MISSION LIBERTAD
By Lizette M. Lantigua
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Lantigua, Lizette M.
Mission libertad / by Lizette M. Lantigua.
p. cm.
Summary: With his parents, fourteen-year-old Luis escapes from Communist Cuba in 1979 and goes to live in Maryland with relatives who teach him about American life and God, but Luis, eager to fulfill a promise to his Abuela, manages to do so under the eyes of spies.
ISBN 978-0-8198-4900-7
[1. Immigrants—Fiction. 2. Cubans—United States—Fiction. 3. Family life—Maryland—Fiction. 4. Spies—Fiction. 5. Refugees—Fiction. 6. Emigration and immigration—Fiction. 7. Maryland—History—20th century—Fiction. 8. Cuba—History—1959-1990—Fiction.] I. Title.
PZ7.L2924Mis 2012
[Fic]—dc23
2012009983
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, events, and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.
Many manufacturers and sellers distinguish their products through the use of trademarks. Any trademark designations that appear in this book are used in good faith but are not authorized by, associated with, or sponsored by the trademark owners.
Design by Mary Joseph Peterson, FSP
Cover art by Penny Hauffe
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.
“P” and PAULINE are registered trademarks of the Daughters of St. Paul.
Copyright © 2012, Lizette M. Lantigua
Published by Pauline Books & Media, 50 Saint Pauls Avenue, Boston, MA 02130-3491
Printed in U.S.A.
ML VSAUSAPEOILL4-24J12-03561 4900-6
www.pauline.org
Pauline Books & Media is the publishing house of the Daughters of St. Paul, an international congregation of women religious serving the Church with the communications media.
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Thanking God for all his many blessings, and my family for all their support—especially my Little Flower for reading the book first!
1 UNO
The smell of wet grass filled the dark night. Fourteen-year-old Luisito picked his way along the path by the light of the full moon, the only sound the squelching of mud beneath his feet. It was June 10, 1979, and he was on the run.
His heart beat so fast he felt sure the sound would alert the police. He could barely see his father’s silhouette in front of him. He grasped his mother’s hand firmly and led her along the path. Luisito swatted at mosquitoes and other bugs that smacked his face as he ran. At the end of the path a man, whom Luisito could hardly make out in the dark, pointed to the ground. There, hidden in the bushes, lay a homemade raft. Wordlessly, the man helped Luisito and his dad drag the raft into the quiet waters. He then patted Luisito’s dad on the back. “Buena suerte,” he whispered, disappearing back along the path. Good luck, Luisito thought. Yes, we will need it.
Luisito and his parents climbed aboard the raft. It was a flimsy little contraption. Would it actually take them the ninety miles across the ocean to the United States?
Luisito felt a knot of fear in the middle of his stomach and an urgent need to go to the bathroom, but there was no time. Elena, Luisito’s mother, wore a look of quiet determination. Her dark brown eyes shone in the night, her face pale with anxiety. Now it was she who grasped Luisito’s hand. He noticed that her palms were sweaty.
He could only imagine how he looked. The left sleeve of his cotton t-shirt had been torn on a branch as he ran along the muddy path, and every time he touched his dirty blond hair gnats would pop out.
Miguel, Luisito’s father, pointed to the oars. They didn’t want to use the noisy motor just yet. Luisito, imitating his father, used his oar to push the raft out of the shallow area and into the deep ocean. Luisito remembered his father mentioning in the past how rafts were hard for the radar in Cuban patrol boats to detect. This brought him a sense of relief as they slowly rowed away from shore. At first, their rowing was awkward, but soon Luisito and Miguel developed a comfortable rhythm. They rowed farther and farther away from shore and into the vast dark ocean.
“Let’s take a break,” Miguel said, whispering even though no one was around for miles. They drifted aimlessly as they stretched their arms. The ocean was still calm, and Luisito’s heart started to beat normally again. His stomach began to relax. He tried to make sense of what had just happened.
A few hours ago, his whole life had changed. He had been sleeping on the sofa bed in the living room. It had seemed like just another hot summer night in Havana. Luisito had spent all day waiting in line with his grandmother to buy bread and rice. By evening he was exhausted. He expected that in a few weeks he would be sent to work in the sugar cane fields. Every summer Cuban children twelve years and older were required to leave their homes and were sent to the country to cut sugar cane and teach poor children to read. The idea had seemed noble at first, and he and his friends had been excited. But after a grueling month at the camp cutting cane under a melting sun, with hardly any food to eat and a combination of dirty mattresses and filthy bathrooms, the novelty had begun to fade. Luisito had come to dread the idea of going back.
Tonight, he had gone to sleep early. It felt hot and stuffy on the sofa bed. He tossed and turned. The mattress made an irritating squeaky sound. He was afraid he would disturb his grandmother. They shared the living room, while his parents had the only bedroom of their tiny apartment. He remembered finally mustering the energy to get up to open the living room window. He felt his way in the dark. There had been another power outage in the neighborhood, and it would probably last until dawn. The cracked marble floor felt cool under his bare feet as he walked past the bookcases and right by his grandma, or abuela (ah-BWAY-la), who was sleeping on her pin pan pun, a simple cot. Luisito loved to say the words. They sounded more like a noise than a noun.
“Go back to bed, Luisito,” Abuela whispered, startling him.
“It’s hot, Abuela,” Luisito protested.
“Don’t touch the windows. Not tonight, Luisito,” Abuela said. In a country where fear ruled, Luisito had learned from an early age not to ask many questions. If his grandmother thought it was best to have the windows just slightly opened, then there was probably a good reason. He tumbled back into his bed, wondering. He could hear Abuela mumbling her prayers in the quiet night. He also heard her sniffle. Maybe it was her allergies again.
Luisito had closed his eyes, and before he knew it he had fallen sound asleep.
“Luisito!” his mother whispered. She shook him awake.
“Luisito, wake up,” Abuela said as well. Luisito opened his eyes. The room was still dark but Abuela held a small lit candle. It was very warm in the room. Abuela looked at him with teary eyes. His parents told him to dress rapidly and to stay quiet.
“What’s happening? Is it a raid?” Luisito whispered. It was not uncommon for the police to search people’s homes or even to take citizens away in the middle of the night to question them.
“Hurry! Get up. We need to leave,” his mother said.
Luisito’s heart pounded quickly as he slipped on a pair of shorts and a t-shirt over his pajama shorts.
“¡Vamos! Come!” Miguel said, grabbing his son by the elbow.
Luisito turned to follow his father and was met by Abuela, reaching out to hug him. Her brown eyes were squinting and her cheeks felt
wet as she embraced him. Everything was happening too fast. This felt more like a nightmare than reality.
“Que Dios te acompañe, Luisito,” she whispered, her lips trembling as she tried to hold back her tears. She pulled him closer and whispered something urgently in his ear. Confused, Luisito strained to hear. “Don’t forget, Luisito!” she said, pulling away and wiping her eyes. “I trust you. It’s important.”
He nodded to Abuela in agreement. He would try not to forget. He repeated the information one more time in his head.
“¡Apúrate! Hurry! Hurry!” Elena said, her eyes red and swollen from crying. At that moment, Luisito realized what they were about to do, and he was scared.
They opened their apartment door carefully, and quietly walked down the steps of the old Havana mansion, which had belonged to his family before the government took it and converted into a four-unit apartment building. Luisito and his family now lived confined to the upstairs one-bedroom unit. Luisito was careful not to make a sound as they passed the apartment of their next-door neighbor, Ofelia, who belonged to the comité de barrio. If she heard, she would certainly snitch on them.
The comité was the neighborhood watch committee whose members kept a close eye on activities of everyone on the block and reported them to the government. If the Ramirezes were discovered, they would be imprisoned— or worse.
As they walked around the corner they looked up at Ofelia’s window. Her apartment was dark. They were safe, for now.
When they reached the main road, Miguel signaled that they should cross the street. They walked quickly behind some buildings. At the next block, a man was waiting in an old truck. He motioned to them to get in. If they had taken their own car, the noise would have awakened the neighbors. Miguel opened the truck’s passenger door and the Ramirez family scrambled in. They were quiet all through the thirty-minute ride to the beach. That’s when Luisito felt his heart pounding in his chest and sweat trickling down his back. The man didn’t say a word, and neither did Luisito’s parents, until they came to a stop. The driver parked near some bushes, then led the way on foot through the tall grass toward the sand. There they found a homemade raft.
Luisito thought of all this as he floated with his parents in the ten-foot raft, now a mere speck in the vast ocean. The raft was made of three large Soviet inner tubes, tied together and wrapped in fabric, with wooden planks across the top. The family also had a white cotton sheet to use as a makeshift sail. Wooden oars were well secured on both sides of the raft, and some provisions were securely tied to the sides. A small motor was attached to the raft.
Luisito felt the warm salty breeze as he sat in the raft. Occasionally, Miguel used the oars to guide the raft in the right direction. The waves were gentle. The current was a good accomplice, helping them along their course. As the raft made its way through the dark waters, Luisito thought, My desk at school will be empty tomorrow. Teachers at the preschool will be wondering why my mother has not shown up for work, and nurses will be looking all over the hospital for my father, Dr. Miguel Ramirez. No one will guess we are escaping to freedom.
Either from stress or from fear, the Ramirez family remained silent even now, when no one could possibly hear them. Everything around them looked dark. Luisito wondered how his father had been able to purchase the raft, who had helped him, and how long he had been planning all this. He wanted to ask but didn’t know where to begin. All Luisito knew for sure was that his family was headed in a direction where life would be different.
2 DOS
As Luisito sat holding on to a couple of oars, thoughts of Abuela, his friends, and his neighborhood bombarded his mind, but he pushed them aside. Survival was the only thing that mattered now.
“Papi, how long till we hit shore?” Luisito asked, finally breaking the silence.
“About two days if everything goes well with this small motor I am about to start,” Miguel said as he ran his fingers through his uncombed light-brown hair. His wide blue eyes, the same color as his son’s, were reddened by lack of sleep and worry during the last few days.
“This trip is going to be tough,” Miguel said, glancing first at Luisito and then at his wife, Elena. “But many others have done it before us and we can do it too. When we get to the United States, we will be free. That is all that matters and all we need to think about right now. Okay?”
Luisito and his mother nodded.
“Sharks are my biggest worry,” Elena said.
“Sharks?” Luisito said with wide-open eyes. “I had forgotten about sharks …”
Miguel gave Elena a stern look, shaking his head slightly.
“Hey, let’s relax. Pretend we are tourists enjoying the beach at a resort,” Miguel said, trying to lighten the mood. “Remember how we always wanted to go relax on those beaches like the foreign tourists, but we weren’t allowed?”
“Papi, please. How did you plan this?” Luisito asked.
“It was not easy,” Miguel said. “I had to wait for the right time and the right people to help us.”
“I never thought it would happen,” Elena said as she worked her brown hair into a ponytail, then wiped the sweat off her forehead. “Since your father is a doctor, I knew the government would make it difficult for us to leave. This is the only way we would ever be able to get off the island.”
Luisito understood. Most people in Cuba were not allowed to travel freely on vacation to other countries because the government feared they would not return. Doctors especially were not allowed to leave because Cuba needed medical doctors.
“We had to make a decision soon since you are almost of military age,” Miguel said. “I knew they would draft you and who knows, maybe send you to fight in Africa… . Oh, let’s not even think about that anymore. The worst is over.”
Luisito didn’t say a word, but he suspected that the worst wasn’t over as the raft carried them forward into unknown waters.
In the silence of the trip thoughts flooded Luisito. He replayed the last few weeks over and over in his mind, now recognizing clues to what his parents had been planning and how oblivious he had been. He remembered a few weeks ago when his neighbor, Ramon, knocked on the door late at night. His father had rushed out of bed to open the door to find Ramon with Johnny, his twenty-year-old nephew, who was visiting from the United States. The young man wore a colorful shirt with words in English, new blue jeans, and big white sneakers. Those shoes are huge! Luisito thought. Luisito had only seen these kinds of shoes and clothes at the diplotienda, a store where only the diplomats and tourists were allowed to shop. The tourists had access to another Cuba where food was not rationed in the restaurants and there were toiletry products in the hotels—a different world from the scarcity experienced by the rest of the people on the island.
Since most Cubans were barred from outside news, he had never realized how much better other people lived until the government started allowing flights from the United States. Many Cuban families who had fled Cuba before flights were restricted took this opportunity to visit their relatives. That’s when Luisito started wondering why his family couldn’t have soap or milk like other people.
“This is my nephew Johnny, from La Yuma,” Ramon said that day, using the slang Cubans on the island often used to refer to the United States of America. “He brings things from your family.”
The smiling young man pulled several envelopes out of a backpack that hung from his shoulders. Miguel recognized the handwriting immediately.
“It’s from your cousin in Miami!” he said, turning to Elena.
Then Johnny pulled out a plastic grocery bag with a pair of glasses for Abuela, a package of soap, underwear for Luisito, and a bottle of vitamins. As he handed them the items he folded the plastic bag and was shoving it back into his backpack when Abuela stopped him.
“Wait. Can I have the plastic bag?” she asked. “Plastic bags are so hard to find. If things get really bad, I can sell it. I can get about five American dollars for this!”
“Sure,” Johnny said, shrugging his shoulders and smiling. Luisito couldn’t help noticing how clean this guy smelled.
Instead of reading the letters out loud, his grandmother hurried Luisito into the bathroom to use the new soap. With all his excitement over the new things, he didn’t realize that his parents were reading the letters in their bedroom and speaking quietly to each other.
Luisito remembered that wonderful bath. He sure smelled terrible now! How he wished he could take a bath again. That day he turned the cold-water knob. He didn’t bother to check if there was any hot water—there usually wasn’t. He picked up the bar of soap and took a deep sniff. It smelled sweet. It had been three weeks since he had last used soap. He had been using water and lemons because there wasn’t any soap left in the stores and his family wasn’t able to purchase or barter any in el mercado negro, the black market. That is where many Cubans illegally bought their supplies when they had used up their allotted ration or when stores didn’t have what they needed. Every store and every home was owned by the Cuban government. There was no longer any private ownership. If the stores didn’t carry something, citizens had to fend for themselves.
Many more thoughts wandered through Luisito’s mind as he drifted in and out of a light sleep on the raft. By now his father had turned the motor on, and they were going at a faster pace. Soon the sky turned from pitch dark to gray, and the sun began to rise. It looked as if it were coming out of the ocean and racing toward the sky. Soon it would be morning. Luisito’s stomach began to rumble.
“Is there anything to eat, Papi?” he asked, trying not to sound annoying.
“Si, hijo, I brought some bread,” Miguel said, sounding almost cheerful.
“Dip it into the water so it be easier to swallow.” Miguel pointed to a bottle of water tied to the raft.
Bread was no longer made of wheat in Cuba but of yucca, a starch similar to potato. If it wasn’t eaten right away the bread was hard as a rock. Luisito ate his wet bread and took a few sips of the water.
“I wonder what Mami is doing,” Elena said
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