TURNING POINTS

1960: Instant Exile; On the Eve of the Most Overhyped Transition in History, Consider Six Moments That Truly Turned the World, Not Just a Page on a Calendar.

                  By Rafael Lima
                  Special to The Washington Post
 
                  I am looking at a dogeared photo of my mother and me standing on the
                  tarmac at the Key West airport. In the faded photo my mother is wearing
                  one of those '50s pleated skirts and a sleeveless blouse. Her hair has just
                  been blown over her shoulder by a gust of wind. I'm wearing a pair of
                  rubber zoris and a terry cloth shirt and shorts. There are no bewildered
                  lines of refugees as would come later on the freedom flights. No grateful
                  immigrants are kissing runways in the background.

                  "We are tourists," my mother tells the immigration officer on this sunny
                  South Florida day, just after the new year in 1960.

                  As I look at the snapshot now--40 years later--I ask myself what it meant
                  to stand there on the tarmac in Key West in a pair of rubber thongs, a
                  turista on the first day of my exile.

                  Fidel Castro had marched into Havana on the shoulders of his bearded
                  rebels. Ours was a military family in the service of Batista. Most of the
                  adult men in the family had been among the first arrested for crimes against
                  the revolution. The first of many. To certain people in Washington, Fidel's
                  position on democracy was still unclear. Was he a freedom fighter, or a
                  Marxist?

                  It was not unclear to me, though I was only 7. I could hear what Castro
                  was all about in the hushed adult conversations I strained to catch behind
                  closed doors that New Year's Eve, and I saw it for myself in the dawns to
                  come. My mother woke me early and led me by the hand into what had
                  been military headquarters but overnight had become a prison called La
                  Cabana. My father and uncles were all there, stripped to their underwear.
                  The longhaired rebels made sure to lead us over a footbridge above a
                  courtyard, where we could see the execution pole in the ground, the bullet
                  holes in the wall, the chickens pecking all around in the aftermath of
                  slaughter.

                  In those panicked, chaotic days, my mother had gone to the trials, had
                  visited the prisons, had begged the old-friends-turned-rebels for the
                  release of her brothers and her husband. Even then my mother's sister was
                  being interrogated and soon would be charged with conspiracy against the
                  revolution. It was only a matter of time before there was a midnight knock
                  on my mother's door, too.

                  She and I were helped to flee the island by a family friend, a civilian airline
                  pilot who arranged for our flight and our tourist visas under assumed
                  names. All I knew was that one dawn, instead of going again to the prison,
                  my mother loaded me and a single bag into the back of a 1958
                  Roadmaster and drove to the airport. Half asleep, I watched the black
                  silhouettes of palm trees slip by against the rose-colored sky. We're just
                  going for a little trip, my mother told me. We'll be right back. But I knew
                  the truth in her voice.

                  At the airport, the pilot friend of ours wrapped his arm around my mother's
                  trembling shoulders, stuffed a forged ticket in her purse and whispered:
                  Los turistas no lloran, tourists don't cry. More bearded rebels with their
                  lank hair and huge Garand rifles, milicianos, scanned the lines of people
                  leaving the island for counterrevolutionaries. If they cried, they were
                  escaping. If they cried, they would be arrested.

                  They picked through us as if we were cattle to be herded. One of them
                  grabbed my hand from my mother's, and another escorted her into a room.
                  When she emerged, she was buttoning her blouse. Her eyes were red, her
                  rings and bracelets gone, even the silver hair clip that held her thick hair
                  had been taken.

                  On board Aerolineas Cubanas DC-3, I listened to the tense, almost
                  breathless silence of everyone praying for the door to close and the plane
                  to move. Then the milicianos boarded and pulled a middle-aged man in a
                  starched white guayabera from his seat. I remember the nervous pleading
                  in the man's eyes as he was marched away. My mother stared ahead, but
                  she could not stop trembling.

                  I know now what torture it must have been for my mother to board that
                  plane. I realize now she would have stayed behind, to visit the prisons, to
                  beg friends-turned-rebels for the release of her brothers and her husband,
                  had it not been for me. I can only imagine what she must have felt as the
                  plane's nose tilted, and the wheels left Cuban soil.

                  Barely more than a half-hour later, the pilot, our friend, came back to
                  escort me to the cockpit for landing. As the rumbling DC-3 lowered
                  through a thunderstorm, past the blur of windshield wipers I saw the
                  coastline of Key West. I was just a boy, after all, and I remember feeling
                  disappointed that the stormy weather meant we probably wouldn't be
                  going to the beach.

                  Alone in the back of the plane, my mother could finally cry.

                  The flight took 50 minutes. And then we were standing in the wind, and
                  our friend the pilot snapped a photo.

                  I look at that little boy, squinting up from the tarmac, and I see the outlines
                  of a life that never happened. A Cuban life. In 50 minutes, the boy in the
                  faded photograph had gone from being a child growing up on a tropical
                  island, the son of an air force captain, to a baffled refugee, standing on an
                  airfield in Key West, fatherless, familyless, countryless--banished.

                  Rafael Lima, author of the play "Salvador," teaches creative writing at the
                  University of Miami.

                           © Copyright 1999 The Washington Post Company