By Scott Brinton
The couple understood the risk they were about to take on their journey from Cuba to the U.S. "When we arrived at the airport, I was so afraid they would take the camera," says Lucila, who has made her home in Bellmore for more than two decades.
It was the fall of 1959. Lucila was 28 and pregnant. If the FariÒases had gotten caught with the cash or the silverware, Cuban border guards would have confiscated their belongings and likely imprisoned them. And during Cuba's communist revolution, jail was no place to be. At the La CabaÒa Fortress, Fidel Castro's fellow revolutionary leader, Argentinean Ernesto "Che" Guevara, rounded up more than 500 officials of the former government and executed them by firing squad.
Castro seized power from Fulgencio Batista in January 1959. At first, many Cubans believed life would be better under Castro, Lucila says. They thought he would bring democracy to Cuba. Castro had, in fact, promised general elections, but never allowed them. "Everyone was thinking that Fidel Castro would benefit the poor people, and many of us were happy about that," Lucila says. "But then it became something different."
A dictator himself, Batista had assassinated many of his political rivals and consorted with American Mafiosi to build sprawling luxury hotel-casinos in Havana, turning the Western Hemisphere's oldest capital into a raucous, freewheeling party city for the jet set -- the Caribbean's answer to Las Vegas. Meanwhile, many average Cubans toiled in abject poverty.
As it turned out, life was different, but no better, under Castro. The communists swept in, took Lucila's parents' dairy farm and forced the family to live in an apartment in the city of Camaguey. The farm went to the new government in what the communists euphemistically called "agrarian reform." Lucila's mother felt such despair that she couldn't return to the family homestead to collect photographs and mementos.
Drophead: Freedom calls
For the newly married Oscar and Lucila, freedom beckoned 90 miles north, in the U.S. And so, as Castro began his tight-fisted reign as Cuba's dictator, the FariÒases left behind all they had known and moved to America.
Oscar had already studied dentistry in the U.S. The FariÒases had also honeymooned in Miami in December 1958, when they first learned that Castro had risen to power.
In 1959, Castro still allowed Cubans with permanent U.S. resident status to leave the country. Oscar had received the status while attending dental school in New York two years earlier. In October 1959, the FariÒases flew to Miami, and with two suitcases of clothes in hand, they made their way to New York.
With $1,000 and two spoons, the couple had money to live for a while -- but not for long. On December 4, 1959, Lucila gave birth to a daughter, Elizabeth. Oscar needed a job -- fast.
Subhed: Finding the American dream
Lucila, who earned her doctorate in Spanish literature from Havana University and spoke basic English, was thumbing through a newspaper when she ran across a classified advertisement -- the Omega watch company needed workers. Lucila told her husband, "If you can polish teeth, why can't you polish watches?"
Oscar was hired. Thus began the FariÒases' arduous climb to the American dream.
To be Cuban in the U.S. during the 1960s was trying at times. Cuba embarrassed President Kennedy and the U.S. in 1961 when the world learned that a CIA-backed band of 1,300 counter-revolutionaries tried to invade the Bay of Pigs and overthrow the Castro regime. The insurgents, armed with U.S. weapons, were quickly routed. Ninety were killed during the fighting; the rest were imprisoned.
In October 1962, the world hurtled toward nuclear war when the Kennedy administration discovered that the Soviet Union had installed atomic warheads in Cuba. U.S. naval ships blockaded the island nation, and Kennedy demanded that the Soviets remove the weapons. After 13 tense and terrifying days, Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev relented and ordered the missiles to be dismantled. Later, Cuban officials said they were fully prepared to fire the weapons on the U.S.
The FariÒases were living in a Woodside, Queens, apartment in 1962. Lucila remembers when she first heard Americans talking about the Cuban missile crisis. She was doing the wash in her building's laundry room. "Everyone was discussing it," Lucila recalls. "They were saying that 'those people' are going to kill us."
Lucila kept silent.
In 1964, she decided that she wanted more for her family, and she sought a job. Armed with her doctorate, she fired off rÈsumÈs to every institution of higher learning in the New York metropolitan area. None except Fordham replied. The Jesuit university hired her to teach Spanish and Spanish literature. Lucila stayed at Fordham until 1998, when she retired as a distinguished professor.
In 1964, the FariÒases moved to Greenwich Village so Lucila could be close to New York University, where she was working toward a second doctorate in Spanish literature. She worried that she would be seen as less than her fellow professors because she had received her first doctorate in Havana, and not an American university.
Those were difficult days for Lucila. She dropped Elizabeth off at school in the early morning. Then she taught a full day at Fordham and took classes at NYU in the evening, only to return home at 9 p.m. A babysitter picked Elizabeth up from school. Lucila earned her doctorate after 15 years of study. In 1980, the FariÒases moved to a quaint split-level in south Bellmore.
Lucila passed her love of reading and learning on to her daughter. "I always saw her with a book," Elizabeth says of her mother.
Keenly intelligent, studious, and fluent in Spanish and English, Elizabeth earned a scholarship to the Marymount School of New York, an elite private high school for the children of diplomats. But she never fit in. Her class comprised 15 students. Fourteen were wealthy. Many did drugs. Elizabeth did not. She was also Cuban, which made her different, and as a teenager, she cringed at the thought of being different. Like her mother had in the laundry room, Elizabeth kept quiet about her Cuban roots.
Then she earned her bachelor's in biology from Barnard College, and she began to embrace her heritage. She went on to earn a doctorate in pathology from Columbia and a medical degree from the Faculte Libre de Medecine in Lille, France. Yes, Elizabeth also speaks French fluently.
Oscar FariÒas died in 1992. Lucila lives a quiet life now, reading and writing, enjoying her family. Elizabeth lives just up the road in Bellmore with her husband, John Rooney, an allergist, and their daughter, Laura, a Grand Avenue Middle School honors student. Elizabeth teaches biology at SUNY-Old Westbury twice a week, which leaves her plenty of time to spend with Laura.
Laura speaks proudly of her Cuban heritage. "I really like to think of myself as Cuban," the seventh-grader says. "Whenever I tell my friends that I'm Cuban, they think it's cool."
Subhead: Visions of Cuba
Lucila knows she will never return to Cuba with Castro in power. But she reminisces often about her homeland. Absorbed for many years in balancing work and family, she had forgotten much of her former life. She mostly cooked American-style fast food -- hamburgers, hot dogs and the like. Now she prepares more Cuban meals, rich with spiced pork and green bananas.
Lucila remembers Cuba's fiery red sunsets and vibrant palm-tree forests teeming with wildlife. She recalls the year-round balmy weather. Most of all, she remembers the people. Strangers were generally friendly to one another, so conversation came easily.
"I am an American," Lucila says. "But I cannot forget Cuba. I cannot forget my roots. It's difficult. As the years pass, you get more nostalgic about your country. You think about your roots, and everything comes back to you."
Comments about this story? SBrinton@liherald.com or (516) 569-4000 ext. 203.
