by Marco Rubio
It was an eventful time in my life—a new school, new football team, new friends, new music and new interests. I soon had a new church, too. I had kept in touch with a friend from elementary school, a Catholic, though not a very devout one. Yet his religious identity piqued my curiosity about my former faith, and early in 1983 I began a new research project. I read about the Church in my World Book. I checked out books on Catholicism from the school library. I pestered my mother about her religious upbringing. During Easter Week of 1983, when the most sacred traditions of the Catholic liturgy are on display and a papal Mass is broadcast on television, I made up my mind. I wanted to be a Catholic again.
The depth of our commitment to the Mormon Church hadn’t progressed beyond attending Sunday services and social functions. My father had never felt comfortable there, and my mother had mostly joined the Mormon Church because she believed it was a safe and welcoming place for her children that would make us happy. So my parents posed no objection when I argued we should return to the Catholic Church, and in the spring of 1983 Veronica and I enrolled in CCD, the Catholic Church’s religious instruction program.
My aunt Lola was upset, as was her entire family. I think Lola’s family suspected my aunt Irma, a vocal critic of Mormonism, of convincing us to return to Catholicism. But it had really just been my decision. We left the Mormon Church with nothing but admiration for the place that had been our first spiritual home in Las Vegas, and had been so generous to us. I still feel that way.
I’ve often remarked that my parents couldn’t give us everything we wanted, but they made sure we always had everything we needed. And when they could afford to give us more, they did. When Veronica and I were old enough to be at home alone or with only my grandfather to supervise us, my mother started working again. She got a job as a maid on the casino floor of the Imperial Palace Hotel. My father was doing well in his bartending job at Sam’s Town. They made a good living between their two salaries and my dad’s tips. It was not enough to support a lavish lifestyle, of course, but enough to afford a few extras. When I asked my parents to let Veronica and me attend the local Catholic school instead of the public junior high school, they agreed. The tuition at St. Christopher Catholic School was a stretch for them financially, but, as always, they wanted us to be happy.
Yet, from the start, I was anything but happy there. We had to wear uniforms, which I didn’t like. The schoolwork was much more demanding, which I really didn’t like. My biggest problem with the school, though, was its location directly across the street from J. D. Smith, the junior high I would have attended, and where every day I watched my friends from sixth grade and football come and go.
After one week at St. Christopher, I demanded my parents take me out of the school and enroll me at J. D. Smith. I made up all kinds of phony excuses. I told my parents the teachers were mean and the other kids didn’t like us. Our priest told them to ignore me. My whims shouldn’t override their judgment. I was a child and needed to obey them. But I made life unbearable in our house, and within a week, my parents had relented. I cringe today when I remember how selfishly I behaved.
I could be an insufferably demanding kid at times. I’m ashamed of it now, and I regret my parents so often gave in to me. I know they did it out of love, and it did make me happy in the moment, which they so badly wanted me to be. But they weren’t doing me a favor in the long run. I can still be selfish with my time and attention, even though I have children. But Jeanette won’t indulge my bad behavior as my parents had. She lets me know instantly when I am shirking my most important responsibility. I think I might have become a difficult person to like had I married someone else.
My football season that year was brief. The Cavaliers and the Sooners had decided to merge that summer, and became a Pop Warner dream team: a collection of the most talented players from two of the best teams in the area. I badly wanted to make the team, and the head coach of the new team was Coach Atkins, my former coach. I worried for weeks he wouldn’t select me because I had left the Sooners when he hadn’t let me play quarterback. So I was thrilled when he called in mid-July to tell me I had made the team.
The team had a great year. Me, not so much. After playing the best game I had ever played in Pop Warner, I broke my leg the next week in practice. I missed the rest of the season, including our victory in the city championship game.
We planned to spend the last two weeks of 1983 in Miami, and Barbara bought us tickets to the Dolphins’ last regular-season game against the New York Jets. I was overjoyed to see the Dolphins break open a close game to defeat the Jets and finish the regular season with a 12 4 record. I was sure they would make the Super Bowl. My father bought me one of those foam “We’re Number 1” hands at the game. I still have it.
We celebrated a traditional Cuban Nochebuena that Christmas Eve with Barbara and Orlando at their new house in a rural part of Dade County. Their house was small, but had an acre of land. Orlando was from a guajiro family, a Cuban term for country folk. He and his family slaughtered a pig, and on the morning of Christmas Eve they set it over a pit filled with charcoal and covered with palm fronds, where it would slowly roast for the entire day. The pig was carved and served at nine o’clock that night, along with black beans and rice and boiled cassava, a traditional holiday feast in rural Cuba.
That Christmas is my fondest childhood memory. It had been a long time since I had seen my parents so happy. My father had felt transported to his childhood in the years before his mother died. My mother was nearly overcome with emotion as she spent her first Christmas in five years with Barbara. And my grandfather was as close to our family’s rural Cuban heritage as he had been since his boyhood. Only Veronica has unpleasant memories of it. She had been appalled to see a pig killed and butchered, and terrified when Orlando chased her around the house with the pig’s head.
Our Christmas in Miami reawakened my affection for the city and the Cuban culture so prevalent there. But I returned to the familiar, pleasurable routines of my life in Las Vegas with little reason to wish I lived anywhere else.
I became interested in girls that year and started to care about my appearance. I was popular at school, and had an increasingly active social life. My schoolwork suffered for it, of course, but I managed to get by making the minimum effort necessary. Life was great—and then it wasn’t.
In April 1984, the Culinary Workers Union went on strike. I went with my father to the union hall, where several hundred workers rallied on the eve of the strike. The strike became my new obsession. The strikers set up camp in a desert field across the street from Sam’s Town and took turns walking shifts on the picket line. I helped make their signs. When the hotel management sent one of their security staff to videotape the picketers, I held a sign in front of his camera to block his view.
I never grasped all the issues involved, but understood generally that the strikers were just asking to be treated fairly. They had worked hard to help make the hotels profitable, and were entitled to better compensation and benefits. I was excited to be part of the cause and join forces with striking workers from many hotels. At the height of the strike, it seemed all the kids at my school had a parent on the picket line. I became a committed union activist. I got to spend time with my father. I thought it was nothing but fun.
Initially, the financial strain on my parents was modest. They had set aside a little money in anticipation of the strike, and the union paid the strikers small sums from a strike fund. But it wasn’t much, and we had to live frugally. We couldn’t go to the movies or restaurants or roller skating. I remember going to the union hall with my dad to pick up government surplus cheese and peanut butter. Everyone assumed the strike would last only a few days or weeks before management would come to their senses and settle. As the weeks wore on, I began to notice the worry etched on my father’s face. I remained, however, happily committed to the cause.
My father was older than most of the strikers. I remember watching him ride in a jeep with
a younger striker. Bouncing along over the hills near our desert camp with a serious look on his face, he seemed so old and out of place there. Eventually, our small savings were gone and the union checks stopped coming. My parents had to dip into the modest college fund they had started for us. Many of the hotels settled with their workers. But Sam’s Town wouldn’t. Every day, the camp became less crowded and the picket line thinner as more strikers gave up. We denounced them as “scabs” when they crossed our line on their way back to work.
The excitement and euphoria of the strike’s early days gave way to anger and bitterness. One day, a confrontation between strikers and returning workers turned violent, and my father stopped taking me to the camp. Not long after, he informed me he was going back to work. I accused him of selling out and called him a scab. It hurt him, and I’m ashamed of it. He had had no choice.
He returned to work for a smaller salary and fewer benefits. All the good bartending shifts had been taken by new bartenders hired during the strike, and his tips were smaller. To this day, Sam’s Town remains a nonunion hotel.
My grandfather usually went back to Miami right after Thanksgiving and returned early in the spring. He didn’t come back to us until the end of May that year. I had missed him terribly, and when we met him at the airport, I knew instantly something was wrong. He had always managed the trip on his own, but this time my uncle Manolito had traveled with him. He needed a wheelchair to get from the plane to the airport exit. He looked much older and tired.
Papá had suffered from bladder cancer for years, and the disease had progressed significantly that winter. Veronica and I had never been told he was ill, and neither had he. His daughters had kept the diagnosis from him for fear he would become depressed and rapidly decline. He knew something was wrong with him now, and despite his weakened condition, and protests from his daughters in Miami, he insisted on coming back to Vegas. He wanted to be at home with his daughter Oria and his son in law Mario and with Veronica and me, his favorite grandchildren.
He complained of back pains, and asked my mother, and sometimes Veronica or me, to rub Ben-Gay on his back. He didn’t smoke as many cigars or sit on the front porch as often. My parents told us he was sick but would get well, and in other respects he seemed normal to me. He still loved for me to sit with him and pick his brain. He still hated football and wanted to watch the Dodgers games. Ronald Reagan was still his hero.
One morning that August, just as I was waking up, I heard a thud outside my bedroom door. I heard my mother scream, and I bolted from my bed to see what had happened. I found Papá on the floor in the hallway, where he had fallen on his way to the bathroom.
We helped him to his feet and back to his bed. He was clearly in excruciating pain. We called the paramedics, who took him in an ambulance to the hospital. I went with him to translate for him. When we arrived at the hospital, he was taken immediately to the X ray room. As the technicians maneuvered him into the right position for the X ray, he cried out in pain so loudly and pitiably it terrified me.
The adults began to arrive not long after, and within an hour a doctor informed us Papá had broken his hip, which didn’t sound so bad to me. I had broken my leg not long ago, and I was fine now. I thought they would put him in a cast, send him home with us, and within a few weeks he would be back to normal. My parents explained to me he would have to stay at the hospital because his hip required surgery to repair. Still, I wasn’t too concerned. I began to make plans for his rehabilitation. I would put him on a regimen of diet supplements and help him do daily exercises on the Universal that he believed was wasting electricity.
He passed his first night in the hospital uneventfully. The next morning my parents dropped Veronica and me off at the hospital on their way to work. They were worried he would become frustrated by the language barrier at the hospital, and wanted us there to translate for him. We were alone with him for much of the day. We made a point to talk with him about things we would normally talk about with him. We watched TV with him. I remember watching the Brady Bunch episode when the Brady parents put a pay phone in their kitchen to discourage the kids from spending too much time on the phone. We tried to make him feel everything was as normal as possible under the circumstances. Late in the afternoon, he began to change. He complained of ants on the ceiling and spider- webs around him. He thought the hospital sprinklers were cockroaches. We thought he was being funny, and laughed at him.
Irma and Enrique arrived after work around six in the evening, carrying a thermos of Cuban coffee. Papá asked Irma for a sip. Right after she gave him one, he began to have difficulty breathing. We called a nurse, who, after consulting with a doctor, put him on an IV. I know now it was a morphine drip, and that the hospital staff was easing him toward his death and not, as I had believed, treating his injury.
He began to slip into unconsciousness. I knew something was wrong, so I grabbed his hand and told him I loved him. I swore I would study hard. I would do something with my life and make him proud. He squeezed my hand to let me know he had heard me. He took his last labored breath less than twenty-four hours later.
He was buried in Miami next to my grandmother Dominga in a joint plot Papá had purchased for them before I was born. We couldn’t afford to travel to Miami for his burial because of the financial difficulties we were in after the strike. But we had a viewing ceremony at the funeral home in Las Vegas where his body was prepared. When I approached him, I was taken aback because he looked so different to me. I had never seen a dead person before then. My mother cried, and called his name repeatedly. She kept touching him and sobbing. Near the end of the viewing, as everyone got up to leave, my father, who had avoided the viewing stand the entire night, approached it to say his final good-bye. Then he broke down and wept inconsolably, and begged my grandfather’s forgiveness for the times he had teased him.
I didn’t keep the promise I made to my grandfather on his deathbed, not for a long while anyway. His death had a pronounced and debilitating effect on me. I was miserably unhappy and stopped caring about things that had been important to me. I quit Pop Warner. What little interest I had shown in schoolwork disappeared. I still went to class, but I didn’t participate in discussions, and all my assignments went ignored. I failed my exams, and didn’t care. I didn’t want to do anything besides socialize with my friends, flirt with girls and follow the Miami Dolphins.
With Papá gone, Veronica and I were alone at home when my parents were at work. I would wander the neighborhood or ride my bike alone or visit friends’ homes, leaving Veronica behind. We were supposed to make our First Communion that Christmas, after preparing for the sacrament during Sunday catechism classes throughout the fall. I refused to attend them because they conflicted with Sunday NFL games. My parents persuaded our parish priest to instruct us personally on Wednesday nights. I reacted to Papá’s death by becoming more selfish, more irresponsible, more of a brat. I’m ashamed of that, and I think he would have been ashamed of me, too. In retrospect, I was a child struggling with my grief, and my parents, also grieving, might not have realized how distraught I was.
My parents watched these developments with increasing alarm. I was spending more of my time with friends they didn’t know from families they knew nothing about. I was bringing Fs home from school. They began to have doubts about Las Vegas, too. They wanted us to go to college, but most of my cousins had gone to work at the hotels right out of high school. It was hard to convince them that college was necessary when they could make $40,000 in their first year of employment. My parents didn’t want that life for us. That was their life, the life they had to live so we could live a better one. Vegas no longer seemed like a safe, wholesome environment for us.
My sister Barbara had met her husband in high school. I would soon be in high school, and had already become preoccupied with girls. They worried I might develop a serious relationship with someone and I would never want to leave Las Vegas, just as Barbara had refused to leave Miami. Our family w
ould be divided forever. Just after Thanksgiving in 1984, my parents made their decision.
That summer, almost six years to the day since we had arrived in Vegas, my mother, Veronica and I boarded a flight to Miami, while my father and Uncle Manolito drove a U Haul truck across the country with all our belongings and our two dogs, Max and Marie, towing our ’73 Chevy Impala behind them. My parents returned to a city and culture they knew well and loved. After a failed attempt to convince my parents to stay in Vegas, I became excited to be moving back to Miami—the city where my Dolphins played, the city filled with people like us, the exciting city I saw on Miami Vice. But I was a fourteen-year-old kid from the West, and accustomed to living in a desert town, among people of various backgrounds and ethnicities. I would have to learn how to make Miami my home again.
CHAPTER 8
Back to Miami
WHAT I REMEMBER MOST ABOUT MY FIRST DAY BACK IN Miami is the thunderstorm. I had never seen so much rain fall so hard and fast. Aunt Adria picked us up at the airport, and as we drove west on the Dolphin Expressway to Barbara’s house, hail began to hit the windshield. It rained all the next day, and the day after that. Miami summers follow a simple pattern. Sun and muggy heat in the morning give way to showers and thunderstorms in the afternoon. I wasn’t in the desert anymore.
We stayed with Barbara until my father rejoined us the day before the Fourth of July. Adria had found a home for us in West Miami. My folks had already signed a contract to buy it, and they closed on it soon after my dad arrived. It had three bedrooms and a small family room in the back. Its biggest appeal was the garage that had been converted into an efficiency apartment. An eighty-one-year-old Cuban lady, Encarnación, and her even older husband rented it. I liked the idea of having elderly renters in our home. It reminded me of living with Papá.