Guatáo

Guatáo

James P. Choca

Copyright © 2024 James P. Choca

All rights reserved

First Edition

PAGE PUBLISHING

Conneaut Lake, PA

First originally published by Page Publishing 2024

ISBN 979-8-89157-328-4 (pbk)

ISBN 979-8-89157-363-5 (digital)

Printed in the United States of America

Table of Contents

It ended like the party at Guatáo.

—Cuban Saying (It did not end well.)

This without a doubt, Sancho, will be a huge and dangerous adventure, where it will be necessary for me to demonstrate all of my courage and tenacity.

To change the world, my friend Sancho, is not lunacy nor utopia, but justice.

—Don Quixote de la Mancha (Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra)

To Elizabeth and James,

For being who they are

(and laughing at my jokes).

Acknowledgments

Preface

To: RSalvatierra@fictionalu.edu

From: SSalvatierra@correomanati.cu

Date: April 20, 2000

Dear Ricardo,

I hope you are well.

In the recent past, we have discussed the idea of trying to put behind us the issues we have had in our relationship. I think there may be an opportunity for us to reengage while working together on a project I have come up with.

The project involves writing a book on the Cuban War of Independence based on the diaries that our grandfather wrote. I think the proposal comes at a good time because Cuba needs another hero. The Cuban government has now approved this project. With that approval comes access to the archives at the Museum of the War of Independence. The museum, called Musei, is in the house where we were born and raised, our grandfather's house. The Musei is where Grandfather's diaries are kept.

There are forty-four diaries covering Grandfather's life, from his days at the university in Boston, through the years of the War of Independence, the decade of his political involvement following the war, and his later life with the sugar plantation. We can look at the university and the sugar plantation years for our own enjoyment, but the project involves researching the War and his public life years. There are three years missing (1931 through 1933). We have no idea what happened to those diaries, but it doesn't matter because he was no longer in public life by then.

Although we don't have to read every word, this is a huge collection of writings, and I am hoping to enlist your help. I need help reading the diaries, and writing whatever articles or books may follow. I know that, as a university professor, you have the summers off. You have also told me about the sabbaticals you have taken in the past so I am aware you may have some flexibility for spending time outside of Chicago.

So I hope you would seriously consider the possibility of coming to Cuba and helping me with a project that could have a great deal of meaning in terms of Cuban history and our own personal lives.

Love,

Sal

To: SSalvatierra@correomanati.cu

From: RSalvatierra@fictionalu.edu

Date: April 22, 2000

Dear Sal,

What a pleasure it was to hear that your project had been approved and that you were inviting me to join you!

In addition to the opportunity of working with you, I would treasure the opportunity of regaining our relationship. I am hoping, at this stage of our lives, to work through the issues left between the two of us and renew the ties we had as kids. I remember with much gratification the many good times we had as we were growing up, we were so close in age and experiences. I look forward to sharing in more detail the many years we have been separated, but also recalling our many childhood adventures, in the site where those adventures took place. I am very much looking forward to reestablishing our ties and walking the Vedado streets with you. Remember that steep hill by the Almendares River where we used to risk our lives coming down at top speeds on our bikes? I want to do that again!

My courses will be over in a month, and I am already making arrangements to join you after that.

Besos, abrazos y apretujones.

Rich

A Conversation with Aunt Clara

The Forbidden Country

A Walk in Time

Pictures at an Exposition

English Lessons

Into the Bird Cage

Museín

Le Grand Boeuf

The Diaries

The Art of Trespassing

Family Secrets

Trails

Sans Souci

Cuban Architecture

A Canadian Friend

Conversations at a Museum

Matanzas

Guatáo

Epilogue

About the Author

It ended like the party at Guatáo.

—Cuban Saying (It did not end well.)

This without a doubt, Sancho, will be a huge and dangerous adventure, where it will be necessary for me to demonstrate all of my courage and tenacity.

To change the world, my friend Sancho, is not lunacy nor utopia, but justice.

—Don Quixote de la Mancha (Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra)

To Elizabeth and James,

For being who they are

(and laughing at my jokes).

Acknowledgments

In preparing to write this book, I took courses in creative writing at Roosevelt University, where I am a professor—now emeritus—of clinical psychology. I obtained much help from my two creative writing professors, Kyle Beachy and Christian TeBordo, when I was taking the courses. The many suggestions I received from my fellow students during that time were also very helpful. My good friends, Richard Delaney, Eloy González, and Steve Strack, and a cousin Amaury Pedro Betancourt, read the manuscript and offered valuable comments or recommendations.

Going beyond the courses I took, the support and encouragement I obtained from Roosevelt University and my many colleagues were invaluable. To mention just a few, I note Lois Backas, Ed Rossini, and Lynn Weiner.

Through our many years together, Monica Becker was always helpful, supportive, and encouraging.

And, of course, are all the people I have in my life now: my wonderful girlfriend, Maricarmen García; my daughter, Liz, and son-in-law, Gaspar; my son, James, and daughter-in-law, Jacklyn; my sister, María, and her husband, Steve, and their families.

Finally I want to thank the staff at Page Publishing, especially Eliana Rodríguez and Diana Botteon, for their help with this publication.

Preface

In 2010 my son, James, needed a senior project at Tufts University. To help him decide on a personally meaningful topic, his professor asked questions about his family. When the professor discovered I was born in Cuba and had never been back after coming to the US with my family as a teenager, he had no further questions. James was to take me back to Cuba and record the visit with his camera and his notebook.

I have a cousin who lives in Cuba. He is seven years younger, so when we were growing up, we didn't have much in common. Except we were members of the same family. After being in the United States for fifteen years, my cousin decided to go back to Cuba. Now we were basically the same age, with families and grown-up children. So from the moment my cousin picked James and me up at the airport, he and I were connected.

That experience led me to dream up my own senior project. I came up with the idea of writing a fictional novel about two brothers who reunite after being separated for forty years. One of my fictional brothers had returned to Cuba while the other lived his life in the United States.

Knowing that I needed much help for my senior project, I signed up for the master's degree in creative writing at Roosevelt University. As part of that program, I took a variety of courses. I wanted to integrate all of those experiences in writing this book. As a result, there are chapters that follow a different style than the other chapters. For instance, there are chapters that read like a movie script.

Cervantes was my literary inspiration. He published the second part of Don Quixote in his senior year, just one year before he died. I hope to imitate him to whatever degree my abilities allow. Except I hope not to kick the bucket a year from now.

James (Santiago) Choca Betancourt, 2020

To: RSalvatierra@fictionalu.edu

From: SSalvatierra@correomanati.cu

Date: April 20, 2000

Dear Ricardo,

I hope you are well.

In the recent past, we have discussed the idea of trying to put behind us the issues we have had in our relationship. I think there may be an opportunity for us to reengage while working together on a project I have come up with.

The project involves writing a book on the Cuban War of Independence based on the diaries that our grandfather wrote. I think the proposal comes at a good time because Cuba needs another hero. The Cuban government has now approved this project. With that approval comes access to the archives at the Museum of the War of Independence. The museum, called Musei, is in the house where we were born and raised, our grandfather's house. The Musei is where Grandfather's diaries are kept.

There are forty-four diaries covering Grandfather's life, from his days at the university in Boston, through the years of the War of Independence, the decade of his political involvement following the war, and his later life with the sugar plantation. We can look at the university and the sugar plantation years for our own enjoyment, but the project involves researching the War and his public life years. There are three years missing (1931 through 1933). We have no idea what happened to those diaries, but it doesn't matter because he was no longer in public life by then.

Although we don't have to read every word, this is a huge collection of writings, and I am hoping to enlist your help. I need help reading the diaries, and writing whatever articles or books may follow. I know that, as a university professor, you have the summers off. You have also told me about the sabbaticals you have taken in the past so I am aware you may have some flexibility for spending time outside of Chicago.

So I hope you would seriously consider the possibility of coming to Cuba and helping me with a project that could have a great deal of meaning in terms of Cuban history and our own personal lives.

Love,

Sal

To: SSalvatierra@correomanati.cu

From: RSalvatierra@fictionalu.edu

Date: April 22, 2000

Dear Sal,

What a pleasure it was to hear that your project had been approved and that you were inviting me to join you!

In addition to the opportunity of working with you, I would treasure the opportunity of regaining our relationship. I am hoping, at this stage of our lives, to work through the issues left between the two of us and renew the ties we had as kids. I remember with much gratification the many good times we had as we were growing up, we were so close in age and experiences. I look forward to sharing in more detail the many years we have been separated, but also recalling our many childhood adventures, in the site where those adventures took place. I am very much looking forward to reestablishing our ties and walking the Vedado streets with you. Remember that steep hill by the Almendares River where we used to risk our lives coming down at top speeds on our bikes? I want to do that again!

My courses will be over in a month, and I am already making arrangements to join you after that.

Besos, abrazos y apretujones.

Rich

A Conversation with Aunt Clara

Clara was ninety-six. A few years before she had taken on another lover, a spry young guy of eighty-nine. Clara no longer had the inhibitions of the young and liked to tell me, without sparing details, what she liked doing with her boyfriend. She believed both she and I had inherited the sexual genes of Genghis Khan, the Mongol emperor who had fifty wives and sometimes slept with more than one woman in a given night.

Clara was thrilled when I told her I was going back to Cuba and would be looking into the family history. Maybe we would discover the family secrets. I wanted to know what secrets she was referring to. She didn't know. If she had known, they would not be secrets. But she was sure there were family secrets. She had no doubt about it. She recalled how, sometimes when a kid asked what seemed like an innocent question, the adults looked intensely at their shoes, exchanged fraught side glances, or offered up some incoherent answer. There were family sugar mills the family had owned that had vanished without a trace. Specific members of the extended family remained undiscussed, unnamed, and unacknowledged. Clara asserted there were family secrets and encouraged me to wrench them out with Salvador.

But Clara also wanted to know what had happened between Sal and me, what was it that we had to repair. As kids we were always together, we went to the same school, the same summer camps. We faced the experience of immigrating to the United States together. She wanted to know what happened. So we had a long conversation…

As Clara knew, being my father's sister, Papi was the dominant figure in my home. My father had his favorite son, and it was not me. Clara claimed my father was a religious fanatic and noted that Sal also took off in that direction. Yes, Sal became an altar boy as soon as he was old enough. Clearly favored by my father and evidently called by God, eventually he went to a Jesuit seminary and, though never ordained, was there long enough to wear a Roman collar. But Sal was Papi's son in more ways than one. He studied Latin, of course, but also as an elective took French, a language my father had learned when he went to university in Paris. Sal stayed home on Sundays to help with Papi's home repair projects. I had come out of a different mold and could not compete. I also resented the fact that, when I didn't do what my older brother wanted me to do, he would beat me, and our parents would not do anything about it. Papi ascribed to the philosophy that boys will be boys and did not assign much importance to Sal's bullying. That fraternal abuse stopped on the day, during our teenage years, when I went after Sal with a crowbar after receiving a beating. Sal ran into a corner of the basement, and I ran after him. I didn't have to hit him. Having found the solution to my problem, I simply told him that the next time he put a hand on me, I was going to wait until he was asleep and bash his fucking head in. That day my family knew, including Sal, that the beatings were a thing of the past. My mother, a docile woman who always kept out of controversies, wore a little smile on her face.

And eventually my luck changed in other ways. Sal lost a lot of his currency when he left the seminary. Then, while studying at Marquette University, he discovered sex and marijuana and married a dancer from a strip club. Aunt Clara allowed how the saint had a little of the Genghis Khan genes after all. Well, yes, as the Spanish saying goes, "Dos tetas jalan más que cien carretas, Two tits have more pull than a hundred carriages." That marriage, of course, did not last, dos tetas notwithstanding. And then Sal was sort of lost. The things he had stood for were no longer tenable. He returned to Peru where, as a seminarian, he had spent time at a Jesuit mission. That involvement did not work out either, and Sal ended up going back to Cuba.

I saw the events in Sal's life as an opportunity to displace my older brother as my dad's favorite son. I took every chance I had to dismiss him, mostly with jokes. At home I joked about my going to Milwaukee for the weekend so my older brother could teach me a thing or two, a joke that did not go well with my parents. I said that Salvador was now S to the fourth power (S⁴)—Salvador, saint, seminarian, and stripper. I wondered if he had devalued or enhanced the name Salvador, the old traditional name of our family. Papi, even more than Mom, felt depressed and angry about the current version of his long-favored son, so I didn't have to do much work to become the new number one. In spite of his occasional abusive behavior, Sal and I had been buddies, a pair that did most things together. He had defended me at school. He was a much better student and a leader in his class, and I admired him much of the time. Sal had expected, given our relationship as kids that I would come to his defense, but of course, I didn't. The change was helped by the fact that our parents, mostly my father, had disinherited Sal, and were no longer relating to him.

Later Sal decided to have his marriage annulled by the Catholic Church. He argued that coming out of the Jesuit seminary, he was too bewildered and naive to make reasonable decisions. His marriage was contracted when he was not able to consent with the understanding of a capable adult. He did not like it when I told him I was too busy with my university studies to help obtain documents in support of his annulment. And then he grew livid when I explained my own belief. By then I was very much an atheist and did not think much of the Mickey Mouse church. I thought a marriage could never be annulled and treated as if it had never happened. I was comfortable with the fact that one could get a divorce and go on to another relationship. But the concept of annulment was part of what the Catholic Church claimed it could do with its magic wand, the hocus pocus that turned me off. Yes, if a wafer could morph into the body of Jesus Christ, they could surely render Sal's marriage nonexistent. But as a matter of principle, I was not going to do anything to help with the annulment. Hearing that, Sal became so infuriated that he stopped talking to me, and all of our communications ended.

However, after our parents died and after Sal won his annulment and remarried, I saw no reason to continue the fight and contacted him. I had always been more like our mother, preferring to live and let live and to have good relationships with people. (I thought perhaps our sibling rivalry would be still alive and well, but we would have to see.) Aunt Clara wanted to know how I was going to fix the relationship and offered me a bit of advice. To whatever degree Sal was like our father had been, it was best not to talk about disagreements. Sal may never come to see it from my point of view or even accept that I had a legitimate point. My best bet was to bury the issues, like the cadavers of a dictatorship, and go on from there.

The Forbidden Country

When I saw the sunny outline of the Cuban coast from the airplane window, I could only think of the rainy afternoon forty years before when I managed to escape. I thought I had come to terms with my decision to return to the forbidden country, but now I was lightheaded and nauseous.

For forty years I had been nostalgic about Cuba. It was an ever-present itch that demanded scratching. I treasured any information that came my way, especially pictures, always wanting to see if there was something I could recognize. For a long time, the country was closed to Cuban-born visitors. Most people can visit the place where they grew up, making it less likely they would become nostalgic about it. Miami's Calle Ocho has the Cuban flavor, but it is a far cry from Old Havana. Puerto Rico's Old San Juan and Spain's Cádiz look more like Havana, but they are not the same. I was missing the playground with the swings I had outgrown, the gazebo where I first looked at the centerfold picture of the Playboy magazine brought in by one of my neighborhood friends, the smell of the bakery with the large crackers, the Carmelo Restaurant where Papi would take us to eat on special occasions, and the corner kiosko where I bought my first cigarettes.

Even after my brother went back to stay, it was impossible for Cuban Americans to visit Cuba. Eventually, however, the country became more open to tourists; and many Cuban Americans had been going in and coming out without any problem. My parents' death took away the last stumbling block against a visit. They had rejected and disinherited my brother and would not have been pleased with my reestablishing a connection with him.

My brother, Salvador, had recently recruited me through email for a family history project that involved reading our grandfather's diaries. I happened to have time off from my university teaching, so this was the right time. Intellectually I knew there was not much of a risk. I was only fifteen when I left and had never done anything the Cuban government could consider objectionable. Salvador had moved back to Cuba many years before, had a family there, and was well-established. Yet I struggled with the idea of voluntarily returning to a place from where so many people had lost their lives trying to escape. With the exception of my brother, no one else in the family had ever gone back. My apprehension led to months of gastrointestinal problems, and two episodes of lightheadedness while driving in Chicago—times when I had to pull off the road to recover my composure.

Salvador had always been a quirky guy, and in spite of many recent email contacts, I didn't know what to expect. When we were kids, and I wanted a dog (to which I paid little attention), Salvador got himself a boa constrictor. Nicomedes was a harmless snake, but it grew in size with the mice Salvador fed it until it was a six-foot-long monster. One day it escaped from its cage and could not be found. Days later, when Papi drove into the garage, he saw Nicomedes's head peaking from behind some boards. When Salvador tried to grab it, Nicomedes slid under the car and coiled itself around a suspension bar. Papi drove the car to a nearby service station to have the car hoisted. The whole scenario was a new experience for the gas station attendants. When they saw the size of the animal, they would not let Salvador near the car and called the police. Soon the station was surrounded by squad cars that had merged there with their sirens blaring. Salvador had a hard time convincing the police not to shoot the animal. With their guns cocked and ready, the policemen reluctantly allowed Salvador to retrieve his pet from under the car. That was, however, the last day Nicomedes was with us prior to being taken to a zoo.

But my discomfort with the trip went beyond concerns about reuniting with my quirky brother. A special visa was required for those of us who were born there, supposedly to ensure we were not going in to cause trouble. The night after receiving the special visa I began to suffer from a recurrent nightmare. In the nightmare, I was in Cuba and someone had stolen my backpack from the seat next to me at a restaurant. There was a good deal of money in the backpack since US credit cards were not valid in Cuba, so I had to carry all