Category Archives: Family history

Cuba, Family, Family history, Friends

Amid family photographs, a surprise

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This is a story about serendipity.

When two of my younger siblings and I went home last fall, my mother gave each of us two envelopes with photographs my grandmother (and perhaps other family members) had taken with her when she, my father and my aunt left Cuba in the 1960s. My mother had us draw numbers and we were given the envelopes with the corresponding numbers.

There were family photographs, but also many photographs of family friends. Among the photographs of friends that I received was the black and white you see below. It is a picture of Elena Herrera and Alberto Moya, who where neighbors to my father in their hometown of Cienfuegos.

I had the good fortune of meeting Elena and Alberto when I visited Cienfuegos on our epic Cuba trip with Manny Mendoza and Marta Crawford in October 2017. Elena is a retired piano teacher who has taught professional pianists who tour the world, and Alberto is a retired engineer. They are a delightful and engaging couple, and have four children and several grandchildren, including two lovely granddaughters we met.

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Elena and Alberto (center) on their wedding day.

That is a picture of Elena and Alberto’s wedding day, and they evidently sent it to my grandmother almost 50 years ago. The back of the photograph says, “With affection, to our longtime friends, a memento of our wedding.” It’s signed by both of them and dated June 1971. (Alberto is the young man on Elena’s left.)

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Elena and Alberto at their home in Cienfuegos.

Elena was one of my father’s playmates, and her mother was good friends with my grandmother. She shared memories that revealed the closeness they had.

She recalled that my grandfather helped her with her English language homework. When one of her grandparent’s died, my grandparents looked after her while her parents dealt with funeral services. When she gave me a tour of the house my father grew up in, she pointed to the spot where my paternal great-grandmother used to sit to have her café con leche, the much sweeter Cuban version of a latte.

She also remembered the day my grandmother, a recent widow, told her mother she was leaving because things were going to get bad. In the days that followed, Elena watched her take family heirlooms to relatives and friends who stayed behind. Soon after, my grandmother, father and aunt left Cuba for Miami. My grandmother, who died in 1993, never returned.

Elena, Alberto and I stay in touch, and I talked to them about a week ago on WhatsApp. It was good see them and to hear their voices.

Children, Family, Family history

The complex legacies of our parents

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On a recent holiday weekend, I resolved to tackle several piles of cards, printed news articles, and mail I’d accumulated for months. One of the folded pieces of paper I stumbled on was the print out of my father’s eulogy that I used to read it at his funeral. The essay was written by a longtime friend of my dad’s who traveled extensively with him in Latin America in the 1970s when they worked together. 

In the eulogy, his friend recalls that my father was a good-natured colleague, a generous and devoted friend, and a man with a great deal of empathy for other people. As I read it out loud to my husband, I cried. But not for the reasons that would usually come to mind.

My dad was affectionate and loving, but the patience, the understanding, and the empathy he showed others was not on display at home. He was quick to anger and when he did, he became coarse and mean. When he lost his temper, he could be verbally abusive and violent.

Not surprisingly, his behavior took a toll on me, my mother, my siblings, and other members of my family. We don’t talk about it much with one another, but I am not alone in struggling to reconcile that part of him with the funny, loving, and gregarious man we also knew him to be. 

My father and I were very close. He was the stable and the more present parent in my childhood. Whereas I was as different from my biological mother as I could possibly be, my father and I seemed to be two peas in a pod. He nurtured in me an interest in pens, history, and a healthy skepticism for authority (though he didn’t appreciate it when that skepticism was extended to him).

I revered him and tried to emulate him as much as I could. We went through a rough patch as I asserted my independence in college, but that resolved itself. I had the privilege of caring for him in the months leading to his death from Parkinson’s Disease complications. Several weeks before he died, my dad asked me to help him track down the longtime friend who wrote his eulogy.

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Shortly before he died, I asked my dad what he wanted to be when he was a young man. He said he had wanted to be a dad. I laughed, but I believed him. Because he loved being a dad and was devoted to his family. And he instilled in my siblings and me an appreciation of our family history that we are passing on to his grandchildren. 

In recent years, however, I’ve wanted to distance myself from my father as much as I could. 

The hurt and anger that built in me as a result of his offensive behavior revealed itself with clarity after he died, and that made me more hurt and more angry. As a result, I buried the love and affection I felt for him, along with the memories of the commendable qualities I knew he had and that his friend recognized in his tribute. It’s been tough to deal with, in part, because I’ve recognized I’ve behaved in the same unpleasant ways. 

Re-reading the eulogy appears to have had a healing effect. It reminded me there were things about my dad that were good, and that they are alive in me and my siblings. It reminded me that I love and miss him. I needed to remember all of that.

 

Family, Family history, Travel

Passports and my dad

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When you walk through security at a federal courthouse, you can feel – you know- that what happens there is serious business. At the Dallas federal courthouse, where I go to for hearings and trials now and then, there’s no chit chat with people on the elevators; even the employees who know one another keep work-related exchanges to a minimum.

But there are moments that add some levity and joy to the elevator ride to the courtrooms, where what transpires is often dark, bad and sad. For me, those lighthearted and happy moments happen when I see children who are going to get their passport.

To know me is to know I love to engage with children. So yes, I start asking questions: is this your first passport (often it is), where are you going, are you excited (always yes).

The little boy I chatted up today was sweet and shy, though he did answer my questions. He was getting his passport to see his grandmother in Vancouver.

I love to see children excited about their passports, a document that is loaded with the promise of adventure, and who doesn’t love that?

I’ve had the privilege of traveling since I was a practically a newborn. Wasn’t even a month old – I was 23 days old, to be exact- when I was issued my first passport. And I know that because I have it!

My dad, with whom I was very close, kept every passport I had as a minor. I didn’t know that until after he died and noted he was the only parent who signed them. It may be that only one parent needed to sign them, but in my mind, it’s a reflection of the presence he had in our lives against the absence of my biological mother, and perhaps more broadly, an indication of the fractured marriage he had to my biological mother and our equally fractured family life.

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Herewith, my favorite anecdote about passports and my dad.

We needed to get our passports renewed and, as usual, he was running late. The film processing shop in Guatemala City he liked to go to to get his passport photos taken only took and developed them till early afternoon and we weren’t going to make it that day. No worry!, he said. We’ll get them taken around the embassy.

Turned out that there were people who had set up makeshift photo studios and darkrooms in garages in houses surrounding the U.S. embassy. And it was in one of those convenience stores-makeshift photo studios where we went to get our picture taken.

I was horrified. These places, with their bed-sheet like curtains that separated the convenience store from the photo studio and lab, reeked of illegal activity. But they were, in fact, legitimate businesses.

What we were given were mug shots. In those photographs, we look like criminals. But not petty criminals. Bombers, cocaine traffickers. I was nineteen, but looked much older. (See picture lower right, above.)

No way we’re going to be able to travel with these pictures, I argued. We’re going to get stopped at the airport all the time. Let’s get our passports on another day.

But my father insisted the pictures were fine and off to the embassy we went. We got our passports and never once were we stopped at an airport for questioning. We should’ve been, because those photographs are awful.

I still have that passport – and the tale of at least one adventure to go with it.

 

 

Cuba, Family, Family history, Photographs, photography

Go old school and use a real camera

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As I reflect on my recent trip to Cuba, I think about how fortunate I am that my grandmother, great-aunts and other relatives had the foresight to take dozens of pictures with them when they went into exile.

Without their vision, I wouldn’t know what my great-grandparents looked like, what my paternal grandmother and grandfather looked like as children and young adults, what my father looked like as a child. A picture of my paternal grandparents’ wedding day sits on a bookshelf in my home.

The black and white photograph below was taken on the portico of my father’s family home in Cienfuegos, Cuba. He and my grandmother are pictured on the far left.

BARBARA AND HANK IN CUBA

Nearly seventy years later, my husband took a photograph of me by that very lion statue.

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That is all to say, to encourage you, that as you gather with your friends and family this weekend, take photographs with an old-school camera. There’ll be more than one that you’ll want to print and frame or print and mail (yes, mail) to loved ones.

Taking photos with our devices is well and good and fun, but not as well and good and fun as holding a printed photograph in your hand.