An American Son: A Memoir

by Marco Rubio

  CHAPTER 4

  Early Childhood

  MY 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.

  The yard had two large palm trees standing a few yards apart. My father bolted the ends of a metal pipe to each tree, then drilled holes in it for metal hooks from which he hung two swings. The yard was a paradise in my imagination. It served as the football field where I pretended to be Bob Griese leading the Miami Dolphins to another victory, and as Gotham City, where I fought crime as Batman.

  We had a great life at Toledo Plaza. I was in the first grade at Henry M. Flagler Elementary, and had plenty of friends. My father worked where we lived. He dropped us off at school every morning and picked us up in the afternoon. My mom helped in the office, but was always home with us. Because my father was the building manager, we had the run of the place, and we made the most of it. I was in thrall to the first of my two abiding temporal passions: football and politics.

  I was football crazy. I still am, but with a somewhat more restrained and mature appreciation for the sport than I had as a kid, when I thought it was the most important thing in my life. I loved the Dolphins. I loved Don Shula, who was hired as the Dolphins’ head coach the year before I was born and almost immediately turned around the team’s fortunes. I loved the unselfish, thoughtful and heroic play of the great Bob Griese, who quarterbacked the Dolphins throughout the seventies, led them through an undefeated season and to three consecutive Super Bowls, winning two of them. And later, I would love Dan Marino, whose dazzling performances would ease the heartache Bob Griese’s retirement had caused me. My father took me to my first Dolphins game in 1977. They beat the Seattle Seahawks and I was delirious with joy.

  My obsession with football originated in my admiration for my brother. I never lived with Mario, yet he lived in our lives as a legend in the tales my father would tell about his exploits at Miami High.

  He had played varsity football in high school in the late 1960s, having attained some acclaim as the first Cuban American to play quarterback for the Miami Stingarees. Miami High was a perennial football powerhouse in those days, and their games in the Orange Bowl often drew crowds of over twenty thousand fans. My father’s interest in the game began when his son was the star quarterback for the school. Dad sat proudly in the stands at Mario’s games, beaming whenever the announcer described a play by Mario Rubio. After each game my father would meet Mario in the stadium’s parking lot, holding a Cuban sandwich he’d brought for him, and he would smile as he watched his son, the young, handsome quarterback, hold court amid a circle of adoring girls vying for his attention.

  Everyone in my family became football fans, except my grandfather, always the individualist. He told me he thought it was a vulgar and pointless game, and if anyone ever tackled him the way they did in football games, he would punch the tackler in the nose. He loved baseball, which he had played as a boy despite his disability. The elegant symmetry of baseball gave it purpose, he insisted, and beauty.

  I grew up listening to my father’s stories about Mario’s exploits on the football field. I kept a picture of him wearing his football jersey in my room, and I imagined myself leading Miami High as quarterback—another Rubio at the helm, and a worthy successor to the famous Mario, my brother.

  Life was good. Then suddenly everything changed. My father’s employers sold Toledo Plaza to new owners. Their representatives appeared at the front office one morning without warning. They changed the locks to the office, informed my father his services were no longer needed and asked him to vacate our apartment within seven days. Virtually overnight, my parents had lost their livelihood and our home. We had nowhere to go since we had sold our other house. And my father had given up his bartending job at the Roney Plaza.

  I am a father and provider now, and can appreciate how worried my parents must have been over their sudden misfortune. While we were a little upset over the disruption of our happy lives at Toledo Plaza, Veronica and I were oblivious to the fears that must have troubled my parents at the time. They were exceedingly careful not to betray the slightest trace of anxiety in our presence. We never noticed a worried look on their faces or overheard a single word of concern in whispered conversations between them. My only vivid recollection of the entire experience was the day the moving truck arrived to collect our belongings.

  My parents were worried, of course—I’m sure they were devastated to have their world turned upside down in one moment. But things turned around for them fairly quickly. My father found a new job managing an apartment building in Hialeah. After a short stint in a rental home, we found a house right across the backyard from my aunt Adria’s house, where my cousin Manny, who was only two years older than me, was my new neighbor.

  The house had a big yard that reminded me of the yard at Toledo Plaza. Plus it had an extra room, so my grandfather, who had been living with my aunt since we didn’t have room for him at Toledo Plaza, could move in with us again. We lived across the street from my new school, Kensington Park, where Manny was a student.

  Not long after we moved, I had a severe attack of stomach pains. It wasn’t the first time. When we were still living in Toledo Plaza, Barbara and Orlando had taken me to the movies, and I consumed a large box of Cracker Jacks. Within hours I was doubled over in excruciating pain. That night my father took me to the emergency room. My parents blamed the episode on the Cracker Jacks and forbade me to eat them again. This time, though, there had been no sugary snacks involved. The pain set in suddenly, and the only way to find relief was to bend into a fetal position. I made another trip to the emergency room. When the next attack occurred, the pain was more severe and nothing relieved it. The emergency room doctor, unable to diagnose my condition, suggested I might be faking it. Without speaking a word in response, my father lifted me from the examination table, carried me in his arms out of the ER and drove directly to Variety Children’s Hospital in central Dade County.

  A few hours later, the examining physician informed my parents that I was suffering from intestinal intussusception, a serious but treatable condition. If treated promptly, the prognosis was excellent. If left untreated, it could cause severe complications, even death. Only surgery would correct the problem permanently. My abdomen would have to be opened and the affected area resected. After surgery, I would be fed through a tube for three days, and would need to spend another week to ten days in recovery. As the doctor explained the procedure, Barbara began to cry. I don’t remember my mother’s reaction, but I do remember my father’s. He told me he would promise to give up smoking in exchange for God seeing me safely through surgery. I learned later he had returned to the other hospital and searched for the doctor who had claimed I was faking the ailment, intending to give him a piece of his mind.

  I was operated on the next day. Those first few days after surgery weren’t particularly comfortable, but I was released from the hospital in less than two weeks and was back at school within the month.

  For a few months all was well, or as well as could be expected, until my father lost his job managing the apartment building in Hialeah. The owners had hired a management company to maintain the place at a lower cost. My dad went to work for Adria’s husband, my uncle Manolito, who owned a small house-painting business. He would have preferred to work as a bartender again, but by the late seventies the tourist industry in Miami Beach was in decline, and the hotels weren’t hiring. While he was grateful for the work Manolito gave him, my father knew it wasn’t a long-term solution to our troubles.

  The city of Miami was entering a difficult period in its history. By 1978, it was experiencing a rapid, significant increase in murders and other v
iolent crimes. Cocaine traffickers had begun using Miami as the primary point of entry into the United States and as the distribution center for their highly lucrative trade. As rival gangs and dealers began competing for territory and business, they commonly employed violence to settle their disputes.

  We weren’t directly affected by the increase in crime, but it was one more concern added to my parents’ growing fears that their changed circumstances would rob them of their hard-won security. The disco-centered social scene in Miami, which they considered a decadent lifestyle for young people, was yet another worry. Their predicament felt more serious than a temporary setback in a tough economic time. They worried my mother would have to go back to work and my father would again work weekends and holidays. They would have neither the time nor the resources to provide us a better childhood than they had given my brother and older sister.

  It was never in my parents’ nature to become paralyzed or stymied by fear. They acted decisively, even precipitously, whenever they felt their aspirations threatened. A quarter century before, they had reacted to a stagnant economy and growing violence and instability in Cuba, leaving their family and the only world they knew to follow my aunt Lola to Miami. They believed emigration was the only course that would allow them to give their infant son a decent chance in life.

  Now they concluded Miami no longer promised a better life for their children, and they would have to leave home again. They looked for a place with better job opportunities, better living standards at a more affordable cost and a more wholesome environment for children. Then they packed our belongings and followed Lola, once again, to Las Vegas.