and certainly not interesting enough to anyone who doesn't know me.

here are chapters 1 and 2, and that's all I can show you, the rest mention people who are still alive.

Introduction

It takes a certain amount of arrogance to start an autobiography. The writer must assume that there is something unusual about his life or that he has witnessed great events; that he or his associates were somehow extraordinary or influential, or at the very least, somehow representative of their times. I certainly cannot claim any of these as part of my motivation to begin this ordeal. Neither can I point to any psychological or spiritual needs which will be satisfied by putting these lines on paper. My life has been unique, but that is the definition of humanity; it is no more unique than that of any of my contemporaries. I recognize that as a native of the United States born just after the end of the Second World War, and because of certain key experiences shared with my own generational cohort, it could be argued that similarities exist between myself and many others; but it is the differences which make up the justification for this particular form of literary self-indulgence. I offer no apologies or explanations. I can always hide behind the excuse that this document is a training exercise for the career in letters I have often fantasized for myself and let it go at that. If you prefer, consider it a bit of correspondence from the last half of the twentieth century.

Before beginning it may be useful to lay down a few ground rules. There will be no effort here to be historically precise; I will do my best to be accurate, but I plan to work from memory. Do not expect precision in the matter of dates or names and forgive me if my recollections are distorted by time or prejudice. The reader may be comforted by the thought that errors of fact may be more illustrative of the writer than of the events described. I can promise a sincere effort to be objective but I cannot guarantee it is wholly successful. The plan is to proceed in chronological order, but I reserve the right to revise and edit my work, an advantage provided by modern word processing technology which I fully intend to exploit. I cannot rule out the possibility that some events or insights will be presented out of sequence if they are more appropriately discussed elsewhere. One more thing, this text is not meant to be complete, there will be omissions and gaps and there are many things which will be deliberately or accidentally left out. This is not a confession and I wish to protect my privacy in some matters, not to mention the privacy of others. I visualize these pages being read by someone in the future and in another place. They are not history or journalism and certainly not an attempt at self-analysis; think of it as a travel journal.

It is inevitable that the character of the writer will influence his work so have no illusions that mine is any different. It may be useful to consider how an author evaluates his own soul. I will be brief: I am intelligent but I'm lazy, I am honest but I'm vain, I am responsible but I'm a coward. I have a well developed sense of humor, defined as a recognition of the absurdity of existence; but there is a streak of pomposity in my makeup as well. I despise injustice but I am an unrepentant snob. I consider myself a basically compassionate and decent human being who is well aware of his faults but not too serious about correcting them. On the whole, I like myself. I value truth, love and beauty but have absolutely no religious convictions. I strongly suspect the Universe is entirely the result of impersonal physical forces: matter and energy interacting in time and space. I am convinced that the Secret of the Universe is that there is no secret.

The essentials of my life follow: Born 28 August, 1947, to the children of Cuban immigrants in Tampa, Florida; attended University, graduated with degrees in science and mathematics, and spent my working life as a professional geographer; married at 33, no children; enlisted and served in my country's armed forces. I have spent most of my life in the United States. These lines were written in February 2001.

Preliminaries

It is sad that as children we often have little interest in our family history; and that only in adulthood do we develop a curiosity about our ancestors. In youth, even after years of absorbing family legends and stories, we are often too selfishly concerned with our own affairs to try and systematize the collective memory of the household and catalog the names and anecdotes. The family tree is hazy and indistinct and often individuals are remembered but not their relationship and connection. Even later, when we speak to the survivors in an effort to learn more, do we really make an effort to fill in all the blanks and explore all the links? I hope I am no worse than the average person in this respect, but I must admit to having very little to recount of my own family's background. I will say what I can remember, hoping that the errors, and some are inevitable, are minimized. I apologize to those who came before me, they deserve better.

My mother was Herminia Rodriguez (Ferrera?), born 1920 in New York City. My father was born Elisee Reclus 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 Elisee. 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 Elisee 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. Elisee 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 Elisee 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.