Pink Boots and a Machete Read Online Free Page B

field, it would be the food I’d eat every day.
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    My mom is a very sharp woman. She graduated at the top of her class in Havana and had been on her way to medical school, but the only job she could get on arriving in Miami was at Burger King, sweeping floors. Adding insult to injury, BK, a fast-food giant in the country of freedom, justice, and workers’ rights, paid her 90 cents an hour under the table, even less than minimum wage at the time. Talk about a whopper.
    After she was granted political asylum in the U.S., my mom still hoped one day to go to medical school. But with a language deficit and a family to support, that dream would have to wait. Instead, she worked so that her only sister, who was five years younger, could go to nursing school. My mom saved whatever pennies remained after food and rent to replace the piano her sister had left in Cuba. Ironically, the piano my mom worked so hard to buy would become the bane of my existence, the one I was compelled to practice on. Though it has long been deemed untunable, that piano still sits in Aunt Ica’s house like a piece of furniture.
    Self-sacrifice is a very Cuban trait. Everyone pitches in for their loved ones. In 1961, when Castro proclaimed Cuba a communist state, my Uncle Pedro, who had just been selected to play professional baseball, fought against the revolution, making himself a target. But it was not his fight alone. My grandfather’s younger brother, Gonzalo, risked his life to hide Pedro in his produce truck and drive him to the Colombian embassy in Havana to seek political asylum. The Colombian ambassador personally told Pedro that the regime would tolerate his taking refuge in the embassy but under no circumstances would allow him to leave the island. Still, the ambassador offered to help him escape by allowing my great uncle Gonzalo’s produce truck onto embassy grounds. With Pedro hiding inside a crate in the back, my great uncle headed for Varadero Beach, where a boat would whisk Pedro to Florida. Armed militia stopped them on the way but luckily never checked the contents of the fruit and vegetable crates. The penalty would have been death for both.
    My grandmother, who was a schoolteacher in Cuba, also endured her share of heartache. Among the fear tactics employed by Castro’s regime, she was made to “volunteer” to cut sugarcane, not much different than forced labor. Her oldest child, my tio Nene, was jailed for spending three months vacationing in the U.S., which to the regime made him a suspected CIA agent. He was 17.
    When they arrived to arrest him, my mother asked one of the soldiers, who had been a longtime family friend, how he could do that. The soldier responded, “If my own father had to be executed for the purposes of the regime, I would put the bullet in him.” Those words would haunt her for many years.
    Regular incarcerations ensued, completely at random. In 1961 there was an unsuccessful attempt to overthrow the Castro government by a U.S.-trained force of Cuban exiles supported by the U.S. military, famously known as the Bay of Pigs invasion. During the invasion, Castro ordered that all suspected dissenters, my grandfather and Tio Nene among them, be picked up and jailed to keep them from joining.
    The prisons were so crowded that my grandfather described having to sleep in turns, sometimes standing up. Executions were brutal and not uncommon. It was at that time that my grandmother made the wrenching decision to help her son flee the island.
    Cuba’s borders had yet to be closed, so with breaking heart Mima arranged to have Tio Nene sent away as soon as he was released. She signed the necessary papers for him, a minor, to travel by plane to the U.S., ostensibly to visit a friend. But this was no vacation. Shortly after, Cuba’s borders closed. Mima did not know if she would ever see her only son again.
    In 1965, four years after both my uncles had made their escapes, Fidel