Former Atlanta Journal-Constitution and current Palm Beach Post staff writer Carlos Frías is the author of “Take Me With You: A Secret Search for Family in a Forbidden Cuba.”
For four days I’ve been asked what I think about this Castro/Ozzie Guillen fiasco.
Four days I’ve spent answering emails and Facebook messages, responding to ignorant Twitter posts and private notes.
They ask me not just because I’m a former baseball writer but because I’m the son of Cuban exiles. And, frankly, that’s the only reason you should read this.
Me, you might ask? What have I suffered to carry such a burning hate for Fidel Castro? I’m an American kid, born in Coconut Grove, liking chocolate shakes better than guava ones, a kid whose parents sent him to private Catholic school and paid most of his college expenses at the University of Florida.
If I am Cuban at all — and I do identify myself that way — it’s because of the inherited testimonies of my parents, the stories that shaped who I am, that molded my thinking, that taught me empathy for people who would rather start new lives at 45 in a country with a strange language than live as pawns in the place where their parents are buried.
You don’t have to listen to me. But my mother and father? We should listen to them. So I did.
I sat quietly next to my father as we turned on the television Tuesday to watch the Miami Marlins hold a news conference to let their say-anything manager Guillen clear up — and eventually take back — his odes of love for the Cuban dictator Castro.
At 11:03 a.m., my father turned to me.
“People shouldn’t just give away their tickets; they should rip them up. Tear them to shreds. Show them with an empty stadium what this means to us,” he said.
What this means to him, he means.
Livelihood taken
My father grew up one of 11 children in the farming province of Oriente, Cuba, with one pair of shoes for every two years of his life.
He worked in the fields — at 11, he traveled alone by train with a load of tomatoes to sell in a nearby town — until he saved up enough money to leave to the big western city of Havana, where he set up a café stand in a corner of a busy market with one of his brothers.
That eventually grew into five cafés, a grocery store and a nightclub in the bustling city of Marianao. The American dream, no? Well, those eventually became property of the Cuban government, which filed soldiers into the establishments, asked for the keys and marched the employees out at gunpoint before they locked the door behind them forever.
And then, when my father tried to leave the country in a speedboat because all travel was frozen, he was arrested and sentenced to two years in a prison called La Cabana, where he heard 17 men executed on his first night in jail.
He spent two years working in an agricultural concentration camp, surrounded by soldiers with German shepherds, to “earn” his right to leave the country and have his passport stamped invalid as he left his Cuba forever, with nothing but a suitcase and a change of clothes.
This is what I’m thinking about as Guillen is looking contrite on the television screen. My father is thinking something different.
“He doesn’t understand,” my dad says, turning to me. “Do you think he can comprehend that I was playing chess with a guy when the guards came and snatched my compañero away? I never saw him again.”
But he heard the firing squad that night.
By 11:15 a.m., Guillen’s eyes look a little puffy. He has said he met with a group of exiles and spent a few hours with them, learning the stories of their fractured families.
And that’s when I look at my mother, who has expanded cable only so she can watch all 162 Marlins games. Well, that and The Weather Channel. And I can’t help but think of her fractured family.
It was just yesterday we were talking about her oldest living sister, her only living sibling of four, who remains in a dilapidated house in Cuba where two-by-fours hold the roof up. It was this aunt who had packed up her family and was ready to leave Cardenas, Cuba, with her parents, two sisters and brother and her family of five when she got word that her oldest son’s visa had been denied. He would soon be 15, military age, and would not be allowed to leave.
She vowed that she would not leave Cuba until all her children were allowed safe passage (and not smuggled on a boat), and today, 50 years later, she remains there, a widow with two broken hips — 90 miles and an ocean of dead Cuban rafters between her and her sister.
Maybe you’ve never heard stories like this. I have. All my life. And maybe now when you hear them, you’ll understand what it meant to Miamians — not natives but naturalized — who love this town, love this country, love their old country, and love their baseball team.
DON’T TALK, LISTEN
Maybe what Guillen needs is to hear these stories. To shut his mouth and open his ears, and reflect on the stories of pain — and not “love” — of what Castro has meant to the people whose team Guillen represents.
He’s talking again, calling his comments “the biggest mistake I’ve made so far in my life. If I don’t learn from this, I will call myself dumb.” He calls himself “very stupid. Very naïve.”
He goes on to say he hasn’t slept in three days and has never cried as hard as he has during this whole ordeal.
Funny, my dad says he never cried the entire time he was in a jail cell with 500 men.
But reliving those memories as he watches the news conference, his lips are quivering now. And yet, a half-hour into the news conference, he turns from the television again.
“Maybe they should forgive him,” he says, pausing. “Yeah, they should forgive him. He’s just an ignoramus. And did you hear? He swore he would never give his opinions about politics again. But I don’t know. It may be too late. What he said, I don’t know if enough people will be willing to forgive him.”
One man can forgive him. But can an entire population, which lives wounded with memories of broken families, murdered sons and a country most will never set foot on again?
Guillen’s been suspended for five games, but this isn’t over. We’ll see what happens when he and the Marlins return for a homestand.
“I don’t think he’s gonna make it,” my dad says, finally, as cameras follow Guillen out of the news conference.
He’s probably right. And maybe he shouldn’t. For someone who has said something so blatantly ignorant, so carelessly offensive, it’s probably the only lesson that would stick in the continuing education of Ozzie Guillen.
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