I have been to Cuba more than 20 times, and each trip has taught me something about the long-suffering island. No question, Cuba is enduring what looks like its worst economic crisis ever. But poverty has always had a grip on Cuba. I got to know Alfonso Gonzalez, who with his wife operated a Havana bed and breakfast in the early 2000s. Alfonso was in his 80s and had an unusual life story. In Havana during the early 1940s, his family was barely surviving, thanks entirely to what his mother earned washing and ironing for the well-to-do.
An uncle in Tampa helped out by taking in young Alfonso, who spent the World War II years attending high school and hawking newspapers. He came to love Americans and the New York Yankees.
He returned to Havana after the war. This excerpt from my book what he found.
It was a bittersweet homecoming. While glad to be reunited with his mother and brothers, he confronted the same
bleak reality he had left. His mother remained mired in poverty, doing laundry.
“I had a dream of going to a university, but we had no money. I was 18, and my duty was to work to help my mother.” An uncle who owned a grocery store provided a job that paid one peso a day. González worked six-and-half days
a week and slept in the store to provide security.
He would labor at the job for five years, as always, giving his mother most of his pay. During that period, González recalled, he had to make a trip to a provincial city. “I took the train, and it was the first time I had been out into the country. It turned out to be a shocking experience. Every place we stopped, hundreds of people would crowd around the train.
They were dressed in rags—not even real clothes—that just hung from their skinny bodies. They were begging for anything at all. What I saw scared me. So, when I hear that old Cubans in Miami say that everything was wonderful in those.
days, I get really indignant.”
https://www.amazon.com/We-Were-Always-Here-Americans/dp/1558859136
Ricardo Chavira Chicano 