Author Desi Sanchez, a native of Cuba, was twenty-two years old when the Bay of Pigs incident took place there in 1961. He had made the decision to side against Fidel Castro long before the confrontation and served as a merchant marine in the SS Houston during the invasion. In 2010 Desi Sanchez received an honorary crew member certificate of the DDE-510 Eaton. Havana was Desi Sanchez's home. He was born there, grew up there, went to school there, and fell in love there. Eventually, however, as Castro's regime began to take hold and everything began to change, he learned that home isn't where your life happened; it's where your heart is. Sometimes you just have to find a new home. Originally writing his memoir in order to bridge the gap between generations within his own family, Sanchez has since come to realize the importance of preserving history from the perspectives of the participants for all to see. Now he shares his life story.

A Funny Thing Happened on My Way to Freedom

By Desi Sanchez

iUniverse, Inc.

Copyright © 2012 Desi Sanchez
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-4759-5520-0

Contents

Prologue............................................................xi1 Crushes and Crashes...............................................12 Rock 'n' Roll, Bullets, Graduation, and Girls.....................193 Who Took My Prostitutes Away?.....................................334 Deceit, Breakup, and a New Year's Nightmare.......................395 Women and Children Only...........................................456 A New Sheriff in Town.............................................497 Looking for a Way Out.............................................598 My Merchant Marine Card and Something Extra.......................679 Bye-Bye, Havana...................................................8110 A Great Time in New Orleans?.....................................8911 Choosing between Life and Death..................................9512 Right behind My Back.............................................9913 Sailing for Nicaragua............................................10314 Midnight Fireworks, No Fiesta....................................10915 Sitting Ducks....................................................11516 A Shower and a Change of Clothes.................................12317 We Have to Get out of Here.......................................12718 Getting Weaker...................................................13519 Among the Dead and the Doomed....................................14120 Ours or Theirs?..................................................15121 Hello, Miami; Good-Bye Alice.....................................16322 Connecticut or Bust..............................................171Epilogue............................................................183Notes...............................................................191

Chapter One

Crushes and Crashes

Mother's Day, May 12 1951, a beautiful Sunday morning, was still the dry season in Cuba; the early morning carried a nice, soft , cool breeze. The sky, which could be seen among a variety of architectural designs in buildings from different eras—from Spanish Colonial to Art Deco was blue with some puffy clouds here and there. After wishing my mother a happy Mother's Day and having breakfast with the family, I went out to our balcony. You could still smell the acridness of asphalt that had recently paved our street; by then, the city was in the process of completing the removal of the old 1920s vintage streetcar rails and converting to an all-bus mass transit system.

There was little traffic that morning; the narrow street was wide enough to fit a car and half, so the city had prohibited parking on that street due to it being a bus route. The same bunch of guys who always gathered at the corner grocery-bar diagonally across from my building—a typical pastime in Havana—were already there. I could see their hands moving with the rhythm of their conversation.

The jukebox at the Taberna de Pedro (Pedro's Tavern), a bar across from the grocery store had all doors open, ready for anybody to walk in. In old Havana, grocery stores, bar-groceries, and bars did not have any doors closed while they were open; they had no air-conditioning. (This same practice is in place at Sloppy Joe's in Key West.) Someone had already put a nickel in the jukebox and played a Glenn Miller tune, "String of Pearls," as if Havana wanted to wake up nice and easy.

If my memory does not fail me, there was a Sloppy Joe's at the port of Havana. Sloppy Joe's bar and dining area was decorated with autographs of many famous Hollywood actors; Sloppy Joe's catered to the weekly visits from the cruise ships, mainly from Florida, as well as to sailors from the American Navy when they touched port. Sloppy Joe's was immediately closed by the Castro regime.

"Mom, I'm going to church; I have a mass to help with this morning, but I'll be back in about an hour," I said to my mother, after waiting a few minutes to see if Pilar Polon, the girl in the Art Deco building directly across from our building, was coming out onto her balcony. I lived on a second floor above a mezzanine of my building. Pilar was the only daughter of a Spaniard couple. Pilar had a nice, tan complexion; deep, dark eyes; dark hair a little straight that she kept about shoulder length; and a nice body, and I loved to look up her legs from my vantage point. Hey, I am a guy and I was only twelve, okay?

Back to my mother. "Your father wants you to go with him and help him out to mount a TV antenna at one of his customers' houses, so don't take too long," my mother said.

I stepped down the wide marble stairs at the ground floor. To my left was the spacious courtyard where the carriages of residents of times past, most likely Spaniard royalty, or, at the very least, the well-to-do were stored. The courtyard was surrounded by smaller apartments; during Spanish Colonial times, some of these apartments were originally used for storing horses and carriages supplies and housing for the drivers.

The mezzanine was for housing the servers of the mansion and the second and third floor, for the owner's family and visitors. The entrance door was huge, a door within the door. The entire door was to be opened only when the resident's carriages were coming in or out; the inner door opened for the people to get in and out. My apartment building covered a good portion of the street corner.

My walk to the church, Santo Cristo del Buen Viaje, was not too far, about three and half blocks away. On my way to church, I passed a movie house called Cervantes. Across from Cervantes lived the cousins of another one of my crushes, or maybe my number-one crush, Emilia. Emilia lived in a three-story building with her parents, two brothers, and younger sister. The building was a little slender because each floor was a complete one-family apartment. I would see Emilia very oft en going by on her way to visit her cousins about a block and half from her residence. Just a few weeks before, I had started saying "hi" to her as she went by; I wanted to go really easy, making friends with her.

After walking about two and half blocks, there it was—my grade school building. My family had managed to place me in a newly built Catholic parochial school, Santo Cristo Parochial School, founded by an American Augustinian priest, Father John McKniff, OSA. The Augustinian Order had instituted a program by which the two top honor students to graduate from the parochial school (grades one to six) were the recipients of a fully paid three-year scholarship at Saint Augustine School. Saint Augustine was a private school established in 1901 and administered by an American Augustinian. The American Augustinians were also responsible for opening the first private university in Latin America, Saint Thomas of Villanova University.

I was in the fifth grade at the time; for health reasons, I had lost about six months of my school schedule—my mother never told me exactly what those health reasons were, and I did not give the situation a lot of importance. My parochial school was next door to the church, and behind the church is Saint Augustine College, mentioned above. To the left of the church, there was a park. Sometimes, on the weekend, I would make a little money by helping at a wedding or a baptism, enough for me to go the movies, my second pastime, after girls. That day, I was just helping with Mass at 10:30 a.m. I had been an altar boy since the third grade, so I'd had a lot of experience by then....