Navidades con Maracas—a Xmas miracle of sorts (By Juana Bimba)

It was almost Xmas. I was living in NYC and working in publishing when I received an invitation to my company headquarters in Knoxville, Tennessee. I was going there to receive my holiday gift: a bonus for my work as editor of their bilingual magazine in New York. Things went fairly well on that trip. Knoxville people were nice, the food was great and the place was gorgeous, with rows of blue mountains etched faintly in the background. But the days were cold, gray,windy and rainy. Nobody spoke Spanish, there were no fondas or bodegas, nobody knew what an empanada was. For me, a product of Miami and New York, it was like visiting another planet. Seeking out the familiar, I befriended the only Hispanic I'd met there, a young Puerto Rican woman who worked for the same company and resided in Knoxville year-round. I asked myself,How could she live there? In this exile of the soul that cities like Knoxville are for people like us? How could she exist in a space where nobody really gets her, where days are gray and cloaked in a drizzle that looks like tears, where she will never hear the sounds of spoken Spanish or rhythmic percussion floating in the air on a summer afternoon? In her shoes, I would pray for some random miracle to find me and brighten up my life. Perhaps that's what she did. She told me a story. Years ago, when she'd first moved to Knoxville, she had lost track of a beloved half brother.The Internet was not around yet, she had no way to search for him. It was as though the earth had swallowed him. This weighed particularly on her during Xmas,when she recalled the large family gatherings back home while outside, she heard the Knoxville rain and wind beating on her windows. Then, a Xmas Eve miracle. She was in the kitchen preparing that night's traditional meal when she heard a familiar voice in the living room. The voice was singing. She rushed into the living room where the TV was tuned to Don Francisco's variety show, and lo and behold: there on the screen, fronting a salsa orchestra, was her dear, long lost brother! Beats me how she could, for years, have missed the whereabouts of a well-known salsero. Maybe he wasn't as famous back then. Maybe she wasn't paying attention. Maybe she didn't watch that much Spanish TV,maybe Knoxville radio stations didn't play any salsa. And as I mentioned, there was no Internet just yet. None of that is important. What does matter is that one Xmas Eve, a loud and tacky variety show became the improbable Star of Bethlehem that reunited a Latina lost in Knoxville, and her salsero half brother.

Death of an ex: the virus comes home

By Juana Bimba

My dad used to say that “para morirse, sólo hay que estar vivo” (in order to die, all you need is to be alive). In other words, anyone can die, at any time and for no reason. On a Sunday this July, my son’s dad died suddenly, unexpectedly, of COVID19.

My son and I got the news by phone in our hometown of New York. My ex had passed away in
Miami, where, as I write this, hospitals are packed at over 140% capacity, but many folks still aren’t taking it seriously. Several staffers at his worksite had tested positive and were walking around coughing and wearing no masks. He did try to protect himself,  wore face coverings, avoided sick people. It was in his nature to be cautious.

But one afternoon—just once—he slipped up and gave a sniffling coworker a ride home. The next day, he tested positive and was sent home from work, to self-quarantine. (I still question why nobody thought of sending him to a hospital.) He called to give us the news.

 When I spoke to him, he was slurring his words and said he felt exhausted, just wanted
 to sleep. He sounded like hell, but I thought he’d get over it, and I guess, so did he. Why not?

This was good ol’ dependable Rudy; surely he wasn’t about to die, to exit our lives without so much as a warning. Coronavirus fatalities happened to OTHERS, not me, not my son, and Rudy,
he was breathing okay. He was being looked after; sort of. People were dropping off food and medicine at his door, checking up on him periodically by phone.

So when he took a turn for the worse that Sunday, he shrugged it off at first —that’s what Latin men do. And when  relatives finally convinced him to go to the ER, it was too late: he collapsed in his bedroom, getting dressed to head to the hospital.

Thankfully, there was no funeral, no need for us to fly to that nest of infection that is Florida today. His ashes were scattered over the ocean. My son is mourning in his own, quiet, intense way, mostly anger at a turn of fate that he thinks could have been avoided.

I didn’t cry, still haven’t. Things had ended badly between us, and had been iffy for a
 long time.We were both Latin, but from completely different social backgrounds and after the initial romance wore off, we fought like cats and dogs. And we never really became friends after the split, something I tried to bring about. Though superficially polite, our post divorce relationship was always kind of volatile and I’d hear an edge of resentment in his voice whenever we talked.

To be honest, I never really understood the guy— but I know I wasn’t blameless, and that whatever I did, he never forgave.

I do recall  some good times along the way. There were sunsets in Key West and moonlit beaches in Puerto Rico.  There was that memorable first night in our first apartment as a couple, in Queens—
we’d arrived before Con Edison and the furniture and had to sleep by candlelight, on a bare
mattress on the gleaming wooden floor. We were much younger; we didn’t mind.

As I say, we did have some charmed moments in our marriage.

So no, when we got the call that Sunday morning, my son and I didn’t cry, but we were
stunned and depressed, and, yes,suddenly even scared for our own lives.

The weird thing about death is that you always think it’s going to happen to someone else, then it sneaks up on you, it takes who you least expect—and it does so with a finality that’s as cruel as it is brutal.

Every day, I see and hear about the number of COVID cases on the rise, about the number of deaths increasing dramatically everywhere. I used to be like everyone else; they were just numbers to me, fodder for the talking heads on TV.

What’s finally brought the virus home is the strange and sudden realization that neither I nor
 my son will ever speak to his father again.

The Jersey Shore before: Memories of Asbury Park

By Juana Bimba

How I almost gave up Mother’s Day. Twice.

By Juana Bimba

With my marriage rapidly dissolving came news of my pregnancy, the result of a failed attempt at reconciliation. Faced with the prospect of raising a child alone,I considered an abortion, but my brother talked me out of  it. I might not get another chance at motherhood, he said.

My husband was not a bad person, just a weak, confused asshole who feared responsibility. He kept pushing for an abortion until my 8th month, when he moved out—taking half the furniture— so

he wouldn’t be present when I gave birth. Again, it was my brother who drove me to South Miami Hospital and stuck around until my son was born.

For the  next 7 years, we saw very little of my son’s father. I had to drag him to court for child support; he was claiming the kid wasn’t his. I never told my son any of this until much later; I wanted him to have a relationship with his dad; I wanted him to know he had a father, that he wasn’t a bastard, like so many other Latino kids.

I succeeded;  the guy came to adore my son, (who loved him back, somewhat philosophically) and
to have a cordial, breezy relationship with me. We exchanged Xmas presents and ocasional gossip on the phone. Today, even more is forgiven and forgotten: he died of Covid19 a few weeks ago.

About two years after our divorce, I moved to New York. I had been offered editorship of a new, bilingual magazine and I jumped at the chance of ditching Miami.

I was leaving a glamour gig as a society reporter and columnist for the Spanish edition of the Miami Herald, but the new job was something else, a service magazine about  health, nutrition and the family which required travel for conferences to Washington DC—where, as I was to discover, they sure know how to party.

After the conferences, there were cocktails and galas and clubs. The city was  crawling with
dapper lobbyists on the make, plenty of spare change in their pockets. I played around like a 20-year-old, and as we say in Spanish, que me quiten lo bailao (they can’t take away what I’ve danced).

But for about two years, I forgot I had a son.  Before going off on my excellent adventures, I just deposited him upstairs with my Sicilian landlady and her husband, who eventually began to feel that they owned him. One day, after a vicious fight with the landlady, I realized I’d lost control of the situation and might even lose my son to these fierce, primal people, who boasted slyly about their  shady “connections.”

Overnight, I took a bus to Miami, handed my son to his father and flew back to straighten out my NYC life. The magazine I edited had folded for financial reasons, so now I had no apartment, no son and no job.Today, I’d contemplate suicide, but back then I had the resilience of youth. I just plowed on. I found a freelance gig as an advertising copywriter and moved into a women’s residence in the West Village.

Inexplicably, my son’s medical records now list me as going into the “shelter system”, but it was more like a women’s dorm.You needed letters of reference to get in. It was in a prime location and I made the most of it.  That summer, I shuffled around the West Village braless, kinky mane adrift. I took Cajun dance lessons, met friends for drinks in cute bistros, shopped on 14th street (when it was still a bargain), dined nightly on free tapas and Marqués de Riscal at the Spanish pub next door.

 Meanwhile, my ex was lobbying hard to keep the child he’d once asked me to abort, alleging he could be a better parent since I was such a fuckup. Given the situation, I could see his point: I hadn’t exactly been an exemplary mother. So I seriously considered giving up my son for his own good. And I would’ve, if it hadn’t been for a friend’s cautionary tale.

She was a gorgeous, successful publicist who had divorced a wealthy man. This guy argued he could give their little girl everything she couldn’t, as a single career woman, so my friend agreed to surrender the child for her own good—and never saw the kid again. “Don’t do it”, she told me.”Or you’ll live to regret it”.

Today, I don’ t even remember her name. I do remember that before we’d been introduced, I ran off with her date after a black tie ball in Washington DC. She could’ve held a grudge, but didn’t. Instead, she gave me the best advice of my life, and wherever she is, I wish her the happiest of Mother’s Days. Thanks to her, I determined  to reclaim my son, renounce my evil ways and become the best mother in existence. It was a Mary Magdalene moment.

And I couldn’t have known it at the time, but it was also the best decision for my son. His father would go on to marry and divorce a second time. The second wife was some shrill, tacky thing who bore him a psychologically and emotionally damaged son. For years, both of these creatures were
very much in the picture and they regarded my son as an interloper until his father’s death ended those particular tensions.

Had I left my son with his father, he might’ve been relegated to a Cinderella existence as second fiddle to these two wretches. Another thing: my son turned out to have dyslexia.I was to spend the next dozen years of my life hiring lawyers to battle the NYC Board of Education, so he could get the best specialized schooling in New England boarding schools.

Today, he has a college degree, but had he stayed with his father, my son might still be unable to read and write. His father just didn’t have the education or mental resources to fight for the boy as I did.

And finally, I spared my son the agony of growing up in a dysfunctional household, something I’m all too familiar with (but that’s another story). So Happy Mother’s Day to me, and to all of you who have raised,or are still raising, kids on their own. P’alante!

With my brother Jorge,my son’s first savior.

No Exit. For Now.

By Juana  Bimba

Here I sit, with a bottle of Riesling and an iPad, writing this piece on my tiny terrace—the only sliver of outdoors I dare enjoy these  days. Now that they’ve opened a Covid19 hospital right here on Roosevelt Island, NYC, I don’t set foot outside my apartment.

The current sheltering in place brings to mind literature like Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s “Love in the Time of Cholera”,where two aging lovers, reunited at long last, hoist the cholera contagion banner on
their cruise ship so authorities won’t let them dock and they can float around forever.

That’s beautiful, but then there are stories like Jean Paul Sartre’s No Exit, which could also apply.In it, three people die and go to hell (a room with no exit) where they proceed to bicker and make each other miserable for all eternity. The play’s most famous line is “hell is other people”.

As in No Exit, I share my space with two others: my son and a male roommate. My apartment does have an exit, but the virus took it away. My son, afraid I’ll die on him, tries to keep me from going anywhere. Needless to say, we have some spectacular clashes, but he’s my kid and we’re Cuban, so we forget about the fight before echoes from the last scream fade.

The roommate is a different matter.

Roommates happen to be a way of life in NYC, where real estate is expensive, and unrelated adults must often share space to defray costs. If you’re the head of household, you try to find a quiet, responsible person.  I, for example, don’t rent to students.

The best roommates are people visiting the city on some kind of training program.  They tend to be mature, intelligent, educated professionals, polite to a fault, but their stays are always temporary. The next best deals are folks who work in Manhattan but live hours away, and need a pied
à terre in the city during the week. On weekends and holidays, they go back to wherever they came from, and you’ve got the place to yourself. Problem is, they’re hard to find.

The rest—the majority— consists of adults who are more or less adrift in life. To me, anyone over 29 who hasn’t settled into some kind of a stable living arrangement and needs to rent a room somewhere is probably damaged goods, or in transition from some personal tragedy. Which makes them
damaged goods. But those are the people who come to your door when you’re renting out a room.

With our current roommate, everything seemed fine initially.

He was a man in his 50’s, never married and living in Long Island with his sister and her husband. He  came to us because he worked in Manhattan and needed to reside closer to his job. At first, the guy worked at night and slept during the day, so we rarely saw him. Then came the virus and his schedule
changed. He now works two days a week and shelters in place with us the rest of the time.

He’s pleasant enough and pays on time, loves our cats, gets on famously with my son and is very quiet—easily one of the best tenants we’ve ever had. But now that he had become more visible, he was getting a touch too friendly. He followed me around, trying to start little chats. If I went to the kitchen at 3 a.m. for a glass of water, he’d pop out of his room and attempt to socialize. I felt stalked in my own home. I wasn’t flattered at all. He looks like the Expedia Gnome with a yarmulke and no beard.  He sounds like Little Caesar’s “Pizza, pizza” character. He has this lecherous glitter in his beady little eyes.

And I couldn’t get away from him, given the present situation. It was like No Exit, live.

For women, few things are more hideous than insistent, unwanted attention from a man they find unattractive. I know it sounds like high school, but men retain the capacity to creep you out no matter how old they (or you) are. My son says I’m imagining things, however,

I’ve been around long enough to realize what people are up to without their having to spell it out.

I tried to be curt and evasive with the roommate, but he didn’t take hints.I once tried to step around him and he moved to block me, until he realized what he was doing and backed off. He kept bringing me little presents of wine and cookies. Then last week, when he showed up with flowers, I exploded and asked him not to give me anything else. He was visibly shocked, but subtlety hadn’t worked, so I had to resort to rudeness. That seems to have worked.

Now he comes in without greeting us, a sullen shadow on the way to his room.  Once there, he barely emerges. Well, that’s fine with me, and it also serves the purpose of social distancing from someone who’s still in touch with the outside.

I just hope he keeps it up until this Coronavirus thing is over and I can find my way to the exit and a normal life.

CORONAVIRUS: THE BRONX CONNECTION

By Zoyla Candela

Okay, is New Rochelle still the epicenter of the Coronavirus outbreak in the State of New York?
Things are changing so fast...

So far, these poor folks have been hit with a one-mile radius containment zone, temporary shutdown of large gathering places, and a visit from the National Guard, courtesy of New York Governor Andrew Cuomo.

Never mind that these measures are a total exercise in futility.

 What does it matter if they shut down public gathering places? People can move in and out of the ”containment” zone at will, and the National Guard can’t be expected to shoot the virus. We’re
 told guardsmen are being called in to distribute food and clean up public spaces (both tasks easily manageable by a combination of soup kitchen and sanitation workers).  But from history, we know that governors summon the National Guard mostly when expecting some kind of catastrophe or

 civil unrest...sooo ...WTF?

Governor Cuomo, bless his two faces, has a tenuous relationship with the truth. No straight answers will issue from him (much less President Trump), so New Yorkers are trying to comfort themselves with the thought that New Rochelle is too far away to pose any danger to big city dwellers. It’s “upstate”, isn’t it?

Well, no, and no. For starters, NYC dwellers consider “upstate” anything north of the Zoo. But New Rochelle is just 20 miles north of Midtown Manhattan! All that separates that hapless, infected place from Gotham’s Five Boroughs is a slender piece of Westchester County. Get it? New Rochelle is less than one mile from the Bronx, which in turn, borders Manhattan directly, which in turn has bridges, tunnels and waterways leading to Brooklyn, Queens and Staten Island.

There’s more. Years ago, my son attended a private elementary school in New Rochelle, 45 minutes away by school bus (from our apartment in Manhattan). I transferred him to a second school,  a little further north (Vermont!) when the first school  was overrun by students with a penchant for throwing chairs around.

Through word of mouth, I learned that Bronx families were moving into New Rochelle.

 I never saw it documented anywhere. “La Calle” (Street Hearsay) is the way we compile statistics in New York City. Anyway, that happened a while back, and I don’t know if the trend continues.

But even if it has stopped, I have to assume that by now there’s a large contingent of New Rochelle people with roots in the Bronx and that they’re probably moving back and forth for visits, shopping,
entertainment, etc. So that, even if all other NYC dwellers don’t ever go to New Rochelle, New Rochelle might end up coming to them via the Bronx.

Which is too bad, because you can declare all the States of Emergency you want, you can shut down Wall Street, Sports Events, colleges and Broadway.

But you can’t shut down the Bronx.

SORRY, NOT MY FAULT

By Zoyla Candela

I’ve reached an age that sometimes moves people to give me their seats on public transportation and I accept. So recently, on a crowded F train to Manhattan, when a European-looking teenager motioned for me to take his seat,  I hustled over and slid right in.

Then I realized, to my horror, that in calling me, he had bypassed this middle-aged black woman standing in front of him.  I looked up at her apologetically and she stared daggers of hatred right back into my eyes. All of my guilt instantly vanished. It wasn’t my fault! She could blame the kid, if she needed to assign blame. What could I have done? It had been a long day, I wanted to get off my feet,
and she looked younger and sturdier. She could handle it. Fuck her.

Would she have reacted differently had she known I was a fellow minority? ¿Quién sabe?  All she saw is that I have light skin, hair and eyes. I call it ”protective coloring”.

I’ve already experienced strangers favoring me over darker folks who perhaps had been waiting their turn longer. That always shocks me; I  find it appalling that such injustice could be a routine part of so many lives in this country.

But though I sympathize,  I’m only human: I always take the advantage being offered. Not many people of any color are willing to renounce a gift, however small,  in order to stand on principle. Life is too hard.

Besides, light skin sometimes works against you. Darker Hispanics may resent me on sight or stare as though I'm a circus freak if they hear me speaking Spanish. Once, when a Black man tried to mug me
on a subway stairs landing off Bryant Park, I remembered another light-skinned friend’s advice: “If you’re ever mugged, speak Spanish.” So I did. And the guy put away his knife, shook my hand, said: “Sorry, I thought you was a White girl’, and walked away.

Whites are astonished whenever I tell this story; Blacks just laugh.

Me, I’m only the storyteller. I don’t even know what race to claim because in this country, the concept of race varies according to location and who you’re talking to. In Miami, I’m White; in New York, Maybe not so much. To Blacks and Browns, I’m White, and to Whites, I’m Hispanic (euphemism for “definitely NOT White as we Whites understand Whiteness”). So I constantly find myself having to adjust my racial identity to the situation at hand. I don’t care; I know who I am. And I suspect most US Latinos do a similar dance when it’s for public consumption.

Fortunately, our own take on race is much less complicated. Hispanics believe that you are what the mirror tells you, no matter what the rest of your family looks like. Blacks get offended when you try to explain this; Whites think you’re being presumptuous.

 It almost seems as though people here refuse to understand that when your notions of race are formed in another culture, you tend to process things differently. That can be a bonus for your mental health. I, for example, have no sense of historical moral debt, no legacy of race-related guilt, and, above all, no feeling that I owe anybody else absolutely anything because my skin happens to be lighter than theirs.

 So whatever the problem, sorry,

I had nothing to do with it.

LATER FOR BERNIE

Back in the early days of my liberalism.

By Zoyla Candela

I used to like Bernie Sanders—until last week, when he started praising Fidel Castro’s achievements in the fields of education and medicine. It may seem odd that I, the child of Miami Cuban exiles, would sympathize with socialism, but I don’t believe a Sanders presidency could ever be anything beyond a mild deterrent to the current excesses of capitalism in this country.

This will NEVER, in our wildest dreams, become a socialist nation—particularly not if we’re counting, as we always have, on capitalists funding our American brand of socialism. That is the
American Way, and it puzzles the hell out of European socialists, but there it is.

Upton Sinclair once wrote that Americans will take socialism, but not the label (what are Social Security and Medicare but a form of socialism, anyway?). The current, virulent opposition to socialism is just rich people trying to get over, trying to get richer at everyone else’s expense.

You’d think they’d gladly spare a couple of bucks to help fund free education and health care for less fortunate compatriots, but no, they want to keep it all. They have no wish to give ANYTHING back to the system that made them rich, so they raise the specter of socialism to scare the ignorant poor into going against their own interests.

As for me being a progressive AND the child of Cuban exiles, it’s simple: I went to school when the winds of social reform were still blowing through the nation, and liberalism was still in the air that I breathed whenever I stepped out of our Cuban home. I became a liberal, like my American classmates, like most of the kids I knew at the time.

My parents, to their credit, never tried to interfere with the zeitgeist, but allowed my two brothers and I to develop our own political ideas. To be sure, they mocked us ruthlessly whenever we tried
explaining  ourselves, but that was the extent of their disapproval.

For them, one thing was not negotiable, though: their opposition to Fidel Castro. But that was okay with me, because I never saw the contradiction between being a progressive and opposing a regime that stifles the free exchange of ideas, to the point of killing dissidents. I still don’t. I’m a liberal who dislikes the Castros, and that’s not such a stretch.

Which is why I was appalled at Sanders’ insistence that yes, Castro did some bad things, but also had some wonderful achievements. Even if that were true,  I wonder how he could’ve been so stupid as to trounce on the sensibilities of so many people whose lives were upended by Castro’s power grab. (What kind of a politician is he, anyway?)

On the subject of Sanders’ conditioned praise for Castro, I read somewhere that Hitler, too, may have done some positive things for the German people, such as raising their morale and sense of patriotism—but he did so much evil that bringing up the good would be tantamount to moral heresy. Couldn’t have said it better myself.

We Cubans have always thought of  pro Castro Americans as naive and misinformed, seeing the Cuban Revolution mostly in terms that promote whatever point they’re trying to make about American politics. If you research online in English, you’ll see only praise for Castro’s achievements in education and medicine.

 But if you can read Spanish, it’s a different story.

You’ll find out about the crumbling infrastructure in Cuban schools so poorly ventilated, that parents are asked to contribute towards installing fans—and guaranteed a cool spot for their child if they do. You’ll discover the stories of grammar teachers who teach egregious grammatical mistakes. Of teachers so underpaid, that they’re currently leaving the system in droves, or accepting bribes to award passing grades (something also said about medical specialists, who are quicker to see patients bearing gifts.) You’ll find out about Cuban doctors so poorly trained, they’re unable to obtain medical certification in other countries.

Won’t somebody translate these stories and send them to Bernie Sanders? And then please, give Elizabeth Warren a second look?