by Achy Obejas
There was no one else but us then, no one to call to, no one who might find us should anything happen. It was all a blue, blue void. “I was just thinking, how it’s so immense out here,” my father whispered to my mother. “I was thinking how it’s such a terrible beauty, and a return trip, if they don’t let us in. . . .”
“We’ll be fine,” my mother said. She knew to let him talk out his fears, to let him examine all the awful possibilities aloud. “There’s no reason in the world we won’t be fine.”
Then, in the moment my father leaned over to kiss my mother’s forehead, we heard the ocean’s gentle silence broken by the blare of airplanes above us. One, two, three tubular Cuban B-26s flew directly overhead, their noses pockmarked with bullet holes.
“They’re headed for Havana!” my father shouted, horrified. “They’re going in the wrong direction!”
Alarmed, Olinsky grabbed oil-drenched Johnny and threw him against the railing. This carefree young man—had he betrayed them? Had this rich man’s son turned the boat around in the middle of the night so skillfully that no one had noticed? Was he fiddling with the motor as a trick to kill time until Cuban security could haul them back?
“Tell me, is it us who are going in the wrong direction?” Olinsky demanded of a very startled Johnny.
The young man squinted in the harsh light. Suddenly, the question for him was not about the compass, about matters of north and south, but about the substance of his soul. He thought about the haphazard summer houses that dotted the beaches of Varadero, how their garish colors seemed not gaudy at all but an organic extension of the surrounding Caribbean bounty. As he looked at us—at the flaming halo around my mother’s head, my father’s expression of constant melancholia, and the innocence in my eyes—he tried to imagine us in austere Miami, a city always looking south for its thrills, where, until recently, for a $10 ferry ride the common streets of Havana became paradise.
It would be this incident, when Olinsky’s doubts about Johnny’s intentions rushed forth, that would cause the handsome playboy to turn around once we reached Florida. He would keep his promise to take us safely there, to let us disembark as refugees, but he would never touch U.S. soil himself. Instead, he sailed back to Cuba, refusing exile with people who could think him a traitor. He arrived on the island just in time to grab one of his grandfather’s sacred guns from the wars of independence, and dash to the Australia sugar mill, where the fighting had already begun just off Bahía de Cochinos. (How he got through all those blocked roads remains a mystery, one of the few stories Johnny refuses to tell.)
In later years, Johnny, a decorated civilian veteran of Playa Girón, would rise steadily through Cuba’s government ranks. In 1995, he was named the head of a special task force in the Ministry of Tourism assigned to rehabilitate women who’d turned to prostitution during the desperate early days of the Special Period in Times of Peace, a job for which he proved remarkably empathetic and well-suited.
It would be some time before we knew exactly what had happened that spring day while we were floating in the sea: how the CIA had dressed some U.S. planes to look like the Cuban air force in an effort to fool Fidel and the media; that while we drifted under the Caribbean sun until Johnny fixed our motor, Fidel was center-stage in Havana. The hundreds of thousands gathered to hear him in the scorching heat chanted: “Somos socialistas . . . pa’lante y pa’lante . . . y al que no le guste . . . que tome purgante!”
The next morning, as the CIA-backed Brigade 2506 landed at Playa Girón and my mother’s cousin José Carlos drowned, we made our way past the U.S. Coast Guard (whose job then was to be helpful, not to arrest and deport Cubans, as happened later) and sailed into the waterfront at 14th Street and Ocean Drive in Miami Beach, much to the amazement of the Jewish retirees who were wading in the tub-warm waters.
Olinsky, seeing the handful of white-haired old Jews in their colorful beach trunks, started laughing uncontrollably. “This is Babylon?” he asked. “This?”
When my mother tried to calm him by putting her arm around him, the trembling old Pole surprised everyone: He climbed over the side of the yacht and dove into the ocean, paddling madly toward his brethren, his body a ghostly blur through the clear water.
“Mir sind pleitim!” he shouted between breaths. Although it was not deep where he swam, an exhausted Olinsky had to struggle against the mild currents.
“Refugees? From where?” asked one of the retirees, incredulous.
“From Poland—via Cuba!” shouted Olinsky, still in Yiddish, as two other old men grabbed him by the arms and pulled him to shore, where he collapsed on the sand, still laughing hysterically. My father, on the deck of La Marilyn, looked on in a near panic.
“And them? They’re Polish, too?” the retiree asked, his finger pointing at the rest of La Marilyn’s passengers—cigar-smoking Johnny, my mother and her wild hair, my frightened father, and me—all of us watching the rescue of Olinsky from the deck of La Marilyn with utter fascination.
“Oh my god,” my father whispered hoarsely to my mother.
She squeezed his hand.
“All Cubans,” Olinsky said about us as we waited anxiously, “except for him.” And he singled out my father. “He’s Spanish, a Jew,” he said, grinning, “marrano”—but he caught himself and, in an attempt to soften the pejorative, switched quickly to Hebrew— “anusim.”
My father, shocked by the only word he understood—marrano — covered his face, humiliated and angry.
At the time, I was too young to appreciate any of this, to have a sense of what it meant to my father, or to me. And in the years to come, I would forget everything about this episode except its broadest strokes: that we escaped from Cuba by boat the night of the invasion of Bay of Pigs, that we were protected by the Virgin of Charity and landed in Miami Beach among the tourists, that my mother wore an emerald-colored suit and her hair frolicked in the air as Havana sank into the sea.
IV
My father’s a Jew, a real Jew, but it’s complicated. It’s a long story, technically a little more than five hundred years old. It is, in many ways, a select history, even though its effects are global, its traditions of mystery and concealment a painful legacy.
If the story could be dated, it might be to 1480, when King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella issued an order that established tribunals throughout Spain to deal with cases of “heretical depravity.” The point of what would become the Spanish Inquisition was to punish converts to Christianity who continued secretly performing Jewish rites and ceremonies—to condemn them, really, for circumcising their male children, or simple acts like lighting candles on Friday nights.
Jews who refused to convert to Christianity were strewn on torture racks, had water pushed up their noses, or were buried up to their heads in dirt and left to die. Thousands were publicly flogged and burned alive in huge public displays called autos-de-fé. Both royalty and clergy would attend these spectacles as entertainments, drinking ices and teas as Jews and other blasphemers were consumed by flames. The Spanish priests in charge of this murderous apostasy were so frenzied that, on at least one occasion, they had the bones of one hundred already dead crypto-Jews exhumed and publicly cremated in a ceremony meant to serve as a warning to those still living. (All this madness was considered “necessary cruelty” by a Catholic Church that, in 1992, on the five hundredth anniversary of both the Inquisition and the European arrival in the Americas, seriously considered canonizing the queen.)
Twelve years after Ferdinand and Isabella’s decree, when Christopher Columbus went looking for India, he took with him a trio of caravels staffed in great part by Jews fleeing Spain under an order of expulsion that displaced more than two hundred thousand people. (Rather than lift the order—still technically in place if not in force five hundred years later—the Spanish king offered an acknowledgment of this suffering and an apology of sorts, finally, in 1992.) Among Columbus’s crew were many marranos—Spanish for pigs— or conversos, as the forcibly Christia
nized Jews were more gently referred to, including his ship’s physician and lookout, Rodrigo de Triana, said to be the first European to lay eyes on Cuba.
Other Jews and marranos were not as lucky as those with Columbus: Hearing that many of them had swallowed gold and gems in order to smuggle their wealth out of Spain, ship captains took them on as passengers and as soon as they were out to sea, sliced their bellies open looking for treasure. Back in Spain, Ferdinand and Isabella confiscated all the property and worldly goods of those who were expelled or “relaxed” by the Inquisition, using these monies to underwrite their lavish lifestyles, constant war, and the conquistadors’ adventures in the New World.
Had Columbus found India instead of Cuba, his fugitive marranos might have been able to make their way to what is now Maharashtra, where Jews had settled since the second century before the common era, descendants of refugees from Galilee fleeing yet another persecution. What no one could know in Columbus’s day was that by 1510, thousands of anusim would settle in Goa, the seat of the Portuguese viceroy in India, nor that in fifty years that same city would welcome its own terrorizing version of the Inquisition.
But in 1492, there was no lack of desire for India on the Pinta , Niña, and Santa María. Indeed, when Columbus (who was Italian but often said to be himself a Jew) was told by Cuba’s aboriginal people that he’d landed in Cuba-na-can, he willfully heard instead Kublai Khan, the Mongol conqueror of China. He went to his grave fourteen years later, penniless and stubbornly convinced Cuba was the southern coast of Asia, mythical India still waiting to reveal itself.
The exact spot in Cuba where Columbus and his secret Jews first disembarked is still somewhat in dispute, but it is generally agreed that it was on the northeastern coast, around Bariay Bay, on the unyielding earth of the province hopefully named Oriente—the east—with its hidden harbors and impossibly long lizards that look like wingless dragons.
Perhaps some of the Jews who came with Columbus climbed to the summit of the nearby mountains and saw the possibilities in the surrounding countryside: the little towns with native names— Banes just off the bay, and Mayarí along the river—that would arise from the bones of the indigenous people the Spaniards insisted on calling Indians and whom they killed with disease and slavery. Or maybe they had visions of the great sugar plantations with English appellations, like Boston and Preston, where a few centuries later the buzz of machetes slicing through the air would rival the sucking sounds of mosquitos during the zafra. Possibly, like the ship’s Jewish interpreter, Luis de Torres, they saw the fortunes to be made in the rolled tobacco leaves the small-boned, illiterate natives so enjoyed smoking.
Standing there, looking out at the lush jungle, they might have intuited the future American military base at Guantánamo in the far distance, a rusting chainlike fortress surrounded by a moat of land mines and strings of human blood. It is possible that, with a symphony of tree frogs behind them, these runaway Spanish Jews glimpsed the thousands of tents housing Cuban refugees living there in limbo during the latter part of the twentieth century— sallow-skinned men, bony and desperate, waiting for somebody to claim them.
But no power of divination would have scared off Columbus’s marranos: exile and diaspora are like genetic markers for Jews, as normal as hair or teeth. They would have accepted their destiny no matter how clearly any tragedy may have appeared to them.
Centuries later, that early view from the mountainous peaks would be enshrined by a hotel with a sweeping veranda, erected to house visitors to nearby American-owned corporations, including the ubiquitous United Fruit Company, about which Pablo Neruda, the great Chilean poet and sympathizer of Fidel’s revolution, would write scornful verses. That view would certainly have been welcomed by Columbus’s hidden Jews: Their descendants, most of them baptized and confirmed Catholics by then, would be alive, making a living from the very panorama offered by that veranda, prosperous in Cuba at last for a brief, golden era.
My family—according to my father, according to the few yellowed papers in Havana and Santiago de Cuba that still bear our names—has been on the island from the very beginning, although it is just as impossible to pinpoint our exact moment of arrival as it is Columbus’s first footsteps. The family Bibles that bore that information are lost in the currents of the Mayarí River, victims of a family struggle for our Jewish souls.
But it is entirely conceivable that it happened right there on a patch of sand with Columbus, that the first of the San Josés of Cuba put his foot down in Oriente, ran off through the hibiscus and cedars, and planted his own roots right then. No one knows for sure, including the remnants of our family back in Spain; what documentation exists there is as scarce as it is dubious.
Yet there’s little doubt in my own mind about my father’s family—that is, that we’re direct descendants of fifteenth-century Jews from Seville, where there was a particularly vibrant Hebraic community prior to Ferdinand and Isabella’s orders, who spoke Ladino and judeo-español (a mix of Spanish and Hebrew that works out like a Sephardic version of Yiddish) and enjoyed the privileges that came to Jews during their Spanish arcadia: advising kings, establishing universities and synagogues, and flourishing as a cultural and religious community.
It was these long-dead predecessors who, when the Inquisition demanded that Jews convert, were asked for proof of their new religion. Wanting desperately to fit in and survive, the first New Christians in our family, like so many of their neighbors and friends, baptized themselves with the most exaggerated Catholic names available, those of saints. This is why we’re San José, instead of Be-jar, Leyva, or Yarmus. Because we seemed to convert easily, we were spared the usual torments and the odious subterfuge of having to rechristen ourselves with the names of places, plants, or animals: Torres, Flores, Oveja.
The persecution by the Inquisition, which later extended to the colonies in the New World and remained active until 1834, may have been an assault on their very souls, but the Sephardim endured, accommodating each new demand, each new violation. In fact, many secret Jews managed, somehow, to reconcile the redemption offered by Jesus and the wait for the messiah; many converso and anusim families even had members in the Catholic clergy. Some, like Morell de Santa Cruz, an eighteenth-century bishop in Havana, infiltrated the highest ranks. (The man was so popular among the people that the path on which he used to take his daily stroll is still, even during revolutionary times, called Obispo, the bishop’s street.)
Until his death, Morell’s Catholic credentials seemed impeccable. But in his last few days it seemed the bishop lost his mind, speaking babble, engaging in odd-patterned gestures and bizarre ritualistic behaviors. In his final moment, Morell slowly rotated his countenance to the wall, his face figuratively turned east toward Jerusalem. When his will was opened to be read, his last testament seemed a deliberate defense against the Inquisition, a virtual admission of crypto-Judaism. On closer examination, the Inquisitors realized they’d been burning Santa Cruces at the stake for quite a while: one of Morell’s ancestors had been executed in Spain in 1490, two in 1491, another in 1492, two others in 1501—all for “heretical depravity.”
That these Santa Cruces were from a good family, connected and even powerful, was irrelevant. Many of the Inquisition’s victims were, in fact, magistrates, governors, prosecutors of the Inquisition itself. From its inception, the Inquisition had not been particularly discriminating in who it targeted—poor or rich, converted or not, repentant or defiant. Almost immediately, it had taken on a life of its own. In 1614, one particularly zealous Inquisitor General, Don Alonso Enríquez de Armendáriz, excommunicated the entire city of Havana, even then deemed Sin City of the Tropics.
In those days, Havana already had countless taverns and brothels along the docks, all jammed with swarthy men of varying nationalities and professions, including many English pirates, Dutch slave traders, African freemen, and—because their presence was not legal in the Spanish colonies—hidden Jews, each seeking their fortunes, enjoy
ing sex with the locals, cutting quick deals and guarding their secrets.
The San Josés from whom I’m descended weren’t among them. They were in Oriente, many assimilating into the weird, hallucinogenic paradise that Cuba can be; others holding on, pairing within the ever-dwindling community of clandestine Jews in the mountains and countryside, praying in seclusion. It would be nearly three hundred years before one of us—my great-grandfather Ytzak— made it out of that impossible verdancy and to Cuba’s capital, where he discovered there were other, very different kinds of Jews in the world.
Whenever my father was asked if he was a Jew, he would slowly lower then lift his eyes, with all the vanity of royalty.
“All people of Spanish descent have some Jewish blood in them, of course,” he would say.
If he was asked if he practiced Judaism, he would sigh, exasperated.
“Who doesn’t? Don’t all the great religions owe something to Judaism?” His manner would be brusque, as if he were bored by something so terribly, and painfully, obvious.
Asked what he did on Friday nights, he would fix his eyes on a faraway point for a small eternity then turn all their fury on the questioner.
“That depends on the season,” he would say, pushing the moment to its crisis.
V
If my father’s lineage is obscured by necessary deceptions and veiled secrets, my mother’s is as clear as stitches, as irrefutable as forensic bands of DNA. Her family story reads like the biblical begots, one name following logically from another, each a stop on a train line that covers a map of the earth.
Not that my mother has ever known much about her ancestors, or cared. She has always been especially adept at living in the moment, at understanding that she is the axis of her own world. Unlike my father and me, who are afflicted with a feverish kind of racial memory that compels us to constantly glance backward, my mother shares Olinsky’s stubborn optimism: she stares dead ahead, free of any burden, free to reinvent herself as necessary, free to reinterpret pain as karmic jet fuel, propelling her—and us—toward the next level of the journey.