HAVANA — The last time René Diaz saw his home in Cuba, he was 6 years old and his family had 15 minutes to get out.
Waiting were two police officers and the people who would move in as soon as they left.
He remembers his mother’s tears as family members picked out the clothes they would wear to America, the only possessions they were allowed to take. He thinks of the photos she tossed out of a window to a neighbor, who would mail them at a later time. He recalls a childhood friend innocently asking, in Spanish, “Can I have your fire engine?”
It’s with these memories that Diaz arrived at Havana’s José Martí International Airport on Saturday, nearly 50 years later. He marveled at the lush farmland surrounding the airport and thought of his late father, a cattle rancher in the years before Fidel Castro’s reign.
“I always thought I would be coming back, but with my father,” Diaz said, his eyes watering.
Diaz is among a group of Atlantans — politicians, businessmen, educators and exiles — who are traveling to Cuba to assess the opportunities there as tensions between that country and the United States ease. The contingent is organized by the World Affairs Council of Atlanta and includes its president, former Ambassador to Venezuela Charles Shapiro, and Atlanta Mayor Kasim Reed.
It also includes Jorge and Silvia Fernandez, who, like Diaz, are returning to a place each fled in the 1960s after Castro came to power. The Atlanta couple met as teenagers as both of their families built new lives in Puerto Rico.
In many ways, the group represents what President Barack Obama’s decision to renew diplomatic relations with the Communist country could mean for Americans. For some, it’s a chance for trade and business expansion to a country of nearly 12 million potential consumers. For others, it brings hope of reconnecting with an identity left behind.
Jorge Fernandez, now the vice president of global commerce with the Metro Atlanta Chamber, came to Havana to tell what he calls “Atlanta’s story” in an effort to explore business opportunities with the island nation.
But it’s his story that matters on his first day back. He’s visited Cuba twice, though briefly, since leaving as a 10-year-old boy in 1961.
He was among the estimated 14,000 unaccompanied children to be sent to America by parents who feared for their safety in the early days of the Castro regime. The program, sponsored by the Catholic Church, was later dubbed “Operation Pedro Pan.”
His parents joined him a year later, he said. Only half of the children sent to the U.S., however, would be reunited with family.
“The reason parents felt it was OK to let their children leave is because they thought this was a short-term issue,” he recalled. “We were lucky to get reunited. Others weren’t as lucky.”
He views Cuba as a chapter in a book that he for years left behind. Being here changes that, he said as he boarded the flight to Havana.
“When I first went back to Cuba, I got the urge to go back to that chapter,” said Fernandez, wearing an Atlanta Braves baseball cap. “Up to that point, I knew it, I remembered it … but it was something in my past. Being there awakened my desire to know more.”
Silvia Fernandez, now a teacher, said she is encouraged by what seems to be an earnest effort to resume talks between the United States and Cuba. But she doesn’t like to get caught up in the politics, the heartache and anger that many still feel about what they lost under Castro rule.
Private businesses, including those owned by foreign companies, were seized. Many landowners were forced to give up some of their property. If they left the country, they forfeited all that they couldn’t take with them. Family members who had shared close quarters in Cuba found themselves separated for the first time as they built new lives in America.
And that’s to say nothing of the political prisoners taken as a result of the government overthrow.
To this day, many Cuban Americans have a deep bitterness toward the Castro government, and say the U.S. should require more of it before easing existing trade and travel restrictions.
Ask Silvia, and she’ll tell you she’s tried to look forward. But now, in Havana, it’s time to revisit the past.
For her, that began during lunch at the iconic Hotel Nacional, the site of a famous meeting of American mob bosses in the 1940s.
Dining in the seaside courtyard, Silvia broke down as a trio of musicians played her late mother’s favorite song: “Aquellos Ojos Verdes.” Translation: “those green eyes.”
“My mom had green eyes, and that was the song my father always dedicated to her,” she said. “I feel like she was here.”
On Sunday, she hopes to visit the home where her grandparents lived, a couple of blocks from her own. It was there, in the spring of 1961, that her grandmother yanked her out of bed and pushed her onto the floor of a guest bathroom. In the distance, she could hear gunshots and artillery fire.
Her family fled that year with no time to say goodbye to her grandparents, she said. Like many, her family thought their trip would be a matter of months, not decades.
She would never see them again.
“The Cubans felt that even if they were leaving Cuba under such drastic situations, that the United States would somehow fix it up, and then we all would be able to come back in a year or two,” she said. “It was just a sense of being protected by the United States. I remember the phrase: After all, Cuba is only 90 miles away.”
Now, a lifetime later, there’s hope that the U.S. and Cuba will shed their Cold War-era hostilities.
While lifting the trade embargo requires an act of Congress, Obama has already taken steps to loosen some trade and financial transaction regulations.
Diaz, accompanied by his wife Barbarella, said that’s only part of the reason he’s come to Cuba now.
As the president and CEO of Atlanta-based Diaz Foods, he’s interested in exploring business possibilities with Cuban entities as the Latin government shows signs of easing its strict Communist rule. Under Raúl Castro, the government has issued a limited number of self-employment licenses, a step toward encouraging private enterprise.
But more importantly, Diaz said, the time finally seemed right.
Both of his grandparents left Cuba at different times in the 1960s, having won a pass to America through a visa lottery system that allowed a limited number to leave. His mother’s parents, who migrated to Cuba from Lebanon, were quickly able to adjust to a new life in Atlanta. But his Cuban father and grandfather, the cattle ranchers, struggled before finding new careers in the grocery industry.
His grandfather dreamed of returning to Cuba before his death in 1999, Diaz said. But to his father, who died last August, America became home.
“He believed that what happened, happened,” he said. “He didn’t like it and was bitter about it, but he learned to understand that he had a new life in the U.S. and made the best out of it.”
Diaz said he, too, has pondered what could have been had the Revolution not happened, had his family’s farm remained theirs.
Those feelings re-emerged Saturday as he sipped a freshly squeezed “coctel vigia” — made of sugarcane, pineapple, lemon juice and rum — and later took in glimpses of Old Havana and its faded Spanish colonial architecture.
But he’s quick to cast aside those thoughts, noting that life is about a series of circumstances and choices.
“My daughter reminds me: ‘If it weren’t for Fidel, you wouldn’t have met mom, and I wouldn’t have been born,’” he said. “My life would have been completely different.”
About the Author
