The Rev. Gilbert Walker came to Cuba to connect with his family’s past, but he found out much more about his ancestors’ lives and secrets than he could have ever imagined.
Padre Gilberto, as his parishioners call the thin, seemingly always smiling pastor, is one of only three American Catholic priests living in Cuba, church officials said.
He has been here for 12 years, and other than Black Panthers who skyjacked planes to Cuba in the 1960s, there are likely few other Americans who have lived on the island so long.
Walker grew up in Gulfport, Mississippi, and dreamed of one day visiting Cuba, off limits to most Americans since the Cuban revolution took power in 1959.
“I became interested in Cuba hearing the stories of my great-grandparents and my grandmother. She lived until she was about 11 or 12 on a small sugar plantation in Chaparra, in eastern Cuba,” Walker told CNN in an interview from the small church he oversees in Old Havana.
A member of the Vincentians order of missionaries, Walker finally got his wish. Six months after moving to Cuba, he journeyed to the remote town where his great-grandparents had lived for more than 30 years.
The Chaparra in his family photos looks like an American town transplanted to Cuba.
The men, including Walker’s great-grandfather Ralph Wood, all wear suits and ties, an act of defiance against Cuba’s tropical heat.
In one photo, Wood’s breast pocket is stuffed with Cuban cigars.
“He smoked them every day,” Walker said.
Most of the houses in the town, which was populated with American employees of a U.S. sugar company, had several floors and wraparound porches.
There was even a country club.
Little of that luxury was left when Walker visited the town, long after after his great-grandparents left to move back to the U.S. in the 1950s.
A few years later, all U.S. property, including the American sugar companies, had been expropriated, and all Americans living in Cuba were forced by the new revolutionary government to leave the island.
Even the name of the town had changed; Chaparra was now Jesús Menéndez, in honor of a slain union leader considered to be a martyr by the revolution.
Walker went to the town museum to ask if anyone remembered his family.
“One man said my great-grandfather liked to gamble, but he was fair to his workers,” Walker said.
Then Walker asked a question that surprised even him: Had his great-grandfather had any children outside his marriage?
“It was a strong intuition. The only explanation that I have is that God gave me this intuition that I have family here,” he said.
The answer was yes. He and a local woman had a daughter named Amparo.
Walker’s great-grandfather Ralph saw his daughter Amparo only a few times. She and her mother were left behind in Cuba when he returned to the U.S. with his American family for good.
Town residents told Walker that they had telephoned Amparo’s son, Rafael, and a few minutes later the American priest was face to face with a member of the Cuban family he never knew he had.
“I didn’t know what to expect, what he’d be like,” Walker said. “I didn’t know if he would be welcoming. It was absolutely unknown to me, and it was absolutely wonderful. He and I welled up as we met each other.”
His cousin Rafael Rabade Guntín had given up hope of ever meeting his family in the U.S.
“I always say he had me at a disadvantage,” Rafael said. “He looked for his family. He could find them or not. He knew he could find them. I didn’t hope for anything. It was a bigger surprise for me.”
From that first meeting, the men stayed in touch and now see each other or talk at least once a week.
Walker said he hopes that with the restoration of relations between the U.S. and Cuba, more families divided by the country’s political differences will once again be reunited.
“It’s been a real blessing for me, and I think for my family here, too, and for my family in the States,” Walker said. “To know that there’s a connection. That time and distance haven’t erased that connection. It’s still there. The same blood flows through our veins.”