The first time Juan tried to escape Cuba was in 1966. He was 17 years old.
One of nine siblings, Juan had always been a child who liked to wander. He would leave the house in Matanzas, southeast of Havana, for hours without telling his parents and then return for dinner. Once, when he was 12, Juan went out in the morning to explore the forested mountains near his home. By the time he crossed the Yumurà Valley, it was getting too dark to turn back.
“You couldn’t see anything at night,” Juan said, “so I found stacks of hay in an open field and went to sleep. When I got home the next day, my parents were furious. Mami was crying. She had called the cops.”
It’s hard to pinpoint the start of his wanderlust. Maybe it was the lure of Cuba’s landscape, or Don Quixote’s adventures, which he loved to read. Either way, though Cuban policy forbade it, he was determined to escape.
“I wanted to travel. I didn’t know where to, but that didn’t matter so long as I was in a place that gave me the option to get up and go. I was a dreamer.”
After weeks of observing docking patterns, he snuck aboard a cargo ship and crawled into a life-vest bin not much bigger than him. The boat set sail from Matanzas Bay, but it made a stop in Havana, where he was caught by the Cuban military during final inspections and sentenced to six months labor in Turiguanó, an island just off the mainland.
Four years later, Juan tried again. He hid in a four-foot space, nestled among sacks of sugar, on a boat bound for Jamaica.
“The reasons were different the second time around,” he said. “By that point, I was forced to cut my hair, and I couldn’t listen to the Beatles. Then, I was expelled from the University for writing ‘seditious’ poems. I had to leave.”
Juan is my father, and while he acted on his dreams of leaving Cuba 49 years ago, I have dreams of returning. Born in America to two Cuban parents, and aware of the divide between countries, I began to straddle seemingly opposing worlds because I saw myself in both cultures. I never felt American enough for the Americans or Cuban enough for the Cubans.
One of the things which unites those two worlds is a passion for baseball, which has shaped my life. And now, after decades of enmity, the United States and Cuba are taking tentative steps to reconcile. That gives me hope that I’ll be able to regularly visit there, connect with my roots and affirm my identity.
Falling in love
Before my father tried to escape the first time, he enrolled at the University of Havana as a biology student. One of his professors was a Dutch woman named Hedda Schmidt, whose father had been a diplomat for the United Nations. In Hedda’s youth, she had been sent by the Nazis to Ravensbrück concentration camp. The experience made Hedda dedicated to social change. She moved to the U.S. shortly after World War II, and then to Cuba in 1962.
Juan had a crush on Hedda, but she was 23 years older, and the feeling wasn’t reciprocated. He was persistent, though, and once, during the school year, he sent her a basket with fruits, flowers and a letter that included a poem.
Hedda appreciated the gesture, but didn’t think much of it — or him — until he stopped attending class. When she asked her students if they knew of Juan’s whereabouts, PepÃn, Juan’s best friend, informed her how Juan had tried to escape and wound up in Turiguanó.
“He almost got away with it,” said Hedda decades later in her unfinished memoir. “The Cuban military came to check the boat and all of a sudden a comandante yelled, ‘Hey, what are you doing here!’ Juan started this half English stuff, and almost convinced the soldier that he was Greek — like the sailors of the ship. But the guards changed their mind.”
When Hedda heard the story from PepÃn, she began to think of Juan not as a boy with a crush on his professor, but as someone with courage and vision.
“I didn’t believe that Juan was seventeen. I just couldn’t believe that. He had ideas at his age that I had just gotten to at forty!”
While he was imprisoned in Turiguanó, they started a correspondence, and after six months, when he returned to Havana, they began to fall in love.
My father’s excellent grades allowed him to re-enroll at the university. Instead of studying biology, he switched to literature. Hedda remembered inviting him, a few months after his release, to a party she was hosting.
“He was very respectful,” she said, “Doctora and all that. And I said, hey, nothing of Doctora… I’m Hedda and you are Juan, and that’s it.”
Well into their relationship, one of the department heads of the university summoned Hedda to her office. ‘We would like to know when you’re going to get married?’ the director asked. ‘You’re going with this young man and we would like it to be official, or we would like for you not to have this relationship anymore.’
At the time, Juan was 20 and considered underage by Cuban law; he needed permission from his mother, Herminia, to marry. She drove two hours from Matanzas to Havana to serve as the witness. Hedda said, “I’ll never forget it, all these people. I had friends there, we had a little car…we were all in this little car going to the notary.”
The trouble with poetry
As a newlywed, Juan continued his studies at the university, voraciously reading and writing. Hedda continued to teach, and write poetry and short stories. They shared their work with each other, and with mutual friends; their themes were love and absence, and politics — so much of their creative energy was inspired by this moment in Cuban history.
Every month, the university selected the best students from the literature program to present their poetry. My father’s poems were hung on the board in front of the building.
On the first day up, students, professors, and political organizations looked at the poetry and wrote thoughtful comments. The next day, Juan received a call from a friend who informed him that all his poems had been taken down.
For a brief moment they joked about how a student must have liked it so much, he or she stole them. Then they realized that the removal of the poems probably signified something much more serious. Later that day, my father received a call from a school administrator, summoning him to his office. Someone had complained that his poems were counterrevolutionary.
The man questioned him; he asked him to decode lines, stanzas, and titles — to explain the metaphors, to reveal the subtext. My father said that poems couldn’t be summarized.
The administrator said that the poems were going under further review, but that he was no longer allowed to attend university. Frustrated and unable to finish his studies, and with very little to look forward to, my father tried to escape again.
Swimming away
Hedda had many friends in Cuba. One of these friends connected her to a merchant sailor who had helped people escape. They arranged a meeting at Hedda’s house in the middle of the night, and decided that Juan would swim to the boat on the day it was scheduled to leave.
Juan scouted the port to get an idea of the distance he’d have to swim, and Hedda accompanied him so the military would be less suspicious. A couple of times, when guards passed, Hedda and my father embraced like lovers on a stroll.
The day came and my father arrived at the Port of Mariel, the same port where over 100,000 Cubans would make their journey to Florida 10 years later, in 1980. Before entering the port, he had to pass guards. If you were by yourself they would ask for identification, but my father entered with the sailors from the boat and, since there were many of them, the guards didn’t stop them.
From the port to the pier, however, it was strictly guarded. The plan was that after they entered the port, my father would veer off, sneak into the bay, and swim past the guards and a few meters beyond the pier where the ship was anchored.
“I was sure I’d be caught because when I started to swim, the water around me lit up from bioluminescence. I looked up at the guards; they had rifles by their hips, and they were talking and laughing as they sat and played dominos. All they had to do was look down.”
He made it past the guards, though, and when he reached the boat, the sailors dropped a rope and he climbed safely aboard. When he was taken to the hold of the ship a couple of sailors rearranged the sacks of sugar to create a small space.
They crammed him in, placed plywood over him, and stacked more sacks on top — the sailors had to make sure that when the military poked around with their harpoon-like sticks, they’d stab only sugar. The space was no more than 4 feet in length and width, and he spent hours in hiding until night, when the boat reached the coast of Jamaica and he swam a few hundred feet to shore.
San Francisco reunion
After my father’s escape in 1970, Hedda remained in Cuba. Both she and my father knew that once word got out about the escape, she would be questioned. In preparation for this, he wrote a letter asking Hedda for forgiveness for leaving her, even though, of course, Hedda knew what was happening. The day my father left, she put the letter in the mail, addressed to herself.
They pulled it off, and almost a year later, Hedda flew to Miami to reunite with my father, who, after awaiting his visa to no avail, snuck onto a cruise ship and casually walked into the city. Eventually, they settled in San Francisco, where Hedda went to school and became a psychiatric technician and Juan worked as a trolley driver. But after eight years, they divorced.
“We just grew apart,” my father said. “I wanted to travel and live with some of the indigenous people in Central and South America, and she wanted to stay in San Francisco.”
It was then that Juan left to continue to explore the world, further fulfilling the desire that had propelled him to leave his family in the first place.
Along with the apologetic letter Hedda sent to herself the day my father escaped was another letter she put in the mail, written from my father to his mother. It expressed similar sentiments, only this one was not staged.
Decades later, he’d reunite with his mother and some of his brothers and sisters. But some of his family he’d never see again, including his father, Alberto, who died the year before Juan returned to Cuba, 31 years later, in 2001.
My baseball identity
That year, a 13-year-old boy gained a deeper love of baseball. On a USA Junior National Team visiting Cuba to play local squads in a series of towns, I saw how the vibe was different. Fans clinked together pots and pans to cheer on their teams. Men shuffled their feet down the first and third base line, scattering chalk with their hands until the foul lines were created. There were also a few men roaming the outfield, cutting grass with machetes.
Parts of life in Cuba seemed harsh. The poverty was apparent in the decrepit buildings. But I felt so close to the land and the people; there was an intimacy with Cuba that I had never felt in any other place — the old man on his lawn chair lost in thought, the handwritten mail, the hugs and kisses given to strangers.
At one point during the trip, some of the Cuban ballplayers noticed “Cardenas” stitched on the back of my jersey, one of two Latino names on the American team.
They joked with me on how my teammates and coaches pronounced my last name incorrectly, emphasizing the “e” in the second syllable rather than the “a” in the first. And when the Cuban broadcaster announced my turn at bat, it sounded as if I were playing for the Cuban team. “That’s how you pronounce your name — Cárdenas,” some of the Cuban players said to me in Spanish.
Five years later, in 2006, the Philadelphia Phillies drafted me in the first round. I played professional baseball for seven years. The majority of players spoke English or Spanish, but not both. I often switched between the languages, relating to my American and Latino teammates. When I’d speak English with the Americans, the Latinos sometimes called me “racista” and when I’d spend time with the Latinos, I was a “traitor.” These crass jokes raised questions about my identity.
In 2010, I enrolled at New York University and balanced the world of sports and academia. The more I studied, the more I thought of my father, who raised me with a passion for language so great that sports seemed irrelevant by comparison. In 2012, after spending most of the year with the Cubs and experiencing unforgettable moments — like hearing 40,000 fans cheer when I broke up a no-hitter in the eighth inning — I quit my career to pursue my even greater love of storytelling.
A painful return
In the fall of 2012, my first semester as a full-time college student, I did an independent study project in Cuba. I went with my father, not only to research, but also to engage with my history.
He took me to San Miguel de Los Baños and told me of the time he climbed onto the aluminum roof of his family’s theater and banged on it with a stick to scare the viewers. We went to the apartment in Havana where he and Hedda lived as newlyweds; the elderly couple that lived there remembered my father because they used to live a few apartments over. When we walked through the university he pointed to the literature building where his poems once hung, and was mostly silent. I looked at his face and saw the bone-deep pain of a past life.
My father had the courage and vision to follow his dreams at such a young age. He eventually moved to Miami, finished school, and became a massage and physical therapist. He found love for a second time with my mother, a nurse in the Transplant and Oncology Center at Jackson Memorial Hospital, and they continue to travel the world.
One of the trips my parents took was to Jamaica. I went along and asked him to tell me stories. I asked him more questions about Hedda — whether she continued to live in San Francisco after they divorced, and whether she was still alive. She had traveled back home to Amsterdam. My father said that she was in the process of writing a memoir, but died from complications of a rare blood illness on October 3, 1994, before she could finish it.
I knew that Hedda had a daughter from a previous marriage, so I located her and she sent me a copy of the unfinished manuscript.
As I read page after page, I thought about the future, how if life moves in an orderly fashion, then my parents will die before me. I imagined living without my father, thinking of the solace that would come from being able to preserve his spirit through storytelling.
As time passes, my father becomes more open about his past. Once, I asked him why he rarely shared his experiences unless I pried them from him. He said that he didn’t think his story was interesting.
“Every Cuban exile has a story like mine,” he said.
It is true that his story is not unlike those of other Cuban exiles; he has had to live knowing that in the one life he was given, much was taken away. But somehow my father has managed to retain compassion for the people who drove him out.
“The Cuban Revolution is not only about the Castro regime, and it can’t be reduced only to the appropriation of land,” he said. “There are over 11 million people on the island today, and the U.S. embargo against Cuba claims to promote human rights. But how can you promote human rights by implementing sanctions that aim to oppress the Cuban people so much that they rebel against their country?”
I agree with my father, and so does the majority of the world; the U.N. General Assembly voted last year — for the 23rd time — in favor of ending the decades-long U.S. embargo against Cuba. Of the 193-nation assembly, 188 voted in favor of the removal of the sanctions. Only the United States and its ally Israel voted against the declaration (three Pacific island nations abstained).
And while there is political rhetoric stirred up on the issue, there is finally real movement toward normalizing relations between the United States and Cuba — the Obama administration took Cuba off the U.S. list of nations that sponsor terrorism, a move that will help the two nations deal with each other in a more friendly fashion.
Stories are complex, and a good one — at least one worth telling — shifts and changes in the light. When I visited Cuba with my father, he brought both his Cuban and U.S. passports. I envy him because he’s able to claim this dual identity publicly and legally.
Like him, I am a dreamer. This May, a few South Florida companies got permission to start a ferry service to Cuba; they’re scheduled to start in September. I look forward to the day when my father and I can, on a whim, hop on a boat to Cuba with our American friends.
