Joaquin Menendez, 70, a childhood friend of Cesar Brioso Sr., gives Karen Branch-Brioso a tour of the carpentry shop Ismael Brioso owned until Fidel Castro took it over.

By Karen Branch-Brioso
The Tampa Tribune

HAVANA - Working from a scribbled list of addresses from my in-laws’ collective memories - some more than 40 years old - I doubted my ability to return to Tampa with the souvenir that would mean most to my husband:

A piece of his history.

Cesar left Havana as a 5-month-old in 1965. A history buff, he long has tried to piece together his own. He recorded interviews with relatives to capture their memories. He scanned sepia-toned family photos.

Now, on a reporting trip to Cuba for the Tribune, it was my turn to fill some gaps.

Many streets in Havana don’t have signs, even some of the elegant boulevards that run through the embassy district of Miramar. Add to that hardship the rumpled piece of paper with the list of homes where my in-laws had lived. Some had partial addresses with question marks next to them.

There was no address next to the listing of the clinic where Cesar was born.

But this was Cuba, where the best information always seems to come from the streets. Our driver got us to the weathered, central Havana neighborhood of Luyanó. A few stops to ask people on the street got us the rest of the way.

In a neighborhood of crumbling buildings that hadn’t seen a paint job in years, the Hija de Galicia clinic looked better cared for than most. Most of the blue paint on the outside was intact. The marble floors had a few cracks. Millions of footsteps had worn some of the bronze from the “H G 1957” embedded in the entry to the lobby. But the dual winding staircases leading to the second floor were set off by paintings of a doctor and a nurse against a brilliant sky-blue background.

My father-in-law’s brow wrinkled when I showed him the photos upon my return: “It’s completely deteriorated. It doesn’t look anything like when I left there.”

My father-in-law - Cesar Sr. - also didn’t recognize his cousins, Yolanda and Magaly, who had lived next door to him while growing up on Blanquizar Street.

“Who are you looking for?” a silver-haired woman called out to me from her front porch as I searched for my father-in-law’s old house number.

“They haven’t lived around here for 40 years,” I told her.

“What’s their name?”

“Brioso.”

“Yo soy Brioso,” said Yolanda Tellez Brioso, 66, tapping her chest with a finger. I’m Brioso. When I told her I was Cesar’s wife, she opened the steel-bar door of her front porch and welcomed me in.

Faces Of Strangers

She and her sister, Magaly, 65, introduced me to their abundant and vociferous collection of roosters, hens and dogs on their tiny back patio.

I showed them pictures of our 2-year-old son, Daniel. Then I pulled out my digital camera and showed them a photograph of Cesar. They searched his face for signs of his father - just as my father-in-law would search their photographs for signs of the twentysomething women he had known decades ago.

He couldn’t find them there.

He didn’t recognize his childhood home, either.

But when he saw the photographs of the carpentry shop next door, a startled look came to his face.

“The photographs of the shop looked like it did when I was there in 1959. Nothing had changed a bit,” he said. “I recognized it right away.”

For decades, Ismael Brioso - his uncle and Yolanda and Magaly’s grandfather - owned the carpentry shop on Blanquizar Street. Cesar’s grandfather, Rene Brioso, managed the place from the 1930s until the government took ownership of it after Fidel Castro came to power in 1959. Yolanda said the government paid her mother some money for it.

My father-in-law had no idea it was still there.

The shop was idle that day, May 1, Cuba’s Labor Day holiday. But the doors were open. So many doors and windows in Havana are always open to let in the breeze at all hours of the day.

A neighbor, Joaquín Menendez, gave me a tour inside at Yolanda’s urging.

“Tell your father-in-law that I’m Chicho’s son,” Menendez, 70, said with a smile. “We played together when we were little.”

Some things, like the carpentry shop, haven’t changed much in Cuba.

My father-in-law said he and Joaquín played Cuba’s national sport - baseball - in the street when they were little.

“If we didn’t have baseballs or bats, we’d use broomsticks and balls that we’d make from cardboard cigarette boxes, tied into more or less a round ball,” he said.

While traveling around Havana that week, I saw baseball games like that every few blocks. Boys and even men batted away at makeshift baseballs: usually soda caps, or a handkerchief tied into a ball, or a rubber ball.

Such games went on long past dark in the Lawton neighborhood where my mother-in-law, María Luisa, moved as a child. Her mother moved her three children to Havana from a farm in Pinar del Río after her husband died of typhus.

They lived in a one-room apartment at the back of a home on 14th Street in Lawton.

‘The Government Lets You Ask Questions?’

Today, it is Emerita Torre’s home. The diminutive 89-year-old woman began to cry when I introduced myself. Cesar’s grandmother, she said, “is like a sister to me.”

My mother-in-law couldn’t remember the address of her first Havana home. That was one of the question marks on my list. But we needn’t have worried.

She had included the address for a cousin who lived down the street, Manuel Alvarez, a retired carpenter. He and his wife, Eva, welcomed me into their home with open arms - and a bit of surprise that I was in Cuba on a journalist visa: “The government just lets you come here and ask people questions?”

Manuel directed me to a pair of rocking chairs in the living room: “Tell your in-laws that you sat in the same chairs they broke in when they were dating.”

My in-laws didn’t recognize the chairs in the photographs I took. When my mother-in-law saw the photos of Manuel, she drew in a sharp breath: “He’s so skinny!”

When I met him, his build reminded me of the multitude of rail-thin bodies that startled me on my first trip to Cuba, back in 1994.

It was the “Special Period” - a few years after the collapse of the Soviet bloc and the end to its hefty subsidies to Cuba. Food shortages were widespread. Even soap was hard to find. Back then, I brought several bars of soap to give away. The reaction of one woman to the gift was unforgettable. She cradled the soap as if it were a bar of gold.

Soap is still rationed today: one bar per person per month. But soap isn’t nearly as scarce as it was then. And nowadays, super-lean bodies are even scarcer. Everywhere I went in Havana, examples abounded of bodies with a bit of paunch or well-rounded hips.

Manuel, my mother-in-law’s skinny cousin, is more the exception today than the rule.

He led me down the street to her former home. On the one-block stroll, we ran into two more cousins who weren’t on the list: Ramón Sánchez ("They call me Monguito.") And Jorge Goicolea, “El Chulo.” The nickname means “cutie.” He’s younger - 48 - than all the other cousins, who are in their mid-50s. He was 6 years old when Cesar left as an infant for the United States.

We returned to the neighborhood later to meet another cousin, Magaly Sánchez, because she’d been away at her job at a cigar tobacco distributor. She met me at Manuel’s house, carrying a plastic bag filled with memories. From it, she extracted a photograph of her with Cesar’s aunt Marta and his great-grandfather.

She startled me by pulling from the bag one of my wedding photos. Manuel’s sister from New York, Mirta, one of our wedding guests, gave it to her.

“You were thinner then,” Magaly noted.

There was no The-Special-Period-Is-Over excuse for me to fall back on.

She tearfully showed me a ring that Cesar’s grandmother had recently sent her through a friend traveling to Cuba. Her eyes also moistened as she showed me photographs of her 11-year-old grandson. He recently left Cuba to join his father, Gilberto - her only son - in Hialeah.

I took several photos of her. I could never get one where she smiled.

Magaly raced to make more memories as we talked. Mother’s Day was approaching, so she wrote Mother’s Day messages on postcards for every female in the family in Florida. The last one had my name on it.

Back in Tampa, I gave them to my mother-in-law and Cesar’s aunt Marta, who would deliver these latest family memories when they returned home to Miami.

I gave Marta the photo that Magaly had sent of the two of them, from decades before, standing on either side of Cesar’s great grandfather.

But Cesar borrowed it first. To make a copy of one more piece of his history.

Reporter Karen Branch-Brioso can be reached at (813) 259-7815 or at kbranch-brioso@tampatrib.com.

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