Rafael Yglesias - Dr. Neruda's Cure for Evil

However, at eight I was not passionate about politics. I was passionate about the New York Yankees. Unfortunately, even that commitment wasn’t free of ideological scrutiny. My grandfather Pepín was a Dodger fan and a Yankee hater. I didn’t understand the reason why until years later when I learned the sociology of baseball for his generation. The working class rooted for the Dodgers and Giants (or the Sox or the Indians) while the middle and upper classes were Yankee fans. What I saw as virtues about the Yankees, namely their wealth of talent and consistent success, made them symbols of privilege to Grandpa Pepín. Sure, they won more games than anybody else, he conceded, but they had bought their championships, not earned them. Besides, they were a racist franchise, unwilling to use “the colored ballplayers.” I didn’t argue with the old man. After all, the reason I became a Yankee fan wasn’t so high-falutin: in 1960 they were the only baseball team in New York City.

Anyway, Grandmother Jacinta didn’t allow Pepín to bother me about my team for very long. If Grandpa berated me for more than a sentence or two, she would mumble at him in rapid Spanish, too fast for me to understand. I heard the word “chico,” indicating me, and I saw the dismissive wave of her hand, which meant he was to shut up, an order that — to my surprise — Grandpa obeyed. Standing beside his small wife, made smaller by her hunched back, Pepín looked able to step on her, but she ruled him and everyone in her house without contradiction or even fear of it.

This dictatorship was to my liking: Grandma seemed to think I could do no wrong and that everyone else was too hard on me. She was fiercely demanding of the others in her family (and their friends, too) but all she required of me was that I eat the delicious food she cooked. Even that demand was flexible: if I didn’t like what she cooked, she would make something else. Freud, in one of his rare optimistic moods, wrote that “happiness is a childhood wish fulfilled.” Grandma Jacinta managed to fulfill many of mine while I was still a child. In that respect she fit the only generalized description one can make of good parenting.

My mother and I arrived in Tampa midday on July 1st. That evening we listened to my father on a Miami radio station whose signal was powerful enough to be heard in Tampa. He sounded happy and smart. I moved close to the speaker of my grandparents’ old-fashioned receiver and felt his voice resonate in me. The house was full of relatives and friends. They mumbled their agreement with my father’s arguments; they talked aloud their approval the way the parishioners of Martin Luther King Jr.’s church amened and called out, “Teach it, Martin,” as he sermonized.

[Remember, these Latins were not the exiles who now dominate the Cuban-American community. These 1960 Tampa Latins were not middle- and upper-class refugees from the terrors of socialism, or fleeing officials and officers of Batistas government and army, but the children of poor 19th century immigrants. Their parents had fled the inequities of Spain’s monarchy. They had been wounded by Franco’s defeat of Republican Spain and had to bear the ongoing heartbreak of his facism. In the United States — their adopted country, Franco’s ally and Fidel’s enemy — they were regarded as only slightly more respectable versions of niggers. These Cuban-Americans believed that Castro’s army consisted of people like themselves, oppressed workers and peasants, whose only motive was to rescue their beautiful ancestral island from its status as the premier whorehouse of the American rich and a lucrative gambling franchise of the Mafia. To understand the passion of their loyalty to Fidel’s Cuba — or blindness, if you prefer — think of how the American Irish of that generation felt about the IRA, or, better still, think of how immigrant American Jews felt about Israel.]

The radio show host took phone calls from his listening audience. Two of them had to be cut off because the Spanish-accented voices were obscene and belligerent toward my father, insisting he was a Commie and he should go back to Russia where he belonged. I was slightly confused by my father’s and the radio show host’s reaction to this accusation. They seemed amused by the notion that my father was a Communist. Francisco did not really contradict the host when he said in a fatuous tone, “Well, I think most of us understand that Mr. Neruda is a journalist and that when he reports for such newspapers as the New York Times or magazines like Esquire he is trying to give an objective account of what he’s seen and heard. Telling what you saw doesn’t make you a Communist. Isn’t that right, Mr. Neruda?”

“I don’t really believe anyone can be truly objective about anything,” my father said in a soothing tone. “But, yes, what I wrote for the Times Magazine, the strides being made in health and education, the closing of the casinos, the elimination of prostitution, can all be confirmed, and have been reported by news organizations throughout the world, whatever their editorial position on the revolution is.”

But my father was a communist. Why didn’t he say so? I wondered. Not strenuously; I understood that he wanted those mistaken Americans to pay attention to the facts about Cuba and not fall back on their automatic rejection of an ideological label. I understood that and yet I didn’t really understand all of the denial. Several of my relatives complained about the callers who accused my father of being a Communist. Grandpa said it was disgraceful. An aunt said it was, “Red baiting.” I asked what that meant. I listened to the answers without protest, but I didn’t agree: if my father was a communist why should the accusation be disgraceful or unfair? (Of course, I did not understand the distinction between Communist and communist.)

This disquieting moment passed quickly. My father charmed all of them, including the angry callers. He told funny and credible anecdotes about how the Cuban peasants took control of their lives; trying to repair the harm done by years of economic inequity the results were sometimes not brilliant, but always sincere. Maybe Francisco was wrong to dodge the accusations that he was a communist, but he knew how to win over an audience and make his points. Eventually I fell asleep on the rug right next to the speaker: I heard my Daddy in my head and pictured how he would smile at me as I lost consciousness.

The next morning, while I finished a second helping of pancakes and my Grandpa Pepín finished a second cup of espresso, Grandpa said, “You don’t want to go pick up your Daddy at the airport, right?”

Grandma Jacinta agreed that I didn’t. “He wants to watch the ball game,” she said.

My mother seemed surprised. “You don’t want to come to the airport?”

“I do,” I said. In fact no one had asked me. When my grandparents wanted me to feel a certain way, they simply ascribed their desires to me and then graciously agreed to accommodate themselves.

“That’s nice,” Jacinta said. “But your Daddy will come here. Right from the airport. You won’t miss him.”

Pepín said, “Your Yankees are on The Game of the Week. You don’t want to miss them.”

“I’ll make you biftec palomillo and plátanos” Grandma said. “Oh!” she cried and went to her refrigerator. We were eating at a round yellow Formica table in the kitchen. She never sat down, however. She was continually on her feet, feeding herself from a plate on the counter while she brewed more espresso or grilled another pancake. This time she hunched over, peering into the refrigerator; she did something inside it, probably testing the firmness of her vanilla pudding with the tip of her pinky. “Yes. The natilla is almost ready. You can have natilla for dessert.”