Camaroneros to the Rescue

It was only four days after my seventh birthday that the rebels entered Havana in 1959. I didn't know much about the war beyond what I'd experienced living in a fairly small city on the south coast of the island.

 

Cienfuegos, my home town, had experienced a battle, really not even a skirmish, when I was five years old. I knew that much, and knew that the planes that bombed us were sent by the government of Fulgencio Batista. And I knew the uncomfortable feeling when we drove down a highway and had the government's battery of gun emplacements trained on our car until we went around a curve. So I thought that maybe Fidel's eviction of Batista would mean we would not be bombed or shot at by the government. That was a good thing, I was sure.

 

But my family clearly thought otherwise. Even before Fidel's conquest of Havana they, and my extended family—uncles and aunts, cousins, grandparents—all had scared me with the idea that the change in government meant a change of life. The only hope, they said, was an American intervention.

 

That summer after the victory of the Revolution we all went off to Varadero, the gorgeous barrier-island beach where we spent summers swimming and swimming some more. That year we rented a house perched on a bluff right above the beach. The water was marvelously transparent, and the shallow sea made Varadero's sand seem to go on and on for miles into the Straits of Florida.

 

One afternoon, when I was sitting up on the porch that overlooked the beach, I saw a huge fish, a shark, swimming up to within a yard or so of the beach, passing so near to a couple of men that, from where I sat, I was sure the shark's rough skin must have rubbed against their legs. And then the shark swam back out into the Straits.

 

Directly north of us, almost exactly one hundred miles away, I knew, was Marathon Key, half-way down the chain of cays that brought the US, the source of our salvation as my family insisted, so very close.

 

On a beautiful, mild, dead calm evening, as the whole family sat on the veranda at the rear of the house, we saw off in the distance a line of lights coming down from the north.

 

The invasion fleet, my uncle said. The marines are coming!

 

Everyone on the porch grew more and more agitated. Back in Cienfuegos we had been targets; now we'd be at the forefront of liberation. Yay!

 

And then the lights simply moved easterly. It was no invasion fleet, just the camaroneros, the shrimpers out to harvest the shrimp run.