![]() “The longest day in Havana,” as my grandmother, Mercedes, so simply put it.Įven now, over 60 years later, the day has seemingly yet to end. The sisters came to know the day they left Cuba through one another’s eyes, cherishing each other’s remembrances as their own. Though both sisters were young when they left their home and have different recollections of the transition, years’ worth of telling the tale has formed a collective memory. She remembers being “confined” in an airport and waiting for hours to get out-one of her three prominent memories of her fleeting time in the country. Mercedes’ younger sister, Alina, only three-years old at the time, has faint memories of that long and exhausting day. When her family arrived in Miami, they went immediately to a Woolworth’s department store to buy shirts and shorts to replace the dresses-just the first in many ways that the United States culture would prove to be different from that of Cuba. In defiance of the system, her mother had sewn extra dresses within the fabric of Mercedes’ clothing, disguising them as petticoats. Already classified as an adult, she was only allowed three dresses on her journey to Miami, Florida the rest would be confiscated by the new Communist government, along with her house and most of her family’s personal belongings. ![]() ![]() As ten-year-old Mercedes Jacobs sat in the Havana airport in 1962, the wait was long and her clothes were heavy.
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