A very merry Christmas in exile, sixty years ago

From our Ghost of Christmas Past Bureau with some assistance from our Bureau of Meditations on Exile

Christmas Eve dinner, Nochebuena, 1964, in Bloomington, Illinois.

My brother Tony was the photographer, so he’s not in the photo. The camera was a Kodak, and I had bought it for only a few dollars and several box tops from Kellogg’s Sugar Frosted Flakes. My first mail-order purchase ever, made with my own money, earned by delivering newspapers.

Seated at the head of the table is my uncle Amado and at the other end of the table is his wife Alejandra. On the window side of the table are their daughters, Alejandrita and Marisol. Across the table, my 14-year-old self and Maribel, a niece of my uncle’s wife Alejandra, who was visiting us for Christmas.

Maribel was also a Pedro Pan kid and at that time she was living in a Catholic girl’s boarding school run by very strict nuns in Beaverville, Illinois. Maribel ended up living in the Bloomington area. My cousin Alejandrita now lives in Manhattan. She’s the only one of my cousins who is still alive.

I loved my “exile” in Bloomington, which lasted two years, two months, and two days. We had no telephone and our television could only receive signals from one tv station, Channel 3, the CBS station in Champaign, Illinois. We bought our clothes at the Salvation Army and Goodwill, and once I started working two paper routes a day instead of just one, I could splurge and buy nice clothes at Montgomery Wards.

No Cuban food of any kind in Bloomington. The closest thing to Cuban cuisine we could find was Campbell’s black bean soup, which was a poor substitute for the real thing. No one else in town spoke Spanish. Sometimes, people would stare at us when we spoke our native tongue in public.

At school, I was known as Charles, which quickly became Charlie, and eventually turned into Chuck. Some adult clerk at a store had told me shortly after I arrived in Bloomington that I couldn’t go around town with a weird name like Carlos. “No, you don’t want to do that, ” he said, “that’s not an American name.” So, I went with the flow.

And, there we were, gathered at the table for Nochebuena. Notice that my uncle is wearing a tie. A tie, in his own house, on a holiday, surrounded by his family. His generation was like that. He was born in 1900 and left Cuba at the age of 62, leaving everything he owned in the hands of Castro, Inc., including his own architectural firm and the dream home he finished building around the same time Castro, Inc. came to power.

It was a beautiful home, less than thirty or forty yards from the sea.

My brother Tony worked part-time at the world’s first Steak & Shake, in Normal, Illinois, the town adjacent to Bloomington. He bicycled his way there and back several nights a week, even in the pouring rain or blinding snow, or even when the thermometer went down to 20 below zero, Farenheit, as it sometimes did.

Uncle Amado wrote letters to newspapers constantly, correcting all the errors in their articles about Cuba. He was relentless. And while I lived with him I helped him translate his very elegant Spanish into Midwestern teenager English. After I left for Chicago to be with my mom, he kept writing without my help — not that he ever really needed it.

When he moved to Miami in the mid-1970’s the local newspaper — The Bloomington Pantagraph– gave him an award for all of his letters, which, as I understand, are now available online.

He worked full-time in Miami well into his 80’s. Quite a role model, Tio Amado.

It was a wonderful Christmas. A wonderful exile with a wonderful family in a wonderful town, full of wonderful people, including those Methodists and Presbyterians who would drive us to the grocery store because we didn’t have a car either.

Best thing of all that Nochebuena– which all of us around that table could agree on — was the fact that we were free and out of Castro, Inc.’s reach. And some of those sweaters and shirts I had bought at the Salvation Army store were really cool. See the proof below. Too bad it’s not in living color. That sweater was bright red, just like Santa’s suit. The gee-gaws on it were black and yellow. And the stripes on the shirt were dark pink.

Top o’ the world, man, top o’ the world.