Here’s the irony of it. I was inspired to leave communist Cuba by the wealth of the Soviets.
My hometown of Cienfuegos is a port city. In my childhood, Russian freighters came into port to load up with brown sugar, processed there in town, and stored in a warehouse so big that it’s celebrated on Cuban currency as a symbol of the success of Castro’s revolution. The Russian crews of the ships would wander through town on shore leave. There wasn’t anything especially fascinating going on in Cienfuegos. Except the people.
And our visitors from far away seemed to take a special interest in me. I was the typical, smiling, barefoot island boy. I would climb trees and throw coconuts down to the Russians. I picked mangos and papayas for them. I couldn’t understand a word they were saying, and they didn’t understand me, but we communicated with smiles, sign language, and commerce. If I put on the little native boy act and tossed them coconuts, then showed them how to open them, I got something in trade. They gave me candy and bubble gum and toys. Whether Castro would have admitted it or approved, that was free market capitalism in its most basic and, to me, most beautiful form. And I was hooked on it.
The Russians might have thought Cuba was exotic, but to me everything they had was new and strange and wonderful. They must have thought mangos were an amazing fruit. I felt the same way about the grapes they gave me. I had no idea what to call them, but I knew they were delicious. What else did I need to know? Years later, in America, I ate grapes again, and I recognized them by the taste before I remembered the appearance. Uva in Spanish. Grape in English. I still don’t know how to say it in Russian. And I still don’t care.
Castro might have been proud of the grand brown sugar warehouse he’d built and of what it said to the world about Cuba’s wealth. All I knew was the scarcity his revolution had imposed upon the island.
When I finally left Cuba in the Mariel boatlift, that scarcity was still all around me. As I said in an earlier post, in the camp where my friend Chamizo and I were waiting to be assigned to a boat, there wasn’t enough for everyone to eat. I had to sneak out of the camp to get us some food, then sneak back in. By the time we got on the Alba Junior, we were once again starving. And that old rusted shrimp boat didn’t make it all the way to Key West. The captain radioed a distress call and all of the passengers had to be rescued.
A Navy helicopter came rumbling toward us. They had to move quickly, so instead of carrying us one by one, or two by two, they lowered a huge cargo net and loaded up about a dozen or more of us at a time. Then the helicopter lifted us off the Alba Junior. There were kids and old people and prisoners all squished together in the net as we whipped through the air above the whitecaps of the Caribbean. Minutes later they set us gently on the deck of the USS Saipan, an aircraft carrier.
After they made sure we were okay, a sailor gave me an apple. I’d never seen an apple before, but I knew it was food, and I was starving. I bit into it and was amazed at how crisp and sweet and juicy it was. I ate the whole thing—seeds, core, even the stem probably. And the sailor asked me if I wanted another. I said I did. I ate the whole thing again, then licked the juice off my fingers and the palm of my hand.
I may not have been on American soil, but on the enormous deck of that aircraft carrier I knew I was in America—a vast nation of crisp, sweet fruit. A consumer driven country, as Castro had told us. And I was ready to consume it.
