I decided to stop over in Miami on my trip back to Australia from Haiti–after all, Miami is the gateway to the Promised Land for many Haitians and others in the Caribbean, especially Cubans.
My taxi driver from the airport, being from the lesser Antilles island of Guadalupe, spoke a Creole dialect similar to that in Haiti, so he was delighted to have a chat in his own language as we crawled through peak-hour traffic on the way to Belen College’s Jesuit residence, the home of several exiled Cuban Jesuits who re-established their school in Miami 50 years ago.
The cabbie knew about poverty and politics in the Caribbean, and he understood the lure of a better life in the United States. When I told him I was working for Jesuit Refugee Service on the Haitian border near the Dominican Republic he remarked, ‘You know life is really tough here for an immigrant as well. I work constantly–long hours, long hours–my life is not my own.’
The Jesuit community where I stayed was celebrating the 50th year since they’d set up Belen College Jesuit high school in Miami. President Fidel Castro–a former student there–had closed down the college following the revolution. On my tour of the college, one of the pre-revolution Jesuits said the original school in Havana was even bigger. He was proud of the new school, but his eyes evoked a sense of nostalgia as he showed me the photo of the original school, which covered an entire foyer wall.
The well-equipped and prosperous new school boasts a ‘who’s who’ list of wealthy exiled Cuban benefactors. It has state of the art facilities, including a meteorology lab that provides hurricane warnings to the local media and city council. Following the tradition of the old Havana college, they have re-created the student barber shop. As a reminder of the old days, sitting on a side bench was a glass display cabinet protecting a blade and scissors allegedly used to snip Castro’s locks.
Soon-to-be ordained Jesuit deacon Frank, whom I’d met in the Dominican Republic, offered to show me some of the sites of Miami. Frank was born in the United States to Cuban parents. While passing though some lush, leafy and well-off streets of Miami, he commented, ‘I tell people in Cuba and the Dominican Republic that these (nice streets) are the result of socialism! It’s all organised and