Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: FRIDAY, November 24, 1995 TAG: 9511270031
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: A-1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: CATHRYN MCCUE STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
``Gracias Senor, por esta gran comida en tu nombre, Amen.''They give thanks for the meal: Rice and beans is served along with mashed potatoes and a Cuban-style turkey, basted with oregano, cumin, lemon and vinegar. No dressing.
And there's some red stuff for which no translation is needed - "salsa de cranberry."
Everyone is wearing nice clothes. Mama has on her red earrings, and uncle even dispensed with his cigar and knit cap for the occasion.
Thursday was the Morales family's first Thanksgiving dinner. There's no such holiday in Cuba, and not much to be thankful for.
In August, Pedro Pablo Morales, his wife, daughter, stepson and brother fled the communist country where the economy is crumbling under Fidel Castro's regime. The United States granted political refugee status to Morales, who spent nine years in prison for speaking out against communism in 1962.
"I've never been a Communist; I always like to be free," Morales said through his case worker and interpreter, Ricardo Valdivieso.
Now he and his stepson are working full time at a Roanoke industry, unloading trucks and making mops for minimum wage - a fortune compared with Cuban standards. His wife is getting the medical assistance she needs, and his daughter just got glasses and is attending Patrick Henry High School.
"Here, we can solve our problems," Morales, 58, said. "Here, you want to eat chicken, you eat chicken. You want to eat pork, you eat pork. In Cuba, you don't know what you want to eat because there is nothing."
On Thanksgiving Day, the Moraleses' dinner table in their modest apartment on Maiden Lane displayed the bounty that America represents - ham, turkey, corn, white potatoes, sweet potatoes, rice and two desserts.
In Salem, another Cuban refugee family was also tasting the traditional feast of the Pilgrims for the first time. Alberto Nodarse, his wife and two daughters, along with six other Cubans, spent the day with Tom and Ronda Clark.
The scene was as familiar as a Norman Rockwell painting - kids underfoot, loud laughter, greetings and kisses at the door, a flurry of pots and pans in the kitchen. The only difference was the language. The Clarks, who learned Spanish during the years as evangelists in Spain, have helped many Cuban refugees in many ways.
Nodarse, 38, was a doctor in Cuba; his wife, Aracelia, a dental hygienist. A pair of shoes cost an entire month's pay. A pound of beef cost a week's pay. Religious worship was forbidden.
"We have a dictator there; it's not a democratic government," Alberto Nodarse said. "We have to do all that the big man says. You know who the big man is?"
In March, he won a government-sanctioned lottery that allows a certain number of Cubans to leave the country. He sold everything his family had, and drove a cab at night to earn American dollars from tourists. He had to pay $3,200 American dollars to get his family out, including air fare, passports, medical exams, and "permission fees" to local bureaucrats.
Now he works as a medical assistant drawing blood, and she works at the Home Shopping Network. Despite the change in careers, the Nodarses are living a better life here than they did in Cuba.
"This is the First World. We lived in the Third World, " said Alberto Nodarse, who speaks English. "The people can't eat; the people don't work. Our government, our economy is breaking."
He misses being a doctor, though, and plans to improve his English and study to pass the medical boards in a few years. One of his girls, 10-year-old Arianna, wants to be a figure skater like she saw on television.
|n n| The Nodarses and Moraleses are among the 175 refugees who have come ""
Barbara Smith is director of Refugee and Immigration Services, which, under the auspices of the Catholic Church's Richmond diocese, has helped settle about 1,800 refugees in the valley since 1979.
They've come from Poland, Bosnia, Haiti, Ethiopia, Cuba and elsewhere, usually arriving in waves, depending on the political and economic conditions at home.
"Bosnia is self-explanatory," Smith said. "Iraq, it was Desert Storm, and Vietnam is still Vietnam," where high-ranking officials of the former South Vietnam are being released after years of imprisonment.
"It's a perfect tie-in with Thanksgiving, because the Pilgrims came to flee persecution in Europe and make their lives better for their children," Smith said. "And I think that's what the freedom in America is still about."
This year, the refugee center has hired two case workers to deal with the influx of Cubans, 73 in all, far outnumbering other nationalities. Since the fall of the communist bloc in 1989 and the loss of Soviet subsidies, Cuba's economy has spiraled downward. There's little food; housing is dismal; jobs are scarce; and pay is next to nothing. The island's factories are producing at one-third capacity. Discontent led to riots last year, which unleased a flood of refugees determined to find a better life in America.
For the most part, they do. The center gets them started by paying a couple of months' rent and arranging for food stamps, Medicaid, job interviews and English classes. Smith purposefully finds apartments scattered around the city so "there's not a Vietnam-town, or Chinatown."
By the same token, she makes sure the refugees are not completely isolated. "We don't throw a family into west Salem and expect them to survive," she said.
All but a few of the Cubans have found jobs at places such as Cycle Systems, Rowe Furniture, Maid Bess and Halmode Apparel. One family recently opened a Cuban food stall at the Market Place.
"We don't want people to get the wrong idea. These refugees are not dependent on the government," said Gilda Machin-Scarpaci, one of the case workers. Most of the newcomers are eager to earn money to buy what they want, not just what the government gives them. And in America, the possibilities are endless, sometimes overwhelming.
"You take them to the supermarket, they go into shock," Machin-Scarpaci said. Without supervision, the refugees often overindulge on the abundance of a free-market society. One young woman spent $18 on chocolate. One family ran up hundreds of dollars in phone bills making calls back home.
The case workers try to teach the refugees about budgeting, planning meals and saving for big purchases. But they understand the reaction to being in America, after leaving a country where several families crowd into a single house, where gasoline costs more than $4 a gallon, where a doctor earns perhaps $10 or $15 a month, where the Committee for the Defense of the Revolution has a watchdog group on every block, where a person can wind up in prison for speaking out against the Castro regime.
"Every story is completely different; it breaks your heart," said Machin-Scarpaci.
|n n| On the night of Aug. 30, 1994, Anna Maria Garcia climbed into a raft with her husband and eight other people and set out to sea. They had bread, crackers, water and a few pictures of loved ones. Nothing else. Their raft was made of inner tubes, wooden planks and a tarp.
They did not know what would happen to them.
Garcia was 32. She had left a 6-year-old daughter behind with the girl's father. It was heart-wrenching to leave her daughter, but it would have been too risky to take the young girl on a raft in the shark-infested waters between Cuba and Florida.
Garcia was among the estimated 25,000 "balseros," or rafters, who fled the island nation last year. She spent 17 hours in the raft - a short time compared with many balseros - before being picked up by the U.S. Coast Guard and taken to the U.S. naval base at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba.
Conditions at the hastily made tent cities there were not much better. "The same day I got there, I wanted to leave. But I got used to it," Garcia said, through translation by Machin-Scarpaci.
During her 10-month stay, Garcia became pregnant, and she and her husband were allowed into the United States in June. She has a brother in New York City, but she had heard the city was expensive and crime-ridden. So authorities sent them to Roanoke.
"It's a pretty city," she said through Machin-Scarpaci. "The people are nice. It's quiet. It's not like other cities. I feel safe." She and her husband plan to stay in Roanoke, and eventually bring her other daughter and her sick brother to the United States.
"You can get whatever you want when you work hard," she said. "In Cuba, you work hard and get nothing." She was a factory seamstress, earning 163 pesos a month - about $4.
Garcia rocked her 3-week-old baby and listened intently as Machin-Scarpaci explained to her in Spanish the history and meaning of Thanksgiving. Then Garcia said: "I have a lot to be thankful for, to leave Cuba in a raft, to be here, to give birth to a healthy baby, to have health and a husband. It's a lot to be thankful for, thankful to God."
Refugee families need clothing, furniture, transportation and tutoring. For more information on how to contribute, call Refugee and Immigration Services at 342-7561.
by CNB