?Are you more like your father or your mother In what ways?
I am more like my mother, the Porto side of my family. Like her, I have thick arab hair, skinny legs and am more irritable.
My grandfather Manuel Porto was born in a village called San Pedro in the outskirts ofthe the City of La Estrada, Province of Pontevedra, Autonomous Region of Galicia. La Estrada is about 15 km or 10 miles south of Santiago de Compostela. He travelled to Cuba in 1901 at age 21. He was a stone mason, short but strong, of a very, very strong and strict character.
We visited his village, found a small church and rang the bell. The sacristan, an old man named Daniel, came promptly thinking it was some emergency, but when we told him that we were visiting my grandfather's village, he asked his last name and we told him Porto, told us that have the village was named Porto, including his wife. He opened the church for us to visit, told us it had been founded in 1025 as a monastery; directed us to the house of the oldest Porto, where we went and met his daughter in law, but he had gone out. Have of the tombstones in the cemetary were for someone named Porto.
My father's family came from Las Palmas of Gran Canaria, one of the eight Canary Islands, where my great grandfather Tomas Rodríguez was born, my grandfather was named Filomeno Rodríguez and was born in Viñales, Pinar del Río, Cuba. I never met him since he died in 1920, but my father was very easy going, slow to anger, very tolerant, always optimist, physically different, with thin hair, good strong short legs. From him I inherited some characteristics as well, notably his optimism. I would have liked to visit Las Palmas, but never did. I did visit Viñales but as a child or teenager, when I did not have an interest in digging into Filomeno or Josefa's youth.
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