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June 20, 2006

Reminiscing about the past: "Only fools who do not heed the lessons of History, are doomed to repeat it!"

Topics: Human Interest

Reminiscing about my Father last Father's day, helped dust off many cherished memories from my childhood, that though precious, lay sitting gathering dust on the shelves of my mind; a treasure, which though revered, had lain undisturbed for years in my version of our obsessive preoccupation with the present.

From it, a myriad images flooded the halls of my memory with long forgotten sights, smells, and sounds, from a world that is mostly no more.

I remembered how as a child in Cuba my Father would take me to visit my grandparents, his parents, every other day. I recalled walking to the upstairs apartment where they lived on Rabi # 54 in El Cerro, Habana, a once Colonial Mansion that had been converted by its owner into apartments, and my grandparent's apartment with the colonnaded balcony that ran the whole length of the apartment, facing the street, upon which I so many times played with my cousin Rolandito.

The first thing that grabbed your senses upon approaching my grandparent's home was the aroma of soup cooking; every day my grandmother Ofelia would cook soup. Wether it be made with chicken, meat, or vegetable, it was a custom she followed religiously every day; a throwback to the poverty days of the "Great Depression" when often all she had to feed her five children was soup made with whatever scraps she could muster.

The other unforgettable aroma that wafted from her kitchen down to any visitor was the omnipresent sweet aroma of dark, rich Cuban 'expresso' coffee being brewed in the "tetera."

As I would walk in I would be greeted by my grandmother with a thousand kisses, and immediately she would go into the refrigerator to bring out and spoil me with one of the many delicious desserts and sweets she made.

She would call out to my grandfather Jeronimo, and tell him exuberantly that my father and I had come to visit; even though we had just also done so the day before.

My grandfather, who was a very self-conscious and proud man, would dress up in his finest even to come out greet us. I remember how he would dress up in one of his 'Guayabera' shirts, which my grandmother always starched and pressed using corn starch she cooked herself (I loved the sweet smell of the corn starch cooking and often wondered as a child if I couldn't eat it - it smelled delicious!), and her old flat iron she placed on coals (my Father often rebuked her about why she didn't use the electric iron he'd just bought her at Sears which she kept new, untouched in its box, in her closet. She would reply that she and her old coal iron where "old friends"). My grandfather liked his shirts so rigidly starched, that I swear you could have driven an 8d nail with his collar or his cuffs into a 2 x 4; My grandmother Ofelia unfailingly obliged him.

Grandfather Jeronimo would come out and immediately he would start horsing around with me. I would tease him because of his name, and call him "el Indio Jeronimo" and he would chase me all around the colonnaded balcony threatening to "scalp" me if he caught me, which he eventually did tickling me to death to my delight - in my mind another hapless cowboy casualty fallen victim to the old Chief!

Such recollections bring vividly to my mind a thousand other memories, some of which are lessons we would all do well to heed in these troubling times here in America!

Take for instance to what extremes politically motivated "Affirmative Action" can be taken to, and the role our schools and government should or should not take in the rearing of our children!!!

One of the first laws arbitrarily passed by the "Revolution" upon coming to power, was that negating a parent's unalienable right of parenthood over his children! Castro's convenient cynical use of "said right," which he abrogated from the Cuban people, to demand Elian Gonzalez's return to his father with the help of his buddy Clinton and the deviant Janet Reno (who I will not properly appellate to here, in order not to use, out of respect, profanity in a piece where my grandparents and Father are so eminently portrayed) not withstanding.

I remember in third grade in Cuba, being taught by the Marxist teacher in her "Combat Fatigues" how the "Revolution was our father and mother, and that we owed allegiance to the 'Revolution' not our parents" prompting us to turn them in if we saw them involved in any 'Anti-Revolutionary Activities' (such as buying food in the black market in order to feed us)! Yeah, right!!! Anyone who read my post about my Father on Father's Day knows how I felt about him to buy any of this crap - even as an innocent child!

I remember, even though only six years old, standing up to the teacher in her "Fatigues," and defending my Father over the Revolution, for which I was summarily taken to the Principal's Office and my Father hastily summoned on the phone. After giving much obeisance to the Principal to avoid any follow-up investigations or being detained for "indoctrinating his child with aberrant anti-Revolutionary behavior," I remember my father walking me home afterwards, and saying: "Son, I am very proud of you, but you must be careful, or you'll get us all killed!"

In a like manner, after the triumph of the Revolution in Cuba in 1959, the social upheaval created by the "Revolutionary Affirmative Action," similar to that the Democrats and Welfare Pimps here in America are so "enamored" with, was rampant.

The endless anecdotes of a thousand instances, which helped bring the Cuba that once thrived: "The Pearl of the Antilles" and the "Pride of Spain," down to the level of one of the most indigent, poorest "Third World" countries in the world presently (only rivaled in its abject poverty and the hopelessness of its people by Haiti, of all places) are legion!

One of such anecdotes of Castro's "Revolutionary" blundering and wastefulness is about a world renowned Cuban brain surgeon, who at the beginning of the Revolution, under penalty of being jailed for years if he did not do so, was made to scrub the floors, as a lowly janitor, of the Hospital where once as a surgeon he had operated on patients coming to see him from all over the world!

Posted by Althor at June 20, 2006 8:19 PM

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