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CUBA
NEWS
The
Miami Herald
Wed in Cuba: She loves me not
Marriages between foreigners and Cubans have
skyrocketed, and while many relationships succeed,
many others fail -- sometimes by design.
By Tracey Eaton, The Dallas Morning
News. Posted on Mon, Oct. 13, 2003 in The Miami
Herald.
HAVANA -- Ted Oswick has heard the tales of woe.
Older men venture into Cuba and marry young, beautiful
women, only to be dumped once they get back home.
But Oswick said he is sure that his romance with
a Havana maid is for real.
''I see men in their 60s with teenagers and it
sickens me,'' said Oswick, an information technology
worker from England. "But I'm not that much
older than my girlfriend. I'm 54 and she's 37.
We're both adults and we have a genuine relationship.''
The number of marriages between foreigners and
Cubans has skyrocketed since the early 1990s,
when the socialist government turned to tourism
to save its economy. but while many relationships
succeed, many others fall apart, leaving a trail
of heartache, shattered hopes and betrayal.
Foreign diplomats who grant travel visas to couples
say differences in customs, language and age can
lead to trouble.
'NAIVE' ABOUT LOVE
'Some men figure, 'I'm 50 years old. When am
I ever going to have a woman who's 20 again?'
So they get married,'' said a European diplomat,
speaking on condition of anonymity. "But
these men are naive. Not that many 20-year-olds
are really in love with someone who could be their
father or grandfather.''
Joaquín Pérez found out about that
the hard way. He was 71 when he traveled to Cuba
from Spain, looking for love. He thought he found
it in a woman who was then 28.
''She always told me that the age difference
didn't matter and that she liked mature men,''
Pérez said in a letter posted in the Spanish
Embassy as a warning to his countrymen.
A MARRIED MAN
A few months after their marriage, the woman
stole his car and abandoned him, he alleged in
the letter.
Women have sad stories of their own.
Yuneisy Pérez, 29, married a Mexican man,
only to find out that he already had a wife.
''I ended up living in an apartment he rented
for me in Mexico, but he seldom slept there,''
she said. "After almost a year, I fled and
moved in with a Mexican family. He found me and
had me deported to Cuba.''
Foreigners can't take Cuban women from the island
without a government-sanctioned letter of invitation
requiring them to pay the Cubans' expenses abroad.
Some Cubans traveling to Portugal get off the
plane in Madrid, leaving their foreign lovers
out to dry. But the men are often so ashamed that
they don't report it.
''They keep it quiet in the hope that no one
will find out,'' a European diplomat said.
In one case, a foreigner spent $50,000 on a Cuban
woman in just two weeks, he said.
''Meanwhile, she slept with at least three of
his friends, got a job at a casino and dumped
him,'' the diplomat said. "He called me,
asking how he could have her expelled from the
country. But that couldn't be done.''
Cuban officials could not provide any figures
on marriages between foreigners and Cubans, but
scattered evidence suggests a dramatic increase.
Only 15 Spaniards married Cubans in 1990, the
Spanish newspaper El País reported in 1997.
That number shot to 670 by 1993 and to 1,190 by
1996, a year when 117,000 Spaniards of both sexes
visited the island.
Today, Spain and Italy each record between 1,000
and 1,500 such marriages a year, diplomats say.
Mexico, Canada, Germany and Portugal also see
a considerable number, they say.
Certainly, tens of thousands of Cuban women --
and some men -- have married foreigners in the
past decade, diplomats say.
Some Cuban men complain that foreigners are plundering
the island of its greatest natural resource --
its women.
ANNUAL VISIT
That would be people like Jorge Represa, a tourist
from Spain, who says he visits Cuba every year
in hope of finding a partner. ''Yes, I want to
get married. I want someone to take care of me,''
said Represa, 67, who currently is seeing Yania
Fabar, a 30-year-old from Havana.
Cuban officials play down the phenomenon, saying
that when the Soviet Union was the country's chief
sponsor, scores of islanders married Russians
and other foreigners.
Now most visitors are from Europe and Latin America,
said one official, who requested anonymity, "so
it's no surprise that there are marriages. And
most marry for love. I don't agree that most Cubans
marry foreigners because they disagree with the
political system or want to leave the country.
That's a distortion.''
HORROR STORIES
But Cubans say they hear plenty of horror stories
about marriages gone bad.
''I know of one Cuban woman who married a man
from Saudi Arabia,'' a woman from Havana said.
"She slept with his brother, and he traded
her for a camel.''
''Yeah, I've heard that story,'' said another
Cuban, Olga Medina, 27. "Did you hear about
the Italian who put his Cuban wife in a cage?
He fed her bananas and invited his friends to
watch and make fun of her.''
No one knows how many of these stories are true,
but it's top-drawer gossip in a country torn between
revolution and the encroaching outside world.
Despite such experiences, some Cubans remain intent
on snagging a foreigner.
PRAYING FOR A HUSBAND
''Every night, I hope and pray to the Virgin
of Charity that I will find a husband who will
take me from Cuba,'' a 25-year-old Havana woman
said.
And sometimes there is a happy ending. Yordanka
Sarmientos, 26, a former teacher who was visiting
home, readily admits that she married a Spaniard
''for pure convenience'' because she wanted to
live abroad.
But ''once I was living in Spain, I fell in love
with him and he with me,'' she said, and they
have been together since.
'La Mamá' of mameys
Cocina by Maricel E. Presilla.
Posted on Thu, Oct. 09, 2003 in The Miami Herald.
A gigantic old tree stands in Donald Pantín's
lush, one-acre backyard in Pinecrest. From massive
branches that shoot straight out looking for the
sun grow football-shaped fruits with leathery
skin the texture and color of sandpaper.
Nothing about the stark exterior of the fruit
prepares you for what is revealed when you cut
one open: a long black seed, shiny as onyx, nestled
in a vivid, custardy pulp the color of wild salmon.
Miraculously, the tree has withstood the ravages
of time, seasonal storms and even Hurricane Andrew.
The family calls it ''La Mamá,'' for this
is, literally, the mother of the sweet and aromatic
Pantín mamey, one of the tastiest tropical
fruits found today in Florida markets.
''La Mamá'' is a relic of the time when
Donald's father, Eugenio Pantín, born in
la Coruña in the Spanish region of Galicia,
began experimenting with tropical fruits on his
five-acre farm in the Redland. Donald recalls
how his father, a retired electrician newly arrived
from Chicago, became a Florida gentleman farmer
with a passion for New World fruit trees of the
sapotaceae family -- mamey, sapodilla, canistel
and caimito. Through trial and error, Eugenio
mastered the technique of grafting, the only way
to breed most fruit trees true.
In the early 1950s, a Cuban émigré
named Josefina Jiménez gave Eugenio three
mamey seeds she had smuggled into the U.S. in
her brassiere. He was no stranger to the fruit,
having lived in Havana and then in Key West, where
he worked in a Cuban cigar factory. He planted
the seeds and used the unknown seedlings as rootstock
to graft budwood from an old, proven mamey tree
that grew near a fire station in Key West. (That
tree had Cuban roots, too, by way of the 19th
century exodus of dissidents from the island.)
The one survivor from Eugenio's experiment is
the 60-foot tree that towers over Donald Pantín's
sprawling ranch house. It was planted in 1953,
the same year as Fidel Castro's attack on the
Moncada barracks in Santiago de Cuba, the symbolic
beginning of the revolution that would ultimately
create an insatiable desire for mamey among Cubans
who had fled to South Florida.
Because of the outstanding quality of its fruit
-- a sweet, aromatic pulp with a bright, salmon-red
color and little fiber -- the tree became the
parent stock for Eugenio's mamey grove. Soon,
news of his superior fruit spread among connoisseurs,
who came to know it as the "Key West mamey.''
Donald Pantín took charge of the family
mamey business in 1963 after his father's death.
At around that time, the respected nurseryman
Lawrence Zill, who had investigated the commercial
potential of Eugenio's prized cultivar, christened
it the Pantín mamey.
The timing could not have been better for the
Pantín's future.
''Of all tropical fruits, mamey is the one that
represents the nostalgia for Cuba,'' says Carlos
Balerdi, a horticulturist at the University of
Florida's Cooperative Extension Service in Miami-Dade
County.
Exiled Cubans longed for a steady supply of mamey
and were willing to buy it at any price. (I remember
paying $5 a pound in the 1980s.) Recognizing this
eager market, Redland farmers rushed to grow the
fruit. The intense demand led to such frequent
thefts that many groves were protected with barbed
wire and watchdogs, as if the trees held golden
nuggets.
It was at the height of mamey fever 15 years
ago that I first met Donald Pantín and
his wife, Sara. Of course, I was shown the majestic
parent tree.
''She is the mother of every single Pantín
mamey grown in Florida,'' Donald said proudly.
Today, Balerdi says, 95 percent of the mamey
grown on the 350 acres devoted to its cultivation
in South Florida is the Pantín cultivar,
in season from July through October. The rest
is planted in such varieties as Pace, El Viejo
and the large Salvadoran Magaña, which
come in season at different times of year, creating
an almost uninterrupted supply.
''They all have merit,'' says Balerdi. "But
none compares in flavor and aroma with Pantín
mamey.''
Culinary historian and author Maricel E. Presilla
is the chef/co-owner of Zafra in Hoboken, N.J.
Her latest book is The New Taste of Chocolate.
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