40 American Christmases

Have I ever told you my American Tale? Remember the movie An American Tail, about Fivel Mouskevitz, the animated Russian mouse who makes his way from Russia to America?

I totally remember that movie. I can still sing some of the songs and I don't think I've seen it in over 15 years. It came out in 1986, at which time I was about 9. I know that it seemed incredibly scary, the move to a totally different country. Of course, Fivel was separated from his family and had to navigate the new world by himself (see, scary!). But still, it's his immigration story. I don't have one, of course, I was born about 15 miles from where I'm typing this, but my family's story is an interesting one. And the fall/winter of 2009 marks the 40th anniversary of their journey from Cuba to America. Kind of a big deal, I'd say.

1969

Over 52,000 Cubans emigrated to the US in 1969. My mom's side of the family came over that year. My mother with her four siblings and two parents came in September. By October, the anti-war demonstrations in the US had reached epic proportions. In November, 500,000 people marched on Washington against the war. While hippies were dancing in Berkeley's People's Park, my mom and her family were adjusting to life outside of a dictatorship. Seeing American flags burn on the nightly news must have been quite the trip for a group of kids who were trained to sing the revolutionary anthem while assembling rifles. The Cuban educational system's motto, 'Estudio, Trabajo, Fusil' means "Study, Work, Rifle."


They settled in Lennox, a small town adjacent to Inglewood and LAX airport in southern California.

Cuba's immigration history is long and interesting. Since the United States has a history of instituting quotas for immigration from certain countries, people often hung out in Cuba, waiting to enter the U.S. This is partly how Cuba developed a variety of Asian, Jewish, and European enclaves. My family's history before Cuba is a mystery. The genealogical documents about when and how my family got to Cuba in the first place is all locked up over there, in databases and files that I can't access. Vague recollections and family gossip place them in Spain, Scotland, and Ireland. But I do have info on the immigration from Cuba to the U.S.

Both mom and dad came over (separately) on the Freedom Flights, the second wave of immigration after the Cuban communist revolution. The first wave was full of all of the rich folks, who could afford to jet out of Cuba as soon as Castro took power. Despite increases in available health care, education, and the enfranchisement of black Cubans, some of the revolutionary policies were seen as unbearable. The Freedom Flights assisted the middle and lower-middle classes, who had become increasingly dissatisfied with the policies curtailing political freedom and eliminating private property (some 55,000 small businesses were closed down by the government in an effort to eliminate private property in 1968). President Lyndon Johnson allowed for daily chartered flights to assist Cubans who wanted to permanently leave Cuba.

I now have my grandmother's and mother's Cuban passports, stamped with "Nulo" or void, which meant they couldn't return home because their passports were no longer valid.


Picture day for the passports was probably not a fun day, if their faces are any indication. Truly any bureaucratic appointment with 5 kids would probably be a nightmare. My mom says she is angry in this picture because she was bummed on her new haircut, which was too short for her taste.

These passports are powerful reminders of the consequences such a decision created for a young family. People who applied to leave were generally treated suspect, as they were defecting, and were given strict rules about leaving. Called "anti-revolutionaries," they were subject to a number of indignities.

In the case of my family, my grandfather was sent to work in the sugar cane fields far from home (quite the change of pace for a banker), while my grandmother cared for 5 small children by herself. Already accustomed to life under the regime, she had quite the side business making shoes out of old rubber tires and selling them on the black market so that she could get more ration cards or trade for goods that would feed her kids and make life bearable. My uncle (the oldest kid) has a story about how he was singled out in front of his whole school as a traitor on a day he thought he was getting an award. They haven't told me too much about what happened during the processing on their way out, but I gather it was a stressful and humiliating few days.

Leaving was the promise of something better, so they got out as soon as they could. They couldn't take much, and many of their family photos had to be mailed to them later, but they arrived in Florida and came to California, hoping to settle forever. You see, my family aren't the kind who are waiting to return, living in "exile." Many Cubans live "en exilio," waiting to return to Cuba to...well...I'm not sure what exactly they plan to do, but they believe that they were forced to leave a place they loved and that they want to go back there. Even so, my grandmother didn't become a citizen until the early years of this decade, just a few years before she passed away from pancretic cancer in 2004.

When she traveled to Spain in the 80s, she had to get some kind of passport. Due to her interesting situation (resident alien, Cuban refugee) her passport had this to say:


It must seem very strange and vulnerable to have no country. To feel like a stranger in your own home, so to speak. I wish now that I had asked her about that, and how she managed to make that kind of decision for such a large group of kids.

Just the other day I was talking to my mom about House Hunters International on HGTV, the show about buying a house in a different country. She and her husband (my step-dad, who was born in Mexico) were both fascinated with the show. They were talking about how "crazy" it must be to make the decision to move to a different country. To which I said "Hello!? You both did the exact same thing!" How quickly 40 years changes things.

This picture is of their first Christmas. They didn't have much, but they did have a tree and new, plastic covered couches. De rigueur for 1969.

Their story is one of many. In fact, a new PBS documentary about the Freedom Flights called My Suitcase Full of Hope just screened this past May and I just ordered the DVD today. I'm hoping to get a broader picture of their journey so I can ask my mom, aunts, and uncles some good questions.

On the eve of my mom's 40th American Christmas, I'm looking forward to celebrating the traditional Noche Buena (Good Night) a Christmas Eve party all about family and food. I'm planning to shadow her preparation of the dinner, so I can give you a good rundown of recipes and how they changed on the trip over.

Grandma's Recipes

My grandmother was a very interesting and resourceful person.
She always managed to make things happen and get things done. Her mother died when she was young and at 15 she left home. She talked about living in boarding houses and going down to the ice box late at night to steal some milk, then replacing what she'd taken with a little water so no one would notice. It must have been a traumatic thing for her, because her refrigerator always had at least one gallon of Vitamin D real deal milk. And she'd freak out if we ran out- you had to go get some ASAP. She was diabetic, but she loved sweets (if you tried to buy her sugar-free sweets, she'd pretty much laugh in your face). She was always joking and making fun of people. She's where my whole family gets its sense of humor.

After the revolution in Cuba (in the 60s), she had five children to feed and managed to do it using the government-approved ration cards and the black market. She sewed up shoes out of rubber and canvas and traded them for meat to cook for dinner. My mother and uncle used to deliver these shoes by hiding them at the bottom of a bag of oranges. She had a high standard for nurturance. So much so that when a pair of swallows made their nest in the overhang of her roof (now my mom's roof- this picture is from today!), she got mad that sometimes the mama bird would let her baby die if it fell out of the nest. One year she refused to even let her make her nest because she was a "bad mother." I guess seeing the hungry chicks reminded her of something. You can see three hungry babies in that nest today, mouths open. They just hung open like that forever. I took something like 4 pictures! Once I realized mama bird wasn't returning because she was waiting for the giant camera wielding monster to go away, I stopped snapping photos.

I'm going through her old recipe books as part of a project I'm working on with a friend to publish our grandmothers' recipes. Her grandmother is Polish and also has some interesting food-related stories to tell. I picked up the books at my mom's house. My mom said that my grandmother would often sit at the kitchen table writing out recipes carefully in a book so that we would have them when she passed away. It was totally morbid at the time, which she acknowledge, but such a treasure to have now, even if nobody sees them but me. This picture to the left is just so...her. She didn't have a stapler with her or a paper clip, but she had a sewing pin. Viola!

This is a project I'd really like to make happen. I am going to be going through these recipes, doing translations, making the dishes, and photographing them in my spare time. Maybe by the end of January I'll have enough to start doing some research (January will be mydown time at work) on the historical side of things. If you have great original recipes from your grandmother and an interesting story to go with them, preferably with a connection to a historical event or period, we'd love to see it! Leave a comment with your e-mail (Don't worry, I won't publish it for the world to see).