{"id":78,"date":"2010-08-10T23:22:50","date_gmt":"2010-08-11T03:22:50","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/joeclarksblog.wordpress.com\/?p=78"},"modified":"2016-11-26T10:19:21","modified_gmt":"2016-11-26T14:19:21","slug":"memories-of-cuba","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/joeclarksblog.com\/?p=78","title":{"rendered":"Memories\u00a0of\u00a0Cuba"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"<\/a>

The North Shore<\/p><\/div>\n

One afternoon, one of my friends and I speak of Cuba, Castro, and what might come with Castro\u2019s passing.\u00a0 I comment that I cannot wait for Cuba to open, so I can visit the island nation again.\u00a0 He is of the opinion we should be able to go there now.\u00a0 \u201cI don\u2019t know that Castro is such a bad person,\u201d he says.<\/p>\n

I am stunned!\u00a0 Then I realize my friend probably has little knowledge of Cuba.\u00a0 Nor has he read Armando Valladares\u2019 book, Against All Hope: A Memoir of Life in Castro\u2019s Gulag<\/em>.\u00a0 He also does not realize I am half-Cuban.\u00a0 I don\u2019t know if he has ever been to Cuba, but I don\u2019t believe so.<\/p>\n

In his May 2, 2007 editorial carried by ABC Radio, Fred Thompson talked about Cuban healthcare and referenced Andy Garcia\u2019s film, \u201cThe Lost City.\u201d\u00a0 He referred to it as the \u201cbrilliant fictionalized movie about the real Cuban experience.\u201d\u00a0 He also noted how Hollywood had given the movie \u201cthe silent treatment.\u201d\u00a0 Thompson went on to say Hollywood had a \u201ccomplete lack of sympathy for fellow artists persecuted for opposing the Castro regime.\u00a0 Pro-democracy activists are routinely threatened and imprisoned, but Castro remains a hero to many\u201d in Hollywood.<\/p>\n

I don\u2019t know if Fred Thompson has ever been to Cuba, but it is obvious the man used his intellect to form reasoned opinions of the world around him.\u00a0 As one who was actually in Cuba when Castro took over, I know the real story.\u00a0 When Andy Garcia directed his film, he was dead on with his portrayal of a Cuban family making hard decisions to leave Cuba in the late 1950s.\u00a0 When my wife and I watched the film for the first time, vivid memories of my life as a boy in Havana came flooding back into my mind. \u00a0The family story Garcia depicted in his movie was very close to my own family\u2019s story.<\/p>\n

My father\u2019s parents lived in Havana, Cuba.\u00a0 We were there when Castro took over during the \u201cRevoluci\u00f3n.\u201d\u00a0 Even as a child of only six, I remember how excited my father was when Batista was overthrown.\u00a0 I also remember how we suddenly left the island a short time later.\u00a0 I remember it all to this day.\u00a0 What else do I remember?<\/p>\n

I remember my grandmother\u2019s music room.\u00a0 She was a concert pianist for the Havana Symphony.\u00a0 The floors in her studio were a rich black and white tile on which sat a grand piano; I remember the bookshelves from the floor to the ceiling filled with music books and sheet music.\u00a0 In my mind\u2019s eye, I still see the overly large windows letting in the warm Caribbean sunlight.\u00a0 It was a very bright room.\u00a0 I remember my grandfather\u2019s medical clinic and the turkeys on his hobby turkey farm.\u00a0 I remember being in downtown Havana with my mom and dad and his parents.\u00a0 And I remember looking out over the ocean while standing with my father on the Malec\u00f3n.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

My grandfather, “Jose Frank,” holding me at the beach<\/p><\/div>\n

Cuba was a wonderful place.\u00a0 I will never forget the island; for me, it really was paradise.\u00a0 I was, of course, too young to know anything about the casinos, the shows, the sex, or the politics. \u00a0What was important to me, and is still important, is family, even if time, family squabbles, and the ever-roaming ranges of my father\u2019s libido hurt the family.<\/p>\n

Today, of course, Cuba is a very different place.\u00a0 When I stood on the Malec\u00f3n with my father and grandfather in the late 1950s, Havana glistened in opulence.\u00a0 The apartments and buildings along the northern shore were well kept.\u00a0 Young people energized the city and gamblers from around the world maintained a high cash flow into the old city.\u00a0 New cars cruised up and down the highway next to the Caribbean; they were all the latest models from Detroit.<\/p>\n

Now, the buildings are crumbling, the young people are disheartened and border on being malnourished, the gamblers come from Europe, and the cars are the very same that cruised the Malec\u00f3n in 1959.\u00a0 Havana, as Andy Garcia has so aptly described, is truly The Lost City.<\/p>\n

For everything Castro promised, Cuba and the Cuban people have suffered tremendously.<\/p>\n

-30-<\/p>\n

\u00a9 2010 J. Clark<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

One afternoon, one of my friends and I speak of Cuba, Castro, and what might come with Castro\u2019s passing.\u00a0 I comment that I cannot wait for Cuba to open, so I can visit the island nation again.\u00a0 He is of … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_coblocks_attr":"","_coblocks_dimensions":"","_coblocks_responsive_height":"","_coblocks_accordion_ie_support":"","om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"_uf_show_specific_survey":0,"_uf_disable_surveys":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[8,9],"tags":[293,397,430,797,1053,1356,1569,1784,2163,2307,2356,3594,575],"class_list":["post-78","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-life-in-general","category-personal","tag-against-all-hope-a-memoir-of-life-in-castros-gulag","tag-andy-garcia","tag-armando-vallaredez","tag-castro","tag-cuba","tag-family-stories","tag-fred-thompson","tag-havana","tag-leaving-cuba","tag-malecon","tag-memories-of-cuba","tag-the-caribbean","tag-the-lost-city"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/joeclarksblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/78","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/joeclarksblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/joeclarksblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/joeclarksblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/joeclarksblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=78"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/joeclarksblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/78\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5581,"href":"https:\/\/joeclarksblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/78\/revisions\/5581"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/joeclarksblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=78"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/joeclarksblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=78"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/joeclarksblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=78"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}