I Was a Teenage Cuban Arsonist

By Ramiro Perez de Pereda

Chock full of anecdotes—some heartbreaking, others laugh-out-loud funny—"I Was A Teenage Cuban Arsonist" is a powerful memoir of Ramiro Perez's adventures growing up in pre-revolutionary Cuba, and later, as an exile in Miami. As a youth, Ramiro and his two older brothers get into trouble with bloodthirsty nuns, discover girls, and inadvertently burn down the family farm. Upon arriving in Miami, he is recruited into a counterrevolutionary movement formed to oppose Castro. In a blink, Ramiro goes from penniless immigrant to inadvertent soldier of fortune. ​Likening this book to a "highlight reel" of his life, Perez's life story promises intrigue, adventure, and the tongue-in-cheek humor he is known for.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Darkwater Media Group, Inc.
• Release date: Jan 27, 2021
• ISBN: 9781954619296

Ramiro Perez de Pereda

Born in Cuba in 1941, Ramiro Perez de Pereda has seen it all. After fighting insurgent communists at home, in 1959 he left Cuba for the United States where he made a name for himself working with blue-chip corporations. He has since retired from the business world and now devotes himself to his family and his writing. Ramiro, who writes under the name R. Perez de Pereda, is the author of several dozen short stories and poems. A lifelong fan of fantasy in all its forms, in his youth he was a big fan of Robert E. Howard's work, particularly the Conan the Barbarian series. He lives in Miami.

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Table Of Contents

Chapter One: Once Upon A Time In Havana

Chapter Two: Of Siblings And Womenfolk, Chaste And Otherwise

Chapter Three: Wasteland Baseball, Spanish Bulls In Need Of Gelding

Chapter Four: A One-Way Trip, And The Shortest Long Good-Bye

Chapter Five: Landing With Both Feet Squarely In The Air

Chapter Six: Apocalypse Postponed, Steal-A-Wheel, Who Ya Gonna Call?

Chapter Seven: Dick Of The House Of House, Dreams Deferred, Womenfolk: Revisited

Chapter Eight: The Past Comes Knocking, Mail-Order Mercenaries, Diplomas Made To Order

Foreword

At the time this book was written, I was well into my eighth decade. That’s more than enough time for one to realize that in life, there are phases. The big phases are the easiest to identify because they’re the bookends—you’re born, and you die.

But life’s more granular than that. For most people, sometime between those two critical phases, you’ll have a first kiss. Maybe you’ll fall in love. Get married, even. Maybe, while you’re young and adventurous, you’ll zip-line across the Costa Rican jungle. Or maybe you won’t find your sense of adventure until after you’ve retired and the kids have left the nest.

You see what I mean? Much like sawing into a redwood to divine its age by counting the rings, it’s these stages that inform us when we’ve arrived at a new period in our lives.

I don’t consider this book to be my memoirs; it’s more like a highlight reel of my youth. It covers the first four decades of my life, from 1941 to 1977. These formative years are what showed me who I am—and who I could have become if I’d turned out for the worse. During this time, I burned down a farm, stole a car, lived in what wouldn’t pass for a doghouse, kept pace with crooks and cons, purchased a college diploma, lost one family, and found another.

Where possible, I have put a humorous spin on past events. That’s the power of nostalgia, to tinge history in a rosy-colored filter so we can look fondly on where we’ve been, and thereby turn optimistically to what the future may hold. But life isn’t all sunshine, lollipops and rainbows despite anything Leslie Gore might tell you. I’ve had my share of heartache and loss.

The stories in this book are true to the best of my recollection. To the extent they are not, you can consider them fiction. Either way, cut me some slack—I’m old and don’t remember things as well as I used to.

That’s why I write things down.

R. Perez de Pereda

Chapter One:

Once Upon A Time In Havana

My story begins, as most stories tend to, at the beginning. It was as good a place to start as any, and seeing as I’d just been born, who was I to rock the boat on how such things as beginnings ought to be done?

I came into this world in 1941, in Cuba. In my infancy, I am told, Cuba was the freest it had ever been. We’d experimented with liberal democratic ideas and even had a string of popularly-elected presidents, many of whom were replaced with more suitable candidates before they could serve their full terms. One, in particular, Manuel Márquez Sterling, was as an interim acting president for a span of hours on September 18, 1934. If that isn’t freedom of political choice, then I don’t know what is.

I don’t mean to burden you with stuffy geopolitical discussion. Scores of writers smarter than me have discussed Cuba’s political experience ad nauseam, and I am not about to add my work to that body of discourse. But certain details do bear mentioning in order to establish the place and time. Growing up, Cuba for me was not too far from the American experience during the roaring twenties—we just had more alcohol, not to mention snazzier places to drink it in.

What a time to be alive, with such characters as Meyer Lansky, Frank Sinatra, and Ernest Hemmingway partying it up in my backyard. The era of the fifties was Cuba’s golden age, during which time the country reached its peak in terms of wealth and prominence in the global community. Former President Fulgencio Batista (in office 1940-1944) won the presidency again in 1952, snatching victory from the jaws of an electoral defeat via the deft application of a military coup. His first act in office was to suspend elections before the voting outcome could be announced. In one fell swoop, this move legitimized his authority as president and silenced his competitors’ claims to the office.

Thanks to President-for-life Batista and his ties to the American mafia, the island became a Caribbean paradise of carnal excess. Cuba was up to its armpits in liquor, cigars, cabarets, dancing girls, beaches, casinos—just about every vice imaginable. If there had been room on Moses’s tablets for an eleventh commandment, Batista’s Cuba would surely have broken it before it could be inscribed.

But with the vice came a tsunami of foreign investment. Deep-pocketed tourists arrived by the hundreds every day, looking for new and more exotic ways to part with their money. The burgeoning tourism industry led to a natural feedback loop—more tourists meant more cash, which in turn led to the development of more hotel-casinos to fleece the visitors. With the economy on the rise, the buying power of middle-class Cuban families approached parity with their neighbors in the United States. These favorable economic factors meant life wasn’t so bad for the average Cuban, so long as he kept his mouth shut and ignored the nightly gunfire. If those now-nostalgic watercolor posters depicting Cuba’s heyday told the island’s full story, you’d likely find a hitman in pinstripes standing in a cabaret’s second-story window; or a greasy pimp in the shadows of an alley, watching his girl on the street.

For all its glamor, Cuba was a rough place. People only visited to make money or spend it, and they went big either way. For those who called the island home, there was only one way to get by: resolver.¹

My father was just the sort of person to tackle the challenge that day-to-day life in Cuba presented. A Spanish expat from Asturias, he left for Cuba in 1939 when Franco’s fascist oppression tightened its grip. True to his North Iberian roots, he was earnest and practical to a fault. The man never bought anything he couldn’t make himself, nor did he throw away anything he thought he could fix. He chain-smoked, drank brandy at every meal (sometimes in between), and had no tolerance for bullshit. Admittedly, his cynical outlook made for rather dull birthdays, as he was too practical to give us toys and too stingy to give us anything but his hand-me-downs. Our best prospects for gifts came in the form of an old pair of shoes he’d shined up, or a shirt that no longer fit him. One year, he gave me a hammer for my birthday, along with the promise that if I’d learned how to use it by the end of the year, he’d buy me nails for Christmas.

Much as I loved him, my father was a man of many flaws. Chief among them was his temper. If you were to look up the archetypal hot-blooded Spaniard, you’d likely find a turn of the twentieth century woodblock print of a man in a flamenco outfit kitted out with a bullfighting rapier, women swooning over him, and men chasing him down with guns and sabers drawn.

Granted, that’s an exaggeration. That wasn’t my father—but it was close. He was a man’s man; tough as nails, never say die, never let them see you cry. If he was hungry and had nothing to eat but metal filings, he’d have them for dinner and excrete railroad spikes the following morning. For as long as he was alive, I never saw him cry—not once.

He was also something of a rascal growing up in Spain, my aunts and uncles often remarking how his weekend excursions would end in bar fights and broken noses. Not much changed after he arrived in Cuba—he was still two inches from being a constant rebel without a cause. Many a Monday morning he’d show up to work with his shirt and tie and a bag of ice over a fresh black eye. But his experience in Spain had taught him that there existed yet another layer of paternalistic oversight he’d never considered. Progressing from youth to adulthood, he came to understand there were several levels of authority, beginning with his parents, then his schoolteachers, then his peers, and so forth; and each of them, in turn, had a hand in imposing upon his life choices. Franco’s oppressive regime showed him that the government was the chief source among all the unwanted intrusions into his personal liberties.

It’s because of my father that I don’t know where in Cuba I was born. In those days, there was a law on the books requiring the parents of every newborn to head to the nearest big city in their province and register the live birth with the authorities. My father—who was quick to decry even the most well-intentioned laws as tyranny—outright refused. This must have led to some colorful discussions between my parents about me and my siblings, but seeing as I was the youngest of three, I surmise my mother chose not to make a fuss by the time I was born.

In the eyes of the state, my brothers and I were non-persons—not that any of us knew this growing up. I’d only started taking interest in my roots in my twenties, after I’d emigrated to the U.S., and it was only then that I learned I’d lived in Cuba for nearly two decades with nary a record of my having been there. Finding definitive proof of exactly where I was born proved impossible, especially after the upheaval Castro’s revolution wrought upon the country. The only records I could consult were the memories of my aging relatives, and even their accounts didn’t always hold water.

My uncles and aunts were already well advanced in years when I put the question to them. Their guess was that I was born in Havana, which was a good guess. Some of my earliest memories were of our family living in a tiny apartment in the city. Our family moved around often because the nature of my father’s work required travel, but we would always come back to Havana.

Meanwhile, Dolores, my paternal grandmother, held a different view. Abuela Lolo continued to reside in Spain after my father left for Cuba and would only visit whenever one of us was born, got baptized, or took our first holy communion. She claimed to have been present while my mother was in labor with me, though how or why my mother allowed this is something I ponder to this day. She said I was born in the countryside of Santa Clara, a province west of Havana, and later came to live in Havana proper when my parents moved there just weeks after my birth.

While what she said rang true, I took her account with a grain of salt. At the time of my asking, she was ninety-seven years old, so I could not rule out failures of memory or dementia. In addition, I could never shake the feeling that Lolo had it in for our family somehow. It’s something we never discussed, but I always felt as though she thought us inferior. She loved us—of that, there is no question—but she just didn’t like us much. It might not be a stretch to think she may have felt Cubans were somehow not up to par with Spaniards. My country was a colony of hers for a good portion of her life, after all. Or perhaps she never forgave my mother (a Cuban) for stealing away her only son, despite it not actually happening that way.

Whatever her reason, she took it to her grave. Still, when I piece together the details in her account of my birth, I can’t help but think she’s still making me the butt of a joke with a punchline eight decades in the making. See, there’s my mom and dad, out in the sticks in the middle of nowhere. My mom, who’s heavily pregnant and in labor, is squatting in a sugarcane field (because all of Cuba is sugarcane fields when you’re from Old World Spain). She’s naked from the waist down as she’s pushing me out. Oh, and let’s not forget that there’s no doctor.

Doctor? Ha! My mother would be lucky to have an alligator as a midwife. This is Cuba, we’re all too busy cutting sugarcane to go to college.

College? Ha! As if!

Speaking of midwives, here comes Abuelita Lolo, mother extraordinaire (and don’t you forget it) who can do everything a mother can do, except better (take that, my creole daughter-in-law). She has got to be the midwife, or why else would she be here? What’s more, nothing gets done right unless she has a hand in it, and so there she goes putting her hands into my mother…

Oh dear, I sure wrote myself into a corner there. Well, you know how children are born, so without further ado…

And just like that, with hardly any effort, Lolo draws me forth from my mother’s womb, simultaneously stiff-arming a hungry alligator that had been patiently waiting to eat me alive. She bundles mewling infant me in palm fronds (who the hell in Cuba has blankets when it’s a hundred degrees out?) and hands me to my father. The grandmother-son duo look upon baby me, their faces reflecting a mixture of exhaustion, satisfaction, and pride in their efforts at successfully bringing this new life into the world all by themselves, with absolutely no input or assistance from anyone else—none at all—and especially not from my mother.

Meanwhile, my mom is on her back, passed out and shivering in buttocks-high water. The alligator from before claps its jaws around her waist and drags her away to its burrow. She will keep it fed for weeks.

I added those last few details as embellishments, but it’s likely close to what Abuela Lolo would have wanted.

Stern as my father and his side of the family were, my mother was a poof. A native of the island, she was the product of several generations of good breeding, which meant her attitudes and sensibilities were locked in a byzantine system of social castes and stuffy manners that had largely died off even before she was born.²

She was Cuba’s response to the U.S.’s southern belle—cloistered, unjustifiably entitled, detached from reality, and ever ready to swoon at the indignities of modern living. She pined for simpler days, when the world was run by people of caliber; people whose forms of address included such titles as viscount and marquis. She wasn’t alone in this manner of thinking—all the money pouring into Cuba gave rise to a class of nouveau riche who challenged the traditional social establishment. The burgeoning bourgeoisie were quickly making the old nobility obsolete. This saddened her, because in her view, all they had was money—not class, not prestige, nor dignity—and they were ruining the country. These newly rich Cubans were pushy and boorish, demanding always to have their way and, failing that, ever ready to pass a bribe to ensure they got what they wanted.

Faced with the waning elegance of Cuba’s yesteryear and the prospects of a crass society where only money mattered, the traditionally-minded Cuban sometimes took it upon himself to trace his genealogy back to someone of importance. It was an entirely feasible strategy—on an island, it only takes a few generations before everyone is related to everyone else with only a few degrees of separation. Moreover, when this strategy worked, it paid off in spades in terms of job opportunities and societal privileges. And when it didn’t, it made for heated conversations at elderly ladies’ clubs, which by this time had become the most reliable genealogical databases on the island.

My mother was the traditional Cuban housewife, by the mutual and silent accord of my parents. Mom considered the concept of a working woman offensive to her upbringing, and dad was such a raging male chauvinist that would make even Stanley Kowalski blush. He rarely allowed her out of the house unless they were together. Dad had the unquestionable rule of the roost. My mother never complained—indeed, she’d been raised never to confront her spouse directly—and yet, part of me believes she was content just with being a kept woman.

My parents likely met in Havana shortly after my father’s arrival there in 1939. My brothers were born the following year—twin boys, Jacinto and Camilo. Their birth came as a tremendous shock to my mother’s family, as my parents were not married. Despite promises and occasional death threats from my mother’s family, my father simply could not be bothered to marry my mother. He loved her, that much was certain, and despite his overbearingly macho personality, he