Delia Cukier: An Introduction

Delia Cukier, wife of Miguel and mother of Juan Miguel and Carlos Ernesto, was born in Cuba. In this first entry, we learn a little more about her first home... in a Cuba before Castro.

All questions in parentheses are mine.
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(What is your full name.)

OK. Delia Rita Rivero González Cukier.

(And your place of birth?)

Pinar del Río, Cuba.

(And the names of your parents?)

Ernesto Rivero y Juana González.

(And do you have any siblings?)

Yes. One brother.

(What’s his name?)

Ernest Rivero González.

(And who’s older?)

He is, by six years.

(So let’s start at the beginning. Can you tell me, can you think of the earliest memory that you have from childhood? This can be a very difficult question.)

I think I remember finding a ring. (laughs) That’s—I was very little. An uncle who died when I was only seven, so I must have been very young at the time, was a dentist, and we were visiting in his house. We don’t know why—I don’t know why, he had lost his ring. And he had a lot of attachment to that ring because it had been his father’s and all this. And everybody was going crazy everywhere in that house looking for it. I guess I was the closest to the ground, and I found it. And everybody made an immense to-do because I had found the ring. (laughs) So I remember. I even got a doll because I found the ring. (laughs) So that is one of the earliest things that I remember very well.

(How was your life in Cuba?)

Very happy. Very happy. My family’s an immense family, huge, on both sides of the family. My mother was the youngest of fifteen siblings, and my father was number ten of eleven. And everybody had at least two. So you know, it was a very big family.

(___ Pinar del Río?)

No, most people lived in Havana, but we were all from Pinar del Río.

(And where is Pinar del Río?)

Pinar del Río is the westernmost part of Cuba, OK? The island is like this, it’s this point, where the big, you know, tobacco comes from, the good tobacco comes from Pinar del Río.

(What did your father do?)

My father was a lawyer. Yes, my father was a lawyer.

(So you have good memories of Cuba?)

Oh, yes, very happy.

(Can you describe what your household was like?)

My household, it was—until this uncle died, who was—and after that it was about three more years that my aunt lived by herself. But then she joined us in Havana, because they lived in Pinar del Río. Our household, there was a big house. It was—I remember my bedroom and then there was a bathroom shared with my aunt, who had another bedroom. Then it was my brother and another bathroom shared with my uncle, who also—he had never married. He was also a brother of my mother. He never married. And he moved with us when my aunt moved with us to Havana, because they used to live in Pinar del Río, and they didn’t want to leave him behind. He was one of the oldest. And then was my parents’ room, with their bathroom. There was a huge hallway, you know, Spanish-style houses where the bathrooms go into a hallway and the hallway goes into a garden and whatever. In the back and on the side, I have to go like this, the dining room and all the servants’ area on that side. On the front, it was the foyer and the living room and studio.

(So it was a big place? And this was in Havana?)

This was a big place. This was in Havana.

(So you eventually moved to Havana?)

I always lived in Havana. I was born in Pinar del Río, where all the family was born, in Pinar del Río, but my parents were living already in Havana. My brother when he was little lived in Pinar del Río for about a year or so after he was born, because that’s where—but my father had his practice in Havana, he had his office, and he worked in Havana all the time.

(So you had this huge family. Where did you go to school?)

A Catholic school named Teresiano. It was by the nuns of the Santa Teresa de Jesús. It’s a Spanish order. They were very progressive, according to other nuns in Havana. (laughs) Because they allowed children of divorced parents in the school, which was not done in a lot of the other Catholic schools. And that was, you know—it was a nice school. I remember when Fidel Castro came that the nuns got kicked out of Cuba. I remember that I would pass by the school afterwards, you know, I had almost a whole year of schooling before we left Cuba—before I left Cuba, my parents left four years afterwards—before I left Cuba, and it was so strange to see that empty shell of school which had been my school since I started in kindergarten.

(Do you remember the revolution? How old were you?)

I left Cuba when I was fifteen and a half, so I do remember. I remember that there was a lot of division in my family, not fighting or anything, but there were some that thought that it was going to be the panacea for Cuba, and some others that did not believe that Fidel Castro was good. They didn’t know that he was going to a communist, you know? But they didn’t think that he was going to be any good, including my mother. My mother was for a while the president of the Catholic Teachers of Cuba. They had inside information of what he had done in Oriente, in the easternmost part of Cuba. There had been an attack in a quartel, in a garrison, and they had gone into the hospital where the soldiers were laying wounded or sick or whatever, and they had killed every single one of those soldiers, just because they had been soldiers. You know, the people—Fidel Castro’s group. And my mother kept saying, “Nobody that can go into a hospital and kill sick people can be good. There has to be something wrong in that person, because he allowed that to happen.” And of course, one of my cousins used to put, you know, (laughs) the bombs that they were fixing and hide them under my grandmother’s bed. And of course she didn’t know, and his parents didn’t know anything.

(So he was working with ___?)

Yes, he was working with the revolution and nobody knew. Most of the family didn’t know because they were not really involved directly, but he was. And so my aunt, who was one of my father’s sisters, got a call from a very good friend who was the head of the police of Pinar del Río. They lived in Pinar del Río, where my grandmother used to live. He said to her, “We know that you have, you know, certain things in your house that shouldn’t be there, and we’re going to go and search it, so you better get rid of everything.” (laughs) And they found out that way that their son was hiding stuff underneath my grandmother’s bed. (laughs)

The first thing to go was the maid, because she wasn’t cleaning very well under the beds. (laughs)

That type of thing that you remember.

Transcript by Sandy Adler, Adler Enterprises LLC