Sometimes I Would Like to Sit Down and Cry: Memoirs

By Amarilis Presilla

Its no wonder that Amarilis Presilla has titled her memoir Sometimes I Would Like to Sit Down and Cry. Reminiscing can be painful when she thinks back on all the hardships she has knownnot just within her family but for the Cuban people as well. Since arriving in the United States from Cuba seven years ago, Amarilis has written it all down, reliving both the good and the bad.

Her idyllic childhood in the riverside village of Mayari was not to last. A powerful flood laid waste to her beloved town, yet this was nothing compared to the coming upheaval of Castros revolution. What follows is an epic tale of love, family, struggle, self-improvement, and rebellion. Finally escaping and reuniting with her family, Amarilis Presilla now shares her triumphant story with you.

Jack Silbert, The Hudson Reporter

• Language: English
• Publisher: AuthorHouse
• Release date: Oct 21, 2014
• ISBN: 9781496945525

Amarilis Presilla

Nació y creció en Mayarí, Cuba, Amarilis ha sido maestra toda su vida, especialista en lenguas y literatura y ha enseñado desde los primeros grados hasta el nivel universitario. En los Estados Unidos fue también maestra y rercepcionista en una oficina médica. Ella es también escritora de ficción y poesía. Vive en Weehawken, New Jersey con su hijo, el arquitecto Gustavo Diez Presilla, cuyas ilustraciones aparecen en este libro.

Book preview

© 2014 Amarilis Presilla. All rights reserved.

Illustrations by Gustavo Diez Presilla

No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted by any means without the written permission of the author.

Published by AuthorHouse 10/20/2014

ISBN: 978-1-4969-4553-2 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-4969-4552-5 (e)

Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Thinkstock are models,

and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.

Certain stock imagery © Thinkstock.

Because of the dynamic nature of the Internet, any web addresses or links contained in this book may have changed since publication and may no longer be valid. The views expressed in this work are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher, and the publisher hereby disclaims any responsibility for them.

Contents

Preface: Dreaming of America

Part l

The Funny Moment

The Family Saga

La Casa Presilla - Modas Isolina

Kundela-Kundela and other Quarrels

Mayari: Valley, Town, and River

My Awful Nightmare

John Vincent Beach

The Flood

Days of War: A Battle in Mayari

The Little House of Noah

The Shining Ghost

Two Phenomena and the Nostalgia

Part II

The Hot Land

The Utopia

The Special Period in Times of Peace

The Avatars of the Third Generation

Buying Chocolate Bars

The Mysterious Place

The Miserable Patriarch

The Lost Dream

Choosing a Wrong Partner

Two Kinds of Prisons

An Angel in Havana

The Romantic City

Epilogue: Thoughts from America

To my children:

My companions,

my teachers, and

my love

Preface

Dreaming of America

Writing a book was always my dream. In fact, I studied my entire career preparing to do it, but life was misleading me all the time. Years passed, and I was losing hope in the bustle of days inside the great prison where my destiny locked me: Cuba, the country of my birth. The great obstacle that kept me from reaching my dream was the totalitarian government of Fidel Castro, which has the record of being the longest tyranny in the world. At this time, he has been there for more than fifty years, but who knows? Maybe he will live as long as Methuselah.

There you could write whatever you had in mind, but you could never get published, even at your own expense, if your book reflected some minimal criticism of the government. You couldn’t write anything negative about the people with high positions, the very bad conditions citizens have to live in, the corrupt laws and injustices, or the lies of those who misgovern the country, among other topics. Since the beginning of this tyranny, Castro and his followers were very careful to keep all the intellectuals under their feet because they knew that the revolutionary movements around the world were always the opus of the intellectual class.

I was thinking about a place where the opportunities to reach your goals in life were at your fingertips if only you made your best effort. I have had to wait almost a lifetime. Maybe I was detained from my destiny in the name of love. I was dreaming of America, but I could not leave behind my parents, old and lonely, knowing that my good-bye might be forever. And I could not leave any of my children because they are the only real and true meaning of my life; they are and will always be my heart.

At last, my time has come, and I have started taking the steps to achieve this dream. But first of all, I have to begin with my memorial to all those people I loved who are already gone. I have to remember, to publicize, and to tell all the suffering, the whole loss. All the agony of living the best years of my youth and witnessing those who expended their lives in the land of the dispossessed, where time is not a reality and the country is a hateful prison that has destroyed all the people I loved. They have lost everything in the name of some macabre dream of an unreal equality, an unreal solidarity, an unreal fraternity of Fidel Castro: a maniac who became president of a beautiful country which he has destroyed in a systematic way, full of nastiness and evil.

Today, not so late, I am at the gateway of my dream. It has given me a great pleasure to start writing, though in the beginning it was very difficult, like when you used to play an instrument but then you stop. When you start again, you feel like you don’t know anything, that you forgot all about it. But you just need to do it, to rediscover the truth. The key is to start, because if you came to know something once, you know it forever.

I have used the English language, which has become my second language, to write this book for my American fellows, because they might not know about the things that happened in a place that has produced many immigrants to their country. Talking to some of them, I have realized that they need to know why we came here instead of fighting the dictator. My most important goal is that all those who read this book may learn that Cuba is not a country of cowards. I want them to know some of the means by which we have been trapped. Cubans are smart, nice, and good people (though sometimes they talk too much!). They are also kind and used to helping those who are disadvantaged in life. Cuban people have suffered doubly because they have had to swallow all the euphoria of the first years of revolution, when most of them thought that they were chosen for fortune, that they were number one.

This stupid man and those crazy, defiant speeches against Yankee imperialism that never gave a dime for all the garbage in his words, all the military marches like those of Hitler and the Soviets (by the way, those are another people who thought they were fortune’s children, yet today thousands of them are wandering around the world, just like Cubans). Those dreams of grandeur are now hidden in the part of the heart where you keep the deepest and most painful memories.

This has been the sin of Cuban people, smart but naïve, intelligent but credulous, educated but silly. These people need forgiveness and help; they don’t know what to do. They are obfuscated after all the years of loss and confusion. They look for the door out of the great prison where they live. They are not martyrs yet, but who knows, maybe the day is close.

Here are some of my personal memories; they might be sad, funny, tragic, and full of melancholy, where the lost dreams are mixed with new ones, and with the nostalgia that will be forever in my heart.

Part l

38993.png

The Funny Moment

There are thousands of bad things that I remember, and others that I have forgotten since the Castro tyranny started in my country. However, there is a funny moment that I will never forget: All my family was gathered around the dining room table, waiting for the clock to strike twelve to receive the New Year with a toast, when somebody came in and said that Batista, the dictator who had misgoverned the country until that day, was gone. Someone proposed a toast to Fidel Castro’s triumph and the cups were raised, but my mother didn’t join in. All who were present stared at her, astonished.

Then she said, I have lived very well until now, and I’m concerned about what this new government could bring to us; that is why I’m not going to do any toast for him. Laughing and yelling, everyone started to throw little pieces of apples and grapes at her. That was the last time I ate those fruits in more than forty years. Everything started to go bad, in all levels of life. The euphoria was so huge that I think most people believed that some kind of Messiah had arrived. This was so pathetic that if it had not been for all I had lost, all I had suffered, and for all that man did to my family, my friends, my way of life, and my country, maybe I could have felt some pity for those people who allowed this egocentric man to be president, but I couldn’t. It is very sad; I’m never going to forgive them.

Nevertheless, I can say that inside me I’m still pure; I’m the educated and cultivated person my parents raised. I’m still the one who carries God in her heart, who still believes in family, in traditions, morals, ethics, and law. My little brother always makes fun of me because he says that communism could have infected me due to all the years I had to live there, but it is not so. In the evolution of this story, you are going to see how the funny moment turned out to be a tragedy. My mother’s intuition