Return to Cuba: 56 years after leaving, sisters revisit land of their birth

For the past few years, my sister, Clara Basch Stone, and I have been exploring opportunities to travel to Cuba, our birthplace and childhood home. Our father, Gerardo, arrived in Cuba from Germany in the late 1930s and our mother, Emma, from Lithuania in the 1920s. They met and married there.

We had not been back since our family, including our brother Ricardo, immigrated to the U.S. and settled in Chicago in 1960. Clara, Ricardo and I are Prospect High School alumni.

Our father had to leave his home twice - Germany in the late 1930s to escape Nazi persecution, then Cuba. Gerardo and Emma despised the dictator Batista, and initially they had great hopes for a Castro administration. But by January 1960 it became clear to Gerardo that the Castro government was communist and he could not raise his family under communism.

In Cuba, Gerardo worked in industrial sales representing American and West German engineering firms, translating sales literature from German and English into Spanish. But life was very hard for our father and mother in the U.S. Gerardo never found the personal acceptance here that he had enjoyed in Cuba, nor could he find adequate work - eventually investing in a Convenient Food Mart franchise on Main Street in Mount Prospect in order to run his own business. He never recovered from the rejection and emotional injuries and died before his 62nd birthday.

In spite of all their hardships, our parents never expressed a desire to return to Cuba. It was not an option, anyway, as long as Castro was in charge. And we kids had become very American and had our own lives. Emma worked in the Food Mart while Gerardo was alive, then cooked for a couple restaurants in Mount Prospect. She lived to 82.

This past April, Clara, who lives in Arlington Heights, and I finally traveled to Havana from Mexico City with Los Cantantes del Lago de Chapala, a singing group of mostly American and Canadian expatriates from the Guadalajara area. Clara had met the choir's director, Timothy Ruff-Welch, in Guadalajara some 10 years earlier, and he organized the cultural tour.

The group obtained all the necessary travel documents, including visas (especially vital for Clara and me with our American passports reflecting our Cuban origins). The cost was affordable and best of all, in addition to the fun concerts with the group, it allowed us plenty of free time to explore on our own.

Only a week before Clara and I left for Cuba we discovered we still had family in Havana - Ramon Vega Osin and his sister, Hilda, whose mother was our mother's cousin, and Ramon's young adult daughter, Anay Vega.

In Havana, Clara and I realized our plans to visit the places in the city center that had been vital in our childhood. We made the most of our first full day when we walked a few blocks from our Hotel Plaza, in la Habana Vieja, to find our Spanish-American school, the Central Methodist School, near our former home.

We were excited to discover that the old, sturdy building survived. It is now a Methodist seminary right next to the Methodist church where our school used to hold assemblies. At CMS we studied in Spanish in the morning and in English in the afternoon.

The school prepared us well for our new life in the U.S. During our return visit, we wandered into the school's small courtyard and found an empty classroom. Everything seemed much smaller than I remembered, although our class sizes were small, maybe 12 students.

Another priority for us was to visit The Patronato at Havana's main synagogue, Templo Bet-Shalom in the still relatively upscale and well-maintained Vedado neighborhood. Our maternal uncle, Tio Abraham, worked there for nearly his entire adult life. Our young cousin, Anay Vega, works at The Patronato and we met her there.

At the Patronato we met the congregation president, who told us about Tio Abraham's life and her and her family's connection to him and our family.

After that meeting, we visited briefly with Anay, who trained at Cuba's famed National School of Ballet until an injury prematurely ended her ballerina career.

Anay arranged for us to meet the rest of the Vega Osin family the following afternoon. During this brief, emotional visit with the cousins, we updated each other on our family histories. Hilda gave us a copy of an old photo of our mother's family that we had never seen before. To our disappointment, we were unable to meet our "new" cousins a second time before our trip ended.

Clara and I also found the apartment in la Habana Vieja where our mother grew up and where her mother and Tio Abraham lived until they died. The current owners of the apartment, Marilyn Reina and her husband, are restoring it to rent out rooms to tourists as a casa particular (private home) and they were happy to show us around.

I explained to Marilyn that our family has a black and white photograph of our mother as a young woman looking out the apartment's only window fronting the street. Esperandote (Waiting for you) is written on it, for her novio (sweetheart). Gerardo Marilyn obliged and posed in the same spot so we could snap a photo.

We also found the two apartment buildings in the center of Havana where we lived - just two or three blocks from the Malecon, the esplanade and sea wall running five miles along the city's coast.

Thanks to the kindness of the current resident of our last home, Clara and I were able to see most of the inside of the old apartment in the second floor of the building. Everything looked much smaller and dingier than I remembered. The poor condition of the apartment's interior and the furniture reflected the relative poverty and shortages much of the population experiences. On the main floor there still is a small and sparsely-supplied bakery.

As we walked the old, narrow streets of central Havana, nothing looked familiar. The city felt foreign and Third-worldly. Some grand buildings have been restored and painted in vibrant pastels and bright colors, but many are dull and crumbling.

Streets in the old neighborhood have been torn up as the government upgrades aged and inadequate infrastructure. Even in the relatively pricey hotels, sometimes the bathrooms had no water or only cold water.

Cuba looks stuck in a time warp. The vintage cars from the 1950s - painted in brilliant colors such as you never would have seen in the originals and repaired repeatedly to keep them in working order; the human and horse-powered carts in the city and country; the inadequate and unreliable public transit system; the food and other shortages; and many other shortcomings - all these we did not experience during our childhood there.

We learned that, until recently, the Castro government did not allow Cuban citizens to sell personal property; it only could be handed down through the family. Hence, the beautifully-restored 1951 Chevy taxi in which we rode from the paladar (private restaurant) where we dined one evening back to our Hotel Plaza had belonged to the young driver's grandfather.

Although all Cubans can attend university at no cost to them, their earning power after graduation and their ability to leave the country to apply their skills and be suitably compensated is severely limited. We hope to see forward movement as Cuba's government allows its citizens greater freedoms and the U.S. finally lifts its 55-year embargo.

• Miriam Basch Scott was a business writer for Wolters Kluwer in Riverwoods until her retirement a few years ago. She has a graduate degree in journalism and lives in Chicago.