A Cuban Refugee: Life Before and After the Castro Revolution

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© 2013 by Camelia Colón Townsend. All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted by any means without the written permission of the author.

Published by AuthorHouse 07/08/2013

ISBN: 978-1-4817-5859-8 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-4817-5858-1 (hc)

ISBN: 978-1-4817-5860-4 (e)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2013910528

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Contents

Acknowledgments

Introduction

PART ONE

1   Prelude to Change

2   Soldiers of a Different Sort

3   A Green Island Turning Red

4   Trials and Threats

5   The Cuban Diaspora

PART TWO

6   The World of El Exilio

7   A Family Disbanded

8   Giving Up the Fantasy

PART THREE

9   Single in Manhattan

10 Life on a Roller Coaster

PART FOUR

11 Fast Forward to the Past

12 Back in the U.S.A

13 A Far Away Land

14 Joining the Struggle

15 A Little Family History

16 Epilogue

In Closing

Also by the Author:

Cuba: Passion and Revolution

I dedicate this memoir to my daughter Yvette

and to my grandson Brandon.

May these pages provide a perspective on the lives of your ancestors and expand your understanding of times past.

Acknowledgments

I am indebted to Maria Nodarse for her invaluable editing of the initial manuscript, to Heather Adams, a young writer who enthusiastically took on herself the task of going over my corrections and additions, and to Tom Bowers who edited the final version of this memoir.

Also, I am deeply grateful to my husband, Lewis Townsend, for his patience in answering my many questions and reading my many drafts.

Introduction

I n the first hours of the New Year 1959, several Cuban Air Force planes took off under the cover of darkness carrying the president of the nation, General Fulgencio Batista, his family and closest associates into exile. At that moment, life in Cuba took a sharp turn: the revolution became victorious.

Barely a few hours after the government had crumbled—a government that had ruled the country for seven years—the high officials of the fallen regime fled in their yachts, followed in the coming days and weeks by others closely connected with the deposed regime. It was the beginning of what would become the Cuban exodus.

The revolutionary turn in the political life of the island had been expected to lead to democracy; that was the promise. But instead it led to a new tyranny—a socialist/communist system of government. So, it didn’t take long for a new phase of the exodus to take place. This time, the refugees arriving in Miami were young revolutionaries that had not fought in the Sierra Maestra Mountains with Castro, but were members of other groups that took their battle to the streets of the cities or to another mountain range, the Escambray Mountains in the center of the island.

This second phase of the exodus soon also included many of the original supporters of Castro, those that were opposed to the path to the establishment of the Soviet communist system in their Caribbean island.

By the time the United States broke relations with Cuba in January of 1961, the refugees arriving to the United States and other places around the world were the ones affected by the draconian rules the revolution was imposing on the population. Entire families chose to live in a foreign country rather than face the possibility that their children would be sent away to be educated in a Soviet country or be conscripted into the new army. Unfortunately most of these families were split, and the reunification process has proven long and painful.

Rejecting the imposition of a foreign ideology in their lives, well-known intellectuals, journalists, famous artists and musicians abandoned their country. Among the most famous were Celia Cruz and Ernesto Lecuona. In 1959 Celia Cruz was performing in Mexico and refused to return to the island. The composer Ernesto Lecuona left Cuba in 1960. But the most emotionally charged exodus of the decade of the 60s was the Peter Pan Program. Through this program, 14,000 children were sent to the United States by their parents to live in Catholic schools or with sponsoring American families.

During the years that followed the Bay of Pigs invasion of April 1961, leaving the island became extremely difficult. The choices were a hard to get visa to fly to Mexico or to Spain. But there was another option: a daring escape braving the Atlantic Ocean to get to the shores of Florida.

This third phase of the exodus is a perilous venture in a small boat or raft made of inner tubes. Cubans of all ages had taken to the sea, facing an endless ocean, high waves, a scorching sun and menacing sharks shadowing their flimsy rafts. What level of desperation would prompt people to risk such a journey? How many have perished escaping from the socialist experiment imposed on Cuba by the Castro brothers?

In 1980 the Mariel Boatlift took place. At the port of Mariel, west of Havana, over 125,000 men, women, and children boarded a flotilla of vessels sent to Cuba from Florida and fled to the United States. A voluntary mass departure from a country during peace times, such as the Mariel Boatlift, has only one precedent in history: the exodus of the Jews from Egypt, and that happened thousands of years ago.

The world press has largely neglected the on going issue of the Cuban exodus and many governments ignore the plight of those still in Cuba. Since the Castro brothers took control of the government over a million Cubans have left their country. To leave your home and loved ones to become refugees in all parts of the world, and to start a new life with limited resources requires determination, bravery, and the will to face the unknown.

Experiencing successes and sufferings, the exiled Cubans have forged ahead. They had built new and better lives even while faced with adversities.

There are scores of stories to be told. My intention is to provide a first-hand account of the plight my family and I faced. This memoir is the story of one refugee, one of very many.

Camelia Colón Townsend

PART ONE

Revolutions take over governments,

communist revolutions, like a tornado,

sweep over land and lives.

Unknown

1

Prelude to Change

(1957-1960)

I t was a beautiful, sunny afternoon in April of 1960 and at the Havana airport, a Cubana de Aviación airplane was on the runway ready to depart. All the passengers were seated, the pilot was in the cockpit and everything appeared to be proceeding normally, and yet the aircraft’s front door remained open. Ten minutes went by, then twenty, and still the door remained open. I was sitting by the window roughly in the middle of the plane and my husband, Pedro, sat next to me. To hide my apprehension I pretended to read Revolución, the official newspaper of the revolutionary Cuban government under the control of Fidel Castro. We had cleared airport security, but I knew that there was no guarantee we would be able to depart on our vacation trip to Miami.

Time went by, but none of the passengers moved or asked questions. All of us just waited in silence, and more than likely, many were praying to God or a favorite saint. Then, two men, obviously government agents, entered the airplane. My heart jumped, but my eyes remained fixed on the newspaper; the last thing I wanted was to make eye contact with those two men. The agents slowly walked down the aisle while looking left and right. At that moment I was sure that those men controlled our destiny. Finally, the agents approached a young man seated toward the front and pulled him off the aircraft. Nothing was said and nothing was asked; no one uttered a word. Soon the plane was flying north. I felt some relief, but I was well aware that some flights never reached Miami, turning in midair to return to Cuba. Besides, it was quite possible that among the passengers were government agents. I was not free yet.

The airplane gained altitude and I saw the island of my birth fading in the distance, until it was nothing but a dot in a vast blue sea and I wondered: what had brought me to this moment? The last fifteen months had been a nightmare. Fear followed by more fear. I feared the police and I feared the neighbors. Every time I saw a police car approaching my house I thought it was coming to arrest me. In April of 1960 it was obvious that the so-called green revolution was turning red. In that plane I was finally on my way to freedom. The flight would take less than an hour and my thoughts turned to the recent past.

IN MID 1957, WHEN I FINISHED Journalism School, I asked my uncle Evelio (my mother’s older brother) to get me a job. My mother, who had remarried when I was a child, was a Congressman’s widow. She had a good pension in addition to income from rental properties, but I only had the spending money she gave me, and the pesos I occasionally received from my father. I wanted my own money.

My uncle, Colonel Florentino Evelio Rosell, was in charge of the Corps of Engineers of the Cuban Army, a powerful position in a Cuba ruled by the military. In addition, he owned a construction company; Colonel Rosell had wealth and power. He did find me a job, an easy government position in the Bureau of Repression of Communist Activities (BRAC).

The Bureau, run by the army, had its headquarters in a two-story building located in a newly built section of Marianao, in the outskirts of Havana. A wide avenue crossed the new section with the vast main army compound, la Ciudad Militar de Columbia, spread on one side of the avenue. On the other side stood several modern buildings, including a large worker’s hospital, a high school and two teacher’s colleges. Green areas surrounded the buildings creating a sense of space and calm. At the entrance of the Bureau there were no soldiers or security of any kind. In 1957, the military had tight control of the capital and the city was safe from anti-government attacks. Perhaps that was one of the reasons why I went about my life with a sense of security; I was not aware of the forces that were to be unleashed in a matter of months.

Military City was large, spacious and beautifully kept. Years earlier, when my uncle was a Lieutenant, I would go there in the evenings with my grandmother to watch movies. She lived walking distance from one of the entrances and we enjoyed the walk. Those were peaceful times in Cuba, well let’s say relatively peaceful.

I had no trouble with the job my uncle got me. I was fervently anticommunist and as far as I was concerned the groups fighting the government didn’t have a chance against the Army. But my fiancé, Pedro Yanes, was apprehensive of the implications of working at the Bureau. I was assigned to the Archives Department, where wall-to-wall file cabinets stored cards with the names of Cuban communists and related data. I did my job and knew little about what was going on there.

During that time, the government was organizing general elections in what, it proclaimed, was a move toward