Below is an excerpt from Lisandro Pérez‘s new book, The House on G Street: A Cuban Family Saga, published by New York University Press.
Lisandro will be one of over 500 authors reading and speaking at the 41st annual Miami Book Fair from November 17-24. Lisandro will be reading at 5 pm Saturday, November 23 in Room 8202. For more info visit MiamiBookFair.com.
I sit once more on the bench directly across from the house on G Street. It’s October 2015. There are many benches on the promenade that runs along the median of the street, but during my visits to Havana, I always sit on this bench, the one facing the house.
I sat here with my father in the year 2000, on the day of his eightieth birthday, during his only trip back to Cuba since he left the island forty years before. We both sat on the bench for a long time, gazing at the house and saying almost nothing. We can’t go in and visit the house, I told him, because it’s a day care center full of toddlers, and we can’t just walk in unannounced. We would not be welcomed. He did not question that, and I was glad he did not. At this distance, from the bench, the house did not look too different from when he lived there for eighteen years, from the time he was ten years old to the moment he left the house in a tuxedo with tails to marry my mother. The house’s exterior still had the reddish-brown color of unpainted stone, just as when it was first built. The tall iron fence that encloses the property was intact, as was the colonnade that frames the front portico. As seen from the bench, one of the columns even mercifully covered the sign near the front door that proclaimed the day care center’s name: Vietnam Heroico.
Had my father gone in, however, the illusion that the years had not passed would have quickly and sadly faded. His heart would have sunk at the deterioration of the interior and the many unattractive ways it had been modified to serve little children. I think he knew that. I knew it because I had been inside during previous trips, on afternoons when I waited on the bench until all the children had left for the day to walk up to the door and give the administrators or the watchman some pretext to go inside and walk around. It did not always work, but a few times it did, and I would enter and try to see as much as I could before I was asked to leave. The sharp contrast between what I was seeing and my memories of how the house looked when I was a child was jarring. But I also felt grateful that the house had not met the fate of other stately Havana homes: abandoned, or turned into a tenement, or perhaps even put out of its misery with a total demolition. The house was minimally maintained, and I felt gratified that it had served to care for generations of children since the days of, well, Heroic Vietnam.
But now, in 2015, everything about the house has changed since my father last saw it fifteen years before. Someone decided that, for the first time in its nearly ninety-year history, the exterior of the house needed to be painted. The dignified terra- cotta look gave way to a bright white with mustard accents. But the worst thing that happened was that Vietnam Heroico was no more. The day care center closed, and the house was shuttered. From the bench, I can see the heavy rusted chain that wraps through and around the iron lattice of the tall double doors of the front entrance, the ends of the chain secured by a huge lock.
I made inquiries when I first learned of the closure. Cuba’s birth rate is so low that perhaps they need fewer day care centers and there is nothing wrong with the house. But no; I found out that the roof leaks everywhere. I was told that the day care closed suddenly after a large chunk of plaster, weakened by water seepage, came crashing down from the kitchen’s ceiling. Fortunately, no one was around when it happened. With each passing day, the house moves inexorably toward abandonment and, eventually, demolition. The idea seems inconceivable.
The closure made me realize the depth of my emotional connection with the house on G Street, a connection I still do not quite understand. I never lived there. When my parents married, they went to live in an apartment in Miramar, a new suburb at the time. I lived in that apartment until 1960, when I was eleven years old and my parents decided we would leave the country. But every Sunday, my parents, my brother, and I would join my uncles and aunts and their children for lunch at the house on G Street. Perhaps it was the sense of belonging that came with those weekly lunches, with uncles and aunts doting over every niece and nephew, and with all those cousins as playmates. The house gave my life a sense of stability, with its spaciousness and solidness. I knew my grandfather had built it and that my father and his siblings had grown up in it. I imagined what it must have been like to live there at the time my father was a child and how the house and its occupants shaped my life in many ways. The house was the physical representation of my family legacy, and once I no longer lived in Cuba, it became in my mind the reference point for everything that had been and would never be again. The house on G Street became Cuba for me.
