Going Home

Going Home
By Donald Jones
When the time came for us to leave the Naval base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, my dad decided to drive across the island to Havana where we would catch a ferry to Key West. My brothers and I had not been beyond the great fence that separated the American Naval base from the Cuban culture and we looked forward to what lay ahead.

We passed through what was called the back gates of the naval station and headed over some small mountains. After we cleared the tops of the mountain, the island lay before us as a sea of sugar cane. We descended down the other side of the mountain through a leafy jungle road. After about an hour, we came to a river. In my seven ? year old eyes, a small river looked monstrous. The water was moving swiftly, but dad decided to drive across the river in the 1949 Plymouth Sedan. I really thought my dad had lost his mind. We cannot drive across that, I kept thinking. I asked my mother, “Are we really going to drive across that river?”

“Yes, I guess so. If your Daddy says we are, I guess we will,” she said in a tone of resignation. He got out of the car and looked at the river while we waited in the car. Maybe he was inspecting the car or the road leading into the river. Maybe there was another place to cross. He got in, started the car, put it in gear and started into the river. At first we drove fast, and the car jumped a little as we drove over rocks . The car was almost on the other side when we got stuck in some gravel, and the car just sat there while the tires spun. Then water started to invade the floorboard of the car. I panicked thinking we were going to get swept down the river and drown. Water came up to our knees. Dad stopped the car, opened the door, and got out. He waded to the bank which was about two car lengths from us. There was an old Cuban standing on the bank grinning. Dad approached him and started to talk to him, hoping he would understand English. After a few minutes of getting nowhere, he took out money from his pocket and the old man knew just what to do. He disappeared. A few minutes later he showed up with an old Ford truck that was made in the 1920‘s. No doubt he had been waiting for some dumb Americans to try to ford the river. He knew where the money was. You don’t keep an old truck with pull chains handy at the edge of a jungle river unless you expect business. It turned out that dad not only paid him to pull us out of the river, but he paid him to take us out of the jungle to the main road. That was just the beginning of the day’s adventure.

We past little jungle villages along the edge of great fields of sugar cane. After a few hours, we stopped at a village to get directions. Naked kids piled on top of our car. All the windows had dozens of faces pressing to see the strangers within. We most likely were the first Americans they had ever seen. It was hard to imagine people were so poor in this part of the country that no one cared that the kids were naked.

In order for dad to get back into the car, he took a handful of dimes and threw them into the street. A riot almost erupted. The kids piled on top of each other trying to get some of the money dad had thrown for them. We sped away. I looked back through the rear window with a feeling of guilt for being so well off.

We came out of the cane fields and ended up on a paved highway that would take us to Havana. As we drove down the road, periodically we saw a car or two piled on top of each other. Some of the cars had crashed into each other and had been moved to the side of the road. Dad told us that there was no speed limit in Cuba. You could drive as fast as you wanted and take your chances. It appeared that some took chances that ended in tragedy.

We arrived at the Havana Hotel late in the afternoon. All of us were tired. The inside of the hotel was gorgeous. There was a grand staircase that went to the upper floors. It was wide enough for all of us to walk up together . The banister would have made any child grin with delight. It was very wide and shiny and slick. No doubt about it, sliding down that banister would be an achievement that any little boy could brag about for a lifetime. That was a dream that would not be mine, because dad took us to our room where we settled down for the remainder of the evening. We went down for supper in the elegant dining room. After dinner, we were ushered back to our room. For a few minutes, dad disappeared, and then returned with a stack of comic books. There was Donald Duck, Mickey Mouse, and a Classic called Rob Roy. We were thrilled till we opened them up, and realized they were all written in Spanish. That did not matter, we could decipher the story from the pictures anyway. I wish I still had those comics, they must have gone out with the trash. Today they would be collector’s items from the pre-Castro days.

The beds that we slept in were large canopy beds. They were draped in mosquito netting. They looked like something out of a castle in the middle ages.

“Don’t get too excited son, those nets are there for a reason. Before you get up in the morning, shake out your shoes”, dad said. We were to shake out our shoes in the morning in case a scorpion or spider decided to crawl in for a place to hide for the night. For the rest of the night till I drifted off into sleep, my mind was filled with imaginary images of scorpions and spiders crawling on the netting.

The 90 mile ferry trip was not a long trip between Havana, Cuba and Key West, Florida. At best, it was only a matter of hours. A cold spell had gripped the southern coast of Florida and it was spitting snow as we got off the ferry. Soon as we got the car off the ferry, we were on our way again for the long trip home to Grandma’s house. Then we would go to our house and start unpacking. It took 6 hours just to get out of the Keys before we got to the mainland and then as we headed up the middle of Florida to Tennessee, it would take another 20 hours.

When we arrived at Grandma’s, it was snowing. We were all exhausted and crawling into the big bed in the cold living room that night seemed very welcome to me. Sleep overwhelmed me and the next thing I knew it was morning already and Dad was talking to everyone in the kitchen about our trip across Cuba, the sights we saw, and our stay at the Havana hotel.

Story ID:	2243
Written by:	Donald L. Jones (bio, contact, other stories)
Story type:	Family Memories
Writers Conference:	$500 2007 Family Memories Writing Project
Location:	U.S. Naval Station Guantanamo Bay, Cuba
Year:	1953