1972 – Flashback To Habana
I was the second youngest of five children. Our parents were both from the mountains outside of Kingston. Both came from families that were active in the Pan-Africanist movement, and loyal followers of Marcus Garvey. None of my grandparents were alive by the time I was born.
My parents had left Jamaica when their first child, my oldest brother, was three years old. It was the late Forties and it just seemed like they’d never get ahead if they stayed on that island.
My mother refused to join the mass exodus to England. “Like lemmings, running towards freezing weather and terrible food!” was how she phrased it.
My father tried his best to persuade my mother to take a chance on Cuba, where he had an uncle who’d moved there in the Twenties and made a modest success of himself. She wasn’t sure they’d be able to pull it off.
“But you know how hard it is to get into Cuba,” my mother reminded him. “What about the quota? We’ll be denied, won’t we?”
“When have you ever known us to be denied anything we’re willing to fight for?” he asked.
And he was right. They got to Cuba, settled in Havana and built a life there. My brother was the only child born a Yard. The rest of us were Cuban.
My great-uncle owned an artisan furniture shop in Habana Vieja. He produced hand-crafted rattan furniture for high end hotels and beach resorts and conducted a successful side business as the bank for a small group of local numbers runners. He gave my father a job as an errand boy and reed cutter and helped my parents find a small room not too far from the shop. My father’s salary was just enough to allow my mother to stay at home, tending to my brother and teaching herself Spanish via visits to the market and Sunday church service.
By the time I was born, my father was the book keeper for both his uncle’s furniture shop and bookie business. And, sponsored by my uncle, my parents and oldest brother had all become Cuban nationals. But my father always made sure to keep their Jamaican passports up to date.
As soon as I was nine years old and my sister was seven, my parents would send us to spend summers in Jamaica with relatives on my mother’s side. They lived in Content Gap, a small village cradled in the hills of the Blue Mountains. My mother would tell us it was good for us to get out of the city for a few months each year, “plus, you can keep your English up and spend time with family.” Our three older brothers were already grown by then, and past the point of being sent anywhere. They were Cuban through and through, and a few weeks in Jamaica here and there would do nothing to change that.
But even at that young age, I had a strong feeling that my father knew my sister and I would have to leave Cuba eventually, and he didn’t want us to be upended by cultural whiplash.
And in 1972, my father and mother packed everything up and took me and my sister back to Jamaica for good. I was fourteen years old, living in Kingston. In Vineyard Town.
