Old Photograph Stories 35
IN CUBA
My grandfather left Curaçao around 1911 for Cuba, to become a partner in running a sugarcane plantation in the province of Camaguey, in the central part of the island. Apparently, it was good a good business deal at the time, when his financial prospects were poor in Curaçao's failing economy.
He and my grandmother moved into a nice house in Havana, where my mother and her siblings were born, and they brought Yaya Leonor with them to care for the kids. My grandfather would travel to the plantation by night train once a month, staying for a week each time. In the mid nineteen-twenties, when the price of sugar began to fall, the family had to move to the small town of Majagua not far from the plantation, as they could no longer afford to stay in Havana. Until finally, in the great depression of 1929, they were forced to leave Cuba for good and return to Curaçao.
Those three years in the countryside, when my mother was between the ages of 13 and 16, she led a life that was much freer from the social constrictions of the city. It was clearly the best part of her life, and it certainly shaped me too, firing my imagination through the stories she told of roaming the countryside on horseback, playing tennis on an improvised court, and riding a cart pulled by a billy-goat. One day the cart turned over in a ditch, breaking her arm so badly, that she had to go to a hospital in Havana on a long train ride, needing repeated surgeries to finally repair it. The large scar, like a giant centipede crawling up her arm, always reminded me of her adventurous spirit.
My mother’s nostalgia was for that period of freedom, especially as she got older. Going through her belongings after she died, I realized she had kept all her notebooks from the private lessons she received while in the small town of Majagua in Camaguey, as apparently, she and her sister and brother did not attend the local school. I also came across a story, beautifully written in Spanish about breaking her arm and the saga of her trip to the hospital in Havana, as well as a note with all the dates of significant events in her life, written in perfect English.
In Majagua, my mother also continued her painting studies with a private teacher, preparing herself to be accepted to the art academy in Havana, but the family had to leave Cuba before she could realize her dream. She continued to paint for a while in Curaçao, and her beautiful oil paintings were hanging all over our house, but little by little she gave it up altogether, especially after she married my father. She said she did not have the time for it anymore.
When we were growing up, she loved to explain to us how sugar was produced from the cane her father grew – how it was harvested, and taken by oxcart to a mill, where its juice was pressed out, then heated and made to crystallize. We were amazed to hear that fires in the sugarcane fields were not extinguished by fire engines with water hoses, but by letting the fire rage and sacrificing whole acres of cane, while calling up an emergency team, sometimes in the middle of the night, to cut down wide stretches of the cane much further away, to bring the fire to a stop. As kids in Curaçao, we loved to nibble on a large cone-shaped chunk of dark brown sugar that was sold in the market, to get a feel of life in Cuba.
My mother deeply regretted never having been able to visit Cuba again. Once, after WWII, flying from New Orleans back to Curaçao together with my father, the plane had to make an emergency landing in Havana, and she pleaded with the authorities to let her down the plane for just a few minutes, to set foot on her beloved island again. But they refused. After the rise of Fidel Castro, there was of course no question of going back.
As a college student in the US in the turbulent second half of the sixties, I was under the spell of Castro’s heroic struggle against Batista’s dictatorship, wholeheartedly supporting his early socialist ideals of justice and equality for all and learning about the island’s sugarcane workers’ miserable conditions of near enslavement.
I realized with a shock, that my very own grandfather had been one of those cursed landowners – even though he had left the island some thirty years before Fidel Castro came to power.
I did not tell that to my classmates.
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photo by my grandfather, Benjamin Gomes Casseres, not of sugarcane (his photos from Cuba are still being processed) but of a harvest of maishi chiki (lit: little corn - sorghum) in Curacao - in the nineteen forties.
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