After almost five years since publishing “Illuminating Family: Paquita and Alberto, My Catalan Grandparents” I felt the strong need to complete and publish its needed counterpart “The House Next Door: My Cuban Family.” The former was a formal study of my Catalan family ancestry and history; this one is about the extraordinary and eventful history of my maternal Caribbean family, mostly in Cuba. The two families, while sharing some commonalities, were very different socially, culturally, historically, and even financially. Even though both memoirs overlap towards the end, they do complement each other. Their differences stage an interesting family counterpoint.

 

The House Next Door: My Cuban Family is a historical memoir about ancestors, immigration, identity, and belonging. The story includes the lives of five related families: the colonial Hechavarrías and Cos, the Cuban Fernández Fernández and García Fernández, and ultimately my own immediate family the Catalan/Cuban Ràfols García. This being a historical memoir, my personal impressions on main characters, places, and times are interwoven throughout. 

  

Regardless of the many difficulties encountered through the research there were some significant highlights. Among them: the finding of common ancestry with the aristocratic Hechavarría family in colonial Santiago; the uncovering of the controversial 18th century wedding of ancestor María del Rosario Hechavarría in the cathedral of Santiago; the unexpected finding of the birth certificate of my great-great-great grandfather Ulpiano Cos Hechavarría in an old Santiago church; and the discovery, via a distant cousin in Canada, of ancestry and documentation on my great-grandfather Pedro Fernández from León.

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The House Next Door: My Cuban Family has fifteen chapters preceded  by an Introduction and succeeded by an Epilogue. The first chapter, “The House Next Door,” describes my personal impressions as a fifteen years old of my maternal grandparents. Beginning with the second chapter the memoir follows chronologically the history of the family from the earliest known ancestors in 16th century Spain, early colonial times in Cuba, the island’s fight for independence, the Republic, the Castro Revolution, and ultimately the family departure from the island and exile to the United States in the mid 1960’s. The last three chapters describe the family struggles during the early days of the revolution.