be the sweet, white meat scraped fresh from a coconut which I had thrown against the hard cement to crack it open. There were also mangoes, or oranges from my own back yard. How wonderful it was to grow up on a tropical island.

Chapter 3

Ataque al Palacio

In the 1950’s, Fulgencio Batista was Cuba’s President. In 1953, when Fidel Castro first entered the picture, during his attack on Batista’s Moneada Army Barracks, on July 26, I was barely getting out of diapers.

When I turned four I was enrolled in Kindergarten at Nuestra Señora de la Asunción—Our Lady of Assumption. Most Cuban children, regardless of their parents’ financial situation, attended Catholic schools.

This was the first of the many contradictions of our Cuban lives. My parents were not Catholic. I went to Mass on Sundays, only because they gave you a piece of paper—a receipt if you will, which we had to turn in at school on Mondays. My family didn’t say grace, I wasn’t taught to say a bedtime prayer, and I never once saw my father go to church. For a while he studied at home with Jehovah’s Witnesses, but it’s hard to say if he did it because he was really interested, or just to be polite to the witnesses who went door to door. My mother attended church once a year, on Good Friday, to do the Stations of the Cross. She said a prayer at each of the stations, and called herself saved for another year. One year she dragged my brother along. Out of habit, he knelt down in the aisle, and crossed himself. My mother talked about this incident for years. It was as if she had won herself a ticket to heaven. In spite of the lack of religion in our household, my parents made many financial sacrifices to send me to a Catholic school. My brother, who is thirteen years older than I, had also attended a Jesuit school all twelve years. That was the Cuban mentality.

On March 13, 1957 a group of young rebels attacked El Palacio—The Palace—President Batista’s government center. A flower delivery truck went around to the service entrance. When the guard came out to check, the rebels shot him and made their way into the building. A young man named José Antonio Echevarría went on the radio to say that Batista and many of Batista’s men, were dead. Echevarría then left the radio station and headed up the hill on which sits La Universidad de la Habana—The University of Havana. He was shot dead on the sidewalk. Some of the rebels were shot by Batista’s soldiers before they even entered El Palacio. Some made it to the top floors and were killed by being thrown off the high balconies. The insurrection was put down almost as soon as it started.

This incident wouldn’t take up more than half a page in a history book, but it was more than that to our family.

My father, who had been in the Military since he was seventeen years old was, in 1957, a member of the Secret Service in charge of Fulgencito, Batista’s twelve year old son. My brother Dempsey, by then a twenty year old university student was beginning to be interested in Fidel’s revolution. This was another one of the many contradictions of my family’s lives. My father, a high ranking official in Batista’s government. His son, covertly taking part in Castro’s revolution.

On that fateful day in 1957, my brother heard Echevarría tell of the attack on El Palacio. Many were dead. My brother ran down the street from the university towards El Palacio. He was still running when he heard the whistling sound of a bullet going past his ear, and he saw a man fall dead next to him. My brother threw himself on the ground and cried. He doesn’t remember how he got back to the university, but he got there just in time to see Echevarría lying dead on the sidewalk.

My father had left El Palacio twenty minutes before the attack, and he heard the news from the back of the chauffeured Secret Service limousine in which he was riding taking Fulgencito to school. He directed the chauffeur to take them to La Cabaña, a seventeenth century Spanish fortress, where he hoped to protect the boy until he could get him into an embassy, and then out of the country. When Batista went on the air to squelch the rumors of his death, my father returned Fulgencito to his home. My father returned home that evening and walked in asking, What’s for dinner? as he always did.

I had probably spent the day playing in my room size play house, or reading comic books, or climbing trees. At that time I was not made aware of the events of that day, but the mood had changed. From then on my mother lived in fear. She feared for my father’s life at the hands of los rev-olucionarios—the revolutionaries. She feared for my brother’s life at the hands of Batista’s army. She was also afraid that if my brother’s activities were discovered, my father would be imprisoned as a traitor.

In that same year, 1957, I told my parents that when I grew up, I was going to be a cosmonaut. The Russians had launched Sputnik I into space on October 4, and later that year, Laika the dog had become a world-famous space traveler when he was launched in Sputnik II in November. In 1959 the Soviet probe Luna 3 flew around the moon and sent us pictures of the moon’s hidden face. The feats of Yuri Gagarin were still a couple of years in the future, but Russia was already training its cosmonauts. My wish to be one of them would have strong repercussions several years later.

Chapter 4

Mi Hermano me Salvó

I was physically abused as a child, but I have no memory of it. I was already an adult when I learned about the beatings. My mother used to say that one reason why we had to move from the apartment in the city when I was five years old was so I would have more room. In the small apartment where we had lived in Old Havana, I was