Toward a Better Life

by Peter Morton Coan

  We were in Spain for eighteen months before I got a student visa to come to the United States. My father was not able to come with me right away, so I went alone. My aunt in Miami sent money for my ticket. The plan was for me to go ahead, get to America, and then petition for my father because as a child, a minor, you were given priority to be reunited with the parent. I think we also had refugee status, although we never collected money or anything. I flew to New York and then took a connecting flight to Miami, and I called my uncle and said, “Here I am!” I was fifteen years old by then. My uncle came to pick me up at the airport, and we went to see my aunt and the rest of the family.

  At that time, my aunt and uncle had fourteen kids in their house, and all of military age, because when we lived in Cuba, if you were fifteen years old you were not allowed to leave the country. So every family would try to get their kids out before they were fifteen and make sure they were safe. I was so happy to see them. My dad and I lived with my aunt and uncle for many years in Miami, and then after my grandfather died in Cuba, my mom came through Mexico to the States.

  In Miami, I remember we used to go to Freedom Tower [a historic 1925 landmark building that serves as a memorial to Cuban immigration to America] to collect food because they gave out food once a month, oatmeal and cheese and many different things for the Cuban refugees….

  I went to school in Miami, but I needed to work. My goal was to get money to bring my family here to America. So I went to school, and I went and applied at Bacardi [Rum]. I knew the family. I grew up with the Bacardi family in Cuba. We went to the same school. And they said, “You're a minor, so you have to get a special permit.” So I asked for a special permit, and I worked at Bacardi as an office boy.

  I also convinced my uncle to get me an accordion because I wanted to make money. It was the only instrument I knew how to play. So we went and got an accordion for $177. We got home, and my aunt told me, “What are you doing? We don't have money to pay even rent. How are you going to pay for this accordion?”

  I said, “Don't worry. I'm going to play, and I'm going to make money with this.” So I went and played with this guy who used to play the violin, and we would play for tips in a restaurant. It was a really old-time famous Italian restaurant in Biscayne. Sometimes we collected five dollars, ten dollars, fifty dollars; it all depended on the crowds that night. After school, I used to change in the car, and I used to go and play the accordion for tips.

  One day the Bacardi family was having a party and they needed a band, and I knew all the songs from Cuba on the accordion, so I brought a percussionist and a bass player and we played all the Cuban songs. We were a big hit. So they used to call me and say, “Come and play at the party,” so I used to go and play the accordion, and that's how the whole Miami Sound Machine got started.

  I met Gloria when she was rehearsing in church as part of a group, and I went and listened to them, and I saw Gloria and I said hello. It was a nice group. And then like three months later, I was playing at a wedding and Gloria passed by, and I said, “Oh, you're the one who was singing [in church]. Please come and sing a song with us.” And I heard the sound, the Latin music, and I thought this would be a great sound for performance.

  So she came to the party and I asked her to perform at the wedding. And she came and I loved the whole sound, and I said, “This is really great! We should do something together. If you want to perform, we can do it this weekend.” And she came with her grandmother, her mother, and her sister. Gloria was very young at the time. She was only about seventeen, eighteen years old. She was studying psychology at the University of Miami. She sang at church, but not professionally; she was just a kid.

  Gloria and I had a lot in common. We were both born in Cuba. We loved music, family, and both of us when we were young were separated for extended periods of time from loved ones. For me it was my mother; for her it was her father. He was a motorcycle policeman. He once was a motorcycle escort for the wife of Batista [Cuba's president, Fulgencio Batista], before Castro. Her mother was a kindergarten teacher, and they lived a comfortable life in Havana. But when Castro came to power [January 1959], Gloria's parents decided to leave the country until things quieted down. Gloria was two years old at the time. Her mother flew into exile in Miami with Gloria. Castro had not yet closed all the flights from Cuba to the United States. Her father joined them a month later. They had very little money, spoke almost no English, and settled into a Cuban neighborhood near the Orange Bowl [now Sun Life Stadium] in Miami [Gardens]. Then her father went off to train for a secret mission, which was the failed Bay of Pigs invasion [April 1961], and was taken prisoner by Castro's forces. He was in a Cuban jail with hundreds of others for nearly two years. Gloria was too young to understand what was going on, but if she asked, her mother would say, “He's away working on a farm….”

  As a singer, what I saw in Gloria was something that was different. She was bilingual. She spoke English, Spanish, and French fluently. I loved her voice and the way she sang, and I said, “Listen, I would love to bring you into the group.” I wanted to call it Miami Sound because I felt it was the sound coming out of Miami at the time that fused American and Cuban music in a unique blend. And then that started the whole Miami Sound Machine in 1976, and we recorded the first album, and it became huge. It was number one almost all over the world.

  I went back to Cuba when my brother's wife died. This was about thirty years ago, 1980. She committed suicide and left him stuck there with the two kids. And Castro at the time was allowing anybody to leave, and you could bring your family to the States and get a boat and bring them back and the States approved that, so I went in a boat. I never went in a boat before, so I got lost.

  When I got to Cuba, they told me my boat was too small. So I called my brother and said, “Listen, I'm in Cuba but I'm not allowed to take you because the boat that we came in is too small,” and he said, “Forget about me—don't even care about me no more,” and he hung up the phone. And I got really worried, and I knew this was the only chance to get him out of Cuba. So I went back to the States, and I had a good friend in Costa Rica who knew somebody who was close to the president, and they helped me. It took a lot of work, but we got visas for him and his kids to go to Costa Rica, and the Cuban government finally let him go. They gave him a hard time. And then he got to Costa Rica and applied to the US consulate and he came to the States.

  I would advise others to have respect for a country that gives you an opportunity. It doesn't matter where you come from; we all cry for this country. We feel that we belong in a way, even though we were not born in this country. We feel that we have an honor, that we're welcome, that we're realizing the American Dream. In this country you can have opinions, different opinions, and anything can come true. At the same time, like I always tell people, to become an immigrant or a citizen of a country, you always have to have respect for the country, and that's what me and Gloria have felt all our lives. We never take our citizenship for granted. We appreciate what we have. We always want to give back to the country.

  Immigration in this decade was heavily influenced by the Vietnam War. The US withdrawal from South Vietnam in 1975 and the subsequent Communist takeover of South Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos triggered a new wave of refugees, many of whom spent years in Asian refugee camps waiting to get into the United States. The number of legal immigrants had now steadily increased for three straight decades: from 2.5 million in the 1950s, to 3.22 million in the 1960s, to 4.25 million in the 1970s.

  KEY HISTORIC EVENTS

  1972:

  US State Department issues guidelines dealing with requests for asylum.

  1974:

  US Supreme Court upholds INS rules permitting Canadians and Mexicans to commute freely into the United States to perform daily or seasonal work.

  1975:

  The Ford administration's budget to Congress asks for an increase in spending to curb illegal immigration. US Supreme Court rules that the Border Patrol cannot stop
a car and question its occupants about their immigration status because of Mexican ancestry; thus, “profiling” is not legally permitted.

  1977:

  Justice Department approves entry of more than five thousand Soviet Jewish immigrants.

  1978:

  Hundreds of Haitian refugees enter the United States after the Bahamian government orders them to leave or face deportation

  1979: Justice Department has the INS enforce a statutory ban on admitting homosexual aliens.

  MIGRATION FLOWS

  Total legal US immigration in 1970s: 4.25 million

  Top ten emigration countries in this decade: Mexico (621,218), Philippines (337,726), Cuba (256,497), Korea (241,192), Canada and Newfoundland (179,267), Italy (150,031), India (147,997), Dominican Republic (139,249), United Kingdom (133,218), Jamaica (130,226)

  (See appendix for the complete list of countries.)

  FAMOUS IMMIGRANTS

  Immigrants who came to America in this decade, and who would later become famous, include:

  John Lennon, England, 1971, Beatle

  Colin Firth, England, 1971, actor

  Isabella Rossellini, Italy, 1971, actress

  Jon Secada, Cuba, 1971, singer-songwriter

  James Cameron, Canada, 1971, film producer/director

  Rudolf Nureyev, Soviet Union, 1972, dancer

  Wolfgang Puck, Austria, 1973, chef

  Alex Trebek, Canada, 1973, game show host

  Patrick Ewing, Jamaica, 1973, basketball player

  Mikhail Baryshnikov, Latvia, 1974, dancer

  Sir Anthony Hopkins, Wales, 1974, actor

  Dan Aykroyd, Canada, 1975, actor/comedian

  Martina Navratilova, Czechoslovakia, 1975, tennis champion

  Iman Abdulmajid (“Iman”), Somalia, 1975, model

  Agostino “Dino” De Laurentiis, Italy, 1976, film director

  Jerry Yang, Taiwan, 1978, cofounder of Yahoo!

  Joaquin Phoenix, Puerto Rico, 1978, actor

  Michael J. Fox, Canada, 1979, actor

  Ang Lee, Taiwan, 1979, film producer

  Sergey Brin, Soviet Union, 1979, cofounder of Google

  She is from St. Petersburg, Russia, where she was a teacher and her husband was an accomplished and well-known architect. Anti-Semitism drove them, along with their sixteen-year-old daughter, to America to start over in search of a better life. They settled in San Jose, California. She became a bookkeeper. He got an entry-level job at a San Francisco architectural firm and worked his way up from there. She is the first cousin of famous Ellis Island immigrant Isabel Belarsky, who immigrated to America through Ellis Island in 1930 when she was ten years old and was interviewed in my previous book, Ellis Island Interviews: In Their Own Words. Isabel is the daughter of Sidor Belarsky, the famed Yiddish singer and conductor, whose music was featured in the Coen Brothers movie A Serious Man. Sidor and Stella's mother were brother and sister. “We knew if we work hard we will get everything,” Stella said in her thick Russian accent. “But in Russia it didn't matter. You could work hard and get nothing, and if you were Jewish, you got less than nothing. You felt like a second-class citizen.”

  We came to America by plane from St. Petersburg to Vienna, Austria. We stayed there for a week and then flew to Rome. We stayed there for nearly four months, and then on April 13, 1977, we flew from Rome to New York and then to San Jose, California. The Jewish Federation of San Jose took responsibility for us.

  We left Russia because of problems with being Jewish at that time. It was very difficult to live there and to build any future for my daughter. A lot of Russian Jews emigrated at that time. People would point at you as a Jew. And my daughter, for example, she was the only Jewish girl in her classroom, and everyone would taunt her and point at her: “You are Jew! You are killer!” They said Jews in Israel are killers because they killed the people to keep their land. And she would come home crying, and the teachers were watching that and doing nothing. For example, for me, I was a teacher; I had to be there and listen to what the students had been saying and talking about, and there was not much I could do. My daughter, Galina, was sixteen when we left Russia.

  I was a teacher in chemistry and biology in high school. I was married. My husband passed away three and a half years ago after forty-seven years of marriage. He passed away the day after our forty-seventh wedding anniversary. We married on December 25, and he passed away on December 26. He was an architect. He was involved in the reconstruction of the main part of St. Petersburg. We had already built our careers because we finished university and had been working. But we didn't know what would happen with our daughter because only 3 percent of young Jewish people could go to university. And the whole situation with Jewish people in Russia was you never knew what could happen. In the street, you could be abused because you are Jew; you could be told in your face, “You are dirty Jew.” All the time we were told and reminded that we are Jews and that in Israel they are killers and you are part of these people, that kind of stuff. Nobody tortured us, but you could be beaten on the street and it wouldn't be by the government, but by regular people. Even now, people said when Stalin passed away [1953], it was exactly the time when all the Jewish people from all the cities were supposed to be transferred somewhere—who knows where? All the trains were ready to take all the Jewish people together to transfer to Siberia or somewhere east. There are a lot of books which are now available to the public to read about what Stalin's plan was….

  Our life in Russia was a hardworking life. Put it this way: I was a teacher and my husband worked many hours each day. We didn't starve. You know, we are educated people. We like theater, we like music, but moneywise, we didn't make so much. We didn't travel because it wasn't allowed for us to travel to different countries. But we did go in summertime to the countryside sometimes and traveled to the Baltic countries, which were close to us, north of St. Petersburg.

  I had some friends who were in America, and they gave information about us to the Jewish Federation. There were a lot of Jewish organizations in communities in different states and different cities that had been taking care of Jews, such as the one headquartered in New York called the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society [HIAS]. They had actually been taking care of us, and there was an office in Rome that had been helping us, and they distributed immigrants to different states and different cities, and that's how we came to San Jose.

  We flew to New York, into JFK, and stayed overnight in a hotel before we continued on to San Jose. My cousin Isabel and her mom, Clarunia, found out from HIAS where we were staying, and they met us there at this little hotel in New York. We were sitting there in the lobby crying and talking the whole night, and the next morning we flew to San Jose. At that point, Sidor, Isabel's father, had passed away two years earlier, so Isabel and Clarunia were living together in Brighton Beach, Brooklyn, and I guess we could have gone there. But they [HIAS] told us it would be much better if we go to California—more opportunity, especially for Galina's education because college in California was free. They said it would be better to build our life in California, and they were right because we were very happy here. They said it was too crowded in Brooklyn, that in San Jose, there weren't so many immigrants, so we could have more attention, more help for our first few months than we would in Brooklyn. We also had a friend who came to San Jose a year before us, and HIAS had an office here.

  It wasn't the same process as the people who came through Ellis Island. This was organized before we left—an organized immigration process. We had a visa just to get here, and then as soon as we came, HIAS had wonderful volunteers here. I'm still friends with them. And they took care of us, and they took us to the office to get permission for work. It was not a green card. We would not get our green cards for another couple of years, but we still had the permission to live here and to work here.

  We lived in an apartment. HIAS took care of everything. They paid the rent on the apartment. But I remember being very scared because we didn't know English. We
didn't have anyone here. Sometimes when the telephone rang we were scared to pick it up because we didn't understand English. I learned a little bit back in Russia many years ago, but our English was very limited. For example, when my husband had to make a speech the first morning at his new job, he said, “Thank you, us, that we came to you.” [She laughs.] So I took English classes. There were forty-five people in a class, but [it was] only two hours a week.

  My daughter didn't know any English. She started English at school. She went to high school in tenth grade. Then she went to summer camp for three months, and she picked up enough English to go to eleventh grade, and the next year she finished and got her high school diploma.

  I went to bookkeeping classes. My husband had gone through the newspaper, and he said most job ads were for bookkeepers. I started working in San Jose at the British-American Club as a bookkeeper. My husband got a job in San Francisco in some architectural office. He went to San Francisco every single day in the morning, taking the bus, taking the train, and then working there, but of course it was very helpful because drawings are drawings so he could look at any drawing and understand what's going on.

  After work, almost every day, he would take English classes. In Russia they used the metric system, but not here. So the owner of the company here said at his first interview, “You first have to learn about inches and feet.” Imagine, this was a man who was a big person in Russia, and so many people knew him because he was very knowledgeable about the old buildings in downtown St. Petersburg. He was accomplished there. He had worked many years already. He went to technical college, and after college he was in Russian army for three years because in Russia you must go into the army. So with his first job here he was like a beginner. He was treated like he was just starting out again. Because it was a different system, different buildings, different measurements, so it was a very difficult time for us. When we first came here, and I would say I'm from Russia, most Americans then knew only Siberia and vodka. I said, what about Tchaikovsky? What about the Bolshoi Ballet? Do you know anything besides Siberia and vodka?