My trip to Cuba with my husband Stew in 2013 in large part was a pilgrimage to try to reconstruct my childhood, abruptly interrupted in 1962 when, at age fourteen, I had been shipped off to Miami with thousands of other children, presumably to save us from the communist apocalypse about to engulf the island.What …
Continue reading Trump revives memories of my "shithole" country
I won't pretend to add anything to the torrent of obituaries marking the death of Fidel Castro, Maximum Leader Emeritus of Cuba, at age 90. For the definitive good-bye, read Anthony DePalma's piece in today's Times.I can add some very personal reminiscences, though, because for nearly 58 years I've lived with Castro's words and deeds …
Stew and I have just returned from a one-week drive through the immensity known as Texas, where we visited relatives of mine in Houston and in Austin—all of whom, like me, came from Cuba as refugees.Our visit coincided with the media and political furor against Syrian refugees, who've been battered and demonized mostly by Republican …
About a year before President Obama's announcement that the U.S. would seek to reestablish diplomatic relations Cuba, one of my cousins still in the island began lobbying me to help his daughter Odette and her three kids get out of the socialist island paradise. The more pronto the better.My cousin, also named Alfredo, and I hadn’t …
What began as a relaxing retirement-type project, to digitize stashes of family photos and documents and convert them into an online photo book, has instead turned into a replaying of the hard times my family went through after the political whirlwind of 1959 and the subsequent installation of the Communist dictatorship in Cuba that survives to …
El Rancho Santa Clara 