Across So Many Seas: Chapters 48-54

I’m grateful Papá doesn’t say much on the trip back from Melena del Sur, just turns around from the front seat every now and then as if to reassure himself I am still there.

“You are a good daughter, dear Alegra. Your papá had decided not to get you, but after your brothers and sister left so hastily, he realized we must be together. We don’t know what is going to happen here from day to day.”

Maybe he was smiling too much after that, because two militiamen stopped him on Calle Amargura and reminded him that peddling was against the law—there was no more private business in Cuba.

“Your father, instead of apologizing, said to them that he was not going to work for anyone but himself. The milicianos beat him and stole his money and the shirts. He spent two weeks in jail. If not for his cousin, Rubén, who has ties with the government, he might have rotted away in there. Now he’s free, but he’s on their list, so any day they could find another reason to arrest him... That’s what’s happened.”

Then he embraces her gently, and she begins:
En la mar hay una torre... In the sea there is a tower...

He returns drenched in sweat and hands me a pocket-size Spanish-English dictionary.

He nods stiffly and turns away to hide his tears, but Mamá brings her face to the glass, to try to kiss me through that barrier, and I want to do the same but I can’t—I’m too embarrassed.

Before I board the plane, an immigration officer peers inside my suitcase.

Maybe, somehow, someday, I will be able to continue performing this miracle.

Only some very young ones, four or five years old, cry desperately and keep repeating, “Mami, where are you? Mami, where are you?”

I didn’t know until then that we were part of an exodus of thousands of children sent here by parents who don’t want us growing up in communist Cuba.

HIAS placed me with them since they are Jewish, but they know nothing about Cuba or Sephardic traditions, and treat me like a country bumpkin that washed up on the shores of their house in Miami Beach.

My foster parents think I was starving in Cuba, and so they like to take me to this restaurant called Wolfie’s, where we eat enormous pastrami sandwiches and bowls of matzoh ball soup.

“There are going to be thousands of people in this heat, including me,” my dad declares as he packs water and granola bars in his knapsack.

“Yes, Papi, I know. Abuela told me. That’s where Cubans went when they first arrived in Miami to get their documents and be allowed into the country as refugees.”

“Yes, sugar is the sweetness that comes from Cuba, but she also wanted to remind us of the bitterness felt by Afro-Cubans who were enslaved on the sugarcane plantations.”

“I sure did, Paloma. I also got into trouble for having an Afro and playing Afro-Cuban music. Oh, and for wearing bell-bottoms. Can you believe it? They sent me to a work camp. To rehabilitate me, as they called it. After that, I knew I had to leave, and so I did when they opened the port of Mariel to any Cubans who wanted to go. I left on a boat that almost sank.”

“That’s right, Paloma. Perhaps the stars aligned so we could be here. It was meant to be—kismet, as your abuela likes to say. And I’m sure it’s meant to be that we’re going to Spain.”

Every time she bites into one, she starts to reminisce.

My mom wipes away the mango juice from her chin and looks at me quizzically, or is it pityingly?

“It’s funny—I didn’t know it was called Ladino when I spoke it with my family in Turkey. We thought we were speaking Spanish, mixed with a few words of Italian, Turkish, French, Hebrew, and Arabic, the languages from the places where our people dwelled after they left Spain. It was Spanish from five hundred years ago because we never returned after we were expelled.”

“I’m getting palpitations just thinking about it!”

“I know, Abuela. Like the way you’re always trying to ward off the evil eye.”

Soon after we’ve eaten, she dozes off, and my mom and dad settle in to watching movies.

Today, one of the biggest tourist attractions is its medieval Jewish neighborhood, which looks like a storybook village in the photographs, with its stone buildings and winding alleys.