Preface

My name is Herman Rodas. I was born in 1925 in Cienfuegos, on the southern coast of Cuba. I taught mathematics in a secondary school in Havana for thirteen years. In 1962 I came to Miami with my wife, our two children and four suitcases. I washed dishes in a hotel kitchen on Miami Beach, I drove a taxi, I studied at night, and in 1969 I received my Florida teaching certificate. I taught algebra at a high school in Miami until I retired in 1990. I am seventy-four years old.

That is the whole of it in one paragraph, which is how a mathematician would prefer it. My grandson Gustavo, who is nineteen and studies computers, tells me that a paragraph is not enough. He says my grandchildren and their children will want the long version, and that if I write it here, on what he calls a home page, it will be kept, and anyone in the world may read it. I am not certain about the world. But I have been a teacher all my life, and a teacher does not refuse an assignment from a student, especially a good one.

So I have begun. I write the chapters by hand at the kitchen table, in the mornings, when the apartment is quiet. Gustavo types them on Sundays and puts them here. I have asked him not to correct my English except for spelling. It is the English of a man who learned it at thirty-seven from the Miami Herald, from the radio, and from the menus of a hotel kitchen, and I would like it to stay that way.

A word about Spanish. Where a thing has a Spanish name that has no proper English twin, I have left it in Spanish and explained it once. My grandchildren should know these words. Everyone else may consider it a small lesson. I could not help it. Old habits.

This is not a political book. Others have written that book, many times, with more anger than I have. I have tried to write only what I saw and what I felt, and to be fair to everyone in it. If I have not succeeded, it was not for lack of trying.

For Those Who Write to Me

Since Gustavo put the first chapter here in July, I have received forty-one letters by electronic mail. Some are from people who also left Cuba and wished to compare memories, and I am grateful to them. Two were from my former students, now in their forties, one of whom informed me that she still cannot hear the word "quadratic" without sitting up straight. Several asked whether I knew their grandfather, who also taught mathematics in Havana. In two cases I did. I answer every letter, though slowly, because I type with two fingers.

Gustavo has also shown me a page by a woman who leads walking tours of the old hotels on Miami Beach, Deco Days: Walking Old Miami Beach. She is very fond of the buildings, and she explains well why they look the way they do. I knew those streets first from the back doors, at six in the morning, carrying a bag lunch. It pleased me to see them from the front.

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Visitors since July 4, 1999:

(My grandson says this is a respectable number. I have asked him to show me the arithmetic.)

Letters are welcome, in English or Spanish:
[email protected]

Last updated September 19, 1999 · Typed by Gustavo Rodas