Revolutionary Oil Lamps

I was having some family and friends over for a get together the other day and went to a dollar store nearby to get some miscellaneous crap and found these really cool looking, cheapo, Made In China oil lamps for two bucks each. They look like the old railroad lamps the conductors use in all those old movies. I bought a bunch of them because I thought they would look great in Man Camp (more on Man Camp at a later date). So I set them up all over, filled them and basically waited for it to get dark to light’em up.

At the get together every one loved them. I kept patting myself on the back as I had gotten them for 2 bucks each. When it finally started to get dark, the party started thining out. Only a few people remained, including my parents. So I take my dad with me to Man Camp and help me light the lamps.

“Do you know why I was imprisoned in Cuba?” He asks me.

“Si papi, for being a counter-revolutionary, no?”

“That’s what they called it,” he says, “but in reality I was making oil lamps.”

“Making oil lamps?”

“Si, oil lamps, Like these..well not like these shits but yes, oil lamps.”

I wanted to know how in the heck he could have been imprisoned in Cuba for making oil lamps. How the heck could that be considered counter-revolutionary activity?

So, he pulled up a chair, I got him a beer and he explained it.

In the first few years of the revolution, everything was run amok. What food there was was meted out. Everyone got a little of whatever there was. Electricity worked intermittently as the utilities were taken over by Castro and the people who knew what they were doing there were either imprisoned, left the island, or were shot.

Now, my dad has been a welder since he was 13, when his older brother got an apprenticeship from a welder in town and my dad climbed up on the roof and learned by watching him learn from a skylight.

Realizing the food shortages were only going to get worse, and that the power outages were to become more frequent, my dad decided to use his skills to make things people would need and then barter them for things our family would need. He made oil lamps and gas burners.

It was not easy. First, he needed the raw materials, which he got by working for the supplier or trading food stuffs for them. Then he had to hide the materials, oil and acetylene welding tanks by burying them in the yard. All the work was done at night, and, to the dismay of my mother, in the house.

With those oil lamps he had leverage to trade for such things as eggs, milk, flour, rice… basic staples. Sometimes, he managed to get other things he didn’t need, but in turn would be able to trade those for meat or poultry.

After about a year of this, a woman down the block from him who had a bunch of kids and had already gotten a few lamps from my dad for free, begged him to make her a gas burner so she could cook when there was no power. So my dad made her the burner and sent word to her that it was ready. She in turn, sent Fidel’s goons which promptly took his materials, his tools and everything else and threw him in jail.

He spent almost two years in prison or cutting cane in the cane fields.

So, now, my little cheapo, Made in China, oil lamps take on a whole new meaning. And I use them all the time here in my Man Camp, in the back yard of my home here in Miami, and think, maybe, someone somewhere over there in Bayamo, Oriente, Cuba, still has one of those lamps my dad made and still depends on it to light their way.