Happy Birthday to Me! (page 2)

Village Idiot

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Happy birthday, IownMylife.

Have a good one ...

Iown Mylife

What a beautiful cake! thank you, Village Idiot-not - and thank you too, Loveuni!

I'm at the kitchen table with coffee, watching bluebirds at the feeders, the sun is shining, OH this is a great day already.

Village Idiot

IOML,
That's what they did when she was a girl in Cuba.

I'm Cuban too! I guess that makes you a second generation Cuban. Tell me, did she flee from Fidel Castro's regime or was she already here in the States in the late 1950s? I came here as a baby in my mother's arms when Fidel was consolidating his power and just before he shut down all flights to the United States.

Iown Mylife

V.I. - Do you remember any scenes of Cuba before you moved here? I don't have any memories of Cuba - my parents took me there when I was six months old and we stayed for six months.

My father met my mother and her family through a friend of his who had a job with the Army corp of engineers, doing some work in Cuba. My mother's sister was the friend's girlfriend. My mother chaperoned them everywhere they went. He told my father and he started writing to my mother. Then he went down there and met her. That was in the late 40s. Soon they got married and came to the States. She couldn't speak English and he could just barely speak Spanish.

She went to night school to learn English. She said it was so hard - she could hardly learn the difference between ship, sheet and sh!t - LOL! She had been to college to learn fashion design and sewing. She could sew anything, and made beautiful clothes. She could look at a dress and make her own pattern and then sew the dress. She got a job at Universal Studios working in Edith Head's costume department. One time Loretta Young saw my mother when she was pregnant with me. My mother sewed several costumes in Ms. Young's wardrobe. She gave my mother a baby shower!

My mother wanted to get to the U.S. because her sister was going to marry this friend of my father's. My mother didn't want to let her sister come to the States without her. My father was born near L.A. and had a house there, that he inherited from his grandmother. They lived in that house until I was 4 and my brother was 1. Then they bought a Spanish-style little house where my mother still lives.

So she and her sister were here quite awhile before the whole thing with Castro began. My father always claimed that he could foresee the trouble that was coming. He tried to get my mother's family to come to California but they wouldn't think of it.

Most of my mother's siblings have passed on but they had lots of kids. I never met any of them, only my one aunt and her kids who live here in the States. My mother and her sister have always kept in touch with their family and there's one sister who comes to visit them once in awhile, she's about 13 years older than me. She can't speak a word of English and I don't have any conversational Spanish, but she calls me when she's at my mother's house and tells me she loves me so much. She remembers me as a baby in Cuba on that visit. It's all so sad.

When people say anything good about Castro it makes me so mad. My mother's life and her entire family's life was absolutely ruined. They still say that life is awful, the food and everything is rationed; they have to stand in line to buy any groceries and by the time they get in, everything is gone. There are no bags to put rice in, just twist it up in a rag. There's no toilet paper or any supplies to fix doors and windows. That latest hurricane that came near them - the rain just comes in the broken windows and doors.

So I was very lucky!

Happy Birthday to Me!

Iown Mylife

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