I am Gelasia Marinas Ales. I was born in Cuba, en Cubita la bella. I am very proud of being a Cuban woman, a Cuban professional. I could never leave behind Cuba or my Cuban identity—it is part of my soul, of my psyche, of my spiritual life.
I learned that the name Cuba comes from the Taíno language. The exact meaning is unclear but may be translated as either “where fertile land is abundant” or “great place.” That is Cuba: a great place where fertile land is abundant. Cuba is a beautiful archipelago in the Caribbean Sea. I loved Cuba’s humid, tropical weather with only two seasons: the hot, wet season between May and October and the cool, dry season between November and April.
I was born on November 23, 1938, in La Quinta Covadonga, in la Habana. My mother told me that I was born gordita (nine and a half pounds) and with the umbilical cord around my neck—my skin was purple so the “comadronas” (midwives) had to break my clavicles to take me out.
Until I was six years of age I lived permanently in the Central España in the province of Matanzas. From the age of six until the age of eighteen I lived in boarding schools and went on vacations to Central España. When I finished my secondary education at age eighteen I moved to Habana. Although I left Central España, Central España never left me: I close my eyes and see myself traveling through the fields of sugarcane, I feel my shoes dirty with the red soil, I look up and see the smoke coming from the furnace of the sugar factory during the zafra (harvest),, I smell the guarapo (sugarcane juice), and I hear the noise of the trapiches (machinery) of the sugar mills. In my imagination, I even distinguish the pine trees from the palmas reales (royal palms) at the entrance of the batey (villages of sugar mill workers).
I still remember the day that we moved to Habana. It was noontime. After the truck took our furniture and clothes, we followed it in a taxi. I turned my head back and looked at “my house” with intensity to copy every single detail, I also looked very carefully when we left the street where the house was placed, when we crossed in front of the Departamento Comercial, when we drove over the train lines toward the entrance of the Central, and, finally, when we approached the carretera central. I close my eyes and look the images of that memory again, and as a product of a video camera, I can click in any specific image because all are impressed in my mind. That is why I say that “I left Central España but Central España never left me.”
I never went back until June 2009. It was very difficult to put together the bright images that I stored in my memory of the Central España with the Central España that I found after fifty-two years. The sugar factory was partially destroyed. The buildings were crumbling. I recognized some houses, some familiar streets, the Departamento Comercial where my father worked, and the house where my siblings were born and I used to live during vacation time. But what I saw were no longer the appealing memories that I stored and that had accompanied me for so long.
When I was in the boarding school in Habana (1947 to 1957) I traveled by bus to my home and from my home. The last name of the owner of the bus was Sosa. His bus left the town of Perico, picked up the travelers from Central España, and drove to Habana. The bus stopped in the city of Matanzas, across its central park, to allow travelers to take a rest. From there the bus continued to the capital. The last stop was in Café Caracolillo, on Egido Street, near the Central Train Station in Habana Vieja. Coming back home was a very rewarding experience. Looking through the window of the bus, I anticipated every corner leaving Habana, every hallmark throughout the route, and the change in landscape when we were approaching the province of Matanzas.
The beautiful city of Matanzas, capital of the province, is located behind a big bay and crossed by the Rio Yumirí in the north and the Rio San Juan in the south. Matanzas means slaughter or massacre and probably relates to the drowning of the settlers by the Indians in Matanzas Bay following the outbreak of a rebellion in 1509. The city of Matanzas was known as the Athens of Cuba and was the focal point for many writers, poets, artists, and scholars. The first national newspaper was founded in Matanzas; the danzon, the first dance for an entwined couple, was created in 1879 and years later, in 1929, Aniceto Diaz invented the danzonete, a sung version of the danzon.
I have very few family memories of my early childhood after José George Thomas’s death. I know that for a while I was an only child. Probably, after my brother’s death, my parents began to see me as the primogenita, the one that has to fulfill the promise. There are black and white photos that Victor, the photographer from Cardenas, took once per year when he went to the Central. I appeared dressed as an Asturiana, or dressed with a beautiful dress and a doll. My mother used to tell me that my father enjoyed taking me after work “para dar una vueltecita por ahi” (to walk around). She said that I was too talkative. And with a lot of imagination.
I remember the day that my brother José Nestor was born. It was a Mother’s Day, May 10, 1942. I was not yet four years old. My mother sent me with one of my three cousins, sons of Uncle Baldomero, to Reglita with a present for abuela Encarnación. When I came back, my brother was born. The midwife Julita (a big black woman always dressed in white) helped my mother with the delivery. That’s it. No more memories.
Then came my sister Gloria. I was five years and five months old and Pepe was two. That day there was at home a younger woman from the countryside who was helping Mamá. Her name was Caridad. She brought us to the backyard and we sat quietly next to the window to hear my mother’s whines. Julita was commanding with her strong voice: “Puja, puja.” (Push, push.) Suddenly, the sky opened itself in strong rain with big hails. That day, the twenty-fourth of April 1944, was later registered as having one of the biggest hailstorms in the area. It was the same day that my sister Yoya was born, when I was not yet six years of age.
Next in time, a few images come to my mind. I am six years old. But I am not at home. I am at a girl’s boarding school, Colegio Hispano-Americano, in Colon, Matanzas. I see myself waking up with a nun next to me and my bed wet. Always my bed is wet. She is sending me to take a shower because I am dirty (“Estas sucia.”). It took me a long time to overcome wetting the bed at night. It took me until my adolescence. It practically happened every single night. It was a real source of shame to me; it was so painful waking up and touching the sheets to find out that they were wet! During my pre-adolescence, I even invented ways to wake up every single hour at night to check if something had happened or to go to the bathroom to avoid it from happening. If it happened on a Saturday night, I had to sleep the rest of the week on those malodorous sheets until next Saturday morning when I received the clean set of sheets from my parents’ house. There were no conditions for me to wash the sheets every single day. In one-way or the other, that was a well-known secret that the community of peers and nuns shared with me. Another consequence was the need to buy a new mattress every September because in June we needed to throw away the one that was in use.
Why did it happen? First of all, bed-wetting is not a mental or behavior problem. It doesn’t happen because the child is too lazy to get out of bed to go to the bathroom. My parents said that in their families this situation never happened. Based on my readings about the topic of enuresis, I have learned that probably I had either slower than normal development of the central nervous system, which reduces the child’s ability to stop the bladder from emptying at night, or not enough antidiuretic hormone, which slows urine production at night.
Since I came to the school at age six with nocturnal enuresis, I cannot blame the transition, the separation anxiety, or the adjustment stress. However, I still believe that the previous factors were contributors to my ashamed condition. It was a condition that I became aware of when I was six years old and had to learn to take care of myself, when I had to learn to survive in an unknown world.
Going back to the recounting of this period of my life, I do remember that the nun who woke me up also helped me to dress my uniform: a white long-sleeve shirt and blue skirt. I had my hair long but I could not wear it that way; the nun trimmed my hair. I had two braids, one at each side of my face. And I remember going down to drink the café con leche. There was no mamá that separated the nata of the café con leche, a mamá that knew that the nata gave me nausea and desires of vomiting. So I was supposed to drink the café con leche with nata, no matter that usually I threw up after that. It was impossible for them to understand that it was undesirable vomiting and that I didn’t do it on purpose, that it was not “una monería”, that I was not so special that needed “a nana que me cuele la leche”.
When I bring up all these images of Colegio Hispano Americano, the feeling that they arise is confusion: confusion because I was the youngest in the school, just six years of age; confusion because I was the only one living in the school, with the nuns, following their schedule; confusion because I didn’t understand why I was there. Where are my parents? Where are my siblings? What am I doing here? However, there were other images too, like being part of a religious procession. I was dressed up as an angel with a pink dress that my mother made. I was next to the Blessed Virgin Mary, the mother of God. Like when a nun was teaching me to read: “A, ala; E, espejo; I, iman …” I was distracted or having difficulties to follow the rhyme. The nun called my attention with a ruler. She hurt my fingers and my hands. And on another opportunity, when the impatient nun pinched so hard my middle finger that left a mark on it, so that Friday, when my father went to pick me up, I told him and showed the mark. He was very upset and told the nun, “Never repeat it again. We are her parents. If something is wrong, let us know and we will take care of it.” The nun was changed by another one with whom I did learn to read, and to write, and to draw, and to do math.
I was doing very well in school; every Friday my father was receiving compliments about his older girl. “She is very bright,” he was told. “She is already reading at the second grade level.” And my father smiled with that, his proud smile. And when we sat in the bus to Perico and later to Central España he asked me to read in a loud voice a newspaper that he already bought, and I read and he smiled with his proud smile. And when I went home, he shared his pride with my mother, and she asked me to read, and I read, and my mother also felt very proud. She expressed this pride, smiling and making beautiful dresses for me with her tired hands. And since I was a good girl, and since the nuns, my father, and my mother were proud of me, I became una niña hacendosa (a good girl) helping my mother with all the household chores, learning to sew, and learning to embroider.
The nuns catechized me for receiving the Body of God—my first Holy Communion. My mother sewed and embroidered the white dress and the white veil. The day before, May 25, 1946, we went to the city of Matanzas, capital of the province of Matanzas, because I could not receive the Holy Communion without being baptized first. The three of us were baptized at the Catholic cathedral by the bishop, Monsignor Alberto Martin Villaverde. My godparents were friends of my father. He was an Asturiano owner of a liquor factory and she was his mistress. They were living together for a few years. I did see them once in a while after that, but it was not a special relationship and there was no special commitment towards me on their part.
The day of my Holy Communion, my mother and my siblings could not attend because my mother was too tired from the day before. Just my father was there. He was at the entrance of the parish church in Colon with his white guayabera. At the expected moment, the nun lighted my candle and I approached the altar to receive the Body of God. I received it. The nun turned off the light and told me in a whisper, “Reza por la conversion de tu papa, para que vaya al cielo.” (Pray for your father’s conversion so he can reach heaven.) I was shocked. I never knew that my father was not going to go with me to heaven after death. A terrible feeling hit me, the feeling of shame that my father did not share the privilege of be called to be saved at the end of his life. But why could he not go to heaven? I never asked. I had to find the answer by myself years later: because he was a mason. My father took me for pictures at Muñoz Photographic Study. I have one of those pictures in front of me. My facial expression is sad. At seven years of age, Ya yo estaba triste. (I already was sad.) Why? Maybe because I just discovered that my father will not go to heaven after his death, or maybe because I wanted my mother and siblings sharing with me that day, or maybe because who knows what. But this is the first of a series of pictures from my school age period where my facial expression is sad. Even when I am smiling my eyes are sad.
A last image comes to my mind from my two years at Colegio Hispano Americano in Colon, Matanzas. I see myself on the floor and two older girls have taken my panties off. One of them is over me, naked from the waist down, moving over me while rubbing her genitals over my body she was telling me, “This is what your parents do at night when they go to bed.”