Boxing for Cuba: An Immigrant's Story - Softcover

Vidal, Guillermo Vicente

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1555919103 ISBN 13: 9781555919108

Verlag: FULCRUM PUB, 2013

Inhaltsangabe

In 1961, fearing the communist rule of Fidel Castro, Guillermo Vicente Vidal's family sent him to America through Operation Peter Pan. He arrived in Colorado and was sent to an orphanage with his brothers, and his family reunited four years later. Fifty years later, he served as Denver's mayor. This is his story of overcoming incredible odds.

Über diesen Titel

Über die Autorinnen und Autoren

Guillermo Vicente Vidal is a native of Cuba, and grew up in Colorado. After graduating from the University of Colorado, he held various government positions, including Mayor of Denver. Vidal is president and CEO of the Hispanic Chamber of Commerce of Metro Denver, and he lives with his family in Denver.

Guillermo Vicente Vidal is a native of Cuba, and grew up in Colorado. After graduating from the University of Colorado, he held various government positions, including Mayor of Denver. Vidal is president and CEO of the Hispanic Chamber of Commerce of Metro Denver, and he lives with his family in Denver.

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Boxing for Cuba

An Immigrant's Story

By Guillermo Vicente Vidal

Fulcrum Publishing

Copyright © 2013 Guillermo Vicente Vidal
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-1-55591-910-8

Contents

1. The Center of the Universe, 
2. A Wonderful Time to Be Alive, 
3. The Bearded Ones, 
4. La Pescera, 
5. Lost Boys, 
6. Boxing for Cuba, 
7. Betrayals, 
8. An American World, 
9. A Desperate Man's Eyes, 
10. Cheering for Cassius Clay, 
11. The First Cuban on the Moon, 
12. Burial Grounds, 
13. Volver a Cuba, 
14. The House and the Mango Tree, 
A Final Word, 
About the Author, 

CHAPTER 1

THE CENTER OF THE UNIVERSE

Our house in Camagüey was named for a bar of soap. La Villita Candado, it was called, and Candado was a popular bath soap in the years before Fidel and his fierce compañeros swept down out of the Sierra Maestra and wholly changed our lives. The house had been a wedding gift to my parents from my paternal grandfather, who purchased it sometime in the 1940s from the family who had won it in a contest of sorts. As an advertising scheme, the soap company had built several modest villitas in cities across Cuba, announcing that a corresponding number of tokens allowing the bearer to claim one of the houses had been buried in bars of Candado. Sales of Candado soared; the tokens ultimately emerged from a few precious bars, and each of the houses retained minor renown for many years afterward in a nation where, for many people, owning a home was only a dream.

In my family's case, it wasn't our luck but our larger family's prosperity that had allowed us to make La Villita Candado our home. Good fortune, in fact, seemed to abandon us entirely beginning at a time when I was eight years old. And our prosperity — such as it was — was the thing that ultimately labeled us enemies of the people, set our small world on its end, and profoundly altered the life I otherwise might have lived.

* * *

In my earliest years in Cuba, however, I was buoyed by the absolute certainty that the city of Camagüey — the third largest in my country — lay at the lush center of the universe. Our home was situated on Carretera Central, the busiest street in town, and the house and its ample garden were surrounded by a stucco and wrought-iron fence that made our home feel like a grand fortress to my two brothers and me. Despite our seasoned tree-climbing skills, we couldn't scale the high fence, yet we didn't mind. The fence simply seemed to define the boundaries of an amusement park that was exclusively ours, the twins — Roberto and Juan, whom we called Kiko and Toto — and I enchanted each day by the rainbow-striped lizards that raced to escape our grasps and the slippery tadpoles that swam in the huge earthenware pot called a tinajon, which captured rainwater from the roof. We built exotic cities for ourselves among the jungle of fruit trees and shrubs and vines, played cowboys and Indians, embarked on daring safaris, and fought great battles against injustice of every kind. We endlessly climbed the great mango tree — its highest branches, even back then, visible throughout the neighborhood — knocking its wonderful fruit to the ground with our fists, rocks, and sticks.

We marveled at our friend Marcelo, the gardener, a young campesino in his twenties already missing his front teeth. Like so many people from the country, Marcelo seemed to find a way to add the word chico, kid, to almost every sentence he spoke, and his accent was thick enough that sometimes we simply guessed at what he was saying. Yet he was lithe and strong and adept — the kind of young man boys like us couldn't help but be fascinated by — and the fact that he used his machete to cut the lawn rather than the mower my father provided was proof to the three of us that he was a man of exceptional skills.

It may have been true throughout Cuba in those prerevolution years, but in our case at least, Marcelo and the others who worked for Mami and Papi were woven tightly into the broad fabric of our family. We all were related somehow, if only by our daily proximity to each other and the fact that all of us — boys and servants alike — depended for our survival on my father's business acumen and my mother's complex kinds of acceptance. Our nannies, Romelia and her daughter-in-law Emilita; Gladis the cook; Ismaela, Felix, and El Negrito Juan — the three of them having worked for my grandparents since Mami herself was a child — were people with whom I shared both love and relation, despite the fact that, in the case of Gladis and El Negrito Juan, it was a kinship plainly complicated by color.

Like the United States, Cuba had been stricken by the blight of racism since the earliest days of the slave trade, and because Gladis was black, none of us considered it unacceptable that she was confined to the kitchen and virtually never ventured into other parts of the house. Her coal-skinned boyfriend wasn't allowed to enter the house at all, and I remember him often waiting patiently for her to come out the back door and join him for a bit, the two of them stealing kisses until the teasing my brothers and I made them suffer — as well perhaps as the demands of our dinner — would send him off to another Cuba, one the three of us knew nothing about. El Negrito Juan, who lived in a tiny room at the back of my grandfather's medical clinic, would seldom venture farther than our front porch. He was a kind and gentle man who had been devoted to my mother since she was a small child, and the two of them shared an important bond, one that somehow cut through the prejudices and terrible affronts of that era.

* * *

My mother was still a small girl when people began to comment about her extraordinary beauty. Marta Teresa Ramos Almendros, they would insist, surely would grow up to be the most beautiful woman in Camagüey, and their predictions proved correct. But Mami's charm, her social graces, her family's wealth and position, and her beauty — the attributes that had drawn my father to her — masked a deep insecurity and a strangely incurable loneliness, the products of wounds she had begun to suffer early in life.

She was born in 1924 to Juan Ramos Garcia, a well-respected Camagüey physician, and Rufina Almendros Boza, herself a storied beauty from one of the city's wealthiest families. My grandfather owned a large home near the city center, one that housed his medical clinic as well, and my grandmother decorated the house with furniture, paintings, and statues she imported from Europe. Dr. Ramos and his young wife wanted for nothing; they led a charmed life, and they lavished attention on their two children, no doubt in part because my grandfather had lost his own mother when he was just five, was raised by an aunt when his father no longer would do so once his wife was dead, and struggled to achieve success, working his way through medical school, then serving as an army doctor for many years before he married Rufina and opened his private practice.

I often suspect that great equalizing forces exist that do not allow even the most fortunate people to live their lives free of suffering, and no doubt that lesson first came to me in the stories I heard from my mother about how her family's world shattered when she was five — at the time when her younger brother, Juan Benito, contracted a disease Dr. Ramos diagnosed as polio.

Juan...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: FULCRUM PUB
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2013
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 1555919103
• ISBN 13: 9781555919108
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 248
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: JUST FOR GAMES; emartin@maximument.com; ; 9 AVENUE MICHELET; SAINT-OUEN-SUR-SEINE; 93400; Frankreich