by Carlos Lopez

Elvira Lopez started as a poor immigrant, but now she owns a home in Florida.

Growing up

Elvira Lopez was 8 years old when her family left Cuba for the United States. "I left with a few clothes, not many," she said. "I remember taking a porcelain doll with me to the airport. One of the toes was broken, and it was inside of the doll. It rattled whenever it was moved. They x-rayed it to make sure I wasn't taking anything valuable with me. We didn't even think they were going to let me take that."

Life in the United States was tough for Lopez. "My parents were disappointed because we had to live in a one-bedroom apartment with six other people," she explained. "There was a bed and sofa-bed in the living room, and the bedroom had two or three beds in it."

Her aunts, who had been in the country longer, helped her enroll in St. Augustine Catholic School in New Jersey. Lopez started in December, before she even knew how to speak English. "I couldn't even go to the bathroom because I didn't know how to ask," she said. "It was horrible. I used to go home every day and cry, 'I don't like this! I don't want to go to school!'"

After several months of being immersed in English at school, Lopez learned to speak the language. However, her parents never learned so translating from Spanish to English came with the territory. "They (her parents) always thought I was going to be next to them and that they weren't going to get old and they would always live there, so there was no reason to learn the language" she explained. "It was something that I just knew I had to do but, to this day, I still hate to translate."

According to Lopez her parents sought mostly factory jobs and thought knowledge of English was not crucial. However, she believes their failure to speak English hurt her parents' chances of ever getting better jobs. "My father had to end up working as a janitor in the couple of years before he retired, and some people were very mean to him because he didn't speak the language," Lopez said. "It hurt his pride, but he had a family that he needed to support."

Politics

Now, Lopez is a grown woman living in West Palm Beach, Fl. "It's like you're between two waters," she said about being an immigrant. "It's my country as much as the U.S. is my country. I love the US, but I love Cuba, or maybe I love the idea of patriotism. But there's nothing there for me."

She is adamant about maintaining the U.S. embargo on Cuba. "We didn't leave out of poverty," she stated. "We left because you couldn't exercise your rights politically. People went through so much and now, because it might be financially good, let's open the embargo and claim it's to make life better for Cubans? How about the people that left? It's never going to be better anyway because the people won't see any money. But Fidel is going to have tons of money in his pocket to do more harm than he already has. He destroyed the nation, we can't just say it's all forgiven."

Lopez does not feel that there will be a push to get tougher on Cuba. "I don't really think the U.S. cares," she said. "If they did they would have done something a long time ago. They have gone into other countries and done things but, for some reason, they decided Cuba wasn't worth the effort."

The Future

If someone younger with more democratic ideals comes into power in Cuba, Lopez said the country has a chance. But if members of Castro's family take over, things will never change, according to her.

Lopez expressed concern over Cuba being exploited by corporations if the Castro regime should collapse. "The thing is not to build and line your pockets," she said. "You have to teach these people what it is to be a democracy. If the U.S. or any other country goes in to make money, they are going to exploit the people, and I don't think that's fair because they've suffered enough."

"I'd like Cuba to be what is was before Castro," Lopez mused. "I would like to see it a free country where there's democracy. I'd like to see, maybe, a little United States."