Days of Awe - Hardcover

Like her heroine, Achy Obejas was born in Havana and came to the United States as a young child. She is a cultural writer for the Chicago Tribune. Her articles have appeared in Vogue, The Nation, Ms. Latina, the Los Angeles Times, Chicago Reader, Girlfriend, High Performance, New City, and Chicago Reporter. She is the author of Memory Mambo, a novel, and We Came All the Way from Cuba So You could Dress Like This?, a collection of short stories. She is a frequent speaker at universities and community centers across the country and in Cuba.

Well before dawn on Sunday, the fifteenth of April 1961, the day we left Cuba—a dreaded day, an ashen day without a single blush of blue in the skies over Havana—my mother ensconced herself in a back room of our apartment, arranging a series of clear glasses of water under a small effigy of Saint Jude, the patron saint of impossible causes.

“This will help purify us,” she said carrying in the tumblers, filled not with tap water but with the sanitized kind that came in huge blue bottles.

If my mother’s Saint Jude looked a little shiny compared with the other saints on her altar, that’s because he was fairly new to her pantheon. My mother’s prayers usually went to the Virgin of Charity, Cuba’s patron, to whom she’d entrusted my mortal soul if I survived those delicate first hours of transfusions and gunfire.

Even as she lit a white candle to Saint Jude to help us on our journey, which seemed impossible enough, her preferred icon was carefully wrapped in newspapers, plastic sheets, and a double-folded yellow cotton blanket. It was then tucked into a box to which my father had fashioned a handle from thin rope and the inside of a toilet paper roll. Regardless of Saint Jude’s divine jurisdictions and whatever seemingly untenable situations we might encounter, it was the Virgin who was traveling with us, the Virgin who would be settled at the pinnacle of whatever new altar my mother constructed wherever we might wind up.

I’ve always thought of the Virgin of Charity as the perfect mentor for Cuba: Cradling her child in her arms, she floats above a turbulent sea in which a boat with three men is being tossed about. One of the men is black and he is in the center of the boat, kneeling in prayer while the other two, who are white, row furiously and helplessly. (It’s unspoken but understood that it’s the entreaties of the black man, not the labor of the white rowers, that provides their deliverance.)

I’ve always found it poignant, if not tragic, that Cuba, whose people are constantly seeking escape and entrusting their fortunes to the sea in the most rickety of vessels, should have early on foreseen this fate and projected it onto its sacred benefactor. When her feast day rolls around each eighth of September, devotees like my mother dress in bumblebee yellow and wink knowingly at each other in church. Also known as Ochún, this particularly Cuban madonna is the Yoruba goddess of love, patron saint of sweet water. She’s a beauty, the pearl of paradise, a flirtatious but faithful lover to Changó, the capricious god of thunder.

It’s these very elements, I think, that make my mother’s choice of this vision of Mary—la Virgen de la Caridad del Cobre—as my patron a perfect guardian: I am a child not just of revolution but also of exile, both of which have so much to do with love and faith.

Even then, on that gloomy gray dawn in 1961, as my father waited for my mother and paced on the third-floor balcony of our home, there were Cubans leaving the island on anything that would float and looking to the skies for signs of salvation. The Cuban Revolution was two years old then, and already defying expectations.

What fueled those who were leaving was less fear of communism, which Fidel had only hinted at at that point, or shortages of any kind, because the U.S. embargo was still a distant concern, but the persistent rumors of invasions and imminent combat that were sweeping Havana. From the countryside came reports that cane fields were being torched, the flames like red waves. What were thought to be American planes constantly buzzed the city. Weeks before, El Encanto—Havana’s most exquisite department store and perhaps its most conspicuous link to the United States—had burned to the ground. Its destruction had traumatized the city no less than the break of diplomatic relations between Cuba and Washington, D.C., back in January. Not an hour went by without the breathless dispatch: “The yanquis are coming, the yanquis are coming.”

Perhaps no one would admit it now, generations later, but until that spring, when Fidel’s police began to sweep out its enemies, real and perceived, and to make chants of “¡Paredón! ¡Paredón!” a part of every Cuban nightmare, few people aside from Fulgencio Batista’s operatives had left Cuba because of political persecution or economic opportunity. Though sugar prices were flat, no one believed they’d stay that way. What was actually propelling people off the island was a sense that things were beginning to look more and more like another one of those bloody skirmishes the United States periodically undertook in Latin America.

We knew, through my mother’s cousin José Carlos, who’d call us surreptitiously from Guatemala City, where he was engaged in a training mission with American military and CIA advisers, that there were Cuban exiles amassing in Nicaragua, waiting to assault the island. José Carlos’s voice was always anxious, almost giddy, on the scratchy line from Central America—surely, had anyone known about the calls, they would have been sufficient grounds to kick him off the invading refugee-composed Brigade 2506.

“Peru is very beautiful, yes, and we’ve met Indians from all the tribes,” he’d say in his own convoluted code in case the lines were tapped, meaning that there were Cubans from all over involved. “Some are a little savage,” he’d add, and my parents would imagine that the men were simply more rugged than José Carlos, a gentle soul who’d been a second-grade teacher in Sagua La Grande before the revolution.

It was only later that they learned that José Carlos, who’d worked arduously for Fidel in the early days of the revolution, was finding among the ranks of the 2506 men who’d served in Batista’s secret police, murderers and torturers who had personally abused him during his short stint in jail just before Fidel triumphed.

“They have no shame about what they may have done in the past,” he wrote in a letter to his wife, Eliana, which she received much later, when a friend who’d also been in the 2506 tracked her down and delivered it for José Carlos, who died without firing a shot, drowned in the warm coastal waters just off Cuba. “Orejón Ramos, the man who slashed my throat in jail, just laughed when he saw me. ‘You? Here? But weren’t you one of Fidel’s best friends?’ he taunted. He pointed me out to everybody: ‘See this guy here, this skinny hero of the 2506? If it weren’t for him and his friends, none of us would be risking our lives here today!’ ”

It was because of José Carlos’s letters and calls just before the invasion of Playa Girón that my parents came to the conclusion that we had to leave Cuba, at least for a while.

The first thing my mother did was sign me up for a foster child program sponsored by the Catholic Church, which would have placed me with an American family in, say, Iowa or Indiana. In her thinking, at least one of us—me, the baby, the important one, the hope for the future—would be passed over, spared whatever was going to happen in Cuba and sent off with the hope of finding a modern pharaoh’s daughter.

It never occurred to my mother that I’d disappear, become an American, perhaps not too outwardly, but in those small imperceptible ways in which people don’t even realize that they’ve made irreversible changes. She never considered that, away from them, I might learn to slouch, that I could feel cocky enough to hurry people along when they tried to tell me a story, or that, in the golden fields of Iowa or Indiana, I might pick up a fear of the dark, a revulsion for the predicaments of faith.

That something happened anyway; that I eventually lost some of my equilibrium, even with the two of them present, didn’t matter. In the end, my mother didn’t have to think about those possibilities—not about the wheat and corn of the American Midwest (with which we would become familiar later, but by our own choice), or about whether they’d lose me for a month or a lifetime.

Certainly my father didn’t want us—and especially me—to be anything but Cuban. “It’s better for you to be Cuban,” he’d say, as if I had a choice then, as if I understood any of it enough to have any input in the matter.

To my father the island was as much the caiman-shaped rock that’s Cuba, with its breathless beaches and poverty, as wherever the three of us might be living. He could manage with an imagined isle, but not without the substance of us. We—my mother and I, the weight of us—were the necessary elements to anchor my father in the physical world. As soon as he heard about my mother’s plan to send me off to the United States without them, he immediately and without discussion canceled my trip.

“We will not be separated,” he said gravely, “never. The act of separation itself is what’s evil.” And he tore the application forms in half very carefully in front of an unnerved priest, who told him in no uncertain terms what a selfish man he was to deny me safe passage to a good Catholic home in the United States.

“This program is run by the church—what could be safer, Señor San José?” the priest implored.

My father just smiled. “Yes, yes,” he said, his hands trembling, “I’m very familiar with your programs. And, no, thank you.”

As my parents explored their options, there was never any question about where we would go. (By the mid-1960s, Cubans would be welcomed with open arms in the United States, enrolled in special welfare programs, eventually even given unique financial a...