Moments, Memories, and Men: An Immigrant’s Trigenerational Historical Reminiscences of Pre-Castro Cuba, Fleeing to America and Serving Its Military for Forty-One Years (1881–2021)

By Pascual Goicoechea

The book is an account of a young man whose mother died in Havana in 1956 and then raised by his father in the pre-revolution turbulence of the time. Fleeing communism, they arrived in Texas in May 1960, where the author comes of age. He soon assimilates into America and graduates from high school. Lacking academic direction, he joins the US Navy and falls in love with the rigors, discipline, and culture of military life. After an eight-year enlistment, he earned a commission in the US Army as an Infantry Officer and retired forty-one years later. At his father’s deathbed, the father asked him to pen the memoirs he kept of his long military career, as well as those he kept of his own life in Havana and those of his father, a diplomat for the Republic of Cuba for 36 years. The book thematically chronicles the written narratives of the three men and ends in present-day America.

• Language: English
• Publisher: WestBow Press
• Release date: Feb 25, 2022
• ISBN: 9781664256842

Pascual Goicoechea

Born in Havana in 1949, Pascual and his family fled Cuba a year after the bloody communist revolution. They arrived in Houston Texas in May 1960. He learned English, and by default, the Texan language, growing up there during his teenage years. He graduated from high school in 1969, and on the day that America landed on the moon, he had an epiphany. Although accepted to a university, he realized academia could not deliver the marvels that life, and America specifically, so readily offered. He also realized that in order to save himself, from himself, the travel agency to deliver that would be the US military. He enlisted in the US Navy for eight years, and thereafter was commissioned an officer of infantry in the US Army. He would go on to serve a total of forty-one years, serving in combat and garrison environments worldwide. He earned numerous combat and achievement awards. He retired from active duty in 2010. He is a graduate of Florida International University, the University of South Florida and numerous senior service schools and institutions. He resides in Clayton, North Carolina with his wife Sharon. Both travel, garden and are involved in their community and with Veteran’s issues. This memoir evokes colorful memories in a gifted writing style. Such remembrances were brought back to life by the author’s well-kept notes, as well as those of his father, a banker in Havana for twenty years, and before that, those of his grandfather, one of Cuba’s first ambassadors to Europe in a career that spanned thirty-six years.

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Moments, Memories, and Men

An Immigrant’s Trigenerational Historical Reminiscences

of Pre-Castro Cuba, Fleeing to America and Serving

Its Military for Forty-One Years (1881–2021)

DEDICATION

This book is dedicated to the memory of my father, a scholar of the world and a man who foretold historical events before they came to pass. He was a gentleman whose knowledge was instrumental in my writing about a magical era and beyond. He was someone I should have listened to more closely and wished I had told more often, I love you.

The book is also dedicated to the nearly two million refugees, immigrants, and exiles who fled Cuba, as well as those who perished to sharks, in prison, or at the hand of the secret police or firing squad.

It is also dedicated to America, the noblest of nations in the history of humanity, and the nation that welcomed this modern diaspora to its bosom, affording everyone freedom.

Lastly, and most important, it is dedicated to my wife, Sharon, whose love, support, and insistence were essential in chronicling three generations of previously scribed, oral, and mental reminiscences and who is the woman at the center of my life.

CONTENTS

Preface

Acknowledgments

Introduction

Chapter 1     Grandfather the Diplomat

Chapter 2     My Father the Banker

Chapter 3     The Innocence of Youth; My Early Years

Chapter 4     Freedom and a New Life in America

Chapter 5     Texas

Chapter 6     Induction into the Armed Forces of the United States

Chapter 7     The Miami of the Early ’70s and Commissioning as a Second Lieutenant of Infantry

Chapter 8     A Short Chapter with Lifelong Repercussions

Chapter 9     The Army of the 1980s and Desert Storm

Chapter 10   The Army and Decade of the 1990s

Chapter 11   Special Operations Command: 1999–2005

Epilogue

PREFACE

I hear, I forget; I see, I remember; I write, I understand.

—Spanish proverb

I have been granted much in life—most importantly, a loving wife who has been a pillar of strength and a beacon of hope during difficult times. Our children, who have achieved much on their own, are healthy and in good relations. I was raised by strong-willed parents whose love ensured we understood the meaning of right and wrong, good and evil. My parents instilled in us the importance of education, specifically, the utilization of critical thinking and common sense. In late 1959, we fled Cuba’s violent communist revolution and arrived on the shores of a nation singularly known in humanity’s history for its freedoms and opportunities. A country that affords any individual the ability to rise from whence they came to any level desired based on their merits and efforts. And I was fortunate to be granted the opportunity to sit in the classrooms of impressive teachers. Teachers who were there to teach and not be one’s friends, psychologists, or counselors. Those same teachers whose passion and love for their profession inadvertently left their names etched in my memory forever: Coach Ashmore; Mrs. Bartlett; Mr. Crittenden; Mr. Dante; Senor(s) Garcia and Lopez; Brother(s) Jorge, Pedro, Alejandro; Mrs. Lawson; Ms. Lay; Mr. Macey; Ms. Rheismueller; Assistant Principal Dale Stafford; Mrs. Taylor; Ms. Trautwein; Mr. Wilkerson; Ms. Witte, and others.

I was also granted the gift of a keen memory—a memory so vibrantly active that it resurrects moods, sounds, fragrances, feelings, and scents as if moments ago.

My earliest recollections of youth in Havana are held in the clarity of yesterday’s events. I credit the affinity of such memory to my father, who, after my mother’s death to cancer in the mid-1950s, did all he could to indemnify for the significant loss of the maternal half of the parental unit. Although my sister suffered the same loss, he could not always provide for her in the same manner he had for me. For her, that support came in the form of and was filled by aunts Tina and Marta, the wives of my mother’s brothers, Jose (Pepe) and Rafael (Rafa) Elortegui. Eventually, to help ease the pain, Dad took us on trips to New York and Canada for Christmas in 1957 and then again in 1958. But for a young man in Cuba during that era and under those circumstances, it was acceptable, even expected, to be under the inculcation of one’s father as I was. Before my mother’s death, Dad had already afforded me numerous glimpses of Havana. Afterward, I began accompanying him more frequently when he visited places in Old Havana (La Vieja Habana), New Havana (La Nueva Habana), its outskirts, and on occasion, the provinces of Havana, Pinar del Rio, and Matanzas. I accompanied him to work on personal dealings, shopping, eating, philatelic club activities, errands, and fishing trips. When we traveled to the older section of Havana, we often rode the buses (guaguas) or the old yellow trolley cars (tranvias) that were still in vogue in the city’s old quarter. However, Dad preferred to drive his blue 1952 Buick Special convertible, as he enjoyed that over any other means of transportation. The area was close to the port near the national train station. The area always smelled of creosote, toluene, and benzene because of the nearby Shell and Texaco refineries at the end of the harbor.

Whenever I was with my father, I met fascinating men and charming women. These individuals all had interesting backgrounds, colorful occupations, engaging personalities, and fascinating professions.

Men were cheerful, resourceful, and, like most Cubans, were loud, funny, and always exaggerating to a fault. Dad quickly found the soul of a person by the way he dealt with them. Dad was a natural, authentic, and truthful man. He spoke in the tone of a common man. There was no aloofness or airs of grandeur about him, as he required no such amulets. His character facilitated the ease in which he and others got to know one another. I learned this from him, attesting to the servitude it has afforded me in my relations with different nationalities, neighbors, fellow service members, coworkers, friends, and adversaries alike. I learned about dealing with people by walking Havana’s streets at an early age alongside my dad. There was a time on this planet when people spoke, joked, and laughed with one another whether they sold lottery tickets at a street corner or peddled peanuts across the handlebars of a bicycle. The cobbler spoke and laughed with Dad, so did the trolley and bus conductors, as did the operations managers for Lykes Shipping Lines or Sears & Roebuck. I reveled during those moments in his company, as well as with the countless other people and places I visited with him.

I was yet too young to have formed an opinion about girls or women in general but already had an interest in and curiosity for them that was not quelled by nonsense statements about girls having cooties as was prevalent with my male counterparts in the United States. My treehouse never displayed signage warning girls to stay away. To me, they were always pretty, clean, and smelled better than I did. In the years that ensued, such appreciation grew to a descriptive, beautiful. The acceptable quality of the word alone elevated women to a level unattainable to men. Men could be funny or intelligent, or both. An old Spanish proverb described the ideal man as "feo, fuerte y formal" (ugly, strong, and formal). During those formative years, the women I met while in my father’s company were always intelligent, pleasing, funny, engaging, and, yes, very pretty.

All those men and women, all those moments, sights, sounds, places, events, captivating enchantment, and seductive tropical ineffability are what made the Havana of the 1950s so mesmerizingly surreal. The beauty, gaiety, music, romance, and innocence that the city was known for also revealed, at times, nefariously dark secrets that gave hints that all the afore was not so. From the comforts of our own home, in the distance, at night, the staccato of machine-gun fire was often heard. By late 1958, the wide boulevards’ orderly traffic pattern was frequently interrupted by Sherman tanks’ movements and other armored vehicles. Young and under my father’s street tutelage, I became an interactive student in a live history class that unfolded in front of my impressionable eyes and soul. Having an early fascination with history, I became a novice and then a specialist in the subject for the rest of my life. Those moments so long ago lived shaped my personal and professional life to this day.

The following is an account of such personal experiences—an autobiography of sorts. To write this, I have called upon my mental faculties as well as the hundreds of notes I took throughout particular moments in my life over four decades. The scribblings were on the back of envelopes, cocktail napkins, inside matchbook covers, Marlboro cigarettes boxes, or c-ration boxes of beans and franks while manning a .50 caliber machine-gun. All came about by the activation of an inexplicable mental mechanism the likes of a tropical breeze, a song or a tune, a woman’s fragrance, the radiance of (her) eyes, a cloud formation, the sounds from within a three-canopy Panamanian jungle at four in the morning, a child’s laughter, the smell of creosote, strong coffee, napalm, cordite, gunpowder, or a good cigar. Memory triggers all. I knew then that by saving such scribbling, I would someday facilitate the writing of this book.

And I utilized the stories and accounts told by my dad and those of his father’s written notes and diplomatic memoirs. Their notes reflected personal and opinionated inflections of societal makeups and unfolding historical events. Their literary recollections were a result of their conscious due diligence during their passage through historical times while human travelers on this earth; my grandfather’s, in service to the Republic of Cuba as a diplomat, and my dad’s, as the man he became growing up in between the two world wars in Europe, and who arrived in Havana in the early 1930s.

Without those two men, I could not have presented much of the early color of this tome.

I thank my father and grandfather for their insight in leaving a written legacy filled with historical and heraldic evidence. To assist me in writing this, I at times utilized the modern marvels of the web and the service of ancestry.com, I only used these to clarify a date, the spelling of a vessel, the viewing of a boarding manifest, or other historical documents. Before the advent of these two modern marvels of today were the two old wonders of yesteryear—my father and grandfather. I regret the misfortune of not having found many of these memoirs until years after my dad’s death in my arms at 0500 hours on 22 November 1998. At the time of his passing, I was still on active duty, remaining so until I retired from the army in April 2010. I then began to open sealed boxes, scrapbooks, and notebooks filled with photographs, yellowed newspapers, and mementos that I only wish I had known existed earlier.

These memoirs are not a work of fiction but are bona fide reflections of facts about life in Havana during that era. It was an era so magical that it could lead the reader to question the author’s fantasy writing potential. Neither is this a definitive history, although the author was an unassuming participant during such moments. The events and personages named here are all on the public record and found in the digest of history; most, if not all, are no longer living. Those individuals still living, and whom I mention by their given name, I did so with their granted permission, owing them my affectionate gratitude. Some names herein were changed to protect the innocent and afford me legal peace of mind. The spelling of some words, cities, personal opinions, and observations, especially those penned by my father and grandfather, were taken directly from their notes and are reflective of the era and language they wrote them in: French, German, or Spanish. This book is not a diary but could best be classified as an individual’s written account of lived historical occurrences in what otherwise sounds like a storybook setting.

The events described herein deserve the characteristic introduction of any good story; not so long ago in a land not far away would appear to be a plausible entry. However, the evidence indicates the story took place in an era warped by time. These memoirs reveal a once vibrant society that once habituated an island off the coast of Florida.

This memoir chronicles the lives of the three men mentioned above and records their recollections about their lives, events, and professions. The protagonists did not take themselves too seriously, as noted by the levity found within the lines and often reverence to God.

I undertook this endeavor to chronicle for our children who I and their forbearers were and to present a reflection of what the world was like not so long ago. The initial push into this venture came from my father, who provided his documentation and those of his father before him. Some of those notes had been in storage for seventy years. Upon my military retirement, my wife, Sharon, appealed to my sense of history and further urged me to write the memoir.

It took me nearly five years to write the book, not because I was void of subject matter, but because I was full of life, and other perceived exigencies beckoned. In the end, they were just excuses that kept me away from writing; however, I would not have done anything differently at Rotary, with my family, my friends, and coworkers at the local hardware store, Hudson’s Hardware.

Finally, in 2016, I started deciphering old notes from stained and moth-eaten papers. As I wrote, I realized the men’s flair for writing lay not in the commonality of their style but in their ability to evoke human feelings and emotions while simultaneously traveling through time.

When I deciphered the protagonists’ notes, style, and time-era of recording, I organized the book’s format in a fashion that lent fidelity to the original writer’s intention. The first three chapters highlight the three men in thematic order: my grandfather, father, and me. Each chapter is indicative of (their) notes and professional observations. Beyond those initial chapters, the ones that follow make lesser reference to the first two men. My involvement in the remaining chapters is evident, as I remain the sole living protagonist. The chapters are subtitled using the protagonists’ memory vignettes, in the order and style of the recorder’s notes and chronological recollections. The book concludes with the author’s retirement from the military and closes with an epilogue and provenance.

I am who I am today due to the very people, environment, and occurrences I mention in my opening paragraph and every page after that. I owe it to them and my rational ability to change and become a better person and the freedoms I have upheld and defended while a member of our nation’s armed forces for forty-one years. I also realize that this beautiful life is not a result of a big bang theory or expanding galactic hole. Neither do I believe that my great-grand-pappy grew catfish legs and walked out of the Almendares River in Havana to appreciate Ernesto Lecuona’s melodies or dance to the rhythms of Beni More or Perez Prado. Life has been too fascinating, romantic, and heartbreaking, but always majestic in its pure magnificence. One must look into a newborn’s face or examine a tomato plant’s DNA through a microscope to realize this whole thing didn’t happen inside a Hoover vacuum cleaner.

No, I would not change a single word from that opening paragraph except the fourth one on the very first sentence, from granted to blessed.

—Pascual Goicoechea Elortegui

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Writing these memories also recalled the tenets I applied during a life well-lived. Without those, none of this would have been possible. These remain:

1. Integrity: Without it, nothing else would have mattered. There would have been no trust, no military, no career, no friends, or self-respect. No book.

2. Education: Formal and streetwise were both essential; learn something, read everything.

3. Faith: In God and country.

4. Love: For my wife.

5. Respect: For the uniform, the flag, and my soldiers.

6. Fear(ed): An insensible death or one without dignity.

7. Positive Thoughts: Think as if you were still thirty!

This is the first book I have written, and perhaps, it may not be my last. In the absence of professional discipline and understanding in the field, I relied heavily on my publisher, Westbow Press, specifically my coordinator Mr. Joseph Anderson. He always provided clear and correct answers to the gamut of questions I often sought answers to. His patience and calm demeanor are noted and much appreciated.

There are (many) other individuals to thank in the publishing of this book. Collectively, their names, natural or otherwise, are immortalized between the covers of this book. Without them and those mutually shared memories and experiences, I could not have written this.

I thank Ms. Christine N. Littmann for the book’s cover design. Tirelessly, she created a cover that encapsulated and was representative of my life and the descriptive written stanzas between the book’s covers.

Before a water pump begins to produce, it needs priming. The initial priming for the book came from my father’s insistence I do so and based on records he and his dad had kept for years and his knowledge of my own written personal memories. I thank my father and grandfather for their insight in leaving (me) a written legacy replete with heraldic and historical evidence that primed the writing pump.

There are others to be thankful toward, especially those who urged me to continue writing after reading selected chapters from the book.

I thank my friend Ms. Jo Pagel who proofread the book and made the appropriate changes and corrections as needed.

And last, but most notably, I thank my wife, Sharon. Her love, support, and dedication were instrumental that I finish the book. Her digital web and electronic format knowledge were crucial to someone still comfortable with an Underwood typewriter. I love you, baby!

INTRODUCTION

Setting the Table for the Book

Rubbing Elbows with History, Its Personae, and the Past

I grew up with an innate sense of the past and the humans who came before my arrival around these parts. I found such thoughts intriguing, although I did not lose much sleep over them.

I attended an all-boys Catholic school in Havana named La Salle in the Miramar district of Havana. In upcoming pages, I will detail the specificity of that learning institution’s functionally eclectic makeup. A student’s imagination was often piqued by the degree to which the teachers taught us anatomy, mathematics, geography, grammar, religion, science, and history. Teachers applied learning techniques by using analogies relevant to the Cuban society of the era. Whatever negatives may have been said about La Salle, students generally walked away with the understanding and knowledge of the subjects taught. This understanding was either learned or earned in one form or the other. For example, if a student was fortunate enough to have had a genuine interest in learning a subject, God bless him. If, however, such a claim was not present, the preferred tutorial mean became a swift blow of the instructor’s knuckles to the student’s head while simultaneously yelling at him in an Iberian accent, "cabetha dura!" (hard-head!)

I learned history naturally and with ease.

I also learned the Spanish language with all its correct tenses, colloquialism, and idioms, and I can speak, read, and write it flawlessly. Unlike history, however, I owe such eloquence to Senor Garcia’s hands-on approach. Years later, when my wife Sharon took Spanish at North Carolina State University, she would ask why certain words, past/present sentences, and verbs changed; I could not answer her in a textbook format why it was so. However, with repeated conviction, I would reply, I know it is so because Senor Garcia said so.

Most of the teaching staff were Catholic brothers and patterned after the Jesuit Order of instructors. All were affectionately called "hermanos" (brothers). The Spanish abbreviation for brother was hrmno, and their birth first name preceded that. By the schools’ protocols, one never knew or was supposed to know their last names.

History and geography were taught throughout the primary grades, initially by hrmnos Pedro and later Alejandro and Jorge, and later still by professor(s) Garcia and Lopez.

Hermano Pedro’s last name was revealed to me by a classmate whose father was the head of the secret police. I kept quiet, of course. However, what was unknown to me in the mid-1950s was that nearly nineteen years later, I would be engaged to hrmno Pedro’s niece in Miami, a stewardess. She flew for Pan American Airlines during the heyday of that carrier’s history. She was a nice girl, and we were a couple for a while but never married. Peter, Paul & Mary had a song during that time, something about leaving on a jet plane.

From such historical teachings, I learned that Jesus Christ is a good man. We knew that He wore sandals, was a decent man who healed the sick, helped the poor, saved lives, and got things done. For all this, Judas, one of his disciples, betrayed and turned Him over to the local Roman legion for a few silver shekels. In typical political fashion unchanged since millennia, Rome’s administrator to the province, Pontius Pilate, sentenced Jesus to death by crucifixion but justified his decision on the will of the people. Like Castro, Pilate became one of the first demagogues to believe history would be kind to them and who justified their ill doings on the assumption history would absolve them.

Indeed, of much lesser stature than Jesus Christ but still having historical significance, we learned about such luminaries as Marcus Aurelius and Julius Caesar and their roles in the recruiting and forming the Sixth, Tenth, and Twelfth Fulminata Legions in Spain—Spaniards (Iberians) all. We learned how these legions had gone north and conquered Gaul, Britannia, and Germania with such recruits. We learned of the numerous Spanish Crusades against the Moors in Spain, North Africa, the Middle East, and El Cid’s role in routing the Moors from southern Spain. To round out our studies with an Anglo-Saxon twist, we learned about King Arthur and his court and the Magna Carta writing.

All this and more we learned at an early age.

We learned Cuban history at an early age, as well.

We learned of an Italian seafarer who approached Queen Isabella of Spain in the summer of 1492 requesting she finance him three ships and an all-expense-paid trip to what would ultimately be the Caribbean, and she did.

And it was with great pride that the question of who had discovered Cuba was asked by our Iberian professors, as what had been the first words uttered by that seafarer upon seeing Cuba. The students had best be ready to answer when called upon, as merely raising a hand indicated a smart-aleck kid wanting to outshine his classmates. The professors had instilled fear and terror as part of the teaching curriculum. Homework was issued daily, and the student had best do it in the event (he) would be called upon the following day. Great was the day when one was not called upon by the teacher. By Thursday and Friday, the teachers knew which students remained to answer a question! In retrospect, fear and terror were effective ways to learn.

The correct answer to the above paragraph’s question was, of course, Christopher Columbus, and that he had discovered Cuba on October 28, 1492. The words he muttered upon casting his eyes upon the land were, the most beautiful paradise human eyes had ever seen.

Columbus claimed the land for Spain and named it Juana. The island was later renamed Cuba as a derivative of its aboriginal name, Cubanascan. The two indigenous tribes found in Cuba at the time were the Ciboney and the Tainos. From where these tribes derived remains a mystery. The Ciboney arrived from Florida or the Yucatan Peninsula and lived on the island’s western part. The Tainos were descendants from South America’s Arawaks and lived in the eastern region. The tribes were relatively small and not hostile. Both were tribes that disappeared by the late fifteenth century due to an immune system that could not cope with European diseases.

Havana boasted a natural harbor that was ideal for trade, whether that trade came in the form of pirates, buccaneers, the British, or other rival naval powers of the fifteenth, sixteenth, or seventeenth centuries. In no small measure, the Spaniards ruled the island throughout most of those centuries, and Cuba prospered, though quietly. Havana was the final embarkation point from the Spanish New World, sailing to Europe and, in reverse, was its primary point of debarkation from Europe to the Spanish New World. Stability, prosperity, and peace prevailed until the middle 1800s, when Spanish rule became tyrannical.

In October 1868, the first battle cry of freedom was given at the city of Yara, "El Grito de Yara. It was proclaimed in the eastern provinces and quickly spread to the western region of Las Villas. The movement declared Cuban independence and the establishment of a republic. The campaign was led by Ignacio Agramonte, General Carlos Manuel de Cespedes, and Pedro Figueredo, who wrote the Cuban national anthem and whose sixteen-year-old daughter carried the first Cuban flag into battle there. This first war for independence lasted ten years and thereby was dubbed the Ten Year War." The war culminated with the Spaniards still in power and little change after the long struggle. When hostilities ended, Spain seized the land that belonged to those that, in their opinion, had supported the insurrection. Spain justified this action to pay for the cost of the war. This action further fueled hatred toward Spanish rule.

In the decade or so that followed, however, the Cuban economy, specifically the sugar exports to the United States, grew and prospered. Nearly all sugar exports were shipped to the United States, as were most other Cuban commodities. The economic boom was enjoyed by Cubans who were now able to purchase more products from the United States with their newfound wealth. The North Americans took note of this enhanced commerce. The economic stability relieved the pressure for nationalist movements, at least for the moment.

By the mid-1890s, a combination of falling worldwide demand for sugar and the imposition of tariffs by Spain on most US products arriving in Cuba created not just a devastating economic situation for the Cuban citizen but a political crisis for both Spain and the United States. Nationalist tensions again surfaced, and a new, emboldened revolutionary movement took hold. Insurgent leaders of the past war, and others, returned to the limelight; all took on the call for renewed Cuban independence.

The Grito de Yara of 1868 was replaced by the Grito de Baire in 1895. Unlike the former, this one harbored a foundation of populism that did not merely believe in just getting rid of Spain but gave thought to a nation’s birth. The economic developments that had fostered between the islanders and the United States in the decade preceding 1895 gave fortitude to the movement for independence. Some people in the United States argued for intervention on the side of Cubans seeking freedom based on the economic ties that had already developed. Many in the United States saw an opportunity to gain a foothold in Cuba to free it of Spanish rule. For those very same reasons, however, many in Cuba’s independence movement argued about why they needed to rid themselves of Spanish dominance if all that was to be gained was dominance by the United States.

Manifest destiny was a coined term in the United States and gave believable credence to the nation’s expansion beyond its then-current borders.

Jose Marti, the apostle of Cuban independence, and after many years of exile in New York and Tampa imposed by the Spanish, returned to the island in 1895. He had made numerous and influential friends while in the United States, all of whom believed Cuba should be an independent nation. On his very first armed attack against a Spanish garrison later that year, he was felled by gunfire.

The years 1895 to 1898 were marked by