Author Lisandro Pérez knows Cuba’s long history: a Spanish colony, the British occupation, wars of independence, U.S. military occupation, the Batista dictatorship and the Castro revolution.
In his new book, “The House on G Street: A Cuban Family Saga,” Pérez writes about that complex history weaving in the story of his own Cuban family’s history.
“I felt a great deal of urgency about writing this book … for my descendants,” Pérez told WLRN. “When I got into it, I decided I just didn’t want to write a book for my descendants. I wanted to write the history of Cuba.”
Pérez was born in Havana, Cuba, and, like so many generations of Cubans fleeing Fidel Castro’s dictatorship, emigrated to the U.S. with his parents in 1960. He later became an expert on Cuba as founder of the prestigious Cuban Research Institute at Florida International University in the early 1990s.
Part memoir, part history, the book, as noted by the publisher NYU Press, “disentangles the complex history by following his family’s thread, imbuing political events with personal meaning.”
“The House on G Street is a unique depiction of one of the most consequential events of the twentieth century, told through generations of ancestors whose lives were shaped by dramatic historical forces,” writes the publisher.
Pérez, who is currently a Professor in the Department Latin American Studies at John Jay College, City University of New York, spoke with WLRN before his scheduled appearance this Saturday at the Miami Book Fair.
The following Q&A has been edited for brevity.
READ MORE: The U.S. And Cuba: A Brief History Of A Complicated Relationship
WLRN: The title of your book, The House on G Street refers to the house your paternal grandfather built in 1929 in Vedado, a neighborhood in Havana Cuba. What were the main characteristics of the house and what does this place mean to you and your family?
Perez: That grandfather of mine, whose name was also Lisandro (that’s where I get my name from) married fairly late, and he had ten children. My father was the oldest male, but the fourth one. My father also married relatively late, so that’s how I had a paternal grandfather who was born in 1879. He was an orphan boy from rural Cuba who did very well exporting tobacco leaves to the United States. Starting in 1920 or so he moved his family to Havana because he was exporting a lot of that tobacco leaf to the United States. He felt his headquarters should be in Havana. Since he had 10 children, he decided he wanted to build a big house. And he had the money to do it, and he built this house on G Street, which is also known as “Avenida de los Presidentes,” the Avenue of the Presidents, in Vedado.
Vedado was one of those suburbs that really arose at the beginning of the 20th century. And I named the book after that house, because a lot of my early memories of Cuba are rooted in that house. I never lived there. In other words, when my father got married, he moved with my mother to an apartment in another suburb of Havana. But, every Sunday, all of my aunts and uncles met in that house to have Sunday lunch. And, so I got a sense of belonging and a sense of family in that house. To me, in many ways, it represented Cuba.
WLRN: And now, that house is a daycare, right?
It is a daycare center. My grandfather was a very practical man. He didn’t want to build a house that had a lot of embellishments. Many of the houses in Vedado are sort of ostentatious in the way in which they have all this display of different types of very fancy sort of columns. He had an American engineering firm build it, but he took a hand in the design of it. It essentially has a central hallway and all the bedrooms come out to that central hallway. Well, when the family finally decided to move out of the house, when all the children had married and left, it was logical that a school got interested in it. [The daycare center] is called “Vietnam Heroico,” Heroic Vietnam. I wonder what my grandfather would have thought of that. I’m actually glad that you go there and it’s being put to some use. A lot of those mansions in Vedado have been abandoned or there’s been 20 families or 10 families living in them and they become tenements and eventually they just fall into decay. So, I’m grateful it’s being put to use.
Courtesy Of Lisandro Perez
Colonel Ernesto Fonts, who was prominent in the history of Cuba, was Lisandro Perez’ great grandfather.
WLRN: Can you tell us a little about some of the characters in your book, for example, your maternal great-grandfather Colonel Ernesto Fonts y Sterling?
Perez: A lot of the narrative in this book is centered around particular characters in my family history. I picked them, one, because they’re the most interesting ones. They’ve got to have a sort of interesting story, right? And I, by the way, think I was blessed with the fact that the history that I’m writing has a lot of interesting characters. Had my family been kind of dull, it would have been hard writing this, right? There are a lot of interesting characters and I kind of center it on three or four of them. One of them was my great grandfather on my mother’s side. That was the father of my maternal grandfather. And his last name was Fonts. The name came from Catalonia, Spain from a town called Torredembarra. I had a lot of stories and Colonel Fonts, he joined the Cuban war of independence in 1895, and he eventually rose to the rank of Colonel. He was this prominent member of my family that actually took a role in Cuban history.
WLRN: Colonel Fonts he studied in America, as well as a lot of your ancestors. Can you tell me about the influence of the U.S. in Cuba, right around the time that you go over in your book and also the influence that it had on your family?
Perez: I think one of the more important contributions of this book in terms of reflecting Cuban history is to really point out how not just in the 1950s when I was growing up, but much earlier, the U.S. started having this tremendous influence in Cuba. A lot of Cubans started migrating to New York in the 1820s as the connection was established with the sugar trade. In the latter part of the 19th century, that influence became really important. So much so that my great grandfather, Ernesto, was sent to study in the United States. We’re talking about 1880, right? He went to a boarding school in the Hudson Valley. And of course when he was dying, because he died fairly young, he told his widow, take the boys (my grandfather and his brother) to New York and put him in a military school in New York so he’ll learn English.
I always grew up hearing these New York stories and these stories about the U.S. My grandfather on my mother’s side was a big fan of the U.S. He would go to a particular store in Havana where he would buy the Saturday evening Post and Time Magazine and buy things like wholesome sliced bread. I grew up with that idea that there was this world out there that my family was familiar and did business with. That had been a big part of my life, but it wasn’t until the Cuban Revolution, 1960, that I actually got to live there [in the U.S.].
WLRN: What do you hope readers will take away from “The House on G Street?
Perez: I hope that one of the things that they take away is that all families have history and that one should know where one comes from. I taught at Florida International University for many years and had a lot of Cuban American students. I would find that frequently students don’t ask their parents about their family history. And sometimes immigrant parents don’t talk about their family history or the lives of their family in their own country. And, I would encourage people who identify as Cuban or Cuban American to ask those questions and to research that history because it tells you a lot about where you come from, and especially in the case of Cuba. This period of time before the revolution is frequently mired in political controversy and stereotypes. Yet, people have a lot of curiosity in Cuba about how life used to be before it was really totally altered by the revolution. The book shows my mother and my father’s two families and how they lived in the 19th, 20th centuries in a world that now is really quite different, a world that would be unrecognizable for many people who have left Cuba recently or who still live in Cuba.
IF YOU GO
WHAT: Lisandro Perez on The House on G Street: A Cuban Family Saga presentation
WHEN: Saturday, Nov. 23, at 5 p.m.
WHERE: Miami Book Fair at Miami Dade College Wolfson Campus – Room 8202 (Building 8, 2nd floor)
Author :
Publish date : 2024-11-21 06:47:00
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Author : theamericannews
Publish date : 2024-11-21 20:23:22
Copyright for syndicated content belongs to the linked Source.