Black Cuban, Black American

A Memoir

Grillo, Evelio

• Publisher: Arte Público Press
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781611926064
• Topic: Sozialwissenschaften
• Subtopic: Hispanisch-Amerikanische Studien

Arte Público Press's landmark series "Recovering the U. S. Hispanic Literary Heritage" has traditionally been devoted to long-lost literary and historic works by Hispanics of decades and even centuries past. The publication of Black Cuban, Black American marks the first original work by a living author to become part of this notable series. The reason for this unprecedented honor can be seen in Evelio Grillo's path-breaking life.

Ybor City, Florida, was once a thriving factory town populated by cigar-makers, mostly emigrants from Cuba. Growing up in Ybor City (now Tampa) in the early twentieth century, the young Evelio experienced the complexities—and sometimes difficulties—of life in a horse-and-buggy society demarcated by both racial and linguistic lines: Life was different depending on whether you were Spanish- or English-speaking, a white or black Cuban, a Cuban American or a native-born U.S. citizen, well-off or poor. (Even U. S.-born blacks did not always get along with their Hispanic counterparts.) Grillo captures the joys and sorrows of this unique world that slowly faded away as he grew to adulthood during the Depression. He then tells of his eye-opening experiences as a soldier in an all-black unit serving in the China-Burma-India theater of operations during World War II. Booklovers may have read of Ybor City in the novels of writer Jose Yglesias, but never before has the colorful locale been portrayed from this perspective.

PART ONE

Ybor City

CHAPTER 1

Father

IT HAD TO BE A SATURDAY AFTERNOON because of the way the house smelled, the way that it felt, and the way that it sounded. I had been home all day, rather than at Mrs. Byna’s, the neighbor who took care of me during the week while my mother worked.

Saturday afternoon was special. Mother would be home from work early, the house would be immaculately clean, and the wonderful smells of a more than ordinary meal would fill the air.

Perhaps we would have biftec a la palomilla—thin slices of sirloin seared rapidly in olive oil and smothered with onions—rice, cold boiled string beans, and a simply magnificent salad of lettuce, vine-ripened tomatoes from our own garden, and large avocado slices.

Framed in the doorway between the kitchen and the back porch, Mother and Father spoke intensely to each other. From the floor of the back porch, where I was playing with a new toy, I heard him ask in disbelief: “Haven’t you packed his clothes yet?”

“I didn’t know he was going,” she replied, her face filled with apprehension.

Quickly and sternly he came back: “Either Chuchi goes or I won’t go.”

I remember vividly my mother’s sad, resigned face as she turned from my father and walked dejectedly back into the kitchen, all hope of keeping me with her now gone.

The puzzle came together years later: “Chuchi” was my father’s nickname for me. He was going to Cuba, to attempt to recover from tuberculosis, which he had contracted, and I was to accompany him.

Only the vaguest impressions of my father exist in my mind. My mother kept absolutely silent about him. She must have been very angry with him, for I do not remember her mentioning his name to us children, not even once.

Scratching around for information, I have learned that he had been drinking quite heavily and that he gambled. While reluctant to soil his memory, an aunt has hinted obliquely that he was a womanizer.

My earliest memory of myself involved my father, whose vague form I can recall, barely. But I have very vivid memories of his presence. I would sit on the front porch, waiting for him to come home from work. When the trolley car came past our house, I would run excitedly to the corner to greet him as he got off, at the end of the block. That’s all, a vignette that plays in my mind over and over.

The very next morning my father and I took the ship for Cuba, the S. S. Havana. That ship and its sister vessel, the S. S. Cuba, handled the lively trade between Havana and Tampa. I believe my father carried me in his arms up the gangplank. Then he put me down, took my hand, and walked me to our room on board.

I felt very special, my hand in his, looking across the infinite distance between his shoulder and my face. It was the last time our father saw his family, except for me. I remember little of the trip over, only the departure, and that only vaguely.

We went to live at the home of one of my father’s sisters. Again, without remembering his face, I remember walks with him, especially one walk, when we returned with a bag of large grapefruit that he had bought for me.

My memory jumps to a very dramatic scene. Sitting in a rocking chair, father hemorrhaged torrents of blood from his mouth into a large white enamelware bucket. My aunts and uncles tended to him with cloths and with expressions of love and concern. One aunt stayed with me, keeping me a distance from the tragedy, but letting me see the entire development, although I did not see my father die.

My next memory is of the wake and the funeral. The mourners came in little horse-and-buggy rigs, to attend what I later concluded was the wake. The first casket was refrigerated. Water slowly dripped into a bucket placed under it, to catch the melting ice. I never looked into the casket, or, if I did, I don’t recall the experience. The mechanics of the melting ice and of the water dripping into the bucket under the coffin absorbed all of my fascinated attention.

In the morning, some men came and took the refrigerated coffin out of the house. They must have switched the remains to the coffin in which my father was to be buried. They brought that more elegant coffin into the house, placing it exactly where the refrigerated coffin had been. I recall a lot of people dressed in black milling about the house.

The aunt who was taking care of me carried me out to the balcony, and held her arms around me as the funeral cortege formed. A sea of horses and buggies, and one very ornate vehicle, the hearse, crowded the street. Then, slowly, the cortege moved out. I watched, fascinated. I had no idea that I was saying goodbye to my father.

I recall little that followed until some time later, when I was on a ship on my way back to Tampa and my mother. A friend of the family named Nicolás took me back. I remember looking at the sea through the railings, and the magnificent hat that my aunts must have bought for me. It was broad-brimmed, a pretty ribbon cascading down its side, just the thing to draw admiring comments from older people giving attention to a very vain little boy.

How and when we landed are all lost memories, for I was not yet four.

CHAPTER 2

Black Cubans and White Cubans

WHILE MAINTAINING ITS IDENTITY as a distinctly Latin community, Ybor City, my birthplace, lies completely within the city of Tampa, Florida, which governs it. Culturally, socially, and economically a small city within a city, its residents were a mixture of white Cubans, Italians, black Cubans, black Americans, Spaniards, and a not very visible number of white Americans of European extraction.

During the years between roughly 1880 and 1930, Tampa flourished at the center of the worldwide cigar-making industry. A great portion of the industry was in Ybor City, giving Tampa the identity of “Cigar-Making Capital of the World.”

Ybor City (pronounced EE-bor) took its name from Vicente Martínez Ybor, one of the earliest manufacturers to build a cigar factory in Tampa.

My parents were part of the large migration of Cubans who settled in Ybor City seeking jobs in the fledgling industry. My father, Antonio, worked as a “finisher,” a very prestigious job involving the final sculpture of the cigars into identical shapes. My mother, Amparo, worked as a bonchera, a “buncher.” She gathered the inner leaves of the cigars into the long, rounded shapes to which the finishers applied the final, prime, wrapping leaf.

While the preferred tobacco for cigars still grew in Cuba, the making of a very large proportion of the finished product, the actual cigars, took place in the United States. This strategy yielded enormous economic benefits. The machinery and materials needed to make and package the cigars abounded in the United States. Tariffs on the finished product presented no costs if it was manufactured in the United States.

Moreover, the United States provided the primary market for cigars. Enough trade moved back and forth between Tampa and Havana to support two round trips a week by the shipping line which served the ports.

Black Cubans and white Cubans migrated by the thousands from Cuba. Legal separation of the two races did not prevail in Cuba as it did in United States, but discrimination along racial lines and separation along social and economic lines did exist. In Cuba, affluent black Cubans moved within the society of the affluent. “Es Negro, pero es Negro blanco” (He is a black man, but he is a white black man) was an expression I heard often.

Separation of the races by residence was not practiced, although separation by economic class made for de facto segregation by race, since discrimination kept black Cubans in a second-class position, economically. Blacks generally did not live in luxurious houses.

However, commercial and governmental facilities were accessible to all in Cuba. Blacks attended, taught, and served as administrators in the schools. Blacks used the hospitals and clinics without limitation, and served as staff members in most capacities. Blacks also served in the military without restrictions. The general who had led the Cuban revolution against Spain was a dark mulatto, Antonio Maceo. As Cubans entered Ybor City, however, they were sorted out. Black Cubans went to a neighborhood, immediately east of Nebraska Avenue, inhabited by black Americans and a scattering of poor whites. White Cubans had a much wider range of choices, though most of them chose to remain in Ybor City. A scattering went to live in West Tampa, across the river, in a sparsely developed section of the larger city.

Nebraska Avenue formed the western boundary of Ybor City. Twenty-second Street formed, roughly, the eastern boundary. The avenues ran east and west, with Sixteeneth Avenue forming a northern limit, and Sixth Avenue a southern one. From Sixteenth Avenue to roughly Twenty-second Avenue were scattered more affluent white Cubans and Italians and Spaniards, some living a semi-rural life, with a cow or two, goats, and chickens.

Black Cubans worked in the factories alongside white Cubans. While my mother formed interracial friendships at work, few, if any, such friendships extended to visits in the homes. Nor did whites and blacks attend church together. Black Cubans had their own mutual benefit society and social center, La Union Martí-Maceo.

Black Cubans and white Cubans worked side by side in the cigar-making industry. But I know of only one black Cuban who won a status above that of worker: Facundo Accion, who achieved the highly honored position of lector, the reader.

Black Cubans and white Cubans interacted in the streets and in public places such as grocery stores, produce stands, meat markets, and in the corner saloon, where men who were not at work gathered in the afternoon to watch the throwing of the bolita bag, and the selection of the day’s number, which paid lucky ticket holders five dollars for every penny waged.

Bolita was Tampa’s version of the numbers game. A hundred small balls, each numbered, were placed in a cloth bag. A small crowd of men gathered to watch the proceedings. At the appointed hour, the bag, carefully sewn tight under the watchful eyes of the onlookers, was thrown randomly across the room to an onlooker. He, in turn, would gather one ball carefully into his hand, through the cloth of the bag, and let the other ninety-nine dangle below. One person tied a string around the lucky numbered ball and cut that section of the cloth away.

Finally, the person holding the lucky ball showed it and announced the number. Within minutes, the word rushed throughout the town, so the lucky ones could celebrate their good fortune and the unlucky ones could bemoan their fate. That is why the populace described the process as “throwing the number.” That this racket enjoyed “protection” from the authorities appeared obvious. No attempt was made to hide the ceremony, held daily at the same time and in the same place.

Blacks and whites visited back and forth at wakes and funerals. A white Cuban or two might show up at the spiritualist seances to which my mother dragged me weekly. Blacks and whites belonged to the same grocery cooperative and to the same pre-pay health clinic.

My mother also took me to one meeting of a labor union, which held its meetings and celebrations in a modern labor temple. As a child, I attended a meeting held in connection with a strike or the threat of one.

Then there was baseball, to which the entire town paid homage, under the leadership of Al Lopez, legendary catcher of the Brooklyn Dodgers and a native of Ybor City. He spent much of his winters in Tampa basking in the glory of his fame.

During the World Series the local Spanish-language daily newspaper provided an elaborate mechanical display which represented the action from wherever the games were being played. Shiny metal balls represented the players, and the game could be followed as the balls moved around a magnetic board representing the playing field.

It seemed that the entirety of Ybor City gathered in front of the mesmerizing display, cheering or booing depending upon the course of the game. This was one activity I could enjoy without special permission from Mother. Many elder male friends of the family would keep watchful eyes on me. That kept her from worrying.

That was the extent of the limited association between black Cubans and white Cubans. I don’t remember playing with a single white Cuban child. I remember the faces of only three white Cuban men who came to the house, two as music teachers and one as a stout, jolly Sunday boarder whom we called “Tío Pío.”

With the exception of the local corner bar, which they could patronize, black Cubans did not share recreational activities with white Cubans. They were not hired as clerks, or even as menial help in the restaurants. There were no black Cuban entrepreneurs except for a tailor, a barber, and a very successful dry-cleaning establishment.

In the main, black Cubans and white Cubans lived apart from one another in Ybor City.

CHAPTER 3

Black Cubans and Black Americans

IN THE GHETTO WITHIN A GHETTO located in the southwest corner of Ybor City, formed by Nebraska and Sixth Avenues, black Cubans and black Americans lived together. Black Cubans formed the larger group in this neighborhood. Neither group held local political power. A very few men developed limited power by extracting favors from the ruling groups of white Americans, and, later, of Italian Americans.

Most black Americans lived west of Nebraska Avenue. No black Cubans lived there. This large section of the city above Nebraska housed solidly black American neighborhoods. They could be distinguished along social and economic lines. The closer to Ybor City, the poorer they were. The farther west one walked, towards the main shopping and commercial streets of Tampa, the more substantial the homes became and the more elaborate became the landscaping.

Public elementary schools functioned in this section, as did large black churches and funeral parlors. The Central Life Insurance Company, an important enterprise in the black American community, had its operations there also.

Central Avenue provided the bustling commercial center. Along its seven-or eight-block stretch were found the offices of the local dentist and the local doctor; a large drugstore (complete with modern fountain); the storefront “colored” branch of the public library; a shoemaker; two barber shops; several restaurants; real estate offices; the town’s largest saloon, Moon’s; the “colored” movie house, the Central Theater; and various other small businesses.

No single broad statement can encompass the relationship between black Cubans and their American counterparts. At the time of my birth, my mother’s family had lived in the United States twenty-five or more years. Mother had attended elementary school in Jacksonville, Florida. This still made us rank newcomers, for black Americans traced their ancestry back for more than three centuries in the United States.

Our parents all came from Cuba and spoke little or no English. Differences in language and culture became formidable impediments to full integration of black Cubans within the black American community.

While black Cuban children became fluent in English, our parents could not navigate the difficult waters of language and culture. Within our homes and in the Cuban community, we spoke Spanish. These factors lent an edgy quality to the interactions between black Cubans and black Americans. This touchiness arose as a natural consequence of the vastly different experiences which the slave ancestors of Cuban blacks had, as compared to the slave experiences of the ancestors of American blacks.

In Spanish-speaking countries, slaves, though subjugated and exploited, were, I believe, taught to read, write, and do arithmetic. The Spanish colonizers generally did not bring their women with them. They came seeking their fortunes, hoping to return in honor to Spain. The colonizers of the United States on the other hand, brought their women with them.

The Spanish took the only women available to them, slaves, as their concubines, and in a large number of cases, as their wives. They lived openly with their black mates. One of the vestiges of this is the custom, at least among Cuban men, of calling the woman with whom they are intimate mi negrita,“my little black one,” be she black or white. It is a term of endearment which is considered a special part of love-making.

Laws or custom forbade the teaching of reading and writing to U.S. slaves. Establishing families was a limited option, for slaves coul...