Angry Cubans

At the time of my birth in 1957 until I was 9 years old my family lived at 275 57th Street between 2nd and 3rd Avenues in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, NY. (or as it was called back in the day of the two-digit zip code, Brooklyn 20, NY). Bay Ridge was a Brooklyn within a Brooklyn - sort of a melting pot inside the melting pot. Within a 10 block radius of my apartment building, there were enclaves of Norwegians, Swedes, Irish, Puerto Ricans, Finnish, Italians, African Americans, Jews, Poles, West Indians, Asians, Cubans and more. The smells of different kinds of food cooking in that neighborhood on a hot Sunday afternoon when all the windows were open... Beautiful.

A tangible dividing line was the extension to the elevated Gowanus Expressway that ran outside our 3rd floor apartment windows, along 3rd Avenue. If you lived on the high side of the Gowanus (3rd Avenue and up) the dwellings you lived in were nice looking brownstones and some were actually houses owned by the people who lived in them.

On the other side of 3rd Avenue, the low side, where we lived, the families who lived there were mostly apartment renters and worked 'on the docks' that were only a block and a half away (as you can see from this map). People who had jobs 'on the docks' were either longshoremen - like my dad - checkers, talliers, fork lift operators, truck drivers, etc... Anyone involved in shipping and related businesses. These people were hard working first or second generation immigrants that broke their back so their kids could have a better life. I've got some good long shoreman stories for you, but that will be for another day.

Meanwhile back to the angry Cubans...

As I mentioned above, there were a significant number of Cuban immigrants in my neighborhood. Some had come there to live before, but most were refugees who had escaped Cuba just after, the January 1959 revolution led by Fidel Castro which succeeded in overthrowing the government of Batista.

I don't remember the exact year of the event I'm about to describe - I was very young and this is one of my first memories. It could have been immediately following the revolution or around the time of the Bay Of Pigs Invasion. Whatever the event, it caused a lot of Cubans to be very pissed off.

It was about 10:00 PM on a Sunday night and we had just driven home from a weekend of visiting friends upstate in Sloatsburg, NY. I was pretending to be asleep, stretched across the backseat of the car (Car seat? What's a car seat?) so my dad would carry me up the three flights of stairs to our apartment. My view was obscured by the front seat so I didn't see what my parents saw when they turned the corner. But I remember hearing a low roar coming in through the car windows. After my father reached in to grab me and threw me over his shoulder, I felt it was safe to open my eyes to see what all the hubbub was.

From every telephone pole, on both sides of the street, for as far as I could see down the block, Fidel Castro had been hung in effigy and set on fire. Have a look at the image above/right and imagine what the block looked like if one of these was hanging from every telephone pole. There had to be fifty of them. This image is one I will never forget. Anyone else ever experience anything like this?

It was at this point when either my mom or dad said, "We gotta get outta this neighborhood." This may have been the catalyst which made them begin saving money to move out to 'the country', Marine Park, Brooklyn.

P.S. Castro just retired this past February 2008, with nearly 50 years under his belt as the ruler/dictator/leader of our uncomfortable neighbor. He outlasted 10 U.S. Presidents - if you count W's presidency(s).