The year was 1959

The year was 1959.

I was 11 years old.

My parents, younger sister and I had come to Florida from New York by car for our yearly summer vacation.  After a stay at the beach in the Clearwater-St. Petersburg area, my father, the only one with a driver’s license, drove us to Key West, the southernmost city in the continental United States.  Until 1938 you could not get there by car, but now, 21 years after the only road into the city from the mainland was built, we drove the 125 miles from Miami to Key West.  My father, who dreamed big – we drove 3,000 miles to see Disneyland three years earlier, just one year after it opened – wanted to take a hopper plane 90 miles south of Key West to Havana, Cuba.  I don’t know why he wanted to do that.  He had lived in Paris after fighting the Germans in World War II only 13 years earlier, but did not seem to me to be a world traveler – we traveled mostly from New York to Florida during my childhood (the only exception being California trips in 1956 and 1963).

But in 1958, a rebel named Fidel Castro, along with his buddy, Ernesto Che Guevera, fought a dictator named Batista in Cuba and on January 1, 1959 took over country in the Cuban Revolution. Castro was a Communist and it was deemed too dangerous for us to fly to Cuba.  Afterall, who vacations in a war zone?

So on August 9, 2017, 58 years later, at age 69, and as the only surviving member of my childhood family, I fulfilled my father’s dream to set foot on Cuba soil.

The circle of life, indeed,

The irony is that in 2017, I saw what my father would have seen in 1959.  Not much is newer than that.