An American Son: A Memoir (5 page)

My father was a very generous man who made sacrifices all his life, not only for us, but for anyone who needed his help. My aunt Georgina recalled for me how he treated one of his coworkers who had been fired for drinking on the job. He visited my father at work and complained he had been offered a new job, but couldn’t accept it because he didn’t have suitable shoes to wear. My father refused to give him money because he suspected he
would use it to buy liquor. Instead, he met his friend outside the hotel after work, removed his own shoes and gave them to him. Walking home shoeless would have been more than an inconvenience to him. He wore a leg brace, and was embarrassed by it—we rarely saw him barefoot even around the house. He owned only two pairs of shoes: one for wearing in public, the other for wearing at home.

I don’t remember him ever buying anything for himself. He drove a red 1973 Chevrolet Impala for twenty years. He wore a Seiko watch until the day he died, even though its gold plating had worn off long before. Every item of clothing he wore had been purchased for him by my mother or given to him as a gift. He wasn’t perfect, but I’ve never met another person in my life as selfless as my father.

Life was changing in the States. The civil rights movement was reaching its zenith. America was increasingly involved in Vietnam, and the war’s unpopularity, particularly among the young, helped cause the social upheavals that gave the decade its reputation for radicalism. The changes demanded by social activists in the baby boomer generation, who weren’t content to be an exact replica of the preceding generation, would affect the values of every institution in America—education, lifestyles, laws, relations between the sexes, entertainment.

Acculturation is never an easy process for immigrants, but it must have been all the more daunting when American mores seemed to be changing overnight. My parents were conservative by nature and in their politics. America was their haven. They had never expected the United States to be beset by so much turmoil, much as they hadn’t expected that the Castro regime would prevent them from living in Cuba again. But they raised their children to respect their new country, and the conservative values they held dear.

My parents bought their first house in 1966, in Miami. All my mother’s sisters were now living in the United States, with her parents living in a nearby apartment building. In 1967, my grandmother suffered a fatal heart attack in her sleep. She was sixty-four years old, the beloved matriarch of the García family. Her sudden death devastated my grandfather and mother, and was a crushing blow to my father as well. She had treated him as her son, and he had loved her as his mother.

The nation’s political and social unrest dominated the news in 1968.
But after a decade of struggles, my parents had come to achieve some relative stability. My brother, Mario, was the quarterback of the local high school football team. My sister Barbara was enrolled in ballet lessons, and my mother doted on her like a little doll. After high school, my brother enlisted in the army, serving as a Green Beret in the 7th Special Forces Group, stationed at Fort Bragg. My parents couldn’t afford to send him to college, but after he completed his service in 1971, he used the GI Bill to finish his education.

By the start of the new decade, my parents had much to be grateful for. Although he had failed at business, through hard work my father had achieved enough financial security that my mother, who had worked as a cashier at the Crown Hotel, could now consider staying at home. My father was forty-five and my mother was forty-one, an age when they could expect my brother, who would soon marry, to give them grandchildren. In October of 1970, my parents learned that a new member of the Rubio family was indeed on the way. But it was not my brother’s wife who was expecting.

I was born on May 28, 1971. My younger sister, Veronica, was born the following year. My mother and father were starting over again as parents in the country they now called home.

My parents had lived in America for nearly two decades. It was clear that Cuba had become a thoroughly totalitarian state, and would likely remain so for some time. They had endured many disappointments, and their lives would never be easy. But slowly and surely they made a better life for our family than they had had as children, or could have ever been possible for them in Cuba. Three of their children were born Americans. Mario had naturalized after returning from the army. And in 1975, they, too, became citizens of the United States.

M
Y EARLIEST MEMORIES ARE OF MY FAMILY’S HOME IN Coral Gate, a neighborhood west of Little Havana. I remember playing with my sister on an aluminum swing set my father had built in the backyard, and a dome-shaped monkey bar–type contraption he added later. We had a screened porch large enough for me to ride around in on my tricycle.

A sunroom in the rear of the house doubled as our playroom. My father installed an indoor gate system so when my mother had things to do around the house, she could put us in the sunroom and not worry about us wandering off. He also converted our garage into a bedroom for my grandfather, who would live with us for much of the remainder of his life. His arrival at Coral Gate began one of the most influential relationships in my life.

We lived just down the street from St. Raymond Catholic Church, where every Saturday evening I would attend Mass with my mother. I can still recall her complaining when I would drop the kneeler on her shin and leave her with bruises. I had a habit as a child of playacting scenes from experiences that had made an impression on me. When I came home from the movies or some other entertainment I would stage repeat performances. After returning home from Mass, I would sometimes wrap myself in a sheet and pretend to be a priest, re creating that day’s service.

Barbara, my older sister, still lived at home. She was in high school and
employed in her first job. She seemed so mature and smart to me, and I was fascinated by her. I would wake up early just so I could join her for breakfast. She had the same thing every morning:
café con leche
—Cuban coffee with heated milk—and a square piece of toast my mother placed on top of the cup. It looked like a graduation cap. Barbara worked in a T shirt shop on Coral Gables’ “Miracle Mile.” I woke up one night to find at the foot of my bed a T shirt with the shark from the movie
Jaws
ironed on the front of it. It was my favorite shirt.

Around my fourth birthday my parents became concerned about my legs, as my knees were turned inward. They took me to an orthopedic specialist who prescribed the use of leg braces. Every morning my mother would struggle to strap them onto my legs. The braces were cumbersome and restrictive, and I hated them. I begged her not to put them on me. When that failed, I physically resisted her, bending and kicking my legs.

She eventually devised a trick to encourage my cooperation. Whenever I refused to wear my braces, our phone would ring. My mother would answer it, then hand the receiver to me. It was Don Shula, head coach of the Miami Dolphins. “Marco,” he’d say, “you have to wear your braces if you’re going to play for me someday.” I would eagerly comply. Years later it would occur to me that Coach Shula didn’t have a Cuban accent, and the voice on the telephone had been my father’s, who had taken time from work to call me and impersonate one of my childhood heroes.

Happily, after I had worn the braces for a year with little progress to show for the effort, my parents took me to a new doctor. He instructed my parents to stop using the braces and assured them I would outgrow the condition soon enough, which I did.

My earliest Christmas memories are also from our years in the Coral Gate house. One Christmas Eve in particular still stands out. Veronica and I had gone to bed for the night. I woke up for some reason and made my way to the living room, where I discovered my father and my sister’s boyfriend and future husband, Orlando, assembling a bicycle. You would have thought I’d walked in on two burglars. After a frantic attempt to cover up the evidence, my father and Orlando explained they had both been using the bathroom when Santa Claus had arrived and delivered our presents. It sounded plausible to me, and I went back to bed happy that Santa had made it to our house and been so generous.

These are most of the memories I have from our time in Coral Gate. They’re just a few scattered snapshots of the earliest years of my life. But I remember them affectionately as part of the pervasive sense of well-being I had throughout my childhood. I always felt I lived a charmed, happy life, with limitless possibilities there for the taking. Security, comfort, confidence and happiness were the gifts my parents gave Veronica and me.

My parents had been very young when Mario was born. My grandmother Dominga had cared for him while my parents were at work. She picked him up from school, and made his dinner. My parents usually came home late from work, sometimes just before Mario’s bedtime. During that period my father often worked on the weekends and holidays. After my sister Barbara was born my parents, especially my mother, were able to devote more time to their children, though not as much as they wished. They rarely had the money to take Mario and Barbara on vacation. It wasn’t deliberate neglect, nor was it a failure of love. They cherished their children and did all they could for them. But the remorse they felt for not having had more time to spare for their older children, especially Mario, drove their almost obsessive determination to be more attentive to their younger children.

Ours was a privileged childhood. I know that now. I think I knew it even then. We were the center and purpose of our parents’ lives; our happiness was their only concern. Unlike when my older siblings growing up, my father was often at home on the weekends and holidays. He earned enough to allow my mother to stay home with us during our early childhood years, and to buy us toys and take us on occasional vacations. My parents deferred buying all but the most basic comforts for themselves so we could enjoy all the entertainments they could afford; they had no hobbies of their own. They rarely made us do things we didn’t want to do, and they carefully shielded us from every disturbance and anxiety in their own lives.

It’s a great blessing for a child to know he is so well loved. We had little money growing up, but Veronica and I had everything we needed, and a lot that we merely wanted. That sense of stability and security can give a child all the confidence necessary to become an accomplished adult. I’ve never lived a day when I wasn’t sure I was loved, nor have I been in circumstances when I haven’t believed I could make my life whatever I wanted it to be.

But it can spoil you, too. When you grow up as the central occupation of others and are accustomed to an inordinate amount of attention, you will very likely struggle as an adult, as I have, to learn to subordinate your own desires to the needs of others—a quality indispensible to a mature and lasting happiness. Mario had left home by the time I was born, and Barbara would stay in Miami when we moved to Las Vegas in 1979. We were a small household when I was growing up—just Veronica and me, our parents and my grandfather. The trade-offs, the deference and the self-denial that are the habits of peaceful coexistence in large families were never imposed on us. We’ve had to learn them as adults, and it has not been an easy endeavor.

When Veronica and I were very young, five and six years old, my parents would take us to the nearby International House of Pancakes on Sunday mornings. We loved the pancakes, and I was an avid collector of the little NFL football helmet magnets IHOP sold at the time. Moments after we placed our orders, I would begin complaining about the time it took to get our meals. “I’m starving, Papí. Where’s the food? Why’s it taking so long?” Instead of correcting me and urging me to be more patient, my father would become agitated as well, and begin pestering the waitress for our food. I struggle with impatience to this day, and when I exhibit the weakness at a restaurant or in some other public place, my wife will remind me that I am behaving like that six-year-old at IHOP.

Shortly before my fifth birthday, my father was approached by the manager of the hotel where he worked with an interesting opportunity. He offered him a job managing Toledo Plaza, an apartment complex in a working-class Cuban neighborhood near the airport. The job came with a rent-free apartment, a salary comparable to his earnings at the Roney Plaza and a promise my father could continue bartending on weekends for extra money. He accepted.

My parents sold our Coral Gate house and moved into three apartments on the ground floor of Toledo Plaza. The first unit served as the building’s front office, where my parents worked, as well as a storage room. Veronica and I spent a lot of time in the storage room, playing hide-and-seek among the furniture and equipment kept there. The second and third units were our home. My father opened the walls to combine them into one apartment. Our playroom, my bedroom and Barbara’s bedroom were in the first unit; the living room, kitchen, Veronica’s bedroom and my
parents’ bedroom were in the second. All three units had sliding glass doors that opened onto a large lawn in the apartment complex’s center courtyard, which became our backyard.