I never wanted to become an immigrant. And probably my father also never wanted to become an immigrant.
As I already mentioned, we used to go with my family to Cerveceria La Polar to participate in the annual celebration of the Asturianos living in Cuba. There were gaitas, abundant bottles of sidra, chorizos, empanadas, and typical dances, but most of all there was a lot of nostalgia. It was the celebration of Our Lady of Covadonga, the patroness of Asturias. For all natives of Spain, Our Lady of Covadonga was and is a symbol of patriotism and a source of pride. I loved to listen every year the story of why Our Lady of Covadonga was a source of pride for my father - a member of la masoneria that never visited the church or attended a religious service other than the ones on Cerveceria La Polar.
In 711, the Muslim Arabs invaded the Iberian Peninsula. The Visigoth King Rodrigo died facing them in the Andalusian field of Guadalete in southern Spain. An Asturiano, Don Pelayo, led a group of valorous knights who had withdrawn to the northern mountains of the Asturias to recoup and fight. Don Pelayo prepared the resistance to meet the large Muslim army at Alzeba Mountain, where the cliffs offered an advantage to the greatly outnumbered Catholics. He placed his men strategically along the cliffs, and while they waited for the enemy to advance, he went to the nearby Cave of Covadonga, where he had placed a statue of Our Lady, and asked for her special protection in the coming battle.
The Moors began the attack, but something extraordinary happened: the arrows returned against the Moorish archers who had drawn the bows, killing them. Later, a thunder roared, lightning lit the dark slopes, and heavy rain caused mudslides that sent boulders and trees tumbling down the mountain and over the retreating Arab troops. The battle of Covadonga was won, and Pelayo was proclaimed king of the Asturias. In recognition of the miraculous intercession of Our Lady, King Alfonso I the Catholic (739-757) commanded that a monastery and chapel be built on the site in honor of Our Lady of Covadonga. Asturianos met just one day in the year with their children and spouses. They drank sidra until they got drunk. They talked about their successes even if those successes were lies. They talked about their plans for the future. My father showed us, his pichones, with pride. “This one will be a doctor,” he said as he proudly pointed at me. “She is very intelligent and is attending one of the best schools of the capital (Habana). She is in Colegio del Apostolado.” And his paisanos looked at me and nodded. I was a celebrity. My father’s celebrity.
My father was always very proud of his origin. He was an español living in Cuba. He was an immigrant from Asturias who found in Cuba a place to live and to be, a place where he founded his family. He used to say he had invested in Cuba: he had a wife and three children, but also he had a job, he had an extended family among his fellow masons, and he had his friends and his connecciones.
After my father obtained his naturalization papers and became a Cuban with rights and duties, he started to participate actively in the political struggles of Cuba. My father was always a member of the Partido Liberal. He was even present the day that the liberales del Perico had to run because the guardia rural was going to give them Plan de Machete. He always supported Batista, the hombre fuerte that he liked and admired.
When my time to emigrate came, the memories of my father accompanied me. I did remember the day that we left Cuba as traitors, as people who didn’t have enough courage to support a revolution of “the poor and for the poor.” That same day we assumed the worst consequence of our so-called desertion: we would not be allowed to come back to our country. Thus, on that day we added our names to the long list of names of politically exiled Cubans. When we arrived at Madrid Airport on March 1, 1980, a Cuban friend, Virginia Martinez Malo, and her mother Panchita were waiting for us, no matter that it was just 6:00 am.
The first hours were very rewarding. Virginia brought us to the house of her in-laws who were very supportive and cooperative. We had breakfast and Virginia went with Pepito to stroll the beautiful neighborhood of Barrio Salamanca. When the time to sleep came, Pepito told his father, “Well, I already saw Madrid, let’s go now to abuelo Julio’s house to sleep.” We didn’t realize at that moment how that dichotomy —there and here—was going to be an important part of our life from now on. I didn’t realize how migration was going to remind us what it meant to leave our country, how migration and acculturation meant a continuous state of leaving something that was yours but no longer is, and how that leaving and continuous leaving were going to mark with its imprint the lives of each one of us as a family unit.
No doubt that migration has played a decisive role in history and is a central aspect of human existence. Human species did not appear simultaneously all over the earth but first evolved in Africa, and from there spread across all continents. Migration means diversification of cultures and of ethnic/racial features. Migration occurs for diverse reasons, and the adjustment of the immigrant depends on the extent to which its original expectations of the migration compare with its reality. However, immigration could also be involuntary, such as the case of political refugees and children. Throughout my last thirty years of existence I have been studying and researching both processes: the process of migration and the process of acculturation. That was the topic of my dissertation for my PhD in psychology. From 1993 to 2000, I studied the changes and modifications of twenty immigrant Hispanic families with different lengths of time in the United States, different means of migration, different countries of origin, different levels of education, different professions and occupations, with a variety of annual incomes. Not only I have studied them, but also I designed, applied, and evaluated different programs and counseling styles to accompany those families while they moved from their home country to the host country, while they experienced loyalty conflict between the adopted country and the country of origin and struggled to hold the family together within two cultures.
The migration experience links two socio-cultural and economic contexts—the one of the society of origin and the one of the host society. As many other critical experiences in life, we approached and entered the migration process without being conscious of its cost, in many opportunities with a naïve attitude, in others with a total ignorance of how to survive throughout every stage of the crossing, without having a previous learning of how to move from one end to the beginning of the other one. Moreover, although the very act of migration may constitute a brief transition, the more pre-migration traumatic events experienced by immigrants, the greater the experience of acculturative stress later.
However, all this knowledge about migration and acculturation came later through study, research, and experience. When we arrived in Madrid, the first steps were looking for friends that were living there to seek orientation and help to find jobs for Pepe and myself, school for Pepito, and the possibility to move to our own place. We had received financial help from my brother living in New York and from Pepe’s siblings living in Tampa and Michigan, and also from some ex-Cooperadoras Diocesanas living in United States and in Spain.
Our first contact was Madre Abigail, however I found that Madre Abigail was no longer a member of the religious community of El Apostolado. She was part of another religious community of Mexican origin and was living in Zaragoza. Also I learned that Father Pablo Martin, the Capuchin priest that helped me during the last moments of the Cooperadoras Diocesanas, was no longer living in Madrid but living in Leon, a city somehow far from Madrid. But there were other very good people in town: two days after arrival in Madrid I contacted the Perez-Naon family. I met this family while I was Cooperadora Diocesana working in the Capuchin Church of Jesus de Miramar and in the chapel of El Salvador de Marianao. Their generous response was impressive. They went to pick up us at Virginia’s house and showed us an empty apartment in the same building where they were living. The owner, a chef, was living in France and had authorized Doris Naon to rent it to Cubans that need to live in Madrid while they were in transit to United States. After spending nine years being a family agregada to another family, we were going to live alone, as a family, in a furnished apartment with two rooms, a kitchen that included a dishwashing machine and a washing machine, a living-dining room, and even a balcony where I started to bring pots of flowers.
The very next important step came from Father Pablo, who called the principal of the Capuchin school just a block away of our new home, and after two weeks Pepito was able to go back to school to continue his first grade, with a scholarship courtesy of the Capuchin community. Not to say that he adapted very well to the new environment, including the accent that the kids and people of Madrid speak in the Spanish language. Soon he had friends from the building who also attended the Capuchin school, and very soon Pepito asked not to be brought to school but to allow him to walk to school with his new friends. Just to mention, he still was six years old—three months away from his seventh birthday.
The second week in Madrid, we visited Hermano Miguel of the Hermanos de San Juan de Dios. We knew him in Cuba and I brought letters of recommendations from Father Zenon, the superior of the order in Habana, and of the psychiatrists with whom I worked there. Brother Miguel was expecting us with a big surprise: a succulent lunch that included a Fabada, salad, bread, dessert, and coffee. After lunch he introduced us to Brother Miguel Barceló, the administrator of the Neurological Hospital San José for children. Brother Barceló checked my resume (called there a curriculum vitae), my credentials, and letters of recommendation, and asked me to come back next Monday to begin work.
My responsibilities were doing neuro-psychological testing, counseling to parents regarding the different diagnoses of their children, and participation in staff meetings every week with the other professionals working in the hospital. My schedule was from 9:00 am to 4:00 pm from Monday to Friday. To get to the neighborhood of Carabanchel I needed to take the metro train, a bus, and walk a few meters to the entrance of the hospital. In many opportunities, while I was working at the hospital and Pepe was looking for a job or visiting the American Embassy or the office of Catholic Charities to find out the status of our possible trip to America, we needed to rely in Dorilyn, the daughter of Carlos Perez and Doris Neon. She was a young girl who just finished studying and was looking for a job. She was a wonderful and reliable support for us.
Soon I learned that we arrived to Spain when the country was experiencing a high level of unemployment. So for migrants in transit or for those who wanted to stay in Spain as their place of permanent residence, there were poor to no work options. I didn’t remember who and when we started to discuss the possibility of claiming my Spaniard citizenship based on the juris sanguineous status, which means that I was the legal daughter of one Spaniard living overseas.
I contacted the parish were my father was baptized in the aldea of Muñas, and the priest sent me the baptism certificate of my father. Then I visited the Office of Exterior Relations to request an application as well as a date for the interview, which was set for September 8, 1980. I put together the portfolio with all the data requested—my own birth certificate, my curriculum vitae, my passport, the passport of my father, his baptism certificate, my current provisional job letter of recommendation, and my letter of intent.
In the meantime, Madre Abigail came to visit us and spent a weekend in our house. It was such a nice meeting! I really needed it. Her wisdom and peaceful manner left behind a quiet and calm atmosphere at home. Madre Abigail introduced Pepe to one benefactor of their community. He was the owner of a factory of lamps. At the beginning of the month of May, Pepe began to work in the factory as administrator of the floor where the construction of the lamp was done. So, two months after we arrived to Spain, we were living together as a family in a separate unit, Pepito was in a Catholic school, and both of us were working.
In June, Father Pablo came to visit us. His arrival coincided with the end of the school year, so he went with Pepito to the end of the school activity and was very proud when Pepito obtained excellent grades. As a prize he invited us to go with him to El Escorial the next Saturday. El Escorial is a historical residence of the king of Spain, in the town of San Lorenzo de El Escorial, about forty-five kilometers (twenty-eight miles) northwest of the Spanish capital, Madrid. It is one of the Spanish royal sites and functions as a monastery, royal palace, museum, and school.
When the school year ended, Pepito started to travel with me every single day to the hospital. There he was “helping” the brothers by playing and singing with the inpatient neurologically impaired children. The brothers working with these patients liked him and commended him for his ability to empathize with the children and his capacity to entertain them.
After Pepe started to work, he didn’t talk more about leaving Spain, especially after the Mariel freedom boatlift. The Mariel boatlift was a mass exodus of Cubans who departed from Cuba’s Mariel Harbor for the United States between April 15 and October 31, 1980. The event was precipitated by internal tensions on the island and a bid by up to 10,000 Cubans to gain asylum in the Peruvian Embassy. The Cuban government subsequently announced that anyone who wanted to leave could do so. The exodus had negative political implications for US President Jimmy Carter when it was discovered that a number of the exiles had been released from Cuban jails and mental health facilities. Castro publicly stated, “I have flushed the toilets of Cuba on the United States.” The Mariel boatlift was ended by mutual agreement between the two governments involved in October 1980. At its end as many as 125,000 Cubans made the journey to Florida.
At the end of the month of August, we received a phone call from the American Embassy to interview us to travel to United States. We went to the meeting with the consul the first week of September. Contrary to our experience at the American Embassy in Cuba, this time the meeting was conducted in a very friendly and empathic way to end with the consul welcoming us to the land of freedom and opportunity. So we left the American Embassy with all the papers needed to travel to the United States. Unbelievable! With just six months of difference, we were approved to travel to United States with the status of legal residents.
Our first visit was to the principal of the Capuchin School to notify him that Pepito would no longer attend the school for the school year 1980-1981. After that, I spoke to the administrator of the hospital. Brother Miguel asked me to work at the hospital during the first two weeks of September while they trained the new psychologist that was going to take my position. Pepe’s boss was very upset. He was not expecting to gain an employee only to lose him two months later. He asked Pepe to leave the factory on that same day and he paid him his salary until that day. I talked to all the old and the new friends. Everyone was happy for us. I didn’t want to upset Pepe who was so excited, but I didn’t feel happy. On the contrary, I was very upset. I anticipated that in the United States the things would not move as smoothly as they had in Spain. I knew that I could not work as a psychologist as soon as I arrived, but after years of studies. I knew that I needed to learn a language to live, work, and succeed in the United States. The nights that followed our interview in the American Embassy were nights of insomnia, of anxiety, of sadness.
At the beginning of September 1980, I went for my interview at Spain’s Exterior Relations Department in Madrid. They checked my records and documents presented and gave me a date for taking my oath of allegiance and for giving me the documents that accredited my Spanish citizenship. When I told the functionary that probably I was going to travel to the United States at the end of the month, he went to see the consul. He came back and in one small office, in front of my husband, my child, and two witnesses, I became a legal citizen of Spain. It was all so quick that I began to realize what the whole situation means toward the end of the recitation of the oath of allegiance to the constitution of the country of my father. At that moment, I felt next to me the shadow of José Marinas Suárez with his half smile, as he used to do, welcoming his older daughter and his grandson to the land of his ancestors.