Chapter Six
Eva
Boston
At the end of June, five American military ships ferried Eva and her fellow teachers—approximately thirteen hundred in total—from Cuba to Boston.
Perhaps it was logistics that drove the decision to utilize the warships; after all, it was an enormous number of teachers, half of all the educators in Cuba.
Or maybe it had been a diplomatic decision, the vessels sending an unmistakable message of the power and might the Americans possessed.
Regardless of what had led to the choice, seeing those ships conjured unpleasant memories of when a military presence had been a constant in her life, the Spanish navy determined to bring Cuba to heel, the Americans fighting their own war against Spain in the Cuban theater.
From the beginning, the ships set the tenor of the journey lest Eva forget it.
She was going to Harvard to represent her country, her people.
Anything else was secondary.
The journey on the Sedgwick mostly went smoothly, her fears of seasickness swiftly allayed.
When Eva was growing up, her mother had told her stories of a grandfather who was a pirate, who had made his way in Cuba sailing the high seas.
Perhaps some of that injected itself in her veins, given her this penchant for adventure that she had never seen coming.
She was determined to memorialize every moment of the journey, jotting down any details that she could think of to use in her writing.
Every single sensation from the rocking of the boat to the sight of the horizon off in the distance was catalogued and remembered as inspiration for a future book or perhaps even this one.
Maybe she would send her characters off on a grand adventure like the one she was undertaking.
She kept a notebook where she jotted down her observations—like how her hair blew when she stood on deck or the color of the sea at the deepest parts of the ocean, land out of sight.
And then, somewhere between Havana and Cambridge, the strangest thing happened—Eva found herself reaching for her notebook less and less, and instead spending her time on the deck feeling the sun on her face and listening to the crashing roar of the waves.
She was becoming someone else, shedding the skin of the woman she was in Havana—a teacher, an orphan, a woman who worked tirelessly to carve a space for herself in an often hostile world—and instead taking pleasure in things she’d never experienced, enjoying moments she’d previously overlooked.
They’d been in Boston for two days since their ship landed on July 2. Their arrival at Harvard was greeted with such fanfare that Eva could do little more than smile and nod at all the goodwill that was thrown their way.
“Nervous?” her new roommate Dolores whispered in her ear.
The two women stood beside each other dressed in their finest. Eva had selected a white shirtwaist and navy skirt for the occasion, pairing it with a navy blue hat that sat atop her updo.
She’d bought the outfit a month ago, right after she had met with Mr. Garcia and agreed to attend the summer school.
Eva had taken a liking to Dolores Aguilar nearly from the first. She taught at a school in one of the suburbs of Havana, and she was as outgoing as Eva was quiet, which made navigating this entire business far easier.
Eva had no problem following Dolores’s lead as they met more people than Eva could possibly keep track of.
“It feels like everyone is staring at us,” Eva whispered, careful to keep the smile affixed on her face.
A chaperone stood off to the side, her presence designed to guard the women’s “virtue.” That the men had no such chaperonage was more than a little insulting, but hardly surprising, considering the concerns that had been voiced within Cuba about allowing the women to partake in such an extensive journey away from home.
Eva didn’t have family members to object on her behalf, and she’d been on her own for so long that the conversations were removed from the realities of her life.
The men were to reside in Harvard’s dorms, while the women were to stay in private residences surrounding Harvard Yard.
For the male teachers, there was the singularity of coming to the United States to study, of attending a university with as august a reputation as Harvard.
The female teachers carried that same weight—the pressure of representing an entire island—but also the added novelty and challenge of coming into the sanctum of male-dominated academia.
The attention and stares were likely experienced even more by the hundreds of teachers on the voyage whose skin was shades darker than Eva’s own.
There was a type of student who appeared to frequent Harvard—white and male—but thanks to her and the other Cuban teachers, Harvard was changing even if just for the summer.
How that would be accepted remained to be seen.
Some of those Harvard men looked at the women passing by as though they had three heads. There were plenty of elbows thrown from one fellow to another, some chuckles and good-natured teasing reaching Eva’s ears.
Not all the Harvard men—but enough—seemed to have more than American history on their minds.
A few of the teachers had complained about their lodging, but the room Eva shared with Dolores was more than comfortable, certainly nicer than her Spartan apartment in Havana.
Its proximity to the campus made it an easy walk, despite how surprised she had been by the heat and humidity that plagued Boston in the summer.
She’d imagined that heading north would bring a cooler climate, but she missed the breeze she’d grown used to off the water back home.
And still—the novelty of their surroundings made her wonder what the trees would look like when they changed colors in the fall, how the streets would be transformed when they were covered in white snow.
A military man stood in front of a beautiful tree giving a speech to the assembled audience, his uniform setting off a riot of emotions within her.
She’d lived in Havana during the war, and while she was saved from some of the horrors that her countrymen and women in the countryside faced, Eva had seen enough military uniforms to last a lifetime.
Eva glanced around at her colleagues, wondering just what they made of the man’s speech.
Most of them didn’t speak English, and many who did only understood a few words.
One of the opportunities at the summer school was the chance to take English classes; the teachers were to be divided up by fluency.
It was a daunting goal to learn a language as convoluted as English in just six short weeks, although she imagined the immersion would help and she was grateful to her uncle for teaching her when she was younger.
She found that it had been easier to pick up his instruction when she was a child, and she had made greater progress back then when everything was new than she did now.
Today’s program was a welcome and a celebration of sorts—the Americans’ Independence Day, July 4. Their pride and patriotism were on full display with the American flags fluttering around them—ones they’d graciously interspersed with the Cuban flag as a welcome to their guests.
Eva hadn’t known what to expect when they arrived in Cambridge, and in her wildest imaginings she wouldn’t have predicted the new Cuban flag everywhere she looked. The flag that so many had died for meant something. It was their hope for the future, for a free and independent Cuba.
The welcome reception was the first chance to make a good impression, and she was determined to represent her country well, the Cuban flag filling her with an overwhelming sense of pride.
Tomorrow, Harvard’s president Charles Eliot was to address them in a welcome speech at Sanders Theatre.
The schedule they were to follow for the summer was packed with activities, and Eva had spoken more in the past two days than she had in the entire preceding week.
She was so used to being alone when she was done teaching that she still hadn’t fully acclimated to the change or to her newfound “celebrity” status.
When the speech and pageantry ended, the teachers marched through Harvard Yard to Cambridge Common, their Cuban contingent on display.
Eva ducked her head, more than a little overwhelmed by the attention their group was drawing.
It was unsurprising, considering this had been touted as the pinnacle of Cuban-American diplomacy, and she figured the good people of Boston deserved to get their money’s worth since they had financed this whole endeavor through personal donations totaling more than seventy thousand American dollars.
The sum was so vast that it made Eva a little dizzy when she thought about it.
What did the citizens of Boston make of the Cuban teachers descending on their city? Would their goodwill help Cuba in its fight for independence?
—
The first week at Harvard passed in a whirlwind of classes, field trips, and social events that left her falling into her bed beside Dolores’s utterly exhausted.
The organizers had scheduled them with military-like precision, and it became obvious that they were meant to make the most of every moment of the cultural exchange.
Their mornings were spent in academic classes, their afternoons dedicated to organized tours of various sites around Boston and Cambridge.
Eva was more than a little impressed by the obvious amount of thought and care that had gone into the summer school.
Would this be the first of many such cultural exchanges between the two countries?
Nothing of its kind had been attempted before, and it certainly set a high standard for other endeavors to follow.