Ricardo "Dicky" Schoening: Things Get Political

Dicky tells us about the Civil War years, first in El Salvador and then as a fresh American immigrant living in Miami.

In 1979, I was doing a project for the Military Hospital of El Salvador. I was basically doing the specifications of a new hospital. And we were—we had just been in the USA doing—showing the committee what we had already done, went back to San Salvador and two days later the government was toppled. That was the 11th of October that we had a coup d’état, October of 1979.

After that, that government named me as the President of the Institute of Rehabilitation. They needed fresh blood there. This was a non-paying job. It was a non-political job also, it was, you know, something that you did for your country. And the government was a very leftist-leaning government with a lot of support from already the guerrilla factions, all these people were very vociferous and they were always threatening and always saying, “If you don’t do it our way, we’re gonna get you.” A few times I was followed home. I mean, I didn’t go to the Institute full-time, but I spent X hours a day there, and a few times I was followed home from the Institute by God knows who.

We had planned for the end of that year—well, in 1979 a lot of our friends left, a lot of our friends, both Jews and non-Jews. Salvadorans just went, left for Miami. Nobody was an American citizen. Nobody was an American resident. They took their tourist visas and came to Miami and bought apartments or moved into the apartments we already had. We had planned a vacation and we had rented an apartment in the same building as a lot of Salvadorans had already bought apartments, came up with our two young children, Sarah three years and three months, Allan five months. While we were here, we came up on the 18th of December, early January there was another coup d’état, and a few weeks later another coup d’état. I went to see what was going on.

I did not like what was going on. I didn’t feel it was a safe environment for my wife and my two young children. So I said to Betty, “Let’s rent the apartment for another month.” And that’s all we got it for, because then the owner of the apartment, who was also Salvadoran, wanted to move in. So then we rented an apartment in a building in Coral Gables which was owned by a Guatemalan friend of ours. Very strange story. I mean, our children were always extremely well-behaved. They were well-behaved. These were not kids that ran around like crazy. What we did not know is that this building permitted children for only thirty days. And it happened to be that in that building lived the mother of a very close friend of my brother, who was an American living here in Miami. And she is the one who reported us—in other words, she reported us or she made a claim to the building management, and one fine day we came home from somewhere and there was a note posted on our door giving us I think it was twenty-four or forty-eight hours or seventy-two hours to move out.

And then we were told that we didn’t have to move out, but our children had to leave. Like they were dogs that went to the kennel.

So at that point, we moved in with friends of ours who were already living in Kendall, and then we bought our first house, because at that time, we had decided that at that point we did not want to go back to El Salvador because it really was not safe. So we bought our first house, and I established an export business in the medical field. I started—in El Salvador I used to be an importer. Now I was an exporter.

Transcription by Sandy Adler, Adler Enterprises LLC