My mother was Herminia Rodriguez (Ferrera?), born 1920 in New York City. My father was born Enrique ******* Pérez in Tampa, Florida in 1911. I know little of my father's parents, except that my grandmother was also named Herminia, and my grandfather Enrique. Both were born in Cuba. My mother's parents were Marina (born in New Jersey of Spanish or Cuban parents) and Mateo, born near Havana in the late 1890's. I dimly remember other names and faces but I hesitate to bring them up, I just don't know enough about them. I do know there was a branch of the family in Camaguey, Cuba, but again, I can tell you little about it. It is enough to say that the maternal side was based in America, while the paternal side still had representatives in the old country. My father had family in Havana, and although born an American, spent much of his youth there. He spoke English with an accent for all of his life. My mother spoke with an accent also, but it was a New York Yiddish accent, a gift of the neighborhood where she grew up.

Both of my grandfathers emigrated to Key West, Florida in the early decades of the twentieth century. In those days, the Cuban cigar industry had relocated to the USA, fleeing war and progressive labor laws for the more business-friendly atmosphere to the north. Both men were professional lectores who earned their living by reading to the workers in the cigar factories while they handrolled 'the finest tobacco in the world'. Later, they both moved to Tampa, where a deep water port and a railroad completed an ideal union-free environment for the growth of the industry. At the height of the cigar manufactory in Tampa there were over a hundred cigar factories, each employing several hundred workers, mostly Cuban and Spanish, but with a substantial fraction of Italians as well. This community of immigrants transformed the sleepy little fishing village of Tampa into a major industrial center based on the fragrant smoke of Cuban leaf. The cigar workers were highly skilled workers and well-paid, by the standards of their day. They were a cultured, urban people who demanded the traditional amenities associated with their profession, including having skilled orators who provided them with entertainment and education while they worked. Both of my grandfathers, men of some education themselves, thrived in this environment and began raising families in the new country. The cigar culture of the Ybor City district is well documented elsewhere so I need not delve into it too deeply here. But it should be noted that this environment, which nurtured both my parents and myself, gave me an opportunity to grow up bilingual and bicultural even though I was a second generation American. Long after the Depression and the cigar-making machines had put an end to the glory days of the factories and the lectores, I was born into a city where it was still possible for an individual to earn a living and raise a family with only the most rudimentary knowledge of the national language. The only thing like it today is the Hispanic community of Miami, but without its reactionary politics. Coming into the world in this environment was a profound influence in my life. There is something schizophrenic about growing up urban Cuban in the heart of rural Dixie, but I will have more to say about that later.

My grandfather Mateo not only had a major influence on me, but is also the only one of my grandparents who survived into my adulthood. He was a remarkable man who had dropped out of medical school in Havana (some say due to politics, others say because of a woman) and joined a theatrical troupe where he polished his classical Spanish and learned the art of projecting and modulating his voice to a crowd without benefit of amplification. During his life he worked as a stage actor, reader, film dubber, radio broadcaster, and Bronx candy store owner. He was extremely well read, and could understand, read and write English perfectly, although he never quite got the hang of speaking it. Mateo married several times, had many children, and moved back and forth between Tampa, Key West, Havana and New York where he enjoyed minor celebrity status among his transplanted countrymen. Both his father and at least one of his brothers worked as a lector, a profession that at one time made him 'the highest paid working man in Tampa'. His friendship with one of his colleagues led their two families to unite in marriage, just prior to the start of World War II.

My father Enrique was a kind and introspective man who worked as a sheet metal worker when he married my mother. After the war started, he was drafted into the Army and saw duty in Burma, where he served at a remote airfield maintaining aircraft flying over the Hump. I can barely remember my father, who died when I was only four years old; but many years after his death my grandfather gave me a yellowed typewritten manuscript which he had written during a separation from my mother and which he had given Mateo for safekeeping. It was the only legacy my father left me, but a priceless one. This long letter to posterity was composed shortly after I was born, when he was forced to move to New York to escape my mother and the asthma which plagued him only in Florida and Cuba, the only two places where she was willing to live. Enrique and Herminia were eventually reconciled and he returned to Tampa, where the asthma finally killed him. I eventually forgave my mother, although I don't think she ever forgave herself.

My mother was an elemental force, like gravity. Widowed with a young child, she attended night courses and taught herself to be a bilingual stenographer, expert in business Spanish and the now obsolete arts of shorthand and typing. She managed to earn a living and raise her family by herself, and even achieved a certain amount of middle class respectability in a working environment which, to put it mildly, was not kind to a single Latin woman without formal education. Her idol was Scarlett O'Hara, because she had experienced deep hunger during the Depression. Without ever abandoning her family obligations, she bitterly resented my father's lack of ambition ("I can't help that the Army trained me to work on the wrong kind of airplane"), and her father's charming but irresponsible lifestyle. She never forgave Mateo for divorcing her mother and abandoning his wife and children in the early '30s. I can't really blame her, but then again, I only heard one side of the story; I was young then and refused to think ill of grandfather regardless of the evidence before my eyes. Herminia was a strong and passionate woman, but she never fully trusted men, not even her son. I was her second child, my sister Blanche was conceived shortly after Enrique was mustered out of the Army and died soon after birth. Herminia died of a stroke in 1992 only months after her younger brother Manny, while my wife and I were living with her the year I was unemployed. I suppose, in the end, I let her down as well.

My earliest memories were of my father. I can still recall, when during a flight to Cuba to visit his family, he had the starboard window seat and I had to crawl onto his lap to look out at a vast plain dotted with palm trees. I remember nothing else of that vacation except getting off the plane on the return to Tampa, proudly wearing the cowboy outfit my relatives had bought me. My only other recollection of him was the night I drank the kerosene; he was driving and mother was in the front seat. I was in the back, driver's side, squealing that I wanted a Coca-Cola and to drive the point home, picked a bottle out of the case of empties on the floorboards and took a deep drink. Of course, in the dark I selected the only one of twenty-four which had a few ounces of the liquid, which I presume was used for cleaning purposes. I remember intense pain, the worst I have ever felt, and not being able to breathe. I also remember the doctors at the Cuban Clinic in Ybor City pumping my stomach. I can still feel the rubber hose being shoved down my throat and the emergency room staff pinning me down; the walls were pale green. I am grateful that this was the most unpleasant and horrifying physical experience I have ever had; I've lived a sheltered life since, with no serious injuries or illnesses.

I don't recall father's death or mother's reaction to it, but I do get flashes of the next few years. Mother worked at Norris Cattle Company in Ocala, and Fogarty Brothers Lumber in Tampa, prized by her employers for her language skills when dealing with foreign clients. I remember my colored nanny when we lived in Ocala, at least I recall riding on a train with her, although I have no idea where we were going. Other fragments: the Catholic pre-school I attended, the trouble I had learning to put on my clothes and tie my shoes. We lived on and off at the Ponce de León government housing project in Ybor City; I can recall strolling through Seventh Avenue, the smell of Cuban coffee roasting and the exotic flavors of tropical fruit sherbets. There was a bewildering array of relatives and friends, notable among them my great aunts Estrella and Blanche (Marina's sisters) and Blanche's husband Frank Norton (she had scandalized the whole family by marrying an Americano). Marina took care of me while my mother worked, and my grandfather Mateo's brother Wilfredo and his son Wilfredito (both trained as classical musicians but forced to play in dance bands to make a living, as I was often reminded) often came to visit. I remember being a happy kid, but a little moody and introspective. I had a few friends my own age, but not many, I looked forward to when my cousins Bobby and Bobby (Manny and Estrella's kids) came to play.

English and Spanish were spoken interchangeably, but they were never confused with one another. I became adept at deliberately switching in mid-sentence (but only with someone who could follow me) for emphasis or humor, but never confusing the two, or speaking the wrong one to a monophone listener. I take no credit for this, with children it comes naturally; I certainly have had no success with my studies in French undertaken as an adult. I have little sympathy with modern theories of teaching immigrant children in their native language. Any child can easily master a foreign tongue during a year in kindergarten while still keeping the language of his family and culture intact at home. I cannot remember ever being unable to speak both languages perfectly, and was often dragooned, at the age of four or five, to translate on shopping trips for adults who spoke only one. The same could be said for my cousins, and my playmates. The Italian kids were really amazing, they spoke three languages.

It is difficult for recent arrivals to Tampa to understand how completely and pervasively Cuban culture was once established in the major cigar-factory neighborhoods of the town: Ybor City, West Tampa, and Palmetto Beach (Desoto Park to the Crackers). There was remarkably little conflict between the Cracker and Cuban communities. There was some discrimination, especially in the business world, but as a rule, people got along, played together as kids, intermarried as adults, and lived and worked side by side. In fact, if there was any racial prejudice, it was more likely to be directed at the Crackers, not the other way round. I was taught at home that although many of them were 'nice people', they did have a tendency as a race to dislike hard work, drink too much, beat their wives, abuse their kids, and not bathe very frequently. Their food was bland, their music barbaric, their religion ridiculous and they had little use for culture or education. 'Crackers', by the way, was not a pejorative term, it was the name native Floridians adopted, referring to their skill with the bullwhip driving mule trains during the pioneer days. I suppose that makes me one as well. On the other hand, we felt the way they treated their colored people was totally unforgivable. Cubans weren't free of racism, slavery was outlawed in Cuba well after the American Civil War, but they felt that they kept racism confined to social relations. Jim Crow laws and the KKK were totally incomprehensible to them, and lynching was as much a horror as the ovens at Dachau.

One of the advantages of growing up biculturally is that you soon learn that the superstitions of your tribe are not necessarily the laws of physics. With close contacts on both sides of the fence, I soon understood how similar the misconceptions of each were about the other. But I believe that rejecting unfair prejudices about others should not lead to cultural relativism. Individuals and civilizations (but not races) have their good and bad points, and some are corrupt and decadent, at least in part. Another advantage of being bicultural is that you are under no obligation to make excuses for the ugly and the bad your conscience sees in another nation; you learn to have confidence in your ability to recognize evil when you face it. You also develop a keen insight into the nature of hypocrisy. Americans did not invent racism, it is a natural phenomenon that exists in every society and even its victims embrace it. But underneath the genteel politeness of the American South it was never far below the surface, and it could erupt unexpectedly with an Oriental ferocity. I am old enough to remember institutionalized segregation, and even worse, the rationalizations and excuses for it. Although I sincerely believe that the worst is over now, the disease is still not cured, and none of us, not even its victims, is totally immune from infection. In this respect America was like a beautiful woman with rotten teeth.

By the time I was born the heyday of the cigar factories was over, those that still remained were automated and culturally integrated. Hand-rolling still went on, but only in small specialty shops, and the lectores were only a memory. Consequently, many of my parents' generation had moved on to other parts of town and to positions in industry and business. But there were still a lot of the old timers around, and I was well exposed, both at home and in town, to Cuban cooking, music and even Spanish language movies. No trip to Seventh Avenue was complete without a Cuban sandwich or a plate of crab croquettes for lunch, and the rattle of dominoes and the fragrance of black coffee and sweet cigars could still reach through the open windows when strolling down the street on a summer night.