My mother was always asking my sister and me to do things—to call her union about her monthly pension checks (forty-nine dollars), to research the contraindications of a new prescription, to drive her to the wholesale distributor to pick up fifteen-pound boxes of frozen tilapia and some nice eye-of-round roasts. Six years ago, when she was eighty-seven, she wrote a letter outlining everything that we would need to tend to after her death. Her first request was that we send a hundred and fifty dollars to Tía Niña—our name for her sister Ada—every December, March, June, and September. She included the phone number and address of the man in Hialeah who would deliver the money to Cuba. “Even dead,” she added in parentheses, “I will bug you.” If we cooked the food she cooked and made sure that her granddaughters could play dominoes, she would be happy in Heaven. She would await our arrival there, she wrote. Buried in the middle of the letter was my mother’s most fervent appeal, one we had heard before. “As to Poly, don’t ever abandon him,” she said. “He is the way he is because of me.”
My half brother Poly, or Hipólito, was born in Havana in 1953. Our mother and his father were married only briefly, and, when Poly was still small, he and my mother went to live in the three-bedroom rental out of which her family ran a little restaurant. It sat half a block behind the city’s military hospital and not far from Camp Columbia, Cuba’s main military installation at the time. In 1957, as many Cubans were waging a revolution against Fulgencio Batista and his government, my mother met and fell in love with my father, an Army stenographer and a lunchtime regular.
In the early-morning hours of January 1, 1959, Batista fled the island in defeat, and Cubans poured into the streets to celebrate. Cars blasted their horns, churches rang their bells. Fidel Castro, who had been fighting Batista’s troops in the mountains of eastern Cuba for more than two years, arrived in Havana a week later, to thunderous cheers. My mother was delighted, and distributed red T-shirts to her neighbors. My father, who was wary of the new regime and steered clear of revolutionary rallies and political organizations, immediately quit the Army and began to sell sandals in the park behind Havana’s capitol. He moved into my mother’s family home; every night he would count out his earnings in front of Poly and give him a small share.
In March, 1960, President Eisenhower approved a plan for the C.I.A. to train Cuban exiles in guerrilla warfare so that they might return to Cuba and topple Castro. Though the operation was supposed to be covert, the training camps in Central America and elsewhere made the headlines in the U.S. and Cuba. As John F. Kennedy took office, Castro was already preparing to repel an invasion. On April 15, 1961, exile pilots bombed Cuban airfields, missing many of their targets and killing at least seven people. Castro addressed the nation at a funeral for the victims, calling on Cubans to defend the revolution, which for the first time he defined as socialist. Across the country, the government began to arrest thousands of people who it suspected might side with the invaders.
That night, my father did not come home for dinner. My mother eventually found him, and many other detainees, at the Blanquita Theatre (later renamed the Karl Marx). He was still there on April 17th, when, in the early hours of the morning, exile troops landed on Cuba’s southern shore, at the Bay of Pigs. The invasion failed spectacularly. A hundred and fourteen of the exiles were killed, and 1,189 were captured and imprisoned.
In the aftermath, the U.S. government severely tightened its economic embargo on Cuba, and Castro accelerated the country’s transition to a one-party state. Every day, twelve hundred Cubans applied for entry to the U.S. The Kennedy Administration welcomed the arrivals, pointing to their growing numbers to discredit the revolution. In April, 1962, when my mother was seven months pregnant with me, my father left Cuba and settled in New York City, working as a short-order cook in a hotel in midtown Manhattan. As soon as he could, he began the paperwork for my mother, Poly, and me to join him.
But Poly was someone else’s son, and his father, a member of the revolutionary police, wanted Poly to remain in Cuba. My mother, my aunts, and my grandmother begged him to let Poly leave with her, but he refused. Years later, my mother told me that one day, as she was walking with us near the docks in Old Havana, she saw a crowd gathered around an American ship—it may have been the S.S. African Pilot, which had arrived in Havana with medicine and other supplies to be exchanged for prisoners from the Bay of Pigs invasion. In a last-minute arrangement, relatives of the prisoners were allowed to board for the return journey. My mother said that the scene was chaotic, and that she saw passersby seizing the opportunity to flee Cuba. Holding me in her arms and my brother by the hand, she considered going, too, but she turned back. She hadn’t been able to leave without saying goodbye to her mother.
Four months later, on April 29, 1963, she left Cuba with me, without saying goodbye to her son. We had left the house the evening before, at 6 p.m. Poly was out playing with friends. When he came home, my grandmother and my aunt Ada told him that my mother had gone to the countryside to care for an ailing relative. I don’t know how long it was before they told him the truth. Decades later, when I met my aunt Ada, she explained that for weeks, maybe months, after we left Poly would clutch my mother’s housedress at night and cry. He was nine years old.
My mother wore stiletto heels for the journey, her legs so skinny that her shinbones protruded. I was ten months old, a baby on her hip. At the airport in Havana, a customs agent almost confiscated the tiny gold posts in my ears, a gift from my grandmother. Direct flights to the U.S. had been suspended the year before, so we flew to Mexico City. A distant relative of my mother’s was supposed to collect us from the airport, but he didn’t show up. My mother had no money with her. “¡Cómo pasamos trabajo tú y yo! ”—“How we struggled, you and I,” she would say, taking my hand, as she told me the story of our departure. In the most consequential passage of her life, I had been her companion. She always kept an eight-by-ten portrait of my brother on her dresser.
Ours was not the only family torn apart by the revolution. Between 1960 and 1962, thousands of children were sent abroad alone, their parents fearing that Castro’s government would ship them off to the Soviet Union for indoctrination. Young men of military age were forbidden from leaving. Some teen-agers stayed behind when their parents fled, committed to a cause that their families rejected. Revolutionaries were not supposed to communicate with people who had left, so family members often spent decades without contact.
I can explain how, amid the turmoil, my mother felt forced to take one child and leave another. She did not think a Communist revolution on an island less than a hundred miles from the U.S. could possibly survive. She assumed that we would return to Cuba before too long. She told herself that, once she was gone, Poly’s father would relent and her son would join us. None of it—not the revolution, not our migration, not Poly’s abandonment—was ever meant to be permanent.
Still, my mother’s decision has always haunted me. After I had my own children, I sometimes found myself measuring the progress of their childhoods against my brother’s. Alina is turning nine, I thought—Poly’s age when we left him. Lucía’s ten—by that age, Poly had spent almost a year without his mother. I would look at my daughters and wonder what could ever make me leave them. Could I have gone, as my mother had, in secret, without saying goodbye? I couldn’t picture it at all.
At nine, Poly was a sweet, skinny boy, quick to smile, with large eyes and big ears. He was smart and liked to read, although he sometimes got into trouble; a neighbor had once jokingly advised my mother to enroll him in military school to keep him in line. As a teen-ager, he cut school, got into fights, and began committing petty crimes. More than once, someone denounced him to the state-sponsored neighborhood-surveillance network, the Committees for the Defense of the Revolution, for one infraction or another. Poly’s father was, for the most part, absent. Poly dropped out of school, couldn’t keep a job, had run-ins with the police. Maybe he expected to join us in the U.S.; maybe he feared that he never would. Only under exceptional circumstances would the government allow a man of military age to leave. Poly lived in the house where we had left him, with my grandmother, who tried to guide him, and my aunt Ada, who had no children of her own and became his de-facto mother. She made him write letters to my mother, to me, and to his new sister, Aixa, who was born in Brooklyn in 1964.
I remember Poly’s letters, the way his “A”s looked like triangles. I usually responded on Saturdays, as I watched cartoons about English prepositions or how bills became laws. We lived in West New York, New Jersey, a working-class Cuban enclave across the Hudson River from midtown Manhattan, where my father had continued to work as a cook. My mother worked in a factory five blocks from our apartment, sewing collars onto winter coats. She taught us old Cuban songs, patriotic poems, the chants of street venders. At our church, priests led us in prayers for the release of Cuban political prisoners; once a year, we marched in a procession in honor of La Virgen de la Caridad del Cobre. We ate mostly Cuban food, and we always kept a drawer full of clothes to send to Cuba. Most of our neighbors did the same, and many of them, too, expected to welcome loved ones to the U.S. I awaited Poly’s arrival unambivalently. In my mind, he was like a brother in a Beverly Cleary novel, handsome and funny—maybe I would fall in love with his best friend. I speculated that the shape of his “A”s showed that he was a born architect, like the father in “The Brady Bunch.”
No one in our family had gone to college, and few people in our community went away to do so, but my mother always insisted that I would. I was already browsing through college brochures when Castro’s government agreed to allow Cuban exiles to return to the island for short visits. In 1979, my mother was one of more than a hundred thousand who participated in the family-reunification trips, as they were called. I remember her singing as she packed, writing Poly’s name on the labels of the clothes she had bought for him. He was twenty-five by then. My grandmother had died, but most of my mother’s eleven siblings were still living in Cuba, and had their own families. As she counted out five-dollar bills for nieces and nephews, I made her promise to take a photograph in front of the University of Havana, which, I explained to her, I would have attended had we stayed in Cuba.
My mother never told me what it felt like to return to the old house or to reunite with Poly. But I can see her there, laughing warmly, sadness be damned. My brother went with her to the university, and he must have taken the picture I have of her in which she stands in the distance, a blurred figure near the top of the university’s steps. I have another photo of them from that trip, posing together on the capitol steps. In the image, Poly is unsmiling, with his arm around her shoulder.
In the spring of 1979, the Miami Herald estimated that the Cuban government might make as much as a hundred and fifty million dollars from the exiles that year alone. The government paid dearly in other ways. The cash, the gifts, and the tales of American plenty all fed the desire of many people on the island to leave. The following year, on April 1st, six Cubans stole a bus and crashed it through the gates of the Peruvian Embassy in Havana, demanding asylum and safe passage out of the country. When the Embassy refused to hand them over to the government, Castro ordered the removal of the security detail around the building. In the next forty-eight hours, nearly eleven thousand people flooded in, perching on eaves and tree branches, camping out with little food or water. According to one account, a baby was born there and an elderly woman died.
Pro-government protesters gathered outside, angrily chanting, wishing them good riddance: “¡Que se vayan! ” But at first neither Peru nor Cuba could figure out how to evacuate so many people. The Cuban government gave the members of the crowd the option to go home and await instructions. Some stayed anyway, worried that, if they vacated the Embassy, they might never leave the country; others, hungry and exhausted, went home to find themselves subjected to state-sponsored harassment by their neighbors. About three weeks after the crisis began, the government settled on a plan. It would allow Cubans from the U.S. to pick up their relatives by boat at the port of Mariel, some twenty-five miles west of Havana, provided that they also collect Cubans from the Embassy.
The operation quickly took on its own momentum. Thousands of Cuban-Americans mobilized, hiring so many vessels that, as one observer remarked, had they lined up one behind the other, people would have been able to walk from Mariel to Key West. Castro insisted that those leaving were “antisocial elements.” He routinely called them “scum.” Soon, disgruntled Cubans embraced the label, and began appearing at local police stations, asking to be cleared for departure. The government also took the opportunity to expel from the country certain prisoners and psychiatric patients. By the time the boatlift ended, in October, some hundred and twenty-five thousand Cubans had reached Florida.
In May, my mother boarded a Greyhound bus at Port Authority and travelled to Miami, then caught a ride to Key West. She feared the sea and couldn’t swim, but found a boat that was taking Cuban-Americans to Mariel, and paid the captain in cash. She spent the duration of the voyage, ten or twelve hours, clutching her purse and pretending to sleep. At one point, she told me, the captain had misgivings and announced that he was turning around. A passenger took a machete out of his duffel and threatened to kill him if he didn’t continue on to Mariel. My mother reached for the rosary beads in her bag and led some of the passengers in prayer.
At Mariel, hundreds of boats jockeyed for position. Every captain was to give the Cuban officials a list of the people his passengers wanted to pick up. It took time for the government to locate them, and the boats sometimes had to wait for days, even weeks. A night club was set up aboard a government-owned ship to entertain impatient sailors. Other vessels patrolled the harbor while guards on the shore pointed their weapons toward the water. At night, floodlights illuminated the scene. My mother managed to disembark, find a phone, and call the house to let Poly know that she had come to collect him. My aunt answered and told her that he had already left. It had not been hard for Poly to convince someone that he should be banished. My mother returned to the crowded pier and talked her way onto a boat back to the U.S.
Poly told us that he arrived in Key West on May 11, 1980—Mother’s Day. It was one of the busiest days of the boatlift, with more than forty-five hundred Cubans landing in Florida; one boat alone, the America, might have carried as many as seven hundred people. Sentiment in the U.S. was turning. The Times ran a front-page article titled “Retarded People and Criminals Are Included in Cuban Exodus.” More than sixty thousand Cubans who arrived without family members were sent for processing to military bases across the country while the government determined what to do with them. Poly ended up at Eglin Air Force Base, in the Florida Panhandle. A plane circled the facility, flying a banner that read “The KKK is here.” By mid-June, he had been cleared to enter the country; my mother and father flew down and brought him home.
My brother was not at all what I expected. He didn’t talk much, and when he did his voice sounded loud and angry. My sister and I were used to having dinner in the living room in front of the TV, but after Poly arrived we began eating together in the small kitchen. I asked Poly continually about Cuba, until my mother told me that my questions were making him feel bad about not having an education or a career. My sister and I soon went back to the TV, while the adults ate alone at the dinner table, my mother trying to keep a conversation going with her husband, who was silent as usual, and her estranged son. At the end of that summer, I left for my first year at Vassar College.
My mother helped Poly rent an apartment in our building, and an uncle helped him get a job at an embroidery factory. Poly soon lost the apartment and moved back in with us, sleeping on the couch in the living room. When I came home on school breaks, the apartment smelled of beer and cigarettes. I spent as much time as I could at the riverfront park, reading on a bench with a bag of cherries. Poly had grown a thick mustache, and I hated it. At night, he would come home late. From my bedroom, I could hear him on the sofa next door making strange noises, sounding wounded and scary. Was he crying? Masturbating? Maybe sick or hungover? One afternoon, while my father was out, Poly got angry about something, and when he stormed off toward the kitchen I assumed that he was getting a knife. My mother suddenly collapsed, and all three of us—my sister, Poly, and I—rushed to help her, the altercation temporarily forgotten. My mother told me later that she had only pretended to faint.
The summer between my freshman and sophomore years, my parents took us on vacation to Miami. We stayed at the Bancroft, a modest hotel in South Beach where most of the guests were Cuban. Relatives came to see us, and Poly sat at the pool drinking beer with old friends from Havana, other Mariel arrivals. My sister and I spent our days swimming and tanning, our evenings playing Ping-Pong and pinball. One night, Poly slapped my sister after he thought he saw her flirting with a boy. I confronted him, and he threw me to the ground and began kicking me, stopping only when a cousin grabbed a phone to call the police. As I lay on the floor crying, he warned me that, if I told my father, “va a haber muertos”— there would be bodies. When I told my mother what he’d said, she asked me to keep it to myself. She didn’t want my father to leave or to kick Poly out.