Mary Cabrera of Belton knows all too well about life after the Cuban revolution. The revolution a half century ago left her a stranger in a strange land, far from her family, isolated, working menial jobs and barely able to understand English.
“There were times I was so homesick that I would cry myself to sleep,” she said.
Such was her dilemma after the 1953-59 insurrection that pushed the Castro brothers, Fidel and Raul, into power.
Fifty years ago this month, the Castros’ band of rebels overthrew the dictatorial government of Cuban President General Fulgencio Batista. They have ruled the island country with a firm whip ever since.
As the crow flies, Cuba is about 2,000 miles away from Bell County, but it might as well be a universe away. Cabrera spreads albums out on the kitchen table to show pictures of her family and birthplace.
“See, look at their faces,” she points to her siblings. “They look so old. Living there is hard. It wears on them.”
Yet, hers is not a story of political upheaval and disconnect as much as it is a journey of faith and blessings.
Born in the central Cuba province of Santa Clara, the former Mary Villar was the oldest of five children. They grew up on the family’s spacious farm, where they grew a wide variety of vegetables, fruits and cattle in the Caribbean nation’s fertile agricultural region. She had a happy, secure childhood. Her father sent her to good schools up until sixth grade.
However, when her mother fell ill, he made her quit school in the sixth grade to care for her family. By 1956, when she was 25 and with her parents’ permission, she and a friend trekked to Miami to find adventure and work, with hopes of finishing her education.
Even as she was leaving for the United States, the Villars were hearing about rebels in the nearby mountains. After a failed attack in 1953, the Castros’ band were exiled to Mexico, where he trained an army and prepared for a guerilla war against Batista. “We kept hearing of this,” she said, “and my father was worried, but we weren’t sure whether they would be successful.”
Shortly after Cabrera left for Florida, Fidel Castro and 82 others landed back in Cuba by sea and fought Batista’s soldiers in December 1956. Batista forces quickly reduced the rebels’ numbers, but most of the important revolutionaries’ leaders made their way into Cuba’s highest, densest mountain ranges. Educated and articulate, Castro quickly gained supporters through his rhetoric, despite his military defeats. The Cuban uprising was well on its way.
Meanwhile, Cabrera, an accomplished seamstress, found work in Miami garment factories and in making alterations in clothing stores. Her traveling companion married within a year, leaving her alone, barely speaking English and struggling to support herself.
Meanwhile in Cuba, Batista attempted to force a showdown with Castro’s rebels in the mountains. Fearful of the outcome, Cabrera’s family told her to stay in the States.
A cradle Roman Catholic, Cabrera made friends with Baptist missionaries in Miami, who encouraged her to continue her skills and education.
“My family at first was concerned because I became a Baptist. In such a Catholic country, they looked down on Protestants,” she said.
Her family soon had bigger problems than Protestants.
Cabrera’s home province of Santa Clara was the site of a bitter battle led by Che Guevara’s army in December 1958. Batista launched a massive assault on Castro’s rebels in the mountains. Outmaneuvered, Batista gave up and escaped to Spain. By Jan. 8, 1959, Fidel Castro marched into Havana and assumed power.
“At first we didn’t know that Fidel was communist,” she said.
But her father, no fan of Castro, criticized the new government. Several of the dictator’s thugs invaded the Villar house and beat him severely. Their lives would be changed forever. Nevertheless, Cabrera’s newfound faith sustained her.
The Baptist missionaries in Miami took her under their wing, helping her to move to Valley Baptist Academy in Harlingen. She had never ventured out of Florida, but the prospect of gaining more education and better job skills appealed to her.
Even though she was by then in her late 20s, “I worked on campus and studied to get my high school diploma,” she said. “There was so much going on in Cuba from 1963 to 1965, my family didn’t think it was safe to return.”
Again, with the help of Baptist friends, she moved to Marshall to attend East Texas Baptist College, where she had hoped to become a nurse. However, science courses proved too challenging.
After 2½ years, she returned to Valley Baptist to work. Eventually, she worked her way to the University of Mary Hardin-Baylor, where she earned a bachelor’s degree in home economics and Spanish.
Along the way, she met and married Josue L. Cabrera in 1970. Two years later, when she was 39, their son, Joshua, was born. After being a stay-at-home mother, she began work at Scott & White as a Spanish interpreter in 1987, retiring in 1999.
She did manage a brief return home in 1961. The disastrous U.S.-supported Bay of Pigs invasion in April 1961 intensified tensions between the United States and Cuba, especially after Castro declared himself a “Marxist-Leninist” and strengthened relations with the Soviet Union. The Cuban missile crisis a year and a half later seemed to end whatever hopes she had of seeing her family again.
For the next 35 years, letters were censored and phone service was impossible.
“I could tell that the envelopes had been opened. Sometimes it would take months for letters to get to me, if at all,” she said. One of her regrets was that she was not able to see her parents before they died.
When travel restrictions and embargoes lessened after the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991, she returned to Cuba as part of a Baptist missionary team in 1996. For the first time in more than three decades, she saw her family and Santa Clara again.
She returned in 1997 and 1999 with missionary teams, each time reconnecting with her family. She still has not been able to meet all of her nieces and nephews. Her brother still maintains the family farm, but the government tightly regulates what crops he may plant and when. Cuba’s infrastructure, neglected for a half century, is deteriorating rapidly, which puts further burdens on her family.
She and her husband, who has worked in the Scott & White engineering department for 37 years, are grateful for the support they have received from their church, Immanuel Baptist in Temple.
For now, she is also grateful that restrictions are gradually easing in Cuba. But she is concerned what will happen when Fidel and Raul Castro die. She hopes that someday her son, now a children’s psychiatrist in Arizona, and her two young grandsons will be able to meet their Cuban relatives.
“My son has never met my brothers and sisters,” she said.
