Three minutes of love

By Varela

(Editor’s Note: Varela is on vacation. This article is taken from his blog.)

When I left Cuba in 1980 and said good-bye to my father, I was 24; he was 48. He was taller and stronger than I.

My father was a hydraulics engineer and in 1983 he and other technicians were accused of trying to sabotage a dam. The reservoir had been designed by Russian advisers but the error in construction (the gates almost broke, which would have drowned everybody in the region) was charged to the Cubans.

My father was sentenced to 15 years in prison, accused of working for the C.I.A. Because he was very elitist and an adventurer, I, in Miami, believed the accusation with a mixture of fascination and shock.

So the old man was an agent, and I never had known it. What a guy the old man was. No wonder he had so many contacts with government people and was invited to dine everywhere. They had given him a Peugeot and when he traveled to the capital he stayed at the Habana Libre, all expenses paid.

The old man got sick in prison, survived several heart attacks and was released in 1989. When I went to meet him at Miami International Airport, I was 33; he was 57.

The tall, portly man I knew never showed up.

As I looked for his face among the arriving passengers, a little old man, bent over, ill-nourished and tremulous, shuffled toward me. “Pepe,” he said.

I almost burst into tears, as I do now while writing this. But I put my arm over his shoulders and walked him to my car as if nothing had happened, as if we had stopped seeing each other for a month after summer vacation, not for a decade after a prison term that lasted six years.

I sat him down on the sofa in my apartment and the family proceeded to parade before him, as if paying their respects at a wake. It’s incredible how one sublimates feelings.

To relieve the momentary gloom, I told Dad he shouldn’t have any worries for the rest of his life because the C.I.A. would give him retirement pay. The look he gave me told me that only a father can forgive his son.

I let him talk about prison for a week and then I closed the chapter. Life had to go on. While in Miami, he was operated on and got a Pacemaker and put on weight and even swam in the pool. (My father was a great diver. He could descend 60 feet on his lungs alone; the best I could do was 42 feet, when I was at my peak.)

He started to work at a supermarket, selling Lottery tickets for $200 a week. I gave him my old Cadillac, and my wife and I kept the little Toyota.

In 2000, at the age of 68, he died of an extremely aggressive form of cancer.

Today I see how people at the airport welcome a half-naked clown wearing a neck brace and carrying boxing gloves who also left a prison in Cuba, being pushed in a wheelchair. The mayor speaks, the former inmate is taken to a hospital for treatment, a bank account is opened for donations – and I think about my father, aware of the difference between human beings.

Humility is one of the most altruistic yet least understood virtues. A person gets bigger as he grows humbler. That is why one of the things I noticed in my father when he arrived from Cuba was that he had found humility and understood that it didn’t imply any loss of pride.

At no time and in no way did he think of himself as a patriot. Founding two homes, two families, starting over three times, and paying for an error in calculation was enough for him. We had several arguments over concepts and issues, none that lasted more than a month before it was forgotten.

I clearly remember that, near the end of his life, he told me something I’ll never forget: “The good are never so good, and the bad are never so bad.”

The Anti-Castro Industry owes my father a big welcome. But the one I gave him was sincere. And that was enough for him.

It’s a question of humility.