Days of Awe

Well before dawn on Sunday, the fifteenth of April 1961, the day we left Cuba--a dreaded day, an ashen day without a single blush of blue in the skies over Havana--my mother ensconced herself in a back room of our apartment, arranging a series of clear glasses of water under a small effigy of Saint Jude, the patron saint of impossible causes.

"This will help purify us," she said carrying in the tumblers, filled not with tap water but with the sanitized kind that came in huge blue bottles.

If my mother's Saint Jude looked a little shiny compared with the other saints on her altar, that's because he was fairly new to her pantheon. My mother's prayers usually went to the Virgin of Charity, Cuba's patron, to whom she'd entrusted my mortal soul if I survived those delicate first hours of transfusions and gunfire.

Even as she lit a white candle to Saint Jude to help us on our journey, which seemed impossible enough, her preferred icon was carefully wrapped in newspapers, plastic sheets, and a double-folded yellow cotton blanket. It was then tucked into a box to which my father had fashioned a handle from thin rope and the inside of a toilet paper roll. Regardless of Saint Jude's divine jurisdictions and whatever seemingly untenable situations we might encounter, it was the Virgin who was traveling with us, the Virgin who would be settled at the pinnacle of whatever new altar my mother constructed wherever we might wind up.

I've always thought of the Virgin of Charity as the perfect mentor for Cuba: Cradling her child in her arms, she floats above a turbulent sea in which a boat with three men is being tossed about. One of the men is black and he is in the center of the boat, kneeling in prayer while the other two, who are white, row furiously and helplessly. (It's unspoken but understood that it's the entreaties of the black man, not the labor of the white rowers, that provides their deliverance.)

I've always found it poignant, if not tragic, that Cuba, whose people are constantly seeking escape and entrusting their fortunes to the sea in the most rickety of vessels, should have early on foreseen this fate and projected it onto its sacred benefactor. When her feast day rolls around each eighth of September, devotees like my mother dress in bumblebee yellow and wink knowingly at each other in church. Also known as Och�n, this particularly Cuban madonna is the Yoruba goddess of love, patron saint of sweet water. She's a beauty, the pearl of paradise, a flirtatious but faithful lover to Chang�, the capricious god of thunder.

It's these very elements, I think, that make my mother's choice of this vision of Mary--la Virgen de la Caridad del Cobre--as my patron a perfect guardian: I am a child not just of revolution but also of exile, both of which have so much to do with love and faith.

Even then, on that gloomy gray dawn in 1961, as my father waited for my mother and paced on the third-floor balcony of our home, there were Cubans leaving the island on anything that would float and looking to the skies for signs of salvation. The Cuban Revolution was two years old then, and already defying expectations.

What fueled those who were leaving was less fear of communism, which Fidel had only hinted at at that point, or shortages of any kind, because the U.S. embargo was still a distant concern, but the persistent rumors of invasions and imminent combat that were sweeping Havana. From the countryside came reports that cane fields were being torched, the flames like red waves. What were thought to be American planes constantly buzzed the city. Weeks before, El Encanto--Havana's most exquisite department store and perhaps its most conspicuous link to the United States--had burned to the ground. Its destruction had traumatized the city no less than the break of diplomatic relations between Cuba and Washington, D.C., back in January. Not an hour went by without the breathless dispatch: "The yanquis are coming, the yanquis are coming."