“Amid the turmoil, my mother felt forced to take one child and leave another,” Ada Ferrer writes. “None of it—not the revolution, not our migration, not [my half brother’s] abandonment—was ever meant to be permanent.”
I can explain how, amid the turmoil, my mother felt forced to take one child and leave another. She did not think a Communist revolution on an island less than a hundred miles from the U.S. could possibly survive. She assumed that we would return to Cuba before too long. She told herself that, once she was gone, Poly’s father would relent and her son would join us. None of it—not the revolution, not our migration, not Poly’s abandonment—was ever meant to be permanent.
I remember Poly’s letters, the way his “A”s looked like triangles. I usually responded on Saturdays, as I watched cartoons about English prepositions or how bills became laws. We lived in West New York, New Jersey, a working-class Cuban enclave across the Hudson River from midtown Manhattan, where my father had continued to work as a cook. My mother worked in a factory five blocks from our apartment, sewing collars onto winter coats.
The operation quickly took on its own momentum. Thousands of Cuban-Americans mobilized, hiring so many vessels that, as one observer remarked, had they lined up one behind the other, people would have been able to walk from Mariel to Key West. Castro insisted that those leaving were “antisocial elements.” He routinely called them “scum.” Soon, disgruntled Cubans embraced the label, and began appearing at local police stations, asking to be cleared for departure.
Poly told us that he arrived in Key West on May 11, 1980—Mother’s Day. It was one of the busiest days of the boatlift, with more than forty-five hundred Cubans landing in Florida; one boat alone, the America, might have carried as many as seven hundred people. Sentiment in the U.S. was turning. Theran a front-page article titled “Retarded People and Criminals Are Included in Cuban Exodus.
The summer between my freshman and sophomore years, my parents took us on vacation to Miami. We stayed at the Bancroft, a modest hotel in South Beach where most of the guests were Cuban. Relatives came to see us, and Poly sat at the pool drinking beer with old friends from Havana, other Mariel arrivals. My sister and I spent our days swimming and tanning, our evenings playing Ping-Pong and pinball. One night, Poly slapped my sister after he thought he saw her flirting with a boy.
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