* * *
For Daniel, and even for Marta Kaminsky, it was a breath of fresh air to find the tumultuous arrival to Miami Beach of dozens, hundreds, and soon thousands of Jews leaving Cuba, pushed by the fear of the communist regime that the trained noses of those men neatly sniffed out in the Havana air. While the second half of 1959 saw the appearance of some of the richest members of Havana’s Jewish community (Brandon, who was a bigwig, moved directly to New York, where he already had businesses), between 1960 and 1961, the rest came, the majority of them poor or suddenly poor due to the losses they suffered upon leaving the island. While Jewish, more or less observant, almost none of them were too Orthodox, the recently arrived were above all Cubans, fortunately of a different kind than the first wave of those characters who were close to Batista, those shadowy men who, to the Kaminskys’ relief, had settled down in the Southwest and in Coral Gables.
Although the couple started to toy with the idea of going back to Cuba, due to the old Galician Arnáez’s growing fears over a yet-to-be clarified future and the silence of Roberto Fariñas—at one time or another, in those initial times, he used the long list of work and responsibilities undertaken in the process of rebuilding the country’s structures as an excuse for distancing himself—they pushed it aside out of caution. At the end of the day, there would always be time to go back, they thought.
The Kaminskys had already begun to pay for the purchase of the little house on Fourteenth Street and West Avenue by the end of 1958 with the money from the sale of their Santos Suárez property and a new loan from old Galician Arnáez. At the same time, Daniel had become the one in charge of negotiating with the grocery’s suppliers and quickly moved on to being the business’s accountant and Bronstein’s right-hand man. It was then that fate came to his aid. In mid-1959, the old Ukrainian man died of a heart attack, and his only son, who worked for the Democratic Party in Washington and had thought of the possibility of selling the business, agreed with Daniel to carry out an experiment in which the heir could only stand to gain with minimal effort: in the face of the continuous arrival of Jews from the North, and the massive arrival of Cuban Jews expanding the population of Miami Beach, it seemed like the best time to turn the modest grocery store on Washington Avenue into a market in the style of Havana’s Minimax, whose operations the former accountant knew so well. To increase their space, they rented the neighboring store, looking over the more visible and advantageous corner of Lincoln Road, and, as a change over the original in Havana, they would devote a notable part of the market to kosher foods. Thanks to the money remaining from the sale of the Santos Suárez house, Daniel would go into the business with twenty percent of the capital (which would be used to modernize the property) and the younger Bronstein would put in the rest solely by investing what he inherited from his father. Meanwhile, the Cuban Jew would be in charge of managing the establishment, for which he would receive an additional fifteen percent of the earnings.
As for Marta, she had made great progress in perfecting her English and was hired as a Spanish and English teacher at the recently founded Jewish-Cuban academy on the beach, of which she would become the assistant director and a shareholder just two years later.
While the doors of financial well-being were opening up, Cuban politics had become radical, and American hostility toward the island was turning tangible, the idea of going back was fading away, despite neither Marta nor Daniel recovering—they would never recover—from the feeling of loss calling them from their Havana pasts. Then, the arrival of old Galician Arnáez and his wife were a relief to their feeling of alienation, while Uncle Joseph Kaminsky’s refusal to go anywhere was taken as the natural reaction of a stubborn man who, in any event, was still living and would continue to live the best time of his life, which, to his disgrace, ended up being all too brief.
In his recovered role as a Jew, Daniel decided to take several steps forward in search of solidifying his position and, as he would tell his son many times, a sense of belonging that would allow him to calm his spiritual deviation. As such, sensing that he would thus strengthen his increasingly more prosperous business, located at the very spot that was turning into the heart of the neighborhood, he linked himself to a group of Jews from Cuba who were determined in the realization of a dream: to create a Cuban-Jewish community or society in Miami with which to face the future and preserve their identity formed in the past. In reality, that aspiration of those who called themselves Cuban Jews—many of them born in Poland, Germany, Austria, or Turkey, but Cuban to the core—was a response to the invisible but rather impenetrable wall raised by American Jews—many of them natives of, or children of natives of, the same places from which the Cuban Jews came—who were richer, with property and supposed seniority rights, and with an attitude that at times bordered on disdain regarding the recently arrived newcomers with their two suitcases in hand and their lack of English and their parties in Flamingo Park, in the middle of Miami Beach, where they danced to the rhythm of music played by Cuban orchestras with a surprising ability to imbue the movement of their waists and shoulders with African cadences, like any mulato from Havana.
Daniel was one of the thirteen Jews who, on September 22, 1961, founded the Cuban-Jewish Association of Miami in a hall at the Lucerne Hotel. Under the flags of Israel, the United States, and Cuba, the founders discussed the first project of rules for the nascent society. Daniel Kaminsky, who preferred to keep silent before the logorrhea of the other founders, almost all of them specialists in the creation of brotherhoods and more familiar with the thought patterns and the religious demands of their colleagues, thought then about how life’s paths can lead men to circumstances never before imagined, even at their most delirious. But, he told himself, and would later tell his son, if the price of economic success and the need to feel like part of something were passing through that hotel ballroom, there he was to buy one and catch the other. Although in his heart, he continued to be the same renegade who, twenty-two years prior, had rejected a God who was too cruel in his designs. The truly sacred thing was life, and there he was fighting for it, to make it better. Because, at the age of thirty-one, Daniel Kaminsky could consider himself an expert on losses: he had lost not one but two countries, the one he had been born in and the one he had adopted; a family; the Polish language and Yiddish; a God and, with Him, a faith and militancy in a tradition built on that faith and its Law; he had forfeited a life that he liked and a culture he had acquired; he had lost his best and even his worst friends, some on earth, and others, like Pepe Manuel and Antonio Rico, already in heaven; and he had even failed in trying to carry out justice, although he was paying the price as if he had succeeded, without even gaining the relief of lifting that burden or the satisfaction of having carried out the warranted punishment. Daniel Kaminsky was sick of losses and, through the only path within his reach, he was now ready to receive gains. As long as his conscience could remain free.
* * *
For many years, Daniel Kaminsky would keep the habit of wandering alone along West Avenue’s promenade, less favored and utilized by others than that of Ocean Drive, which ran along the beach. Thanks to those walks by the so-called intercoastal, which he could only make on Saturdays after temple in certain seasons, thanks to the many duties of his job, Daniel was able to witness the changes over the years to that part of Miami Beach and to the keys located on the other side of the canal, like the so-called Star Island, where mansions started springing up in the 1980s—a time when drugs flooded the city—that were more numerous, lavish, and almost unreal in their competition for the luxury and shine that easy money brings along with it. To Daniel, who was on his way to becoming a rich man and would eventually become one, that whole display seemed grotesque, since he was still living in the same little art deco house with two stories and two bedrooms where he lived at the beginning, and not even the mean-spirited people who accused him of being very Jewish would make him change his mind just to satisfy others’ expectations through
ostentatiousness.
Daniel liked to sit on the small pier at Sixteenth Street, from which you could make out the old bridges uniting the beach with firm ground, the islet with the obelisk raised in memory of Joseph Flagler, and, in the distance, the port of Miami, where, he couldn’t help thinking of it, the Saint Louis had waited for forty-eight hours before receiving the final no. When he wasn’t in a good mood, he took off for a solitary walk along the intercoastal to feel like he was trying to find himself and not get completely lost, since he was starting to sense that he was getting too far removed from what he had once been. Ever since deciding to return to the fold of Judaism, that man would always feel that he was living an apocryphal life, with his conscience and soul subject to a clandestine state. In his first years in Havana, when he chose to distance himself from ancestral beliefs and traditions, Daniel the adolescent had seen himself forced to go through the world with two faces: one to please his uncle and another to satisfy himself and get lost in the crowd. He had to undertake that painful dichotomy, to which his economic and emotional dependence on Joseph Kaminsky obliged him, as the only path toward the chosen path of freedom.
But his reconversion, which transfigured him again into wearing a mask, presented itself, by contrast, as a loss of many of the gains of a freedom that he had enjoyed so much in his Cuban life. Although the community in which he had inserted himself was much less restrictive than that of his country of origin or of the faction of New York Orthodox Jews, in which the Law and the rabbi’s word were powerful and oppressive, a tangible social compulsion forced the Jews of Miami to be respectful of most social precepts if they wanted to be accepted. In contrast to the diffuse religiosity with which many Jews lived in Cuba, in Miami the need for social reaffirmation fell like an added weight on his daily life. Daniel knew that among them there were many who, like him, barely kept any vestiges of religious faith. Nonetheless, almost all of them publicly followed the regulations to maintain their belonging and to not seem too different, since the greatest risk was exclusion, marginalization. It could even be considered revolutionary, a bad word that summarized the status just below “heretic.”
When he wandered alone, breathing in the canal’s pleasant breeze, the man leapt over the border of his nostalgia for a lost world. He looked at his past and saw a Daniel who was fulfilled and satisfied, free as only a man who acts, lives, and thinks according to his conscience. The hypocritical submission he subjected himself to now seemed even more petty and cowardly, although he knew well that it was necessary to obtain the respect and even the impunity that power allows. And in his case, power was money.
What would he do with the money with which he didn’t plan to buy himself a mansion or an ostentatious car, or jewelry he would never wear or even a sailboat, since, to top it all off, he was prone to seasickness? Daniel Kaminsky smiled, satisfied with his options: he would buy freedom. First, the most valuable one: the freedom of his son Elias; later, if he still had the energy and the desire, his own.
With those prospects in mind, Daniel was raising his son with a moderation that on occasion seemed exaggerated even by his wife’s standards as a Cuban mother and old Arnáez’s standards as a softy of a grandfather. But he was convinced that the boy had to learn that everything in life had a price and that when one pays for himself out of his own effort, he values his gains much more. Nonetheless, in contrast to what had happened to him, his son would have the advantage in life’s challenges, since he would be able to study and gain the wealth of knowledge, which is not transferrable and constitutes a tangible wealth, as his Polish grandfather would have said. And, in possession of those advantages, Elias would be able to choose. Daniel would guarantee him the supreme freedom of choice, and for that, he was preparing Elias through moderation.
Daniel, who in his American life had discovered traditional Jewish literature and had become intimately familiar with the most rationalist thinkers, tried to pass on to his son the instruments that would allow him to make the best choices. From his readings, he had imbued his paternal advice with the notion that human decisions are the result of a balance (or lack of balance) between your conscience and arrogance, a relationship in which one’s conscience should be the driver toward the best results and decisions. And he backed up that notion with the extraordinary assertions of that Sephardic scholar who had so dazzled him, Menasseh ben Israel, a nonconformist dreamer, author of many books, but above all, a treatise called De Termino Vitae, a curious text in which the Dutch-Jewish sage, although Portuguese-born (and by the way, a friend of Rembrandt’s, as many confirmed), reflected about something as transcendental as the importance of knowing how to live life and learning how to deal with death. Elias Kaminsky the painter, who years later would also read Ben Israel and, through him, Maimonides and even the arduous Spinoza, would always remember his father citing the Sephardic philosopher in his conceptualization of death as a process of loss of expectations and yearnings suffered by men throughout their lives. Death, his father used to say to him, is just the exhaustion in life of our yearnings, hopes, aspirations, and desires for freedom. And from the other death, the physical one, one could only return if it was arrived at with a life adequately used, with a fullness, consciousness, and dignity with which we led our lives, seemingly so small, but in reality, so transcendental and as unique as … as a plate of black beans, the man would say.
* * *
Two months after the glorious meeting with Orestes Miñoso, which occurred in the spring of 1988, it was discovered that Daniel Kaminsky had prostate cancer. He was fifty-eight years old, in robust health—perhaps a bit overweight—the main shareholder of three markets, located in Miami Beach, the Southwest, and Hialeah, father of a son with a university degree and already defined artistic aspirations, and, despite his public dissensions, considered one of the pillars of the Cuban Jewish community in South Florida. A winner who now had the worst, irreversible defeat sneak up on him, but against which he would fight, as he always did in life.
The revelation of the illness, the operation he underwent, the anticancer treatment that followed, and the adaptation to a nuclear device in the affected area (which he would always refer to as an atomic warhead up his ass) prompted him to see life differently. In all his years in the United States, the Jewish-Cuban Pole had silently and regretfully carried the weight of someone else’s guilt that he could not shake. But before the more-than-possible prospect of death, he decided at last to share it with his son.
According to what he would tell Elias, Daniel Kaminsky was sure that his good uncle Joseph, dead more than twenty years before in his little Havana house in the neighborhood of Luyanó, had left this world convinced that his nephew had killed the man who cheated his parents and sent them back to the European inferno of 1939. He knew that his old friend Roberto Fariñas had distanced himself from him, not for nonexistent political differences or because of the stellar distance created by geopolitics over the Florida Straits, but because of the conviction that he was a ruthless murderer. Even his beloved Marta, despite deciding, accepting, and wanting to believe him, at heart had never believed him. And because of that, faced with the oncologist’s diagnosis, he had launched himself into confessing before his son, to relieve himself of the burden and, incidentally, to remove the possibility, improbable, but not impossible, that the young man would have to receive that same burden someday, through a less propitious route.
“In the hospital, as he recovered from the operation, he told me this whole story … My mother would spend the day with him. I was there nights. Since he couldn’t sit, he lay on his side, with his face very close to mine, while I sat in an armchair. He spoke for five, six nights, I don’t remember very well. He would talk until he fell dead asleep. He started from the beginning, enjoying that talk, and I remember how an image started taking shape in my head of my father’s life that I had not had until that moment. Like a painting that starts taking on colors and the edges become outlines that attain shape. Before those convers
ations, sometimes due to lack of time, other times due to my lack of interest or because of his fears, or for years because of our being out of communication with each other, I didn’t really know the details of his life and I wasn’t too interested in knowing anything about Cuba. I think like the majority of children, right? He started telling me what his family life had been like in Kraków and in Berlin, before the war, in the time of pogroms and fear chilling the blood in your veins … His obsession with the subject of obedience and submission, the choice of free will. Later, he went into the discovery of Havana and his miserable life in the tenement on Acosta and Compostela, the friends he started making, the faith he started losing. All of that for me was a void, sometimes pages from some history book, and suddenly it became a life very close to my own. The story of the Saint Louis and my father’s first years in Cuba, which went from tragedy and pain to joy and discovery. The reasons for his renouncing Judaism and even his condition as a Jew … His discovery of sex and his erotic obsessions with saxophone-playing mulatas from El Prado’s cafés … All of that, he started handing to me. And finally, he told me the story of the plan and what happened the day he went to kill Román Mejías. Everything I’ve told you in the past few days,” Elias Kaminsky said without ceasing to gently, but repeatedly, pull on his ponytail, as he always did when he got into thorny subjects. The painter left his hair alone for a moment and lit up one of his Camels, of which he seemed to have brought an abundant supply, and added, “You have the right not to believe him. In fact, you have reasons not to, as Roberto Fariñas did, as my mother did, as my uncle Joseph could have. But I have a greater reason to accept what he told me: if it was possible for the cancer to kill him, and if, of his own volition, he had told me the good and the bad of his life, his fears and his decisions to deny everything he had been and free his soul from something that was oppressing him and the rather hypocritical decision to return to the fold without handing over his conscience … why in the hell was he going to lie to me about Mejías if, for what that son of a bitch did to his family and God knows how many other people, he deserved to be killed a thousand times?”
Heretics Page 19