Delivering on a dream.
A Point of View © 1996
By Paul V. Montesino, PhD, MBA, ICCP.
Sixty-eight years ago this week, June of 1955, my mother Bertha, dressed in her best attire to attend my high school graduation.
The event was not a mere formality. I was the first member of my family to graduate from high school. The fact that it was from one of Cuba’s most respectable private Jesuit educational institutions founded in 1854, Colegio de Belen, added extra luster to the basic shine. My mother had been the youngest of five siblings born to an impoverished country family that lived in a town thirty miles from Cuba’s capital Havana. Her father was a peddler of popular baked cookies and sweets who used to travel frequently to Havana for basic ingredients needed in his trade.
On one of those trips, his delayed return came with the shattering news that he had suffered a fatal heart attack. My mother was seven years old then.
To survive and feed her children, my grandmother Julia didn’t take too long to remarry and have two more kids and was forced to join a tobacco factory making cigars by hand to make a living, an activity that was nastily interrupted four and a half years later when she, also, died suddenly at her workstation. Fortunately for the seven children, the surviving spouse did the best he could to give them a home and some level of security and, above all, an opportunity to remain together with the love and support of the oldest son Francisco.
In April of 1934, my twenty-two-year-old mother married my father and three years later I was born.
My mother never had a chance for a decent education, and she was very much aware of my need to have one. It was with that concern in her mind that one day she accompanied me to visit Colegio de Belen during the summer school hiatus in the company of Dulce, a niece of my father whose son was already enrolled in the famous school.
When my mother saw the impressive buildings that made up the school she tightened up her face and said in an authoritative voice: “You are going to go to this school.” The rest was the history that took place between that summer and the June 1955 date of my graduation, ten years in total.
All my life, I had held my mother’s arm for protection. The night of my graduation she was the one who was holding my arm with love and security. She knew I had arrived at the promised land. At Belen, I participated in a literary academy where I learned how to speak in public and write in private. You can say that you can blame that academy for expressing my points of view. They did not know what they were creating when they gave me my High School diploma and the blessing to “Grow and Multiply” literally speaking.
I had wondered about the shock of my grandfather’s demise on the family and also his community. Not only about the lack of details about the death of a familiar street merchant who sweetened their lives, but the obvious reaction of his family as well as not being able to see a headstone with his name in the cemetery whenever we visited and being told that his remains were in the common grave.
It was not until I was almost finished with my memoirs that the reasons hit me with more impact than the knowledge of his death: he had not died in Havana of a heart attack as his innocent children were told. He had disappeared suffering from a heart full of shame, the one suffered by fathers who can no longer support their families for countless reasons, finding another lover amongst them.
I felt obligated to rewrite the history of my maternal grandfather in my memoirs and rewrite it I did.
My mother lived only eleven years after that date. But her hope for my education and dedication to her family has given her a life that goes beyond this world. Every time I write one of my opinion points, she gets recognition points as well.
And that is my graduation memory point of view today. So Long.
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