Miami-Dade and Miguel

In this excerpt, Delia Cukier describes her years in college and then her new life in El Salvador.
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(So you’re at Miami Dade Junior High [sic]. Your parents are now together. What happens then?)

What happens then? I finish my two years of junior college and I was accepted at the University of Florida in Gainesville. I got to the University of Florida. I had some friends there. We went to lunch, and when we came back from lunch, we went to their apartment to have coffee, Cuban coffee. And who shows up but someone who—you know, it was a friend of theirs who was coming back from vacation. It was his first day back. And we met, and he was Miguel Cukier. I asked him where he was from. He said, “Santa Ana.” I said, “Oh, OK, very nice.” And I kept my mouth shut, because I thought that my world geography was very bad. I didn’t know any country named Santa Ana. After a few hours, when he left, I asked my friend, “Where’s that country?” And they said, “Oh, that’s Santa Ana, El Salvador.” (laughs) So that’s where we met. We started going out and in and out a little bit, like that, and then a month later we became novios, and that’s it.

(How long did you date?)

Well, he graduated from the University of Florida in August of that year, so that was from January through August, and then he came back to El Salvador, and we wrote every week and talked once a month on the phone until we married in December of ’69.

(That same year?)

No, this was in ’67. It was two years and months, you know, that we went steady. I came in 1967, I think, my parents-in-law invited me to come over to El Salvador for—I think it was ’67 or ’68. I don’t even remember—to see the country, to see if I liked it and everything. I did. And then I went back. I was going to go back to university to finish my last semester when I got very sick with mononucleosis, and it turned into chronic hepatitis and they put me in bed for three months, so I was very sick for a long time. I kept writing to Miguel and Miguel kept writing to me. (laughs) So after that I went to work. I worked at—I don’t know how you call it nowadays. Now it’s some kind of a technician. I used to write the orders—translate the orders from the doctors into what the nurses would understand and give all the orders from the doctors to the patients and translate English into Spanish or Spanish into English if the need arose. Afterwards I worked for a whole year with one doctor, may he rest in peace. He was an endocrinologist. I changed jobs, because I was working in gynecology and obstetrics at the hospital, which was very nice. But then the translator quit in intensive care, and the only one that they could put there was me. And after working there for one week, I gave them my resignation papers. I could not take people dying around me eight hours a day. That was something that I could not take. I did not mind going into surgery, I did not mind going into anything, but people dying constantly—and the things you see in the hospital when people are dying are just too cruel. So I decided that I had to move on. And I went to work in an office. I had a very good time for the year that I worked there.

(This was in Miami?)

In Miami, yeah.

(How were your parents doing at that point?)

My parents were doing OK. My father had settled as an assistant cook in a school, in a private school. My mother was working in a factory also as a—you know, always fixing up things that were wrong with the rest of it. My brother had already moved apart. His family had arrived from Cuba also, he was married and had two kids. So we were doing OK. We weren’t rich or anything, but we were doing OK, financially we were doing OK, and my parents were very content and very happy. Most of the family had already arrived in Miami, and a lot of my parents’ friends were there in Miami also. So they had their clique, they had their friends. Everything was OK. No problem whatsoever.

(So you married Miguel in which year?)

December of 1969. We moved here. I will never forget it, January 1st, 1970. In Cuba there was not a tradition of firecrackers. And in 1969 they had had here the war with Honduras, OK? So January 1st we come, my mother-in-law and my father-in-law had a beautiful buffet with all the friends waiting for us in the house. We met everybody and everything was really nice. And then everybody left and we went to bed, and about—maybe 11:30 or 12, there was—the biggest firecrackers started going off, and I sat in the bed and I said to Miguel, “Oh, my God, Miguel, the war’s started again!” (laughs) And he couldn’t stop laughing for ten minutes.....

Transcript by Sandy Adler, Adler Enterprises LLC