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| Photos: Courtesy Raquel Stabinski-Leib |
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A Reunion Like No Other
Uprooted from our homeland, we have grown older in a different country with different customs and traditions. I can’t help but wonder if we have anything in common anymore. Besides, how would I find my classmates in a crowd of hundreds of alumni from different years? I fly from my Connecticut home to Miami, where I stay with my mom. This, I suddenly realize, is the first stop of the time machine that will take me back, figuratively, to the place where I was born and lived the first 19 years of my life. The day of the reunion, my mother, in true Latina spirit, makes me try on outfits until she finds the perfect one and then warns me not to come home too late. Now I know for sure that I’ve begun traveling back in time to my teens. I have a strong urge to say, “Hey, I’m a 67-year-old woman!” But I don’t dare. After all, she is my mother. Transported Back in Time
It’s not long before old friends are holding me in fierce embraces. Amid excited laughter, we can’t stop reminiscing. “You haven’t changed a bit,” we tell one another when we see the pictures in our yearbook, La Memoria 1958. It’s been placed right in the middle of the memorabilia table. We looked so intense and focused then, I tell myself. Maybe we really haven’t changed that much. As a group, we count our fair share of professionals, inside and outside of Cuba, as far as Spain and Mexico—though only those of us in the United States are joining us today. Our success stories defy the travails of emigration and Cuba’s particular brand of socialism. I run into Waldo López-Aqueres, Ph.D., still the youngest-looking in the class and now director of economic research at the Tomás Rivera Policy Institute at the University of Southern California; Enrique Hochman, a restaurateur in Miami Beach; Elías Vilkas, keeper of the sole extant copy of the 1958 yearbook and an award-winning member of the American Institute of Architects; Pedro Fernández-Roig, outgoing president of the alumni association; and so many others. Today, in this Miami hotel, we’re all just proud graduates of Instituto Edison. The afternoon yields another high point: a heartfelt chat with Marta Abreu, the professor who nurtured my love for books and inspired me to become a writer. Principled Paths Later, as I proceed to the banquet room with Mery Kratz, a classmate since elementary school and now a sales manager for a large manufacturer of plastic containers, an announcement tells the class of ’58 to stay in the reception hall. As instructed, but quite puzzled, we stand in single file and alphabetical order until doors open to the stirring notes of “Pomp and Circumstance.” Each of our names is called. To the clamorous ovation of the more than 200 other alumni present, we march—many, I am sure, like myself on weakened knees—to the podium and receive our diplomas. Finally, the class of ’58 is truly celebrating. Fifty years ago, our class of idealistic students, believing that the existing dictatorship under Fulgencio Batista was openly violating Cuba’s constitution and its people’s civil rights, forfeited a fancy graduation. Instead, we chose a simple ceremony in the school’s courtyard to show our support for the revolution brewing in the Sierra Maestra. Following graduation, always true to ourselves, we traveled our own principled paths. Those who embraced the promises of Fidel Castro and remained in Cuba became professionals who continue to serve their country: classmates like Jorge Lodos Fernández, Ph.D., the class genius, now a chemist working for MINAZ, the Cuban sugar ministry; and Bienvenido Grá Oramas, a physician and researcher at Havana’s National Institute of Gastroenterology. Others—like my dear friend Luisa Rodríguez, one of the smartest in the class and at first a passionate defender of the revolution—ultimately became disenchanted. After a long career as a lawyer and university professor, she finally sought asylum in Spain in 1994. Then there are those of us at this reunion who, disillusioned when the new government began implementing its socialist policies and became a communist juggernaut, chose exile to pursue our dreams.
As the day ends, there’s not a dry eye. I leave, tightly clutching my diploma in one hand, my classmates’ e-mail addresses in the other, and, embedded in my heart, the beauty and inspiration of a reunion like no other: ours was a moment in time that helped define who we have become and how we have fought our battles. It’s evident today that, wherever we went and whatever we did, we continued to be the one and only Instituto Edison class of 1958.
Other Cuban Schools Alumni Associations in the United States: Academia Baldor President: Magdalena Ortega 305-238-7480 Vice-President: Sarah María Sanguily 305-667-0570 Colegio Maristas Website: maristascuba.org E-mail: maristas@maristascuba.org Escuela Immaculata-La Salle Website: ilhsalumni.com E-mails: info@ilhsalumni.com reunion@ilhsalumni.com Colegio de Belén Website: belenjesuit.org E-mail: alumni@belenjesuit.org These links are provided for informational purposes only. AARP does not endorse, and has no control over, or responsibility for, the linked sites or the content, advertisements, materials, products, or services available on or throughout these sites. |
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