I Come from Where Palm Trees Grow

My brother Gus is "the guy" who is in charge of our family's genealogy. Some might call it obsessive but not me. He is all kinds of good crazy. Let me tell you how far Gus goes to get our history. But first, I must tell you a bit about my family. My mother, Silvia is the kind of woman people write stories about; whether as a protagonist or antagonist is still up in the air. But no one can deny she has led a most colorful life. She has been married twice. Once to Pedro Marinello and later, to Alfredo Villate. She had eleven children. TECHNICALLY, five children were with Pedro and the others were Villate. The truth is there was a whole lot of explaining to do later in life when almost all of my brothers looked like my father Alfredo. Gus, along with my other brother Peter, and sister Sylvia (who died in Cuba) were the only true Marinello children that we can tell. But I believe that none of us really ever thought of ourselves as anything else than true brothers and sisters. My sister Maria, has a completely different father but that is another story for another time, as is the fact that I believe my blood type does not match my father's. Different story again.
     Back to Gus. He loves to find out where we came from. And in doing so has had us all swab our DNA to trace our maternal lineage back to the dinosaurs but more interesting is that he travels to Cuba often to visit  relatives and obtain documents from our life back in Cuba. He has taken pictures of our homes, plantations, Sylvia's grave, the beaches of Ciudamar Yacht Club. It is all so wonderful and sad to see what I know in my mind must have been such a beautiful country be so destroyed. And yet, I can tell you without a doubt that there is no one more proud of their heritage than a Cuban. Even a Cuban who has never stepped foot on it's soil.

My mother in white on her wedding date with Pedro Marinello

Zoilo and Pedro Marinello, brothers.

    So that pride is what gets a guy like Gus to go to the Marinello museum in Cuba (Yes, there is a museum named after the Marinello family.) and without really thinking things through, he proceeded to stuff pictures of our family in his pants while his cousin stood watching in shock. Now, it seems a funny story but if he was caught, Gus would have been way up a huge Communist prison creek with no American embassy paddle. In telling the story, Gus simply said he saw a picture of our family. My mother, Piry (Pedro) and such that used to be in his house growing up. He was furious that these Communists pigs would take it and than use it for their socialist museum. I get it. Really. I do. But it was hard not to laugh at how things spiraled when the curator of the museum came up to Gus (with pants full of photos) and asked what he was up to. Gus, who is the funniest man I know, isn't sure of what she had seen so decides to play the only card he can. He tells the woman that he is a Marinello and wants to speak to whoever is in charge. The woman tells him it is her. He than proceeds to berate her over the "poor conditions" of the museum and how upset his uncle and father would be over the wall color, tiles etc. The woman is now all apologetic and Gus leaves with a limp because one of the photos is running down his leg.
So now, I have this wedding photo of my mother at seventeen. I see so much of me in her. And I see the resemblance in my niece and daughter too. It's amazing to have these memories that were stolen from such an awful dictator so many years ago. And if you want to know what my brother Gus' smile looks like, you just have to look at the brothers. I see it most in Zoilo in this picture. Gus looks a lot like him.
For most people, genealogy is not so hard to obtain. You just need to make it into your nearest Mormon website and start. I am thankful for Gus for doing a lot of the leg work that was required for the missing documents in Cuba.
One day, I will go to Cuba. Since I was a very small child I have heard the stories over and over again that I feel I was actually there. Thus, my blog title, "I Dream in Cuban." Once, someone asked me if I dreamed in Spanish or English. I was going to say Spanish but what subconsciously came out was I dream in Cuban and I never corrected it because it is true. In the first lines of Guantanamera the words say, I am a sincere man who comes from where the palm trees grow. I guess that is where my roots begin and where the tree ends is still a story unwritten.