Gelasia Alés Martin was my mother. She was a very beautiful and talented woman, the best embroiderer of Central España.
My mother was the oldest of three children from my grandmother Encarnación Martín and her lover, Francisco Alés. My maternal grandmother was a native of Málaga, Spain. Encarnación was a married woman with two sons when she met Francisco Alés and both decided to come to Cuba together. My grandmother brought her two sons: Baldomero and a younger one that died while they were sailing in the Atlantic Ocean.
Regretfully, Francisco Alés was not a man of just one woman. He was already married when he met abuela Encarnación. After my grandmother gave birth to my mother, Gelasia, my uncle Manuel, and my aunt Margarita, he disappeared. Francisco Alés had specific abilities in the area of sugar production, thus he moved around different sugar factories (centrales azucareros) in Cuba, selling his abilities. I heard that my mother was born in Central Francisco in Camagüey, later the family moved to other centrales, and they ended up in Central España where they finally settled. I never met Francisco Alés, but I grew up hating that man that brought so much pain and poverty to my abuela and her children.
When my mother talked about her father she described him as a tall and very handsome man, with blue eyes. His ancestors were from France and his trip to Cuba with abuela Encarnación was not his first trip there. He already had “his” family in another central azucarero. I also learned that he suffered from diabetes. My mother inherited his blue eyes. She also inherited his diabetes.
When Francisco Alés left my maternal grandmother she had four children to care for. Abuela Encarnación, now a single mother, started to wash and iron clothes for other families, and especially for single men that came to Central España to work only during la zafra. I do remember going to Reglita, the suburb slum where she was living, and seeing her in front of a big aluminum washbasin cleaning the clothes of her son Manuel. How that short woman, no more than five feet tall, was able to do so is still a mystery to me. Baldomero was the oldest and soon he started to work in the sugar factory. My mother was the next in age and responsibility. She had learned from my abuela to embroider and to sew. She also learned to crochet.
Thus, just in her early adolescence, my mother started to sew, to embroider, and to knit for other people. She was always a very proud woman. She was also a perfectionist. Soon people started to comment about Gelasia, the embroiderer.
At that time, the owners of Central España were people from the United States. They used to live in the chalets outside the central neighborhood area. The general manager, Mr. George Walker, was almost the whole year living in his house with his wife. Mrs. Walker was looking for a person to help her with her wardrobe and asked for help. I never knew how, but my mother was recommended and accepted to do the job. Thus, every morning, the personal driver of Mrs. Walker transported my mother to the chalets to sew, to embroider, to knit, to repair, to tailor, to help in whatever Mrs. Walker wanted from her. She liked my mother. Years later, when my mother used to talk to me about this time, her blue eyes shined while she described the admiration of Mrs. Walker for her work: “She always said how beautifully you sew.”
It was because my mother had excellent skills for embroidering, sewing, and knitting. I did remember what she was able to do with her hands for each one of her children. Las chaquetas mexicanas (the Mexican jackets) she embroidered for my sister and me, el vestido rojo con los pollitos (the red dress with the small chickens) that she did for my sister. When I celebrated my fifteenth birthday she sewed my first strapless dress, exactly as I requested, like one of Marilyn Monroe’s that we saw in a magazine. I had never found in my life any embroidered work so well finished like the one my mother used to do. She taught my sister and me to sew, to knit, and to embroider, but we never were able to reach her stature.
Those years when my mother was working for Mrs. Walker were her golden years. She got status in the town even though she continued living in Reglita. She became the provider for her house. She shined among the other girls and many single men looked at her as a precious jewel. I love the image of my mother that I fabricated in my mind based on her stories of that time. There, in my mind, is “mama” with beautiful shining blue eyes, slender and young, looking toward life with an immense feeling of being proud of herself, somehow challenging the future.
Every morning, the driver that brought my mother to the house of Mrs. Walker stopped at the Departamento Comercial to buy what was needed for the house that day. My father was the one that helped the driver to put together the shopping bags in the car. So, day after day, he had the opportunity to see my mother, and to exchange courtesy words with her. One day he decided to ask her permission to visit her at home.
My mother and also my father used to talk about that time of courtship with joy. They got married on December 7, 1936. The ceremony and the reception were held at the Social Club of the Central. My father was represented by his brothers from the Logia Masónica of Perico. After the civil ceremony they went to Hotel Inglaterra in Habana for their honeymoon. When my parents came back, they went to live in a two-bedroom house with a bathroom and kitchen inside. It was in an urbanized area of the batey. The house was given to them, as a gift, by the administration of the central.
Soon my mother got pregnant with their first child. José George Thomas was born on December 3, 1937. His godparents were Mr. and Mrs. George Walker. He really was the light and the joy of my parents’ life: el primogénito. Regretfully, God’s plans were not my parents’ plan. José George died when he was two and a half years of age.
This moment was the real turning point for my parents. My father started to drink more and my mother started to feel “like a black curtain of despair had come down over their lives.” My mother never sought psychological help. For losing a child, there was not psychological intervention at that time, and probably if there was such, my parents couldn’t have paid for it. Moreover, if there was such a specialty, probably it was for affluent people that were living in the island capital, Habana.
I was the second offspring of my parents. As I will relate later, José George was eleven months old when I was born and I was one and a half when he died. I learned that my mother was pregnant with her third child when José George died. When the moment came for delivery, she and my father went to La Quinta Covadonga in La Habana for his birth, but he was born dead. I cannot imagine how my mother and my father were able to overcome this second terrible outcome. Once I read that when a parent dies, you lose your past; when a child dies, you lose your future. My parents lost their future twice in just a few months. Sociologists and psychologists describe parental grief as complex and multilayered and agree that the death of a child is an incredibly traumatic event that leaves parents with overwhelming emotional distress for many years after.
My mother related to me on various occasions how everything happened. Her wording of the pain suffered allowed me to create an image of her in my mind. The image is none other than the Mater Dolorosa or Pieta (Italian word for compassion) of Michelangelo, the Virgin Mary cradling the dead body of Christ. I pictured my mother with her dead son on her lap, the mother with all the dreams destroyed. The mother with an immense pain in her face. The mother feeling impotent in front of the death, in front of God, who has taken away her primogenito.
Time went by and two other children were born: José Nestor (1942) and Gloria (1944). My mother recovered and diligently began to make plans for the educational future of her children. Soon (1945) I went to study in a boarding school in the town of Colon and later went to study in a boarding school in Habana (1947–1957). My time at home, feeling and being family, dramatically got reduced to a week for Christmas, a week for Holy Week, and two months during the summer. But, during those years in the boarding schools I had contact with my family via my mother’s weekly letters. Let me explain this.
Every Saturday my father brought a box with my clean clothes to the inter-province bus driver in Perico, the town next to Central España, and paid for delivering the box to the school. Around noontime of the same Saturday I received the box and gave the bus driver another box with my dirty clothes of the week. Every week, my mother washed and ironed my clothes but also she wrote a letter to me and sent it with the clothes and with one small brown bag filled with chocolates and candies. Every week the connection with home was done, I read about my brother and my sister, about my abuela Encarnación, about my father and about herself. Every week I responded, telling her what she was expecting to hear: that I was studying hard and that I was happy. The letters never filled the vacuum of the space and time away from my home, or the daily details and routines that give sense to a family relationship. But that was what was supposed to happen, that was the price that both my family and I paid for getting a well-rounded education, for preparing myself for the future, for making me “una señorita educada con un porvenir por delante.” (An educated young woman with a future in front of her). I always knew that my responsibility was to make my family very proud of me because they had placed a lot of expectations for my future and had made a lot of sacrifices, and I also knew that the future of my family was on my shoulders. Now that I became the oldest child.
In June 1957, I graduated from Bachillerato and with the perspective of attending the Catholic University of Saint Thomas of Villanueva University my mother and my siblings moved with me to an apartment in El Vedado, La Habana. My father was left behind, living in our house and working in the Departamento Comercial of the Central. It was difficult times for all of us. Adjusting to a totally new environment was not easy for the five of us, and leaving my father behind with the economic responsibility of two houses was very stressful for him. Every weekend he traveled to be with us. On a weekend in December 1957, my father had his first heart attack. That was such a scary experience! He recuperated and a few days later he wanted to go back to work at the Departamento Comercial. Towards the end of the same week, he came back, very sick, accompanied by one of the sons of Tio Baldomero. There was no other option for him than to be hospitalized for a while until his heart fully recovered. We spent Christmas and New Year in the hospital with him. On February 1958, he was released from the hospital and, against our pleas, he decided to continue working and traveling week after week. It was not until 1961, and after Bay of Pigs disaster, that he stopped working and came to live with us.
I have read that when you are at the end of your life you are able to go back in your memories, and with the perspective of the years lived and of the experience acquired, you are able to understand what and the why of some of those memories. The experience that I am going to narrate now still confuses me, arises a lot of questions, and continues being a real enigma in my life.
When I started attending the Catholic University of Saint Thomas of Villanueva, I met a young fellow who was studying with a full scholarship due to his grades, moral character, and values. I liked him. We usually met every morning at Mass. We talked, we liked each other, and somehow we started to see a future together as boyfriend and girlfriend: I don’t remember when and how I shared the news to my mother, but what I do clearly remember is her negative reaction. She didn’t like him (no arguments to substantiate the negativity) and she was reacting and overreacting at every single moment toward him. I clearly remember how she cried every time that we sat to eat or to watch TV, or suddenly before going to bed or after just waking up in the morning. She cried and cried because she was “too upset with me” and because of my fault, “there was no peace at home.”
I resisted as much as I was able to. I tried to talk to her, to provide arguments in his favor, but nothing moved her away from her position. My siblings cooled down their relationships with me, and my father didn’t want to talk about the issue with me. His only way to console me was saying, “Ya tu sabes como es tu mama.” (You know how your mother is.) And that was exactly the problem: I didn’t know how she was, because for ten months during ten years I was living away at the school and just going on vacations to my home. I never learned how to deal with a crisis or with a situation like this with my mother.
My situation at home was becoming insufferable. I didn’t know how to conciliate both situations: my first love that I didn’t want to lose and my daily struggle to survive at home. Finally, I surrendered in favor of the peace at home. I even consoled myself with the thought that, if this relationship is meant to “be,” then it will survive this separation. In December 1958, I decided to finish the relationship—but I was so afraid of my own feelings that I didn’t talk to him; I didn’t have the courage to disclose to him the battle that I was going through at home. Worse than that, I used the changes introduced by Castro’s Revolution after January 1, 1959, as an excuse and never went back to the St. Tomas of Villanueva University. Still today this memory brings up sadness but also anger. Still today I wonder why my mother made such a dramatically negative response. The injury in the relationship that I used to have until that moment with my mother never healed. From then on, and in one-way or another, we started to have difficulties getting along. In one way or another, I never reached her level of acceptance—always there were a discrepancy between what she was expecting of me and what I was able to do.
My mother died on March, 1981. At the moment of her death, my brother was living in New York and I was living in Tampa. Only my younger sister Yoya was there—with her for her whole illness. Yoya took care of her until the last moment.
In January 1989, after being nine years in exile, I went to visit Cuba as part of a delegation of the North East Pastoral Center. I went back to the apartment where my mother was living until the end of her life. I went to visit her tomb at the graveyard. I carefully looked everything at home, I revived images and I thought a lot about my life there. I felt deep inside the emptiness of her absence at home but also the emptiness her absence in my life. When I came back from my visit to Cuba, I felt terribly depressed: I was sad, and I felt empty with decreased energy, as if I were unable to continue with my life. After a few attempts to understand, to console, and to pamper myself, I realized that what I desperately needed at that moment was professional help. I went to visit a psychiatrist recommended by a social worker friend of mine. During near to 5 months of weekly therapy sessions some of the repressed and suppressed memories that had survived throughout my fifty-one years of existence were revealed with the same intensity and emotional pain as when they were internalized. Evidently, the visit to my mother’s grave in Cuba was the last straw to break down my half a century defenses, the ones that built up to survive.
Still today, deep inside my soul, I have a big empty hole filled with grief, anguish, sorrow, and tears because between us—between the woman that I most admired and loved in my life and myself—there was no understanding. We never were able to communicate as mother and daughter because we never opened ourselves to have a heart-to-heart dialogue. I cried, I angrily reacted then, and I cry and still react now because I cannot overcome the mixture of feelings associated with her memory.