The New York Times

February 3, 1998

Journal: A Sentimental Journey to 'La Casa' of Childhood

  By MIRTA OJITO

AVANA -- This is the moment when, in my dreams, I begin to cry. And yet, I'm strangely calm as I go up the stairs to the apartment of my childhood in Santos Suarez, the only place that, after all these years, I still refer to as la casa, home.

I am holding a pen and a reporter's notebook in my hand and, as I always do when I am working, I count the steps: 20. In my memory, there were only 16. The staircase seems narrower than I remember, the ceiling lower.

Perhaps I have grown taller, perhaps my hips have widened with age and pregnancy. I am buying mental time, distracting my mind from what I am certain will be a shock.

After 17 years and 8 months, I have returned to Cuba as a reporter. I am here to cover the visit of Pope John Paul II, not to cry at the sight of a chipped, old tile on the floor.

The last time I went down these steps I was 16 years old and a police car was waiting for me and my family downstairs. They had come to tell us that my uncle, like thousands of other Cuban exiles who had returned to Cuba to claim their relatives, waited at the port of Mariel to take us to Miami in a leased shrimp boat.

It was May 7, 1980, the first days of what became known as the Mariel boat lift, the period from April to September 1980 when more than 125,000 Cubans left the island for the United States.

That day I left my house in a hurry. The police gave us 10 minutes to get ready and pack the few personal items we were allowed to take: an extra set of clothing, some pictures, toothbrushes. Everything else, from my books to my dolls and my parents' wedding china, remained behind. There were dishes in the sink and food in the refrigerator. My underwear in a drawer and my mother's sewing machine open for work.

Since then, I have often thought about this house, remembering every detail, every curve and tile and squeaky sound. The green walls of the living room, the view from the balcony, the feel of the cold tiles under my bare feet, the sound of my father's key in the keyhole and the muffled noise from the old refrigerator in the kitchen.

A stranger opens the door and I tell her who I am and what I want. "I used to live here," I say. "I'd like to take a look."

Surprisingly, she knows my name. She asks if I am the older or the younger child who used to live in the house. I say I am the older as I look over her head. Straight into my past. My home remains practically as we left it, seemingly frozen in time, like much of Cuba today.

There, to the right of the bedroom's door, is my father's handiwork -- two glass shelves he screwed into the wall -- and my mother's set of orange and green glasses. Later, I learn that no one ever drinks from those glasses. If they break, the new owner of the house tells me, they cannot be replaced. Under the shelves is my bookcase, painted a fresh coat of dark brown. A carpenter friend of my father's had built it for me when I was a little girl.

My books are gone, though. When the Cuban government declared a few years ago that it had entered a "special period" of shortages and books all but disappeared, she took my books to the school where she teaches. I am pleased to hear that. It is a much nicer fate than I had imagined.

One book remains, "Captain at 15," by Jules Verne. I want to take it to New York with me, to show it to my son. But I do not say anything and the yellowing book remains there, inside the bookcase. My mother's pots and pans are in the kitchen. The old wooden ironing board remains where it always was, behind the door to the patio.

The dining set is exactly the way it was, except the table is covered by a plastic tablecloth and I do not feel the coldness of the beige Formica when I sit at the table as I used to. A painting of red, white and yellow hibiscus that always hung over my sofa bed is still in the same spot in the living room. It was painted by one of my mother's cousins, who now lives in Florida.

This is a strange feeling. I knew I would face my childhood by coming here, but I never expected to relive it as I am doing now. I go out to the balcony and then, as if on cue, I hear someone calling out my childhood nickname, "Mirtica! Mirtica!"

For a moment, I do not know who is calling or even if the call is real. It sounds like my mother calling me for dinner. But it is the neighbor from the corner who looked up from her terrace and somehow recognized me. I wave faintly. I want to stay in this apartment for a long time. I want to be left alone. But I cannot. It is no longer my home.

The Jimenez family now lives in the house. He is a truck driver, just as my father was. They have a 15-year-old son who sleeps on a sofa bed in the living room, just as my sister and I did. The government gave them the apartment a few months after we left. Their own house, nearby, had been badly damaged in a hurricane.

They were shown three apartments, all in the same neighborhood. They settled in ours, they said, because it seemed the nicest. It does not seem so nice anymore. It is rather small, smaller than I remember. The floor tiles are porous and lackluster and chunks of plaster have fallen from the ceiling. There is no light in the living room, because nowadays in Cuba light bulbs are luxury items. But it is home. And, yes, I cry.

Despite their warm welcoming, I am acutely aware of what the Jimenezes may be thinking. For years, one of the propaganda campaigns that the Cuban government has mastered is that of instilling in ordinary Cubans the fear that exiles in the United States want to return to the country to recover the homes and businesses they lost when they left the country.

There is even a television short that mocks the Helms-Burton Act, a law designed to strengthen the United States embargo against Cuba, that warns Cubans to watch out for people like me, returning exiles.

I have no interest in my former home and whatever furniture still exists there, other than a purely sentimental one. But I do not know what the Jimenezes are thinking. They are, however, extremely generous with their time and space. They serve me coffee. We discuss the good features of the apartment, as if this were a real estate transaction. They tell me they love the old American refrigerator, a white Hotpoint that, miraculously, still stands.

I roam through the house as if it were my own. When, upon leaving, I apologize for the inconvenience, Mr. Jimenez tells me: "Don't mention it. This is your home."

I knew this would be an emotional visit. Before I mustered enough courage to go up to the apartment, I had walked through the neighborhood. As my father asked me to do, I visit la bodega and search for Juan, the Spaniard who once owned it and, after it was confiscated by the government in the early years of the revolution, remained there as an employee of the state.

He is retired now, but I find him helping out at another bodega, and we chat. I take a picture for my father as he stands behind the counter with a pencil balanced behind his ear, as he always did.

I walk the streets and find faces I recognize. I approach some; others approach me because, they tell me, I remind them of my mother. Some even call out her name, which is also mine, from across the street: "Mirta, what are you doing here? You've come back?"

They tell me who died and who left. The son of my sixth-grade teacher lost a leg in a bicycle accident. My next-door neighbor left for Spain with her son, Pepito, to claim an inheritance. The musician from downstairs died of bone cancer; his daughter married an Italian and left.

The downstairs neighbors returned to the province where they were born. For years, she was the president of the watchdog neighborhood committee; he wore a green olive uniform, a military man forged in the mountains of Sierra Maestra with Fidel Castro and later trained in the Soviet Union. Their two children left for the United States.

My old neighbors tell me how they live, how they survive, as one woman put it. They make sweets at home and sell them in the street. They receive money monthly from the United States. They steal from the government. They save and scrape and work very hard just to put food on the table every day.

The old movie theater is gone, demolished two years ago because it was crumbling with age and disrepair. Another theater has been condemned. The front door is covered with bricks. The hardware store is now a government office. The glass of the windows broke years ago; crude wooden boards cover the empty shelves. The streets are unpaved and full of potholes. Workers rip them open to fix water or gas pipes and then do not have the materials to finish the work.

In a way, I'm reporting the story of a neighborhood, a typical one in Havana. But I'm also reporting the life I never got to have. Through their stories, I see what my life could have become. I search for parallels. I imagine myself as my neighbors.

What would have become of me? Could I have become a professional like the two girls from the corner who now teach? Would I have left in a raft like my next-door neighbor? Or perhaps I would have gone crazy, like the woman across the street, Regina, who could not recall my name after years of electroshock and pills. Her husband was accused of counterrevolutionary activities in 1979 and executed by a firing squad.

Had I stayed, would I have talked to a returning neighbor the way they talk to me? They tell me about the sadness of their lives, their husbands, their lovers, their misguided children, their ungrateful relatives, their never-ending litany of needs: bread, toilet paper, sanitary napkins, underwear, freedom.

Because I left, and because they know I will leave again, I become a depository of their penury. They are happy I have returned, glad that I remembered. A woman gives me a rose from her garden; another, two lithographs from an old book of paintings and a silver cross that has been in her family for years.

The Jimenezes give me a plastic bird that hangs from its beak from a wooden stand and, more important, our old soap holder, a white enamel piece from Poland that my mother always kept in the patio.

Down the block I find a man I never knew before. He stops me and asks if I am a foreign journalist. I say yes. "I want to ask you something," he says. "Perhaps you know. Why is it that children can no longer eat breakfast in the morning?" He is 70 years old and has lived in the same house for 44 years. His grandson goes to my old school, down the block. It is the man's birthday and, he says, he cannot even buy a bone in the market to make himself a soup. I get a lump in my throat and wish him happy birthday.

I cross the street to the school and ask to see the library. It is here where I became a reader and, therefore, I think, a writer. I hardly recognize the place. The marble columns are there, but the bookcases lean precariously to the side. The books are dusty and yellowing.

I ask for the French literature section, but there is not one anymore. The librarian tells me that last year she received only two books, copies of "La Edad de Oro," by Jose Marti. The year before, none. In fact, except for those two books she does not remember the last time she got a shipment. Children now use the library as a classroom.

After a second visit to the apartment, I leave. And I leave exactly the way I left almost 18 years ago, profoundly sad, surrounded by friends and neighbors, people glad that I remembered them, unselfish people who are happy that I left and live better than they do.

Who says that Cubans are divided by politics or even by an ocean? In Enamorados Street, at the foot of a small hill called San Julio, my home and my people remain.