June 18, 2000

Gunless Cubans

"Two things turned Cuba into a communist country," said Nellie and Lolo, two charming sisters who fled their homeland shortly after Fidel Castro took over in 1959.

"First, we gave up our guns."

"Then, the government issued food ration books."

"After that, all our other oppressions were secondary."

We were having a roast pork, rice and black beans dinner on the balcony of the ladies' Washington, D.C., apartment in 1984. Castro had just released some American prisoners to Rev. Jesse Jackson.

"It was a propaganda stunt both ways," they agreed. Then Nellie and Lolo recalled the first prisoner release four years earlier, and their own escape before that.

An incredible exodus of Cubans voting for freedom with their feet began in April 1980. The Peruvian embassy at Havana said it would accept several hundred people for immigration. Within hours, 10,000 desperate Cubans climbed the embassy walls seeking escape from Fidel's paradise.

Peru complained to the United Nations that it was unable to assimilate this huge number of persons and asked for international help. Overnight a "freedom boat lift" from Florida was organized by Cuban-Americans who had fled to America years earlier in the first mass escape.

A thousand boats - from weekend skiffs to shrimp trawlers - shoved off into the dangerous Gulf Stream to take on cargoes of joyous Cubans waiting at the coastal town of Mariel. U.S. President Jimmy Carter announced he would welcome the Cubans "with open arms and hearts."

For every person taken off the beach at Mariel, two more rushed out of hiding to take his place. Overloaded boasts capsized, drowning hundreds. It made no difference to those waiting their turn.

The U.S. Immigration Service, already inundated with Haitian refugees, tried hopelessly to cope with the human flood. It "assisted" 1,400 boats. No one knows how many more sank en route or made it to Florida shores unnoticed on homemade rafts.  

Castro craftily emptied his prisons and mental hospitals. He forced overloading and bad-weather departures at gunpoint to embarrass the United States. Within six months, 125,000 penniless Cubans poured into Miami. Florida prisons bulged with Castro's violent criminals.

It is estimated that more than a million Cubans refugees have made it to Florida. Thousands more have been intercepted and turned back.

Cubans still attempt the perilous journey. Elian Gonzales, the now famous six-year-old Cuban boy, was found last year drifting on an inner tube in the ocean. His mother and 10 others drowned fleeing communism in a leaky boat. He now waits, reunited with his re-married father, in Washington, D.C., waiting for a court ruling about refugee status.

* * *

It was in similar circumstances that Nellie and Lolo fled their homeland before there were organized escapes.  

"At first, we welcomed Castro," said Nellie who was then the only woman vice-president among Cuban banks.

"We believed him when he said we should surrender our arms because we did not need them now that we were a free country. In our joy at overthrowing Batista (Cuba's prior, corrupt dictator) we rushed to police stations to give up our guns.  

"Today, the Cubans have no weapons to actively resist the much worse corruption of Castro, even if they had the will.

"Very soon after the revolution, Castro confiscated all property and bank accounts. Instantly all Cubans were reduced to the same level of poverty. All were dependent on the favor of communist party bureaucrats," said Nellie.

"Hundreds of corporate and bank executives were summarily executed - 600 by official count, more actually. We never found out the fate of our bank president.

"Everyone was given a book of food stamps, without which you could not even eat. If you didn't behave as the officials wished, they would not issue you a new book. Without a ration book you had to beg food from friends or starve.

"It was a simple, ruthless system that kept everyone in line. You lived from mouth to mouth. You had no time or will to protest the loss of personal property and freedom."

Even so, Nellie - jobless when the banks were confiscated, and with an aged mother to support - had some part in an organized resistance group. She is tight-lipped about her part in the anti-Castro movement to this day. Some of her friends are still under communist control.

However, she recounted the terrifying circumstances that prompted her to flee in the middle of the night.  

"One day, Mr. X (name withheld) told us he had been questioned by the police and might be arrested. He said that if he was picked up we should all start running because he didn't know how long he could withhold our names under torture.

"Very soon after that, Mr. X was arrested. His relatives said later he was burned, cut and had his eyes gouged out," said Nellie with tears in her own eyes.

Nellie feared the worst but wavered whether to flee immediately or wait a few days to try and get some money together.

"I decided to run right of way. However, I had to wait an agonizing six hours until the neighborhood 'watchers' committee' would be sleeping.

"At 3 a.m., I and my 79-year-old mother loaded two suitcases into our car and sped toward the U.S. Naval Base at Guantanamo Bay where Lolo lived with her American husband. I learned later that the police had arrived to arrest me just two hours after we had left.

"We managed to avoid all road blocks except the last one. It was a hundred yards from the main gate at Guantanamo. There, a peasant soldier held us three hours waiting for verification of my claim to be Lolo and an American citizen by right of marriage.

"When the guard turned his back, against the wind to light a cigarette, mother and I ran for the Navy base gate. The U.S. guards opened it a crack. 'Run! Run!' they shouted. We made it. The Cuban guard apparently was afraid to get too close to the Navy guard house."

"I remained on the base for three years as a political refugee working in the pay office. Eventually I learned to operate the Navy's first computer there.

"When Lolo's husband died, our families moved Washington D.C. I got a job as a teller for the Federal Navy Credit Union. It is the type of job I first held in Cuba before I became a bank vice-president. But Lolo and I are free.

"We have made new lives for ourselves, as the latest Cuban prisoners will," stated Nellie. "We are now U.S. citizens who love this country. Lolo's children speak, think and act like typical Americans their ages.

"We do not want to go back, ever, but we are sad for our former country. The best brains of Cuba either fled, as we did, or have been killed or imprisoned. Those there now - especially the children -- have been brainwashed to feel grateful to Castro for the necessities he bestows."

Nellie paused to gaze at the floodlighted U.S. Capitol - a symbol of liberty gleaming in the night.

"If only we hadn't given up our guns!' she murmured - more to herself than to us.  

Author: Lindsey Williams

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[At first we welcomed Castro. We believed him when he said we should surrender our arms because we did not need them now that we were a free country. ]