When he worked for El Mundo newspaper,my great uncle Victor Munoz popularized the idea of Mother's Day in Cuba in the 1920's. I know very little about the guy, except that he was my great grandmother's brother, that he managed to get his face on a Cuban
postage stamp, that he was a lector (reader) in the legendary cigar factories of Key West when they were hotbeds of revolution against colonial Spain,and that he enjoyed a considerable measure of popularity and influence in his Havana days. He died 99 years ago in New York. Unfortunately, sportswriters seldom make a lasting dent in the annals of literature and much of Uncle Victor's legacy seems to have dissipated within the mists of time. But he's still the Founder of Cuban Mother's Day,still my maternal kin's biggest claim to fame and was definitely a point of pride for me when I decided to become a journalist.
Needless to say, our careers were to follow very different paths. I first broke into writing at Cosmopolitan in Spanish, as "La Chica Cosmo", with a piece about what it's like to be a professional escort. But I chickened out of going on real "dates" and quit, two days after being hired by some pimp with a jewfro. Instead, I spoke to several male friends who had used escorts, and I wrote the piece based on their input. (So there,my first published article was a fake.You read it here first.)
My editor, a corpulent fairy, loved it,and I doubt he would've cared that I made it all up. Subsequent endeavors at Cosmo would be legitimate, mostly interviews with Latin American singers. I arrived at empty theaters before showtime, carrying my little tape recorder, and invariably, security guards
blocked me, saying: "Excuse me, miss, but dancers go in through the back." And I had to explain that I wasn't a dancer, but a JOURNALIST, thank you. It annoyed me; I felt demeaned. That was, of course, many years and many pounds ago, and I was too young and full of myself to realize that I was being paid the best kind of compliment: an unwitting one. Nobody mistakes me for a dancer now, nobody would hire me as an escort, but that's okay. I'm still a woman. Una mujer completa, as we say-- I even gave birth and get congratulated on it at least once a year.
So from myself and Uncle Victor, wherever he may be, Feliz Día de las Madres to you all.
