?What is one of the strangest things that has ever happened to you?
Many strange things have happened during my 80 years of life. After returning to Havana on 11 January 1959 from Miami where I had been on vacation since before Christmas, there was a lot of euphoria with Batista living on New Year's Eve and the United States recognizing the Castro Government right away, a very unusual occurrence.
I returned to work at La Selecta, where I had worked since June of 1958 because the University of Havana was closed. I worked with Manolo Sánchez, my father's partner and life-long friend and his son Manuelito. I was mostly on the road, which I enjoyed much since I was 16 and newly licensed, making errands and visiting clients, usually with Manuelito who did not drive, to collect payments or replace defective items small enough to fit in our 1952 Mercury woody station wagon.
One of the first things the new regime did was to retire from circulation the $500 and $1,000 pesos bills, paper currency that was backed in gold and recognized globally. No sooner had they done that that Celia Sánchez, Fidel Castro's long-time assistant and some say lover, showed up at the store and selected several thousand pesos worth of rattan furniture, some for a house that their government had taken over in Cojímar for Fidel and some for another occupied home in Tarará for Ernesto Guevara. She paid the deposits with... you guessed it! with bills of $500 and $1,000 pesos. When Manolo asked how could he deposit them since they were now out of circulation, she gave him a paper with a telephone number, told him to give it to the banker and ask him to call her for authorization.
I took the deposit to the bank as I usually did, when I presented the deposit to the bank official with whom we normally dealt and he questioned the bills, I told him the story, showed him the paper, but he did not call, he just credited us with the deposit.
I did not follow the delivery truck when it delivered to Fidel's house, but I did when it delivered to Guevara, who was at the time Director of the Banco Nacional. After the delivery truck had brought down the furniture and installed it, I approached Guevara who was sitting at the dining room table, asked him if everything was to his liking, he did not show much interest, then presented him with a bill for the balance owed, upon which he pulled a thick roll from his pocket and paid me. He had been the talk of the town, but in person he did not impress me, he did not emanate charisma.
As I related previously, on 15 June 1960 my father-in-law Alfredo Torralbas and I could not get seats in a National Airlines airplane flying from Miami to Norfolk; it was full, there were no seats available, so we flew to Jacksonville instead, only to find out later that the National Airline flight had crashed.
My high school class at Colegio Trelles had 24 pupils, we graduated in June 1958. In 1960 I moved to Miami, in 1961 went into the Army and on February of 1962 I was in Germany. Enrique Almagro Rodríguez, one of my best friends and classmate wanted to leave Cuba but had no visa for the United States; however, he had an uncle -curiously also named Humberto Rodríguez- who worked at the Cuban Embassy in Brussels; since Cubans before Castro did not need visas to visit Europe, -something that changed in 1962- he travelled to Camagüey where he boarded a ship bound for Brussels. Graciela Planas, another of my classmates, who was active in Catholic Action Youth, had married a man named León and had been sent, with husband and a group of Cuban catholic youth, to study at the University of Louvain, close to Brussels.
So it was that in late 1962 or early 1963, three people of our class of 24 that had graduated in Havana on 1958, without a thought of leaving Cuba, met at Louvain Belgium by one of those quirks of destiny.
Young and inexperienced in mountain driving I drove through the Brenner Pass from Garmisch-Partenkirchen in Germany to Verona in Italy, with Miriam and my son Humberto not quite a year old, in a 1956 Buick Special with Dynaflow automatic transmission, which even though in Low, could not hold down the speed of the car during an entire afternoon descending from the Alps. The brakes therefore began to burn and fade, the car speed continued to increase; finally, I spotted a small grassy shoulder and, pressing the brake pedal very hard with both feet, the car slowed down and stopped into the little clearing. When we got down, saw the rear wheels were smoking and a terrible stink exuded from them. All the small Volkswagen and Fiats that we had passed during the morning while going uphill, now passed us back, puffing in first gear at a steady pace.
We returned to Miami in 1965, I went to work for Western and Southern Life Insurance Company, in 1970 I was hired by The Travelers Insurance Company and in 1972 Miriam and I opened our first insurance office which we called "Select Insurance" in the Elías Shopping Center, Fourth Avenue and 20 Street, Hialeah. We called it Select remembering "Mueblería La Selecta" and used the same logo, because I had brought stationery and business cards from when I worked there.
Suddenly one day, a Cuban with the unlikely name of Cástulo Gregorisch came in the door, told me he had seen the logotype on the wall outside and that he knew the son of the owner of that furniture store in Havana. It turned out that he had gone to Academia Edison in the neighborhood of "La Víbora" in Havana, with Manuelito Sánchez, son of my father's partner and former boss Manolo Sánchez. We became friends, he is still alive in Broward County, writes nostalgic poems about Cuba, hundreds, if not thousands, of them.
After we moved to Fort White, while Daniel still lived in San Diego, one day we drove to the Jacksonville Airport, we were rather late, in a hurry, and I was upset for having to rush and reach the gate when most passengers, if not all, were already aboard.
Instead of pre-boarding and sitting together, we were at least lucky that we were seated on the aisle seat on both sides of the same row. Next to me was a man and his wife was on the window seat next to him. He was talkative, I did not feel like talking. He said he was from Portsmouth, Virginia, with called both Miriam's and my attention. I told him we had married in Portsmouth in 1961; he asked which church? Miriam answered Holy Angels Church; he asked which priest? Miriam answered Father Hammond; he asked who was altar server? Miriam said one was a rotund redhead and the other a lively brunette; He exclaimed: The redhead died; the brunette was me!
I made many friends in different countries talking and recording on Skype, but mostly in Spain, so that when Miriam and I travelled to Madrid in 2011 Juan Carlos González, husband of my friend Salvi Melguizo, was waiting for us at the Barajas Airport. He took us to Salvi's physiotherapy clinic, then next door to have a superb chocolate con churro; while there, he asked Miriam which dessert was her favorite, to which she answered Tocinillo del Cielo. He made a telephone call and we left for Huelva in his car with a big germen Sheppard in the back. Our destination was a duplex they owned at the beach in Huelva, where he placed us in one side of the duplex, he in the other. Then we crossed the Guadiana River and had wine in Portugal. When we returned, went next door to a restaurant owned by his friends, very talkative and friendly, she had made a huge Tocinillo del Cielo for Miriam, from which we all partook.
He took us to several tourist places, the Convent of the Immaculate Conception, to El Suspiro del Moro, to Sevilla, where we spent some time, visited the Cathedral and many more places, picked up Salvi who had come in the AVE with her guide dog "Bimba" and then went to Granada, where we stayed at a home they own in the town of Dúrcal. From there we continued visiting tourist places, notable La Alhambra, La Cartuja, etc.
Juan Carlos took us to many other outings, Museo Del Prado, to Avila and all Santa Teresa sites, to his mother's apartment in Zumárraga in the Basque Country, to San Ignacio de Loyola, etc.
During this 2011 trip we met in person many people with whom I had corresponded and talked on Skype for years, above all the family of Antonio Perán Elvira and Paqui Sánchez Galbarro, who from then on, became close collaborators and eventually inherited the majority of the duties and expense of running EIberoAmerica.com.
Then in 2015, we had a "Radioencuentro" or sort of convention where we invited all collaborators worldwide to join us in Madrid to spend a week together and tour some of Spain.
Paqui organized everything, we had people from Argentina, Brazil, Mexico but most were from Spain. We visited several cities in the AVE and buses, took walking tours, saw much, ate wonderfully, all had a good time.
Paqui and Antonio, with their son Jorge driving, took us to San Pedro, La Estrada, Pontevedra, Galicia, the village of my grandfather Manuel Porto.
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