July/August 2019 7
I
will always remember the first time I was
challenged to plunge into something that
fascinated and scared me simply because
I had never seen or felt it before. It was
snow. In mid-November, five months shy of my
seventh birthday, I arrived in the windy city of
Chicago from Havana, Cuba. Little did I know
that in the next several weeks the balmy warm
shores of my childhood would give way to the
frigid shores of Lake Michigan. Near Christmas,
I woke up to a winter wonderland. It had to be
magic! I was frozen in awe.
Venturing outside the warm hall-
ways of our apartment, I was so
bundled up I could hardly breathe,
let alone walk. I wasn’t used to
wearing a woolen hat and scarf,
thick gloves, heavy boots and wa-
ter-resistant pants.Wow, imagine
that! Clothes that don’t get wet! I
stepped onto the snow very softly.
So white and beautiful, I did not
want to disturb it. Everyone said this was simply
frozen water. So there I stood, looking at a knee-
deep glistening horizon. My grandmother took me
by the hand and coaxed me forward. She encour-
aged, “Run, Ibis, play in the snow! Why are you
walking so slowly? Don’t be afraid.” I explained,
“I’m not afraid. I don’t want to step on the fish.”
I seem to have also been a fish in many oceans
most of my life. Stripped of country because of
the Castro regime, I came to the U.S. with an
eighteen-month-old brother on my lap. We joined
one aunt, two uncles, my grandmother and several
other children, all squeezed together in a two-bed-
room apartment in Rogers Park, a northern lake-
front town in Chicago.
The challenges that I’ve faced have been hand-
ed to me either by circumstance or by my own
volition. My father always said that he was glad he
got me out of Cuba at such a young age because,
given my revolutionary spirit, who knows what
side I would have ended up on. I rolled my eyes
every time he said this!
Incredible love got us through those tough, tran-
sitional years. The more family that joined us the
more help we had in our quest for freedom and
safety. We were superglued together! Every Sun-
day, no matter what, we gathered
to play music, games, and celebrate
just about anything and everyone.
The elders played cards and talked
about the old country—the one
they thought they might eventual-
ly return to but never did.
Between family, friends and a
cast of boyfriends and girlfriends,
over twenty people gathered every
Sunday. The dynamics were not always sane. I tried
to warn potential prospects, mine and others.
My family generated all the drama of a rather
loud hardcore Latin novel, with ghosts from past
hauntings in every conversation. Isabel Allende
would have enough material for ten novels on any
given Sunday.
Through it all, there was a will to restore a sense
of belonging, a sense of self, an expectation of
hope. That was the determination of our elders,
some who had lost everything half-way through
life, with so frighteningly few years left to recoup.
Some were closer to the end than others. This
affected my generation greatly, shaking it to its
core, creating a sense of urgency, an ambitious
revolutionary spirit eager for conquest.We were
Lives can be rebuilt
through hard work,
hope and an abundance
of love, even amidst
heartache, lack and want.
It was a complex dish
of circumstances.
Our plates were full.
