In addition to her roles as baby and princess, for years my sister Glenna starred as the sole blood relative born in the United States. Glenna, la americana. From St. Luke’s Hospital in February 1963, she went to the Sibley Manor apartment complex in West St. Paul. Our 730-square-foot basement apartment was one of five hundred fifty units in fifty-five buildings on twenty-two acres of land. Other Cubans had moved to ten-year-old Sibley Manor as well.
Then and now, the Julen family owned and operated the apartment complex. To their credit, they have stayed true to their founding mission, which is to provide clean, safe, and affordable housing. Originally, the Julens had military housing in mind—specifically, Korean War veterans and people working at nearby Fort Snelling, according to Community Reporter editor Jerry Rothstein. Those populations declined during the late 1950s. Airline and airport workers followed as tenants.
The Beruvides family moved from their sponsors’ house to an apartment inside an old, divided house on Rice Street. The living quarters were small, with one bathroom and a master bedroom. The children, José and Ariana, shared a room with many windows behind the kitchen, probably a sun porch.
The Beruvides family was not satisfied with their new place, partly stemming from living apart from other Cubans. At the time, many Cubans gathered at the St. Paul home of an American woman who had sponsored an exile family. Roberto Beruvides went to see her about moving again, this time to Sibley Manor.
The Beruvides family moved to an apartment facing a courtyard in the 1358 building and it was their home for many years. Luis Padilla helped with the physical move. Already, his wife, Virginia, and their three boys were settled at Sibley Manor.
Meanwhile, some Minnesotans were not pleased with our coming into the United States. A December 5, 1965, Minneapolis Tribune article, “Public Uneasy over Influx of Cubans,” gives the results of a statewide poll concerning Cuban immigration. “A majority of the people taking part in a statewide survey (51 percent) think the United States should not encourage Cuban families to leave their homeland.”
Minnesotans were “just as reluctant about inviting Cuban families to live in Minnesota. Fifty-two percent believe it would be a ‘poor idea’ to invite Cuban families to settle in their communities, while 34 percent look upon that as a good idea.”
The arguments against our immigration still echo today. The opposition said we’d work for lower wages and therefore hijack jobs from American workers; they said the United States could not afford to care for more people; Cubans wouldn’t adapt to a different social structure; Communists and other troublemakers would be among the refugees. Adaptation to the climate was another reason.
The Beruvides family underwent many changes in order to adapt quickly to their new home in Minnesota. Roberto Beruvides had been a professional actor in Cuba. In the Twin Cities, he worked two jobs, one with EMC, on equipment; another involved making Spanish language recordings. Later, Roberto worked at a factory during the day, with my uncle Epifanio. Roberto’s evening job was at KTCA television. Noris also used her Spanish language skills to make recordings. In addition, she provided childcare in their apartment. Eventually, Noris went to cosmetology school to become a licensed hairdresser.
Like other Cubans, their household furnishings were sparse and rickety, Noris said. The double bed, for example, was missing a leg so she and her husband propped it up with brick. When they moved to Sibley Manor, the bricks were accidentally left on Rice Street. They discovered this, much to their dismay, when they were exhausted from moving and setting up the bed. Quickly, the bricks were replaced.
My great-uncle Epifanio had been referred to a thrift shop for second-hand furniture. Refugees were directed there in order to make selections suitable for their household. He was amazed by the inventory in the warehouse.
“I’ve never seen such a large collection of garbage,” he told my father.
From those stacks of rejected furniture, unmatched plates, and tired clothing, we initially set up households.
We were grateful. My family is not pretentious. However, the underlying message tied like a little price tag to every second-hand item was this: be satisfied with leftovers.
Owning used goods does not constitute a character flaw. It becomes problematic when others associate it with being people who are less moral, less worthy, perhaps even less human.
Those early days in Minnesota resurfaced when I was in my mid-twenties. I was living in Toledo, Ohio. I’d just gotten a master’s degree. I was teaching as an adjunct professor and writing. Two of my poems had been published in an important journal edited by Ireland’s best poet, Seamus Heaney. Though low on income and without a car, I was healthy. I lived in a cool (also read: poorly insulated) Victorian house with other young people. My free time was spent with other poets and visual artists. Toledo has a tradition of good live jazz. I didn’t go to church on Sundays; instead, I walked a few blocks to the art museum and spent time before favorite paintings.
That day, I sifted through used women’s clothing at a thrift shop in downtown Toledo. More than likely, I was searching for sweaters, as my winter wardrobe was and remains limited. I heard a foreign language. The voices belonged to a Vietnamese family—a mother, an older woman who could have been her mother, and two children. Rack by rack, they sought inexpensive, warm clothing.
The Vietnamese family was a painful reminder of my early years. I knew their purpose in the store. That was us, I thought. It was the first time I felt such a powerful link to my childhood experience.
The moment was overwhelming. So was the aftermath of depression. The days of early exile in this country, those days were never the subject of my writing. I focused on learning technique and craft in my poetry. Like many women writers before me, I explored the private worlds of family, love, and sometimes nature. These worlds provide fodder. In my early forties, I began writing commentary on the U.S. Hispanic experience for Hispanic Link News Service. I danced around many key topics.
The public world of politics was dangerous. It was traumatic for our family; therefore, I avoided it. Yet I couldn’t deny that a political revolution had redirected our lives. Writing about exile was tricky as a result of its triumphs but also its inherent cultural conflicts. I also lacked the confidence to be honest with readers.
So many of my thoughts were hidden or ignored, just as my elders deleted our past life in Cuba. A blank past was a coping mechanism I learned at home.
However, after identifying the source of my depression, I did what I had learned to do. I didn’t tell anyone. I got busy with the psychological task of burying it again so that I could continue ignoring the painful loss.
But there is some digging I have been able to do over time. Excavating the past in order to find answers to basic questions has been dificult work. A simple question like “How did you learn to speak English?” lacked an answer. Through much reflection, I was able to see it was on the grounds of the Sibley Manor complex—its courtyards, side yards, and backyards. That’s where I pinpoint the moment, though of course language acquisition is far more complex.
That day I remember, I played with a bunch of Cuban children—boys and girls together. Many of the kids were older, like Luis, who had gone to school in English. Now in second grade, he had more English words in his vocabulary, though his comprehension was minimal.
Sadly, I didn’t understand what the others were saying as they incorporated English words into Spanish expressions. I was excluded. The norms of my Cuban community were changing. Though it was a beautiful day, I returned to the apartment and my mother. She told me to go back outside to play, but I resisted. I explained why. She encouraged me to go on.
Obediently, I went. That afternoon, on the grounds of the Sibley Manor apartment complex, the English language began making sense to me. I understood English! I ran back inside the apartment to share the triumph with my mother.
Courtyard vocabulary wasn’t sufficient. The kindergarten teacher or my classmates at Homecroft Elementary School didn’t have those words. I didn’t understand them. Why should I go there? Why spend hours with people I didn’t know or understand in that ugly building?
Luis was at St. Therese Catholic School, as was José Beruvides. Later, the school merged with St. Leo’s Catholic School and later still with St. Gregory’s Catholic School. Today, Highland Catholic School is their consolidation.
José’s sister, Ariana, was younger than me by a year and one day, too young to be in my class. I was the only Cuban, the dark one who didn’t speak English.
Homecroft Elementary held confusion and pain. I came to understand the Spanish expression that translates, I haven’t lost anything there.
Let me explain. Since I didn’t speak English, I didn’t have any friends. My classmates didn’t know how to respond to me. Also, my name and my complexion were liabilities. I’m sure the descendants of Northern Europeans found me odd. They must have thought of me as a Native American or African American. Those two peoples were their only points of reference in this northern land. Generally speaking, neither one of those ethnicities, at the time, was held in highest esteem.
This desire to not participate, to not go where others are going, “to not lose anything there,” has been with me since then. I’ve shunned Robert Fulghum’s All I Really Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten despite its wild popularity. It’s now going on my reading list with the hope it will shed more light on those important years.
I’m an introvert, though I am sociable and a skilled public speaker. While I have made most of my living as a professor, groups of people don’t invigorate me. I prefer fewer students and small gatherings, quiet swims, especially in natural surroundings. I meditate and practice a little yoga. I try to limit social situations requiring too much chit-chat. I have played tennis and hiked with a friend. I’ve run miles alone. Beaches are for swimming but also for scanning the horizon. A vacation alone is a prize!
The need for silence results from my acute hearing. I am fifty-eight years old. A recent hearing test revealed that I hear better than a twenty-year-old. Consequently, I can’t get enough silence to compensate for the daily noise, even though the neighborhood is quiet. In fact, one of my dreams is to travel way north, above the Minnesota line, into the middle of Canada. There I imagine renting a cabin for a week or two. With little white noise around me, I will hear the earth’s natural sounds. I long to hear them.
Introversion and resistance have served me in many ways. However, since I’ve had to earn a living, the “not wanting to go” has had to be overcome, conversation after conversation, school after school, year after year, job after job. God’s angels, family and friends, have kept me going.
Often, as in the case of my kindergarten days, my angel of a mother understood my predicament. I didn’t want to be in a community I was unable to be a part of. I couldn’t segregate with Cuban students, since I was the only one in the classroom. Often, she relented. I could stay home with her, like I wanted.
There is a stereotype concerning Latinas and their immediate bonding, that is, our ability to establish community within seconds. First, we are not as individualistic as people are in the United States, so the move toward community may be swifter. Some Hispanic cultures are more formal and reserved than others. A person from Bolivia’s altiplano may have a different temperament than a Spanish Caribbean islander or a coastal person. Depending on the level of enthusiasm displayed when Latinas meet, outsiders may think they are witnessing tremendous bonding. For example, many, many Hispanics greet one another with a kiss on the cheek and take leave from one another in a similar manner. It’s an important gesture that means hello and goodbye, nothing else. Strangers may also receive this greeting. Additionally, the use of Spanish language or not, extended families, religious traditions, class, educational level, country of origin, and U.S. experience—these and other factors may or may not facilitate ease.
Latinas are no different from any other smaller group within a larger culture. For instance, St. Augustine has numerous resettled New Yorkers. When I’ve seen them gather, laughter and conversation abounds. Past experiences and points of view generated by living in New York City are a pleasure to revisit. The immediate common ground, however, does not guarantee the budding of good friendships. My closest friendships are with men and women who either are naturally culturally diverse or have traveled and lived in various regions of the United States or as outsiders in another country. Stronger bonds exist with those friends who are keen on spiritual development.
Despite my refusals to go to school, my parents made attempts to organize my half-days at Homecroft Elementary. A patrol boy from the school lived in our building. He was responsible for walking me to school. I remember his early-morning knocks on the door to get me, my mother often saying no. The door closed. Then, he’d run up the short staircase and out the building’s door.
My mother’s gentle voice explained that I had to go to school soon, that it was time. Luis Gustavo went to school and he liked it, she said.
I do have a few memories from those kindergarten days. Students brought rugs to school for regularly scheduled naps. I liked the quiet time. The other activities were more difficult to enjoy: sitting on the floor while being read to by a strange adult in a strange language, stacking blocks in one corner of the room, alone, and finger-painting at the art table in silence.
One time the teacher stood near the classroom door and called my name. It was time for me to work on art. For once, I was busy in another corner of the room, building something with another little girl. We weren’t talking but we were involved. I didn’t want to stop. It is the only memory I have of engaging with a classmate until the fourth grade.
More than likely, the building blocks had caught my attention. This was unusual because, as my father reports, since a very young age I bored easily with toys. I’d play with them a while, then leave them, much like a cat does when the catnip inside a felt mouse has evaporated.
Across the room, the teacher continued calling me and pointing to the long art table. I waited. I liked the blocks. I didn’t want the rare connection with a classmate broken.
“I know you understand what I’m saying,” the teacher said.
I obeyed.
I left to sit at the table bearing the shame of resisting authority. I feared my parents would learn of it. Having an adult single you out for misbehaving and calling it out for everyone’s attention was to be avoided. In a culture that prizes the collective, a public correction sheds light on the character of the entire family, not just on the individual. A Cuban represents his or her family. Any adult could correct a child, by the way. But causing problems for a teacher was particularly disrespectful.
Still, as an adult, I am ashamed if I am called to task about my behavior by a supervisor, an elder, or a friend. How embarrassing. I work to avoid drawing attention to myself as a result of lack of compliance.
The Cuban model makes room for individuals and their idiosyncrasies. We are family-oriented people, and we include extended families. Often, we are clannish, which inhibits interacting with and committing to the functioning of a larger community. Unless, of course, one belongs to a faith community.
Some blame Catholicism for the shame involved in being singled out for misbehavior. The daily, private review to identify sin results in acknowledgments of failure. Some voices in popular culture contend that such a regular focus on failings erodes self-esteem. Focus on strengths, they say, or you’ll not become a fully realized individual.
The opposite is true.
By understanding themselves as fallible, people learn to live in community. How does that happen? We identify failings and confess them to God. We accept his forgiveness; it is hoped we forgive ourselves. From there, we can begin to extend the same mercy to others.
That’s where community happens.
It must’ve been Halloween when Great-aunt Carmen explained the devil was on the loose that day. What a horrible thing! Scared, I stayed inside the basement apartment at Sibley Manor. At one point during the day I looked up to the living room window and saw the devil run past, but I saw only his feet and tail.
Noris Beruvides (now Baldwin) remembers her family’s first Christmas at Sibley Manor in 1962. An enormous snowfall came. Church members made sure the family had a turkey for their Christmas meal. In fact, that holiday season, they received three turkeys as gifts.
No doubt my great-aunt immediately adapted her meat marinade to the turkey. She wouldn’t have made it any other way. Every year, she made a tender, flavorful turkey at Thanksgiving, a new holiday for us. The basic ingredients making it come alive for our palates are Spanish: olive oil, fresh garlic, lime, vinegar, salt, and pepper. The bird marinates for several days. Cuban traditional side dishes are served with it. The foods cooked in her Sibley Manor kitchen made us feel we weren’t far from our island.
Traditional foods—malanga, plantains, black beans, coffee, cassava, even Spanish nougats—were ordered from a small grocery store in South St. Paul. One crossed the Wabasha Street Bridge over the Mississippi River to get there, my father said.
Somehow, a Cuban resident of Sibley Manor found the store. The proprietor was a Russian who had lived in Cuba. About twelve or fourteen Cuban families in St. Paul would love to place special grocery orders, he said.
The Russian welcomed the Cubans. His bodega-like store was a good place to gather with other exiles, swapping stories while picking up orders. The Russian knew their hanging around and talking was not loitering. Miami Cubans struggled with that interpretation.
The Russian was fluent in Spanish, having moved to Cuba to escape the politics of his native country. When he saw the direction the revolution was taking, he packed and left Cuba, bypassing Miami and heading straight to Minnesota, where he settled. He lamented leaving Cuba almost as much as he did the loss of his own country.
The Russian called people when their orders arrived from a wholesale warehouse in Chicago. Thanks to him, our family and many others did not have to change their diets much while they were undergoing the changes implicit in living in such a different environment.
The traditional Cuban Christmas Eve and New Year’s Eve meals feature pork; the garlicky pig is slow-cooked for hours in a backyard pit, if one is lucky. Side dishes include black beans and rice or, if you’re from the Eastern Provinces, a red beans and rice dish called congri oriental. There’s a green salad, boiled cassava with mojo garlic and oil sauce, plantains, bread, and then desserts. The Spanish turrones or nougat candies hit grocery store shelves in Miami sometime in October, when people are starting to consider gifts and guests during the holiday season.
In Cuba, while Christmas Eve remained important, we opened gifts in Cojímar on Christmas Day. At the time, in Havana, some people were adopting this American custom. However, throughout the rest of the island, Three Kings Day remained the traditional day for opening gifts. That’s how my parents were raised.
In Minnesota, we kept Christmas Day for gift opening so as to keep in alignment with the larger U.S. culture. Christmas Eve was still important, as was attending Mass on either of the two days.
Generally speaking, there’s not much hedging with Cubans. They’ll tell you what they think, some more softly than others.
If you’re a child and a Cuban adult gets a hold of you to let you know for a final time you’re not behaving properly, watch out! A tug of the hair, a pull on the ear, a slap on the hand, a long, hard look for some. A looming threat was of the tapaboca—our mouth being slapped if our language or responses toward our elders was disrespectful. A galleta, which literally means cracker in English, means a slap, another strike to avoid.
Later, when my siblings and I were older and bolder and settled in another, bigger house, our mother issued warnings for us to control ourselves. When she tired of coaxing, she’d remove a shoe and fling it at one of us across the room. If she missed and we laughed, that was worse. We were, at times, intolerable.
In extreme cases, when we didn’t respond to the authority of my mother or grandmother or aunt, my father learned of the matter when he got home from work. He pulled a leather belt out of pant loops and chased us.
“El cinto! El cinturón!” Holy Moses! Not the belt! We ran and screamed and were spanked and cried. For a time, we were better behaved. We were sorry, for a while.
The best part of going to kindergarten when I did go was that my great-uncle Epifanio walked me home. He didn’t hold my hand but walked beside me. During the winter, I walked behind him on the narrow cleared path of icy sidewalk, where boot prints made in slush became like fossils when temperatures dropped again.
Great-uncle Epifanio Echevarria was a tall, thin man who smoked cigarettes. He wore a dark-gray wool cardigan with a white button-down shirt underneath it and black pants. That was his uniform. His Adam’s apple protruded. His white hair was thick and combed back. He wore black-framed glasses. He spoke some English. He loved baseball and knew many of the Spanish-speaking Twins players. He was a quiet man who loved to read, especially history and politics. Cuban national politics were important. His son Orlando inherited his father’s love of reading and of politics. Both men kept their eyes and minds on political developments in the United States and Cuba.
Every Sunday after church we gathered for a big lunch, the day’s main meal. Afterward, Epifanio napped in a chair. He snored.
Some Sibley Manor Saturdays my father volunteered to be the community barber for the Cuban boys. He didn’t have any training for it. No one had. However, he took on the task because it needed to be done and no one else dared to do it. With a scissors and comb my father made the Cuban boys from Sibley Manor presentable. He saved their parents money.
When the word spread that our family planned to move to Merriam Park after a year, the Cubans found a way to formally thank my father for his services as a barber. They pooled their money and bought a barber’s kit with an electric shaver that had different nozzles. That was a beautiful gesture, my father said. For many years, he used the electric shaver on my brothers.
My father and Epifanio visited the Beruvides family on Saturdays. Noris brewed Cuban coffee and my father played Spanish classical guitar.
Roberto Beruvides tried to teach my great-uncle to drive. After each attempt, Roberto returned to the apartment shaking his head, dismayed with his lack of progress.
“I don’t know if he’ll be able to learn,” Roberto said to Noris.
Epifanio Echevarria never drove in Cuba or in the United States. On the island, he lived within a block of his job. So he walked to work, as did most of the people in the small northern coastal town of Punta San Juan, Camaguey, Cuba. When he found work in the Twin Cities he got there by foot, bus, or commuting with my father.
Wherever Epifanio worked, he was good at it. His son Orlando remembered that when his parents first arrived in Minnesota, his father got a factory job assembling boxes. He liked the work, though it was piece work. Two or three months into the job, his employer called, asking him to slow down. The union complained he was too productive.
Eventually, at Twin City Meats, my father’s boss asked if he might know of someone, someone who spoke English, to fill a position in the company’s seafood department. The job didn’t carry a big salary with it, but it was full-time work.
“I know the man,” my father said.
Epifanio started at Twin City Meats, riding to work with my father every day.
In Cuba, Epifanio Echevarria had kept the books at a sugar mill called Central Punta Alegre. That’s where he met Maria del Carmen Ballesteros. With her father, she and her younger sister Manuela had come to Cuba early in 1923 from Ledesma, Spain. After a year working at the sugar mill, their father returned to his new wife and life in Spain, leaving his daughters on the island.
The Cubans were outraged by his act, which they saw as parental abandonment, though the young women worked and were housed with good families. My great-aunt and grandmother were scared, embarrassed, and devastated by what their father had done. They never spoke about their early days as immigrants to Cuba. Apparently, those memories were too painful.
My great-aunt Carmen did return to Spain to visit her father and stepmother, years later, with her son Orlando. My grandmother Manuela never returned. I don’t know why. She was younger than her sister when she came to Cuba and identified more as Cuban. I heard her mourn the loss of Cuba, but never the loss of her native Spain.
Great-aunt Carmen was a beautiful, religious woman as well as a skilled seamstress. In time, her sewing, upholstery work, and knitting skills were recognized for their excellence. Like my grandmother Manuela, she was a top-notch home cook. Eventually, when she married and had children, her earnings helped to educate her sons. Hector died in 1942 in Cienfuegos, Cuba. Orlando became a physician and died in 2015 at age eighty-four in Fort Myers, Florida.
In Cuba, her skills and integrity were noticed by Mr. Jenkins, the general manager of the sugar mill. Mrs. Jenkins also appreciated my aunt’s work whenever she visited from the United States with their two daughters. Beyond new garments, the Jenkins family hired her to make all sorts of domestic things—curtains, pillows, bedspreads. She also did upholstering.
The families maintained a friendship for many years. The Jenkins visited my parents in Cojímar when they came to Havana from the interior. When the revolution came, Jenkins loved Cuba so much that he stayed. At least, that’s where he was when we boarded the airplane and came to Florida, my father said.
But those were other times. Punta Alegre, El Central. Life was good there. Only my grandmother Manuela reminded us of our past. When she lived with us in Minnesota, she mourned our previous way of life. My parents hoped she would quiet, like they had.
Meanwhile, my grandmother and her sister talked about El Central. I didn’t know where it was. No one unfolded a map to explain. If life was so good there, why weren’t we living there? Why did my parents bring us to a place where we lived such a second-class life? My grandfather stayed in Cuba. Why? A long time passed before I understood the answers to these questions.
My great-aunt Carmen bought a sewing machine and was back to work. She made our best clothes. She knit beautiful wool sweaters and dresses. In another era, she would’ve been an exalted textile artist. She is one of the countless home cooks and seamstresses who should’ve been called chef and artist with income corresponding to these talents.
Luis Gustavo remembers our first snow, I don’t. He said a group of Cuban children were in the courtyard at Sibley Manor, waiting for snow. The day was dark. Finally, big, fluffy flakes flew down. The overly bundled children ran to catch them with their tongues. Luis followed. Our mother saw him, was horrified, and hauled him indoors.
Our mother was slender. Yet that winter she gained weight and girth, as a child was due in February. She didn’t buy maternity clothes but adapted her skirts using a diaper pin to close the growing gap. The modification must have been uncomfortable. My mother lived with it since she knew fabric and notions cost money, even if her aunt Carmen could sew a few garments for her.
One of the Lauer girls came to visit that winter with some of her classmates from the nearby Catholic high school. She asked what we needed as time for the delivery approached.
My father, trying to get a chuckle, said, “Maria needs a new zipper!”
The girls were confused. Maybe they didn’t understand his accented English. My mother lifted a sweater to illustrate how she kept her skirts wearable. Everyone laughed. The charitable girls raised money to help with the layette for the coming infant.
I remember my mother was absent from the apartment. Where had she gone? My father took my brothers and me to a parking lot outside a large brick building, St. Luke’s Hospital, one afternoon to find her. We looked up to see our mother waving from a window in a top floor. She was fine, just staying in another place. She’d be home soon. I didn’t know a baby sister would be with her.
One winter day when I didn’t go to school, I remember going into my parents’ bedroom. The bed was made. A baby was lying on it. My mother closed a diaper pin on each side of a cloth diaper. By the light, it was late afternoon. The apartment was quiet. No one else was home but my mother, the baby, and me. I was content.
The other americano born to the Sibley Manor Cubans came more than a year later, in August 1964: Robertico Beruvides. He was named Roberto, but the diminutive distinguished him from his father.
Cuban children call adult family friends by their first names. Noris was not Mrs. Beruvides. Keti was not Mrs. Beguiristain. Their husbands were Roberto and Luis.
Children are taught to use the formal address of Usted for adults. If you’re an adult, you use it with people you’ve just met. If that happens to be another Cuban, it won’t be long before he or she tells you directly: “Don’t use Usted, it makes me feel old. Use the tu.”
In a way, using the tu is the beginning of confianza. More relationship time must pass before one receives a person or family’s confianza. The level of intimacy allows a person a closer look inside a family’s dynamics. If confianza exists, for instance, I answer the door and invite a guest in, even if the house lacks order. If people have confianza between them, they overlook such a slack.
Have you walked into a family argument? No matter, you are de confianza. You might be asked an opinion about the issue under discussion. If a child is screaming or slamming doors in disagreement when you arrive, more than likely you will express empathy and acknowledge similar struggles.
Two weeks after Robertico was born, the building’s caretaker wanted to see the infant. Noris welcomed the visit, as any young mother would. She didn’t speak much English at the time.
The apartment’s cleanliness and tidiness astonished the caretaker. Shortly afterward, she recommended the Beruvides couple to share the building caretaker position. They were the first Cuban caretakers in Sibley Manor, opening doors for other Cubans to obtain similar positions. Rent was reduced. In fact, their work was so good, they won an award for maintaining the cleanest building! The prize was a dinner at Gannon’s Restaurant along with cash.
Rare is the Cuban who does not keep a clean house. In Cuba, tiled or terrazzo floors are swept and mopped daily. Mold won’t grow under daily showers of vinegar and water. Keeping homes disinfected promotes good health. Besides, it’s nice to have fans blowing without dust scattering. It’s good to prepare food when, if the boric acid lining your cabinets has to be replaced, roach waste is wiped off counters.
When Luis and I were in Cuba, we played a game that illustrates the cultural focus on cleanliness that we, at young ages, already subscribed to.
Here’s how it went: Luis Gustavo indicated someone had spit in a particular spot. Or he said a particular spot was dirty. The possibility of the existence of either state caused such disgust that I vomited. When that happened, he was so repulsed, he’d do the same.
The last time we played this game was in Miami. I remember Luis running in the little rented house, then skidding in my vomit. Great-aunt Carmen had had enough of cleaning floors, washing clothes, and giving baths. She spanked us so much we stopped playing the game.
My younger brother Juan Carlos is absent from my memories of Sibley Manor. He was three years old, being watched by my great-aunt and uncle upstairs, especially after Glenna was born. He was our aunt’s favorite. My mother certainly appreciated the help.
Juan Carlos, Luis, and I shared a bedroom with bunk beds and another single bed. We slept across the hall from our parents and the baby. That winter our bedroom window was cracked for ventilation.
Unfortunately, my parents’ interest in good air quality became a factor in my catching pneumonia. We were off to the hospital, where I stayed for three days, my mother and father rotating night shifts to be my advocates.
This caused a tug-of-war with the nuns who were nurses there.
“You should go home,” they said. “We’re nurses.”
But my mother came to my defense with logic.
“She doesn’t speak English. How will you know what she needs?”
They yielded.
Round-the-clock visitation was not the modus operandi during the early 1960s. Fortunately for patients and their loved ones, U.S. hospitals have liberalized visiting hours. There’s a literature on its benefits.
Whenever I pass the open doors of patients on the way to visit someone I know, I am saddened to see anyone without company. Some prefer it. They don’t want to impose on others. Or they know people are afraid of being exposed to bacteria.
Despite these objections, hours in a hospital room pass slowly. A television is no solace, especially if it is dueling with a roommate’s set.
Some people avoid the sick, especially if they are in hospice care.
Meanwhile, the dying patient wonders what happened to so many of his or her friends. Are they too busy to stop by for ten minutes to say goodbye?
No one likes the accessories to disease. It hurts to see how sick a person can become, how mangled, how pock-marked and feverish. Tubes, plastic pouches, the smells of urine and bowel movements, the spitting up, the wiping of the mouth, the spoonfuls of ice chips hand-fed to those fresh from surgery.
Remembering the person in a hammock, sipping a ginger beer, is better. She looked nicer then.
Cubans, generally speaking, insist on visiting the sick. They come to hospital bedsides in numbers, setting up living quarters in the patient’s room. Some sleep at the bedside in recliners. Others stay for hours. If too many are in the room, they chat with others in a waiting area. In Miami, it is an accepted practice.
A lack of staff contributed to the creation of this custom. Today, even with well-staffed hospitals and trained nurses on all shifts, the custom remains. A visitor adjusts a pillow or feeds the patient. A family member ensures medications are timely. The doctor’s visit is recognized. Visitors ask questions for the patient, especially when he or she is drugged or asleep.
In other words, Cubans are not fans of HIPPA. Since the family is affected by the illness of one member, the family claims its right to know medical details concerning the one in bed.
During our final days at Sibley Manor, the summer of 1963, our family was having a picnic with another Cuban family at a park in St. Paul.
There, on those soft rolling grounds, Margot Romillo, a Cuban woman in town visiting family, heard Spanish spoken with a familiar accent. She approached the group.
Friendship with the resettled Beguiristain-Romillo family began.
Keti Romillo de Beguiristain was twenty-eight years old when she and her four children arrived in Miami on July 17, 1961. Luis III was six, Pablo four, Xavier two, and Maribel one. Soon, Keti welcomed her niece and nephew, Mary and Jose Luis Porto, who were eight and six. Her husband Luis Beguiristain II arrived in Miami a few months later, in September.
In Miami, Keti found work as a secretary for the Cuban Refugee Program section of Church World Service at the Freedom Tower. Her English skills were excellent, as she had graduated from Greenville College in South Carolina. Luis Beguiristain II had mechanical engineering degrees from the University of Pennsylvania and the University of Havana. In Cuba, he owned and operated two sugar mills.
In those days, the majority of Cubans had some allegiance to the Roman Catholic Church. Those who wanted to resettle registered to do so with Catholic Relief Services. Keti remembers many Protestant churches had willing sponsors—both individual and congregations. They offered to sponsor refugees, even if the candidates were not Protestants. They wanted to help.
Macalester Presbyterian Church helped the Beguiristains resettle in St. Paul on December 15, 1962. Their first home was on Cambridge Avenue in an upper duplex. Immediately, they learned about the Cuban activities of the International Institute of Minnesota. Keti Beguiristain met my mother at a reunion there, but didn’t encounter her again until her sister Margo made the serendipitous connection.
So our Cuban community in Minnesota expanded. While blanket statements do not cover exceptions, I can say that once you befriend a Cuban, you will meet many others. Many Cubans welcomed extended family to the Twin Cities, even for short visits.
A robust connection with extended family members is less common for the “prized” nuclear American family. Unfortunately, such insistence on individuality leads to an insurmountable loneliness. Ask a general physician about the percentage of patients seeking treatment for depression in her practice.
I’d be foolish to forsake the social wealth characteristic of Hispanic cultures.
My parents prepared to move from Sibley Manor to a Merriam Park duplex. The neighborhood was close to downtown, so my father had an easy commute. In addition, three blocks away was a Catholic elementary school and church.
Our great-aunt and uncle moved too. Luis Beguiristain II helped my father move them to a nearby apartment.
Our little community continued growing.
Many Minnesotans came alongside, enjoying a chance to use their Spanish language or to acquire more of it. Others liked our strong, sweet coffee. In turn, we started pulling of boots in their foyers and putting stocking feet on their carpets.
We were, in fact, adapting to some of their ways.