93 Miles

Ninety-three miles.  That’s it.  Cuba is only ninety-three miles away from the United States.  If we were on land, you could drive there in an hour and a half.  Why, some people drive that long in this country just to get to work every day. 

Ninety-three miles. That is virtually the same distance as a round trip between Martha’s Vineyard and Cape Cod.  

Ninety-three miles and fifty-four years of two countries being a world apart.  Until now.  This week Secretary of State John Kerry went to Cuba to raise the American flag above the U.S. Embassy for the first time in 54 years.  History just shifted, an embargo was lifted and we all came back into view.

My own lack of knowledge about Cuba and its history is astounding. I learned about the Cuban Revolution, Fidel Castro and the Missile Crisis as glibly as I absorbed Life magazine photos of Cuban cars and cigars.  Back then we were a nation of children watching adults watch the news, in a world of black and white. I was seven years old.  Parents talked late into the night in hushed tones about the Cold War, Kennedy and Castro. Children were to be seen and not heard.

I lived in the state that bred the Kennedy monarchy, in a time determined to sell us a post war bliss.  We were fed a new normal surrounded by TV dinners, potatoes flakes in a box, Soupy Sales, PF Flyers, Romper Room, puppets and clowns.  Dads were meant to go off to work in the tall buildings in the city and Moms could stay home in the burbs, wearing pearls.  There were cocktail parties, convertibles and terraces in a time when magazines had full page ads for Winstons and whiskey.  It was a world right before stereo, plastic, pill box hats and pantyhose.  Meanwhile, in Cuba, a mere ninety-three miles away, there was a revolution, a dictator and families were being torn apart.  Children were seen but some never heard from again. 

My understanding of the Cuban people and its rich, beautiful culture was never in my history books.  I can’t remember one course in school that chose to dive deep into it.  There were no people of Cuban descent in my world and no stories shared. A plethora of Cuban talent and important people never made it to my privileged, packaged, political world.  The Cuban culture came to me only through the stereotype of Ricky Ricardo from I Love Lucy.  And that Havana scene in Guys and Dolls.   Ninety-three miles away became out of this world, merely forgotten and forbidden.  

Flash forward to the custody and immigration status battle of Elian Gonzalez in 2000 in Miami, Florida and that about covered my deep dive into experiencing the politics of Cuba.  Sprinkle in a few vacations to Miami for some Cuban culture and that was about it. 

Until last year.

Last spring I got cast in the play Sonia Flew by Melinda Lopez.  We were a cast transported back to Cuba 1961 as seen through the fictional family experiencing Castro’s Cuba.  I played teenage Sonia’s mother, Pilar.

Researching and preparing for this role became a Cuban crash course in the history I never received.  The political pain and fear from which I was protected was at the heart of these characters and the world in which they survived.  But truth be told:  Sonia Flew was the first time I had ever heard of Operation Pedro Pan.  It was nothing like the Peter Pan from which it translates.  It seems Never, Never land lasted 54 years.

“Operation Pedro Pan was the largest recorded exodus of unaccompanied minors in the Western Hemisphere…a joint operation by the U.S. government and the Catholic Welfare Bureau, Pedro Pan secretly airlifted to the United States more than 14,000 children after warnings began to surface that Fidel Castro’s government would soon be taking children, against the wishes of their parents, to military schools and to Soviet labor camps.  Once in the U.S. some children were united with family members who had immigrated earlier to the U.S. but others were sent to live with foster families, to boarding schools or orphanages in as many as 35 states.   Parents who made the decision to send their children to Operation Pedro Pan probably figured that the Castro regime wouldn’t last long and their children would soon be home.”  (Source: JTB program) 

However, many never saw their parents again. Like Sonia in the play when she is ripped from her parents to suddenly leave for America in the dark of night.  It’s was a final scene in a beautiful script that implores us to remember and never forget.  The children, the parents.  The beautiful country, its culture and people.  

Ninety three miles away this week two countries met again in the middle, and raised their flags in peace.  

I watched it on the TV news, in color and wept.