TODAY I HONOR MY FATHER {4/15/17-12/13/05} R.I.P.

José Marchante, he was the sweetest man you could ever meet. After a series of heart attacks, strokes and seizures, he finally let go last December. I used to call him “el hombre de hierro,” the man (made) of iron, because of his endurance in spite of all his illnesses. He would bounce back after each episode. He would prevail. With his right hand misshapen and his right leg impaired, he would get up and walk: first with a cane in the early years of his convalescence, and then with a walker, until he became bedridden the last few months of his life.

Married over sixty-six years, my good mother Manuela adored him. She would tend to all his needs night and day, and she was the main reason he lasted so long. Talk about love, theirs was a perfect example. “Ustedes nunca pelean,” you two never fight, some of their friends used to say, because of the way they treated each other—sweetness personified. Ours is a close family. His two sons and his daughter, we too loved him very much. Whether by phone or in person, we kept in touch. We used to hug him, and kiss him, and let him know how much he meant to us. My brother Oswald, the youngest of the three, took it very hard when Dad departed. He was inconsolable, grief-stricken, devastated. My sister and I shed countless tears also, but somehow we were better prepared to handle the inevitable.

Dad was born in Spain, and his family left for Cuba when he was about a year old. At first, they lived in the countryside. When he was old enough, he worked the fields. Although always a man of good manners, he did not have the benefit of a good education. My mother helped him polish his skills when they became neighbors, and even more so when she became his fiancée. As a young man, he worked as a bus driver. Later on, he began working as a service man with the largest “glasses and mirrors” company in the country. He became their most trusted employee, and the owners really appreciated his efforts. I remember going to one of the owners’ house by a beach, when I was a young boy. It was a luxurious home. We went fishing, had some of the fish for dinner and—bottom line—I had a great time.

“La Compañía Nacional de Espejos,” the company my father worked for, financed our last house in Havana. To pay the loan, in addition to working in the shop and on the street as a glasses-and-mirrors expert craftsman, he became a bookkeeper, working on the company books at night, after he got home. So much did they consider him a good man and an exceptional employee, that when he left the company to start his own business, his own little glasses-and-mirrors shop, they wiped out his debt: they told him to forget the rest of the loan and use the money he had for his new business. "El Estilo," (The Style), that was the name of my father's shop.

Imagine that, helping the competition, even if it would be competition in a small scale. Kind-hearted capitalists, the kind of story Fidel Castro will not broadcast to the rest of the world, and I am sure there are many other examples of good management-labor relations in the Cuban archives: the memories of exiled families. Many of us are slowly but surely passing on. It is a shame: the loss of all those stories, of stories untold, stories of both the good times and the sad times.

Everything was going well with his small shop until a very dark cloud engulfed the country. Castro seized power. To make a long story short, after the failure of the Bay of Pigs invasion, my parents decided to send me to the United States. I was sixteen when they started the paperwork. Having been educated in “Los Maristas de la Víbora,” (Marist Brothers) a catholic school, they were afraid I would get in trouble with the naïve masses, the hordes of brainwashed followers of the evil man at the helm and his noxious revolution. They were afraid I would be forced to join his red army or his “volunteer” (not really) workforce.

I remember looking out from the window of the Pan American plane I boarded and seeing all of them standing there on the second floor terrace of the airport: my father with my months-old brother in his arms, my six year old sister in the middle, and my mother at the other end holding on to a handkerchief. I could see my mother crying. I think my sister was crying too. I was too far away to see the tears on my old man’s face, but either they were there or he was trying to be strong for the rest. I will never forget that day, that event, that image: like a photograph, imprinted in my memory. The passenger next to me tried to console me, and I thanked her for it. I think it was a woman, but somehow that fact is not clear in my mind. It could have been a man. For sure, it was another victim of our national tragedy.

That was in 1961. Eventually, my father lost his small business and my family the house. They had to leave everything behind in order to emigrate. Later we learned that a small thief, a lieutenant in the army, had inherited our house, a gift from the big thief, El Ladrón Fidel Castro. Oh, I am sorry! Let me correct that statement. He confiscated the house my father and mother worked so hard to own. He did not steal it. That is how dictators, especially communist dictators, get away with murder. They play with words, while playing with the lives and possessions of their subjects. What happened in Cuba is happening in Venezuela today. Monkeys will be monkeys, and Castro has taken Chavez to school. The people there will suffer as sure as we have suffered. Most will not realize the error of their ways (supporting Hugo Chavez) until it is too late.

In 1963, my family left for Spain and stayed there for about ten months. I would send them some money from New York where I was working, but my father had to work the construction trade (something he had never done before) to support the family. In 1964, they arrived in New York. My father began working as a janitor and later as an elevator operator for Columbia University. A couple of years later, after I was married, they left for Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania. My father worked as the chauffeur-gardener-handyman and my mother as a helper in the kitchen for a retirement home. They lived on the premises, in a big and comfortable house on the five-acre estate. The people at the home loved my parents. Some kept in touch after they left. That took place in 1974, when they came to Miami after my father’s second heart attack. I also arrived here from West New York, New Jersey, a few months earlier that year to pave the way.

Between 1969, which if I am not mistaken was the year of his first collapse, and 2005 how many years are there? Thirty-six years more or less they were, by my calculations. Thus, I believe I was right in calling him “el hombre de hierro,” the iron man.

Today I honor you Dad. Today I send you a big hug and many kisses from Earth. Your first son misses you very much. I loved you before, I love you now, and I will love you forever. May God keep you in the company of the Angels, and may the Saints rejoice with your presence. You sure belong there, a much better man that Castro will ever be. That is a fact, and our world’s history will record it as such, if not the one written by man, for sure the one sanctioned by God during Final Judgment, the one that counts in my Book.