April Hunt. Sentinel Staff Writer. Posted June 6, 2001.
Orlando Sentinel
KISSIMMEE -- Juan Romagosa leaves Thursday on a mission back in time.
The trip itself is to Cuba. But the 57-year-old Kissimmee retiree will step
into history as he guides a group of college students through the crumbling
historic buildings on the island nation he left at 16 for a lifetime in the
United States.
"I had to rediscover my heritage," said Romagosa, who didn't
revisit his homeland until 1995. "My attitude is that of an American, but I
want to say I tried to do something for my heritage, for Cuba."
An estimated 20,000 Americans visit Cuba legally each year as part of
educational or cultural programs licensed by the U.S. Treasury Department. About
that many visit illegally, circumventing the embargo that prohibits Americans
from spending money in Cuba by traveling through third countries.
Romagosa is one of just a few dozen people and organizations nationwide with
a special federal license to lead the tours. Many visitors use those programs as
a veil to become tourists, but the people in Romagosa's first tour won't be
beach combing or looking for discounted cigars.
The 12 students and two faculty members from the Savannah College of Art and
Design will get a hands-on study of Cuba's colorful and varied architecture.
Preservation of historical buildings has been one of the rare side benefits
of a government-run economy. In Cuba, buildings from the 1500s to the 1900s
mingle on narrow streets, crowded with aged American and German cars, because
there is not enough money to tear them down and build new structures.
For Cuban architects, historians and preservationists, the American visit is
a chance to network and exchange professional ideas on how to revitalize the
wealth in buildings that range from Spanish colonial sites to century-old sugar
mills and factories.
"Historical preservation is one of our many majors, and we emphasize
practical applications," said Ron Jones, the college's coordinator for
study-abroad programs, who will be on the trip. "We want the students to
learn from the shared interest in historic preservation."
More tours possible
If the journey is a success, the college will consider having more and
opening them to other majors, plus adding workshops and seminars at the college
on Cuban architecture and art.
For Romagosa, such formal recognition of the links between the two nations
he loves would be the surest sign that he has left his mark. Such lofty goals
weren't in his sights when he grew up in the city of Cien Fuegos, the son of a
soda distributor.
He didn't realize his family had money until, when he was 14, they decided
unrest on the island made it safer for him to be in school in the United States.
The wealthy had the most to lose in the coming revolution.
Romagosa stayed three years at Howey Academy, a private school in
Howey-in-the-Hills in Lake County. Every summer, he went home to see his parents
and brother, who was two years older.
He remembers the last day he visited: Sept. 14, 1960. He flew back to the
United States that day and within a year was part of the Pedro Pan program that
helped find American homes for Cuban children whose parents remained on the
island.
Romagosa moved in with a family in Michigan, further isolating him from
anyone who knew his culture or even his language.
He was treated with love in the house, and quickly became just another
American teenager, a third child to Fred and Iona Vogt. He went to Michigan
State University, taking classes part time while he worked at any job that would
pay his bills: a carpenter, a butcher, a stock boy at a grocery.
After a stint in the Army, he finished his hotel and restaurant management
degree and accepted a job with the Walt Disney Co., which just months after
hiring him opened the Magic Kingdom. He worked 30 years for Disney, retiring in
March.
Through it all, Romagosa says he became purely American. Michigan and
Kissimmee through the years were not places where Spanish was heard. Romagosa
had long since made English his primary language, so much so that he thinks in
English and translates into what was once his native language.
Culture shock in reverse
When his parents, brother and an aunt were able to leave Cuba and move to
Kissimmee in the early 1970s, he was taken aback by their culture. His mother
took only an hour to meet and talk at length with neighbors with whom he had
never done more than wave to each morning.
"That's just the way it is in Cuba," Romagosa said. "Here,
you go to work and you go home and watch TV or go inside with your family.
There, they have to help each other."
After his parents and brother died, Romagosa became more interested in his
homeland. He traveled there in 1995 as part of a seminar on Cuban economics and
culture. He left feeling that the two nations are connected, regardless of the
political rhetoric or economic embargo, and he wanted to strengthen those ties.
There are, in fact, many connections between the two nations, said Fred
Padula, a former State Department analyst on Cuba and just-retired professor at
Southern Maine University who has studied the country extensively.
"We share many cultural characteristics, from our love of baseball to
the belief in business," Padula said. "There have been more efforts to
recognize that in people-to-people linkages, to move around the respective
governments, with an eye toward what will become of us in a post-Castro world."
Romagosa's answer was a nonprofit agency, the Bridge for Historic
Preservation. The agency is little more than him, a secretary and four-member
board of directors. Still, it has allowed him to bring the city historian from
his hometown of Cien Fuegos to Savannah for a meeting on topics that will be
covered on the student trip.
Common language found
It has also put him in touch with Isabel Rigo Savio, the president of Cuba's
chapter of the International Council of Monuments and Sites. Rigo Savio, a
professor at the University of Havana, is an expert on Cuba's restoration and
preservation programs. She will help the students on the tour.
When she and Romagosa talk, it is about buildings. He once feared going to
Cuba, worried that what he believes in and what people there believe in would be
too different. But in the common language of architecture, he says he has begun
to feel the greatest link of all -- one to a history that includes him.
"I have to force myself to be aware of how to act and be Cuban,"
Romagosa said. "I am still an American learning about a country called Cuba
and people called Cubans, even though I am one."
April Hunt can be reached at ahunt@orlandosentinel.com or 407-931-5940.
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