Havana, where the Melendez' and Bruzon's formed the family
The story which follows is actually a series of highlights which come to mind about my family, as well as a chronicle of my most personal and memorable events, at the time of writing. It is not a full compact history, nor may it perhaps include what others see as defining moments. It is my personal story, written one day, extemporaneously.
Ignacio Meléndez, was born in Spain in the late 1880's. He was a great nephew of one the greatest Spanish poets and philosophers of all times, Don Juan Meléndez Valdés (1754-1817). A paragraph about Don Juan is appropriate here, as he left the greatest heritage of any other of our known ancestors, Meléndez or otherwise. He continues as a great cultural icon in Europe, Spain, and in the Spanish-speaking world at large. Heck! In the United States too. I read him at my Spanish Literature courses at Miami-Dade College in the early 70s.
Don Juan, while alive, enjoyed great fame. His contemporaries considered him simply the best in his field: "the best poet of his time." See: http://www.cervantesvirtual.com/servlet/SirveObras/01604185547816075212257/p0000001.htm
This "best poet" attribute was expressed by Martín Fernández de Navarrete, and placed Don Juan Meléndez, without reservations, on equal footing with the Spanish literary giants Garcilaso or Lope de Vega (the Spanish "Shakespeare"). His work was almost unanimously praised by his peers, and found resonance far away from Spain: in Germany, England, Italy and France. Don Juan Meléndez was particularly appreciated in France. There, the name "Meléndez" symbolized Spanish Arts and Spanish Literature for half a century, and above all, defined the Rebirth of Hispanic Literature.
Less than two decades after Don Juan's death, our (this author and Maria Cristina Melendez') great grandfather Ignacio was conceived, while the family was still in Spain. He migrated to Cuba (WHAT YEAR??)in early adulthood to found one of the first Michelin Tire Concessionaries
in the Americas, in Havana in his case, early in the second decade of the 20th century. (I have NO idea what a picture of me in Spain's Costa Brava in 1970 is doing here)In Cuba, he met and later married our paternal grandmother, YNÉS PERFECTA SOUTO Y GOTANEGRA.
The document I possess dated December 21, 1915 and signed by the Municipal Judge of Güines (Cuba) confirms YNÉS PERFECTA's birth, and that of her three siblings. It was issued in 1915, when she was already in her 20s, to prepare for her children's Cuban Birth Certificates, one of which I possess as an annex to my own. This information comes from "Folio 147 from Section 5" relating to "Births and Civil Registry of Citizens, Number 1089 taken from the Villa of Güines Records of 1887" - the year of Ynés' birth.
Now about Ynés' family: the Souto y Gotanegra's. The above referenced document corrects the spelling of the surname Soto to "Souto" in several places. The family name is indeed Souto, but was entered by a Spanish notary as Soto, by mistake. Soto is the Spanish spelling of the Galician and Portuguese surname Souto, which indeed is the family name - not Soto. Ynés Souto y Gotanegra was the daughter of the Catalan Doña Magdalena Gotanegra y Montaña and Don Mariano Souto, from Mataró (in Catalunya, called Barcelona Province at the time), in Spain.
To recap, the Souto - Gotanegra's had four children, all Spanish citizens born under the Spanish flag. They were, in addition to Ynés Perfecta: Rafael Domingo Victoriano, María Teresa Margarita and Zoila Rosa Paulina. Zoila bore two children, with her female offspring Magda producing four male heirs, two of whom are still alive, and reside with their respective families, in the United States, where indeed, all Melendez-Souto's descendants live.
María Ynés married Ignacio Meléndez (WHEN???) in Havana in and bore five children. Their first born was Maria Teresa (b. Havana 1914, d.1972 in Miami, USA, known as "Terina" to all),
followed by Ignacio (b. Havana 1917 - d.2002 in Miami; for a good part of his life, a well-known Havana lawyer and womanizer), and then Gonzalo Mariano (our father - b.1919 Havana d.1984 Miami).As this is a history belonging only to us, the two Melendez Bruzon descendants, plus Maria Cristina Melendez Bruzon's children and grandchildren, I will be more specific about our father Gonzalo Mariano Melendez.I'll attempt a sketch of his life, so influenced by the times he lived through: the boom of the Roaring 20s, the Great Depression, the Spanish Civil War, various coup d'état's in Cuba, working and achieving in the 1940s a seemingly idyllic life in the hedonistic "golden decade" of Havana in the 1950s, then Fidel Castro's seizure of power, the ensuing "Revolution" with the gradual expropriation of all that was his, including his whole way of life.This was followed by exile in the United States, and gradual acceptance that his "exile" had become permanent.
I am emphasizing here what most impacted my father, according to my own recollections, the volumes of picture albums he left behind, the dozens of 8mm and Super 8 reels documenting his life since 1947 (and in color), and the stories of those who knew him on a different level, adult to adult, sister to brother. That said, among all the personalities he knew and all he did, a few events and a few people in particular, plus his association to the Miramar Yacht Club in Havana and his activities there, influenced and shaped his life. These people, the events and the Yacht Club defined him, our family, and had a great hand in what we (my sister and I) became.
My sister and I have continued to frequent the periodic Miramar Yacht Club reunions up to the reunions in the 1990s, representing our parents. Even now, 47 years after after seized by Fidel Castro's Regime, reunions of the Clubs former members & their descendants - now spread across the Americas and Europe - take place, usually in Key Biscayne (Miami), Florida. Since 1961, the CLUB has continued to function in Havana in the same place with same facilities as the "Club de las Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias" (Club FAR).
My sister attended the last reunion in 2005. I did not as I have been living in Brazil since 2001. But she, María Cristina, always represents our mother and father who were among the Club's most popular, years before their marriage in August of 1952. Back to our father's teenage years in the then-chic "El Vedado" district of Havana, our father lived with the rest of his family plus an uncle, surrounded by relatives who lived in adjacent buildings. He was a student at Havana's prestigious Belén Jesuit Academy, in High School, when the Great Depression of the early 30s took a turn for the worse, and sugar prices, the mainstay of the Cuban economy, plummeted. Many families went bankrupt; our grandfather's Michelin business bit the dust too. So, our father then skipped university - as family finances allowed supporting only one university student - Ignacio Jr in this case.
Our father's main interests, as early teenage pictures show, were swimming, diving and sailing. The friends and contacts he made at Havana Clubs while practicing these "bourgeois" sports at upper class clubs as a teenager and young man were to serve him well in the future. His exposure to the most powerful families in this milieu was made all the stronger by his outgoing, friendly manner. This shaped his character, and developed values and a lifestyle which remained consistently intact through the rest of lis life.
Gonzalo and Terina Bruzón de Meléndez
MELENDEZ COAT OF ARMS
Through private clubs in particular, my father began to frequent high circles of Havana society, even if by invitation only, not membership.In his mid 20s, his friendship with our mother grew. They were neighbors and both families were already twice related by Melendez or Guanche marriages to the Jimenez Rojo Family. Our mother was almost seven years his junior, and belonged to the "landed classes" who were already an instrumental part of his life. She was not from a Sugar Baron family, nor did his approximation to her, bring him direct returns.
But she was several steps above his socio-economic class, and their union definitely strengthened his social status, and added a beautiful wife - a feature which can be most important in a man's image. They certainly pondered and waited to tie the knot. He did so finally at age 33, while our mother was 26. More than a dozen years of knowing each other had already passed.
Our mother's famuly home was in Cojimar, a once-ritzy seaside suburb. But in Havana, she lived in El Vedado - in the middle of an area where our father's entire extended family lived, and ultimately produced many marriages: our Aunt Terina to Ramiro de Cárdenas, Aunt Gloria with Jorge Jiménez-Rojo, our aunt Alicia with Ñico Calvo, our Uncle Ignacio to two ladies (the second after becoming a widower), and finally our mother to our father.
As our Aunt Gloria recalls, she and most newly-poor students during the depression had to walk or take public transportation to school. Well, at least Gloria did continue attending a private American Nuns' School. But, our mother, an only child to boot, was dropped off at school in an imported Buick with a uniformed driver.
Our mother was a hard nut to crack, very enigmatic. Her father Eduardo Bruzón was an avid sports fan, particularly a New York Yankees fan. Though he was a lawyer, he like all men on my mother's side until me, never really worked. These men studied and obtained a University degree, sometimes in the USA or Europe, but then did basically nothing (by our standards today). They lived off the rent of the extensive landholdings, from tenant farmers who cultivated these lands and sold agricultural goods derived from them.
Even the collection of these rents, the supervision of these lands and accounting functions were carried out by paid third parties - the equivalent of today's middle classes. On my mother's side, all the men before me, going back at least the 7 or 8 generations which are documented, were what we call today "the idle rich." And their wives all came from that same social circle, with those marriages often creating larger holdings.
Our mother's mother, Teté, also came from such a family - actually a little better off, perhaps since our great grandfather Facundo Guanche did study, and DID WORK, becoming a famous architect and providing additional income, while not squandering money - as Eduardo Bruzón was rumored to do. But his wife, our great grandmother came from the most traditional, richest and largest land holders of all sides of our family. That may have motivated Eduardo to marry Teté quite a bit, at least in the beginning, though his family had large land holdings in Oriente Province and in Holguín.
Our grandfather Eduardo Bruzón had a lot of affection for the Melendez family, and witnessed with appreciation our father's rise in position, on his own; and saw my father supporting the entire Melendez clan for some years. Hard-working (OK, just "working") white men of 100% Spanish lineage who lived in the "Vedado" social milieu were a rarity. The men who married richer women and lived off the wife's family was more the rule than rich men marrying women of lower social status.
So, our father's work ethic and honesty impressed Eduardo, though the more pompous relatives on our grandmother's Teté side were not as impressed. Our more liberal, man of the world grandfather Facundo Guanche died in the late 1940s. So, family pressure on my grandmother's side came from our strict matriarchical and "aristocratic" Rodríguez de Armas great-grandmother. She only died in 1957 and interfered in her daughters' lives completely.
She never allowed children to speak during dinner, which was served nightly, punctually and rigorously, according to my cousin Cocó Cacicedo's often told accounts. She may not have been too crazy about one of her only 3 nieces marrying a middle class professional, whose parents were "gallegos" - a term still used through Latin America for Spanish immigrants, usually poor and just "off the boat from Spain," though that was not our grandfather's Ignacio's case - he came to Havana as an investor in a car tire multinational. But my father's parents were still "gallegos" to her, and she was loath to have her niece (our mother Terina) repeat the cycle of supporting husbands and children.
However, our mother at 25 and 26, was not getting any younger. Times were changing not only through the Americanization of society, but branches of the Guanche family had already intermarried with branches related to the Melendez, and in those cases, the marriages and the men did work. That, however, as our father loved to point out two instances, was not always the case with the men who married the Meléndez women, or so was the version our father spread.
I later realized this was false. My father actually had an extremely overzealous work ethic, to the detriment of his nuclear family. He did a lot of work "for friends and family, well -the Cardenas family alone really" with no financial gain. This "work ethic" left my mother, my sister and me living in an inferior economic situation than all his "friends'families" and also below all his siblings' families.
That lasted until the mid 70s, after my mother had been working with him at the agency a few years, bringing home another salary. Of his 3 sisters, only one Gloria worked, and with a vengeance. But Gloria always maintained a balance between work & parenting - bringing up her children with so much love, she perhaps paid too much attention and care (and my sister and me in our father's absence), sacrificing her own personal life. By the time our father achieved a similar economic position to his siblings, but never anywhere near that of his friends, my sister and I were in our mid to late teens, and left home a few years later.
Going back to our parents wedding in August of 1952, our maternal grandfather Eduardo(weakened by food, extreme jealousy/suspicion about our grandmother's nonexistent lovers, and alcohol consumption) was, at this point, submissive to our great grandmother and the very forceful, modern and enlightened Guanche sisters. So, he would not have opposed our parents' marriage, even if he didn't like the Melendez' as much as he did. And he loved them, particularly my aunt Gloria and her twin nephews Ramirito and Gonzalito, with whom our grandfather shared his passion for Baseball.
Eduardo Bruzón died less than 2 years after our parents' wedding, of a fulminating heart attack while following, live from New York, a pennant-deciding championship dispute involving his beloved New York Yankees, together with other Melendez-Cárdenas males, in the block of "El Vedado" where they all lived. My sister was born exactly two months and one day after his passing. My parents - ever away from home having fun, where at the Cine Miramar, a few blocks awy from our Havana-Miramar home, when the just-widowed Maria Teresa went in to the theater to break the news. A factoid I remember.
So, I view our parent's marriage somewhat as one of convenience, as one of two people who loved the water, partying, dancing, and drinking. They made the perfect pair for the fun and frenetic Havana scene of the 1950s. Our parents, within 3 years of their marriage, already had produced the bourgeois ideal of the nice "pareja" of children (a male heir, and then a cute girl), while smoking and drinking as usual. NOTE that this didn't lessen our birth weights: I was 9 lbs and my sister 10 lbs at birth, a couple of packs a day of filter-less Pall Malls notwithstanding
So, our parents got that social requisite out of the way expeditiously, and quickly resumed their intensive social life at full pre-child bearing rythm. Not that my father ever stopped - he was not present at either one of the deliveries, and partied with the boys at the Club when he learned the news for hours, before even going to see his newborn children, or wife.
Our mother had never stopped entertaining at home, dancing, drinking (often at the Club's main bar - see picture) and smoking her Pall Mall's without filter. In all the pictures we have of our mother pregnant - taken at our house's backyard to record for eternity her huge bellies in both cases -she has a cigarette in her hand, as did our cousin and photographer for the occasion, Terinita de Cárdenas. A highball glass of "Cutty Sark" appears in these afternoon pictures too. Perhaps I'm being too obvious in noting that the woman, and not the man, suffers through the pregnancies. But the Scotch, rumba, cha-cha-cha and filterless Pall Malls, definitely did not produce the monsters you see in anti-smoking cigarette packs these days.
With a huge array of aunts and uncles, cousins (6 of these relatives lived next door), both grandmothers, in addition to the house service staff, and two live-in English speaking Jamaican nannies (one for each of us), our parents continued living as partying, young, childless couples until the first days of 1962. They were not the only parents like that in Miramar. A small example of that, but a good one, was my First Communion at Corpus Christi Church. Studying at a private (non religious) English-speaking school, I took a course at the Church for my First Communion. This "Holy Sacrament" was, needless to say, so, openly presented as a social event or rite of passage, that even a 7 year old like I was, knew it was just another big party I was entitled to. Our parents never went to church, how could I expect that they would trade their cocktails on a yacht on a sunny day for a "Kid's Party"?
Of course, I couldn't expect such a "miracle" (no religious implication meant obviously). Not only were my parents absent at My First Communion (and it was a big event). It was comparable to a huge wedding, with elaborate tailor-made uniforms, the ostentation of any appropriate family gold or jewelry items, real pearl rosaries, gold-leaf commumion books, and hundreds of people in attendance. See my Holy Communion Album for even more excesses - which not even served religious purposes, but rather created activities and much discussion amongst the families for the selection of tailors, material for the different pieces of the "uniform", the choice of silver crucifixes, pearls for the rosaries, photographers, menu items for the "après" Breakfast, at the Miramar Yacht Club in its final few months (see photo of entrance)..
It was something playing out the "idle rich" legend, obviously NOT a legend, and also NOT something created by recent American materialism. This was almost 50 years ago in a Third World country. And yet, these same mothers still ask themselves, how could people support a Fidel Castro? How could they accept God-less communism over God's given Catholicism, which supposedly "saved the sick, the poor, the homeless"?
How? Because everything the Catholic Church did was pompous, pandering to the upper classes (who supported the high-living clergy), creating fabulous and ostentatious pageants for every so-called Sacrament. Hell, the priests, and bishops at these affairs were, to understate their garb, decked out to the nines. These "real clergymen" were more over the top in their gowns, capes, hats and countless accessories than the Bishop and Cardinal Draq Queens I see at Rio's Carnival.
Well, this "First Communion" episode was a real-life slice of life of the times which very clearly showed, even to a 7 year old, why another evil - Stalinist communism seemed like paradise to the poor masses. And to end the illustration, neither of my parents were present, nor were close relatives in spite of the fortunes spent on the event.
They already saw their kids dressed up at home, with a professional photographer recording the moment, in addition to the studio pictures, and would later the see the photographs taken at Church at leisure. Why go, and have to sit through a whole mass? I mean they did not even know what to respond to "Dominus Vobiscum!" Even I remember "Et cum spiritum teu. Ah-men."
By the way, neither grandmother or relative appeared either. Actually, as my Communion Album proves, there was a "relative" indeed in the packed Corpus Christi Church in then-elegant Biltmore neighborhood. My pious grand aunt Marietta, and our head house keeper - Mercedes were there. And this was at a time when First Communions were a big deal. The ceremony was of course followed by the real event - the big breakfast bash at the Miramar Yacht Club already mentioned. But my parents didn't even appear there even though the "breakfast" soon gave way to dancing and cocktails galore, ending in the typical drunken bash by 3 PM. I think they were in Nassau.
"As birds of a feather", I guess, many of my First C's friends felt no absence of family either, as our friends' parents were the same. I never even thought about their absence one way or other. I only remember this as an "issue" 2 years later at my sister's 1963 First Communion at St. Hugh's, in Coconut Grove (Miami).There I recall comments by our cousin, Carmencita Jimenez-Rojo. She lived with us at the time. We rented a rather large two story house on Ponce de Leon Boulevard in Coral Gables, which we shared with "Cucho" and his daughter and my cousin/godmother Carmencita. At St. Hugh's, in its courtyard, she asked our mother (who yes, did make it to that First Communion) a rhetorical question. Why our father had not come.
I remember a sailing friend of his was staying with us at home, having just accomplished the impossible - he had recently arrived in Florida, after a daring news-worthy flight in his own sailboat from Cuba to Florida. Our father went out sailing with him, this latest arrival having one of the only "original sailboats from Cuba" in Miami - deserving priority as a Sunday activity.
I, at least, never even thought about their parenting until I was an adult, and realized I had no recollection of doing anything with our parents AT ALL until age 8, when "exile" was upon us. What I do remember are their more prolonged absences, like during their 1959 trip to Rio de Janeiro, São Paulo Porto Alegre and Buenos Aires, plus a couple of other longer regattas which kept them in Nassau or St. Petersburg for over a week or 10 days.
I remember those times due to pictures, 8 millimeter films of their trips (including endless, boring footage of hour-long regattas) and because our parents were good at calling home since those very-long distance calls are memorable.
All that said, I left Cuba on a Pan Am DC-7 with grand aunt Zoila (Ynés Perfecta's older sister) to come live with my godmother and cousin Carmencita and her then-husband "Machadito" in the United States, leaving our parents' last days of freedom from parenting with those days counting down. Once that life ended, I soon realized, even at age 8 or 9, they did not have much in common, and they both had to start learning how to be parents.
It took our mother years to adapt and learn. But our father resisted that change to the bitter end - always a provider to the family yes, but a parent no. The USA they had known in ritzy Yacht Club Regattas, periodic shopping sprees on Fifth Avenue, and their friends' waterfront estates in Florida and New York State had very little in common with the new life they would begin as exiles.
Besides, they were to move and establish themselves in Miami, a sleepy, provincial place very different from the bustling cosmopolitan Havana of the 1950s. Previously, Miami had been but a connecting point on my parents way to Regattas in other American cities, and actually, their first stop on their honeymoon, which ended in Mexico City and Acapulco.
They shopped in New York, which had several nonstop flights from Havana. But not in Miami - dismissed as a "pueblo de campo americano" by many. Our Uncle Jorge still thinks and repeats that same expression.
The fact is that Miami's shopping, among many other activities and attributes, was second-rate to Havana's. It must have been very hard to accept this new social and cultural milieu, embark on a new profession, and start a new household over again when our father was already 42 or 43 years old. He had moved up to a very high social level, enjoying a great degree of quality life through his own efforts, not resting on family laurels. He worked all his life for it, in addition to the socializing and travelling leading to that network of those "right social contacts" so crucial for success in Latin American, and even in North American society at the time.
His friends always came first, and extended family also, even before his wife. Leading a family business (travel agency) where he brought in most of the sales, he was never paid the salaries or profit shares equivalent to the other "partners" and was always subservient to his clients and to the Cardenas family, much to our detriment - our lifestyle and economic condition in the USA until my sister and I started working for ourselves was, again, never on par with our father's "friends" and "CARDENAS + Jimenez-Rojo" relatives, not on par with his sister's (Alicia Calvo) either, until the Calvos made the mistake of leaving Spain and coming to Miami to work for the shrewd Ray Cardenas, Sr.
For me, it was always very difficult to understand why everyone our father broke his back doing favors for, lived several big steps above us, while we lived in relative poverty until the early 70s, when we became more independent. Our mother who worked as a virtual slave in a storage room of the agency as the bookkeeper during her final 6 or 7 years of life, was responsible for partly or completely supporting my sister and I during our studies outside Miami.
Actually, we would not have had that opportunity AT ALL if not for our mother's hard earned money. I had to take out Federal Student Loans, paid back between 1973 and 1977, even to pay my tuition in Miami colleges. And of course, I worked FULL TIME during my 3 years of college in Miami to support myself, while my father's "equals" had had their children studying in Switzerland or Spain since High School. Parenting was one skill our father never bothered to learn.
Back to when our parents had to somehow begin as primary, front line parents, that was a very difficult time. Our parents always managed from DAY ONE of their EXILE, to always live next door to other family members who were more child oriented. Years later, when older aunts and our maternal grandmother were allowed to leave Cuba, they took over the parenting and house management chores.
This co-habitation did lead to our mother's learning how to cook. We started eating home cooked meals only after 5 or 6 years of dining EXCLUSIVELY out of the daily catering service "Chez Millet." Since Sunday Dinner was not included in the Catering Program, we usually ate at a cheap Spanish or Cuban restaurant. But more often than not, we were usually left with our aunt Gloria and first cousins (brought up like brothers and sisters) Jorge Ignacio and Patricia, when not dumped on another family "couple" while our parents went out Sunday night for drinking and dancing adult style.
Our parents had never taken care of us personally until we were 8 and 6 respectively, and they were definitely NOT the "parent type," even in those days' much looser definition of a parent. And they continued to get away with never becoming real parents by dumping us on the friend and family who LIKED kids. Since the "basics" were provided with skimpy amounts of money, and there was never a shortage of adults to step in for them during their absence, I'm sure they died thinking they had been great parents, or "blaming Fidel Castro" for not giving their children more.
But pictures of their lifestyle outside the home in the 60s and 70s reveal the truth. That is, that lives ouside our crummy duplexes, was of course much more pleasant for them; that they needed to get out as much as possible in order to lead the lifestyle they had always enjoyed. They had a lot of rich friends, as I've said.
With them, my father was "paid back" for his service. And they continued night-clubbing, sailing, yachting, traveling, entertaining exiled-Cubans in Miami - who all made it big in Madrid, Venezuela, Mexico,... anywhere but Miami. So when these people came, our parents acted out their real life style, while my sister and I lived in relative poverty until we were 16 or 17 years old.
Our parents were most definitely partying, "hang out with adult friends" types. The type, I believe, should not have children, as I (in one of the few things I did right as an adult) didn't. In any case, I never wanted anyone to have the "casual parenting" we got. We were saved by our extended relatives whom, in all fairness to them, did so much for us. But our parents got away with their absent parenting, and they maintained that behavior their entire lives, up to hours before checking into Mercy Hospital in Coconut Grove, where once admitted they never left it alive - both passed away within four years of each other.
Our father perhaps gave so much importance to his "friends" since he reached his social standing, and maintained its façade with millionaire friends throughout the world, through "friendships." In the beginning, he climbed socio-economic circles mainly through international sailing competitions, where he competed often as the junior partner to an older yachtsman - Cuba's sugar barons and other notable "nobles." Several of their descendants attended his funeral and burial, attesting to his life long friendship with his mentors.
In this sporting life, he found sports buddies-cum-mentors, as the mentors seemed to repeat our parents' later mistakes. That is, they all had children. But curiously they often adopted my father as their "son." They confided secrets about their mistresses, entrusting my father with paying for their houses and wardrobes, among the other "not public" activities many well healed married man did.
Most of these men were members of the sophisticated, cosmopolitan milieu of downtown Havana's Company Headquarters and Trading Markets, composed of the major élite Cuban-owned sugar businesses, dealing with worldwide markets, of which OF COURSE, the USA was a major player. His gregarious manner and excellent people skills, mixing business with pleasure admirably, allowed him to go from an entry level position to Purchasing Agent while still in his late 20s.
He was already traveling to Europe in 1947 and 48 (when he was 28) on TWA's new Constellation Planes and Boeing's Stratocruiser, with sleeping beds. All the souvenirs he kept from international travel in the 40s and the 50s definitely made me a wannabe traveler since I can remember. Just before, or after marrying our mother, he was promoted to a Director position for the powerful FANJUL Sugar Family, a position usually reserved for family members (or the useless husbands of female family members).
He worked himself up to an executive position, while at the same pursuing his sea-faring hobbies at Havana's Miramar Yacht Club, where he was extensively involved - including the planning and opening of the new multi-million Dollar seaside club. The new club inaugurated in the very early 50s, down the beach from the old club. It offered all the the ammenities any Country/Yacht Club in the world offered, with a beautiful Caribbean Beach to boot. The club was also, conveniently, only five blocks away from our home in the new American-style neighborhood of Miramar on Havana's west side oceanfront.
The MIRAMAR YACHT CLUB
To our parents, before and after marriage, this Club was the absolute center of their lives. And not just for them. For us kids, the Club was like a parent - since we spent most of our time there, and learned about real life there, saw our friends and relatives there, everything influencing our lives came from there. Our lives revolved entirely around it.
At a time in my life (from age 2 to 8), the club was my "parents." So, excuse my ranting and raving about it. It was at the "Miramar" that our parents finally became engaged (after a long courtship). At the Club, they lived the best years of their lives, interacting with members of many other Yacht Clubs around the world where they partied, yachted, sailed, and enjoyed themselves fully.
From 1948 to 1961, my parents were often found at the Royal British Yacht Club in Nassau, the St. Petersburg (Florida) Club, the New York (Flushing Meadows) Club, the Botafogo Yacht Club in Rio, the Buenos Aires Club on the River Plate, and at the San Sebastián Yacht Club in Spain. The Miramar and its members epitomized a veritable "Golden Age" of lifestyles during the 1950s.
The Club hosted World and Olympic Yachting, Sailing, Diving and Swimming Champions visiting Havana. There were also American, Brazilian and particularly Argentine yachtsmen, who had the "official games medals" they lacked many times over in other "gold medals" held in banks.I am still in touch with a couple of them.
My parents likewise traveled around to attend or compete in regattas, and always brought us back stories, objects or people from other cultures, speaking different languages, different cuisines, which always fascinated me. The Miramar Yacht Club was so important in my parent's life that it deserves a special section all of its own. Miami exiles in fact have created a great website, which includes many details about the old (up to 1949 or so) and the new club, as well as interesting anecdotes (one mentions our father) and vintage pictures, a couple of which I display here. Thank you, http://www.miramaryachtclub.com/
Those relationships with people from other areas marked my life, much more than my sister's in my opinion. People like the Hanoi-born (when French Indochine existed) Havana Bureau Reporter for PARIS MATCH, who married a well heeled Austrian Cuban-born friend of my mother's from the Club. I remember they spoke German together, which I found odd. They visited us in Miami few times, and I stayed at their hilltop villa in the French Riviera in July 1973 and sailed to Corsica on their yacht that same summer, after finishing academic year 1972-73 in nearby Avignon.
Among our parents friends, their Argentine friends from the River Plate Yacht Club near Buenos Aires, visited us most often. My parents danced to milongas and tangos. Chimi churri was a staple sauce whenever meat was barbecued.
S'AGARÓ & LA COSTA BRAVA (1969 - 1973)
We have "long lost uncles" in Spain, the Alonso-Melendez, according to Rubén (my father's "cousin") and my father. They are related on their Galician (gallego) side of the family. This was proven dubiously since, among other family links, Meléndez is not common in Galicia. They participated in Regattas together for many years. The first images of Rubén we have are from an international championship in New York filmed by our father in color 8 mm film, still a novelty in 1947/48.
After that, Rubén and his wife Peque, visited our family in Havana in the 1950s, and our father visited them many times in Barcelona and Madrid. He always made it a point to see them when in Europe, including Ruben's children living in other parts of Europe - like Paloma, who at one point had a boutique in London, where our father spent some time with her (and took pictures) in the mid 70's. There is a picture of Paloma, her brother Juan (who first visited us in Miami in 1969), and me at a table poolside at the S'Agaro Yacht & Sailing Club below taken in July or August of 1970.
These Spanish cousins - the Alonso Melendez, lived in another world. They were six, all very attractive, very sociable, very sophisticated as their world revealed, and fluent in at least a couple of languages, since they had all studied or were studying in French Switzerland. They had a palatial Barcelona abode, the type which hardly exist anymore as they (not theirs last I knew) have been split up into several still very big and costly apartments, or have been bought by multinationals, and consulates for commercial use. The day is long over where even a few can live like that.
Their cliffside mansion in exclusive S'Agaró in the Costa Brava or Spanish Riviera, is also shown below. S'Agaró was Spain's most exclusive seaside community.
The two guarded gates allowed only residents and their guests to enter the small hilly community of mansions. Theirs was all the nicer for being on a cliff - oceanfront, and having a small forest whee lunch was served daily at 4:30 or 5 PM daily. Back then, in Europe, and under a military regime on top, a guarded protected neighborhood meant a lot, as such exclusivity was hard to find anywhere along the Mediterranean.There were no apartments, no commerce or hotels within S'Agaró. Bordering the gate, the Hostal de la Gavina, still stands as one of ther "luxury hotels of the world," followed by a wide beach and the gorgeous, small village of San Feliú de Guijols - where regular guests could stay, if they could pay. And where Rubén went to fill up the boat's tank, and from where the help ordered provisions for the household, some nice homes and quaint restaurants, and so on.
But not even the guests (back then, I don't now) of the "Hostal" or residents of San Feliú were allowed in S'Agaró proper. On S'Agaró's other side was (is) Playa de Aro. Beyond the unspoiled, park like setting of the curved "golden" beach, small buildings, then followed by luxury high rise condominiums came into view. It was there we went after lunch to walk around its pedestrian streets or sit at the outdoor cafés, then return after midnight for the night life. The most glamorous discos or night clubs I ever saw were there.
It was also there where the European tourists stayed: French, German and Swedes in particular. No wonder two Alonso Meléndez siblings married Germans, and one married a Swede (who communicated in French among each other).
The latter, Uge (Eugenio), was perhaps our cousin's Jorge and mine's favorite cousin. Their son, Robin born and still living in Sweden visited me several times in Miami in the late 1990s, as did Uge, whom I last was in 2000. He owned a couple of restaurant in the Dominican Republic, a location making Miami the closest "civilized metropolis" and a must stop whenever he or Robin came to and from Sweden or Spain.The whole Alonso Meléndez family family moved there from Barcelona every summer, from June to early September, along with butler, head housekeeper, chambermaids, and a cook - and they weren't alone. A few other Barcelona and Spanish families did the same, as did my summer companions I vividly remember. These included an oil-wealthy Venezuelan family, whose sons were friendly with us since they spoke similarly accented Venezuelan Spanish (like us), and had frequent parties at their particularly huge mansion, the French brothers son to an Ambassador - among them Philippe, who lived in Beirut - at the time very European and sophisticated, and spoke French with me.
French, and not English was still the lingua franca among people in Europe. And not only among the aristocracy. Swedish Karina spoke with Uge in French, but English to us. The French only spoke French (mais bien sûr). The German Wolfgang, who later married Paloma communicated in French and Spanish.
That lifestyle and Eurocentric culture ended with Franco in the 70s - I caught the tail end from 1969 to 1973. But the experience was life altering; and I don't highlight or mean that the opulence or money behind it was the most impressive feature. Far from that. At the time, I had no clue about how money could be made, how fortunes were amassed. It wasn't about money and life featured in HOLA or HELLO Magazine.
I was impressed by the sophisticated, cosmopolitan way of life, which was so rich culturally, but yet dealt with by my "Europeans cousins" as something so normal - that's how they had always lived and spent their summers. They had all studied in Switzerland, so what? The experience was life altering; particularly for someone coming from the provinciality of North American life in the late 60s and early 70s. This was our last remnant of country club or yacht club life, and it fascinated me, though not as much as it did our cousin Jorge who went there two more summers than I did.
Our "cousins" who spoke 3 or 4 languages ended up marrying some foreign Europeans, as I said above. But ironically, only Juan - as of 2001 - was still married to one, paradoxally having always been the "Don Juan" of the group. He married a German girl he met in Ibiza, and they still live there. Only 3 of the 6 married Spanish spouses. Not all unions were successful, nor all relationships fruitful. But, these "relatives" did open a fascinating world for us, and created a contrasting scene for us: one we participated in, decades after the Golden days of the Miramar Yacht Club were over.
THE MIRAMAR YACHT CLUB - Its last years & its world wide diaspora
That said, the Miramar Yacht Club does have a reunion every 3 or 5 years, as I earlier stated, where the entire diaspora gets together again, many of the younger participants never having even seen the club.
But I described the Miramar Yacht Club extensively, for it was more of a parent for many (especially for those 4 to 8 years older than my sister or me) than the parents themselves were. Ours were always drinking on a yacht, or abroad. Or so it seemed. I really have no recall of them until age 8 in 1962 Miami.Of my first 7 or 8 years, it's the Miramar, our Jamaican nannies, and our older cousins, particularly Cocó & Carlos, and Carmencita whom I most remember. But I remember them always at the club, and only there; by one of the pools, on the beach, at one of the cafeterias. Carlos Cacicedo and his brother, for example, were American Football Stars of the Miramar Club. Yes, there was an American Football Field and trained coaches at this club.
As I said, the club was like our parents in many ways.However, as all happy stories come to an end, the Miramar Yacht Club was nationalized by the Communists in 1961 as and reopened as an exclusively Military Club for "the Revolution" - first as the Patricio Lumumba Club, named after the murdered Congolese leader, now simply as the Club de las FAR. My father's powerful friends including Manolo Rasco, Guillermo Kirsch, the Fanjul's, the Seiglie's, Gomez-Mena's and the Bacardi's also had their busineses "nationalized." So, our family, like the others, also went into exile. All our property was seized as neighborhood informants from the CDR, Committee to Defend the Revolution, tipped off the G-7 Fidel's "Gestapo" or Secret Police.
After the Bay of Pigs debacle occurred (we had stayed expecting removal of Castro, as popular uprisings against him had begun to surface), things got progressively bad for the upper middle classes, and middle classes. The upper classes had mostly fled by then. But, the organized anti-Castro movements all but disappeared after the Bay of Pigs fiasco, which appealing to nationalistic and popular instincts made the United States look like invaders, and their Cuban collaborators like traitors working for the enemy. This patriotic, nationalistic streak in many people strengthened Castro, and immigration (any contact with the non-Communist World) was made very difficult if not impossible.Immigration was now impossible for many or most families since males of "military age" (which went from age 14 to 45, I believe) could no longer leave the country. And most families had at least one male member in that wide age range.
Those deemed counter revolutionary had all their properties, even passports and jewelry taken from them. We were under house arrest for a couple of days for suspicion of possible immigration. I left shortly thereafter on a regular Pan Am DC-7 flight to Miami, still young enough to leave with my grand aunt Zoila Souto. But my immediate family members stayed.I was still not old enough to be shipped off to the "Young (Communist) Pioneers," so I began a new life in the States on July 16, 1961.
My father, who was also a Spanish citizen (son of two Spaniards) and an American resident since the '50s, had contacts with the Spanish Embassy (ironically, Fascist Spain never broke relations with Castro). He arranged for new passports, so my parents and my sister could leave on a private Christmas visit to Mexico, another country friendly to Castro.As every last utensil, picture, even furniture ornaments were kept at the family house intact, the three were allowed to leave the country for Mexico (disguised as tourists with one suitcase per person).
Once in Mexico City, where some Havana neighbors already lived pretty well, our father and mother claimed their US Residency, and travelled to Miami with their now Mexico-based friends. In what seemed anything but a trip "to exile", they drove a car from Mexico to Houston (where the friends' car was left), then took a first Class flight on one of the first National Airlines "Jets" (a novel DC-8 at the time) to New Orleans, where they also had exiled Cuban friends already pretty well established.
They rented a car in New Orleans to complete the ride to Miami, though they stopped in St. Petersburg, where they had a 1961/62 New Years Eve Party fit for millionaires, in the company of sugar baron Raúl Rasco and an American millionaire sailing buddy, who had been "Honorary Consul of Cuba" and other Latin American countries in St. Petersburg.That New Years Eve Party produced the last picture I have of my mother in her mink coat.
Now, I realize that one suitcase she took must have been pretty big. No, those regular flights to Mexico were not very scrutinized. The Miami and New York flights were. Plus, I don't know what, if anything, could have been shipped from Havana to Mexico as private cargo in those days. We visited this St. Petersburg yachtsman, and Cubans who settled in St. Petersburg (undoubtedly related to the Yacht Club or their big members in some way) a couple of times again in the ensuing 5 or 6 years.
Arriving in Miami a few days after New Year's day 1962, the family found a reality not yet seen in their romp through Mexico and the visits to well off Cuban exiles in the US en route. Our family friends and travel companions in this trans continental voyage - the now deceased but unforgettable Maña and Roberto Poey - visited their parents who lived in Miami, as well as their cousins, Silvia and helena Chacón. The Poey's were able to get some capital out of Cuba in 1959 and had rebuilt their seed and flower-bud business in the United States, the Caribbean and throughout Latin America.Later in January 1962, Maña and Roberto returned to Houston to pick up their car and return to Mexico. But they visited Miami often thereafter, moving to Miami (Coral Gables and Key Biscayne) definitely in 1972 or 1973.
For my parents, what was a temporary exile in the USA began in January 1962. See my "Exile in Miami" section, clicking on the link in this section's Archives.
posted by Gonz at 6:32 AM
0 comments
Coral Gables-our new & future definite "home town"
Venetian Pool in Coral Gables - where my sister, my cousins Jorge and Patricia and I took swimming and life saving classes, and had lots of fun in the early 60's; and the nearby Biltmore Hotel in Coral Gables, and Vizcaya Palace and gardens, both the setting of many parties in the 80s and 90s.
