September 1947. Colegio del Apostolado, calle 21 esq. a Paseo, Vedado, Habana. Phone: 3-4560. My number of identification as a boarding student was 51.
At the end of the 1800s the Spanish Jesuit priest Padre Valentin Salinero conceived of creating a religious community to educate Cuban women. On December 18, 1891, the priest founded in La Habana a religious institute with five devoted women. This was the first religious community founded in Cuba. The community’s name is Religiosas del Apostolado.
How did I get there? My mother found Monsignor Arcadio Marinas in the photographic section of the Diario de la Marina. She pushed my father to look for him to find out if they were relatives or not. After finding that they were related, my father talked to him about me. Why Colegio del Apostolado and not any other Catholic schools in the capital? Because the younger daughter of the administrator of the Central España was there. Competence? Maybe.
Monsignor Marinas went to see the nuns and told them about me. He asked for a full scholarship for me. The nuns could not give a full scholarship but were willing to give me partial scholarship; my parents still needed to pay 50.00 pesos every month. Fifty “pesos” at that time was too much money, but they were willing to make any sacrifice needed to give me a good education.
That was the way the Monsignor Arcadio Marinas entered my life and made the difference. He not only went to talk to the nuns to get me a partial scholarship, but he used every single opportunity that he had to go to the school and find out how I was doing, to sit with me and give me advice, and even to hand over to me 5.00 pesos before leaving “just in case you need it.” It took me time to familiarize with this older priest who had the same facial features as my father. His black habit always intimidated me. When I was in sixth grade his godchild entered the school as a kindergarten student. She was a very beautiful blonde child and the only child of older parents. He introduced me to them and even suggested them to take me out on the first weekend of the month when the boarding students were allowed to spend time with their families. So I started to go with the mother of this girl to the beauty parlor to do my nails, or to the cinema, or to eat at a restaurant. Later, Monsignor Marinas, who was part of the “Patronato” of the Cuban Ballet, opened another door, and through it I was able to enter at the sophisticated world of ballet presentations, or classical music concerts, or opera dramas. My natural curiosity and imagination filled in the blanks of my lack of knowledge and social training.
The school’s population was upper middle class: children of professional parents, children of owners of business, and children of politicians. Children with “class.” I was the child of a “bodeguero” and a “costurera”. We were poor. We didn’t own our house. We lived in a house that belonged to Central España. The administration of the Central España allowed us to use it while my father was his employee. We didn’t have a car. We moved using buses or taking cabs. In our house there were no sophisticated manners or habits. We were simple. We ate simply, sometimes only with the spoon. In that sense, among many other things, I was different.
The mothers of the children that attended Colegio del Apostolado didn’t sew their uniforms; they bought clothes in Fin de Siglo or La Filosofía department stores. My mother sewed my uniforms, my bed sheets, and everything that they could buy from the list of required things to bring to school. There were many items listed as “required” that the boarding girls must bring to school that my parents never were able to buy. I had just the necessary. In that sense, among many other things, I was different.
The mothers of the children that were boarding (around seventy-five students) didn’t do their laundry but paid employees of the school for that service. Every Saturday, one employee of the guaguas de Sosa went to Colegio del Apostolado to pick up a box with my dirty clothes and bring a box with clean clothes. In that sense, among many other things, I was different.
Every week there were two periods two for relatives or families to visit the boarding students: one on Thursdays at 4:00pm and one on Sundays at 2:00pm. Once per month there was a weekend to go out. Only those who used to live outside the province of Habana didn’t go home. Some of them had relatives living in Habana and they were allowed to go to their houses. For the first four years in school, I didn’t go home and I didn’t have relatives in Habana. There were three big vacations: Christmas (from December 23 to January 6), Easter (from Holy Thursday until the Sunday after Easter), and summer (from the end of June to the first week of September). Sometimes at Christmas my father went to pick me up, a few days after the other students had left. Usually he could not pick me up during Easter. Thus, I learned to spend time alone in that giant three-story school. Sometimes I was afraid that my parents would never come to pick me up. In that sense, among many other things, I was different.
My peers used to talk about the different clubs in the beach area where they went to dance, to hang out, or to swim at the pool or the beach—or they talked about their vacations on other beaches, or in Miami, or in Europe, or on a private farm, or going to movies, or going to Coney Island. In that sense, among many other things, I was different.
No nicknames in school: now I was Gelasia, not Nena.
How did I cope with all these differences? I learned to lie or I just lied. Children often tell tales and have difficulty distinguishing between reality and fantasy. This usually is just an expression of the child’s imagination at work and does no harm to anyone. Telling those tales is entirely different from lying. So my tales were not simple exercises of my imagination but real cries out for help and, more often, ways to relate with the behavior of those around me. I could not compare with my peers and I could not tell them my own circumstances because my reality was out of their daily scope. So I exaggerated, twisted the truth, hid the facts, manufactured stories, and denied the obvious. As expected, teachers, administrators, and peers became suspicious and distrustful of me. Once the cycle of lying and distrust was in full swing, it was difficult to find a single way in which the cycle could be stopped.
On the other hand, I needed to recognize that lying was not the only wrong behavior I exhibited. There was also stealing, poor behavior in groups and social settings or with authority figures, and my inability to link consequences with my wrong behavior.
There was no school psychologist and there was no guidance counselor at school. The only way that the administration had at that moment to deal with the situation was punishment, or talking about the problems with my father or with Monsignor Marinas. Did I know that my behaviors were wrong? I guess yes, since I did remember praying on knees at night, asking God to help me to be good. And I remember going to confession to get rid of “my sinner soul,” and praying to the Blessed Mother of Lourdes to help me to be good. I even remember thinking that maybe I had something wrong in me. I felt miserable at night, I felt miserable at everyday mass, and I felt miserable at every single moment. Yes, I was miserable.
Today, I can look back and talk about those behaviors, but I still hesitated to describe the major consequences of these behaviors developed during my formative years. I grew up with a very poor perception of myself, with very low self-esteem, and was involved in many social difficulties. In sum I grew up with a near to ground evaluation of myself as a person. These consequences took me time, effort, pain, prayers, and tears until I was able to learn how to overcome them and become the person that I am today.
I did remember that during the first years in Colegio del Apostolado I suffered excessive distress when separating from home. The trip from Central España to Habana lasted approximately five hours. I cried most of these five hours. I imagined myself leaving the bus and running back, or worse throwing myself out of the bus while it was moving. I cried at night in school. It was clear to me: I didn’t want to be there, but at home.
I did remember in one opportunity that I was trying to picture in my mind the image of my mother’s face but I was unable. Tears came out of my eyes. “What happened?” asked my peers. “Nothing,” I replied. How I was going to explain what had just happened to me? Other times I woke up at night in the middle of a recurring nightmare: I was left alone, or I was in the top of a mountain, or I was going to fall. Always the feeling of being alone with no one that helped me. Always the anguish of not feeling connected with other like myself. The real sense of loneliness. I went through periods of excessive worry about losing my parents, or about thinking that they were in possible harm, and that when I would go back nobody would be at home,
I am pretty sure that my parents also suffered with the separation. They were sure that this was the best for me and for my future. They said it and repeated it to me. I always understood and understand the sacrifice done by my parents, and I am very grateful for that. When I read the book of Richard Rodriguez Hunger of Memories I found myself described in his own description because he too grew up separated from his parents and his pueblito. Like him, I paid (and I am still paying) the cost of academic success with a painful alienation from my family. Without going out of Cuba, without becoming a “formal” immigrant, I became a person living in two words, a person in transition between two worlds.
From 1947 to 1951 I was a problematic child, behaving as a real emotionally disturbed child in the school environment. During those years I was “a very different one” from the one who came to school in September 1947, I was no longer “the intelligent one.” My grades were the minimum to pass from third grade to fourth, to fifth, and to sixth. I didn’t have interest for learning. I didn’t do my homework. Instead, I used the time allocated for that to draw, to move in and out of the room, or wander around the marble staircases. The school had three floors and very beautiful white marble staircases that I loved to climb up and down, that I loved to run up and down, up and down.
When I was in sixth grade, a miracle happened. I was doing sixth grade instead of Ingreso al Bachillerato because probably in two more years I would graduate from eighth grade and the nuns would say to Monsignor Marinas, “This is it.” La Madre Valentina, a Spanish nun who taught math to every single grade in Bachillerato (secondary education) discovered the way to turn my life around. She just gave me attention, and—guess what—she discovered that I had potential. Every Saturday she asked me to help her record the grades of the students. She sat in a chair, I sat in front of her, and I was telling her the grades and she was annotating them in the big book where every child in the school had a new page every year. The attention received for such an important person in the school gave me a sense of anticipation during the week, and probably at the subconscious level I was trying to deserve this “selection.” Slowly, I started to mellow. Slowly I started to have status in the school—because every Saturday I was “the helper” of Madre Valentina.
In June 1951, when my parents came to pick me up, they didn’t feel ashamed of me because I only had the medal of assistance. Now I did also have a Medal for Effort. Moreover, the madre superiora, Esther Diago, told my parents that since I had improved my behavior, instead of going to seventh grade I would have the opportunity to go to the course of Ingreso al Bachillerato.
Ingreso al Bachillerato was the turning point of my life. I graduated from Ingreso al Bachillerato with excellent grades. The nuns reinforced my efforts by covering all the expenses of the ceremony of graduation from primary education—including a long pink dress. There is a photo of my graduation from primary education. In it was Monsignor Arcadio Marinas, me, and also la Madre Valentina. Her smile still tells a lot to me: I knew and I still know that that day also meant a lot to her, that she felt very proud of me.
From September 1951 to June 1957, I was slowly becoming one of the three best students in the school. Now El Colegio del Apostolado was not a cool and silent place but my nest where I was learning to be a señorita, where I was learning good manners, and where I was cultivating my spirit. I started to love the building with its different special places like the chapel and the gruta de la Virgen. I began to pray in a different way; I learned to meditate, to place myself in God’s presence and feel God’s love and peace. As I was moving further, the nuns were giving me more privileges and signs of acceptation, like becoming math tutor of other students—I was even allowed to receive payment for my work as tutor—or becoming the assistant math teacher of the seventh and eighth grade. But the major sign of trust was when they allowed my younger sister Yoya to attend the school as a boarding student with a partial scholarship too.
At fourteen years of age I was allowed to become Hija de Maria, the maximum privilege of a school that had a strong devotion for the Blessed Mother of God, the Virgin Mary. Moreover, I was the one that read the “Poem of Farewell” the day of my graduation as Bachelor in Science. However, I didn’t do my dream of participating in the ceremony of crowning the Blessed Virgin Mary at the end of the month May. This was a public recognition to those students that excelled in achievement and conduct. Every year I started the month asking both God and His blessed mother to help me to behave so I could deserve that prize. But I never got it. Something always came and messed up my good intentions.
During these years something very beautiful happened to me: it was like an awakening, a moment of clarity in which a new insight or understanding is gained. With this new awareness, the experience of life was seen differently, and new possibilities were opened. The expected changes in patterns of thought, emotions, and behavior that occur in adolescence came accompanied by a noticeable growth to new levels of psychological and spiritual maturity. My spiritual life blossomed. When, how, and why it happened I don’t know. I started to enjoy doing spiritual readings. I followed the daily mass not as an obligation but as devotion. I prayed at night. I did visits to the chapel … just for the sake of being there in God’s presence, grateful for the gift of the faith and asking His protection for my family and for myself. When I evoke those memories, I feel peace but also nostalgia. Those years were my golden years in life.
A few months before my graduation of Bachillerato, the superior nun of the school, Reverenda Isabel Bolivar, asked Monsignor Marinas to think about my future. Under her guidance he worked out my entrance to The Catholic University of Santo Tomas of Villanueva.
In 1947, the American priests of St. Augustine had founded a private Catholic university called Santo Tomas de Villanueva. It was the same name and spirit of the one that was in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. This private Catholic university was attended by rich and upper middle-class youngsters and also by those rich youngsters whose parents could not afford sending them to study in the United States of America. By June 1957 there were three public universities in Cuba: in Habana, in Santiago de Cuba, and in Santa Clara. The University of Habana was closed due to the political struggle of the late years of the government of Batista.
After Monsignor Marinas spoke to the administration of the university, Mother Abigail Aguilar accompanied me on the different steps required for admission: interview and academic and intellectual assessment. In June 1957, just before graduating with the degree of Bachillerato en Ciencias I received my acceptance letter. So, on September 7, 1957, I began a new life, with new peers, and with enormous possibilities for my future.
I have no doubt that family is the primary and foremost place where we learn to form and keep close emotional ties, where we learn to live together, where we learn to work out family difficulties, and where we learn to help one another lovingly and creatively. Throughout these ten years of ten months, I was living in Colegio del Apostolado and “vacationing” with my parents in Central España.
In Colegio El Apostolado I learned to live according to the values and habits of society, it was the place where I trained to work out my difficulties, where I learned to discover my own expectations in life, and where I found out my talents and how to use them creatively. My parents got older without me around. My siblings grew up without me around. I have had the privilege of a refined education, but my siblings enjoyed daily life with my parents; they became family while they were together, without me. In June 1957, I was no longer the daughter I was in September 1947. They, my parents, were no longer the parents they were. It was sad. It left a sense of solitude inside me, a sense of hopelessness when I became aware of the meaning of family intimacy –of the sense of togetherness, and the lack of it in my own life. Instead I had a sense of being uprooted and alienated, a sense of confused identity.
But nothing is forever. My umbilical cord with Colegio del Apostolado very soon was abruptly cut. On May 1, 1961, Commander Fidel Castro announced in a rally for the Workers’ Day that private education was going to disappear because it was not needed. During the early morning of the next day, May 2, 1961, different groups of milicianos entered each private school of the island and announced that in “the name of the state” the school was nationalized. Soon the priests and other religious men and women began to leave Cuba. On July 14, 1961, the Madres Apostolinas left Cuba after educating younger Cuban women for seventy years.