Sangre De Mi Sangre

My Abuela's 75th birthday is coming up. As part of her celebration, everyone in the family is writing their own letter about her and what she means to them. Below is my cousin Juanito's letter. What you need to know is that my Abuela's name is Enedina, but everyone calls her Cuca. Also, she has been close with the Alamo family since she was a child, but didn't meet my Abuelo, Arturo Alamo, until she was in her teens. I promise this is as far into Genealogy as I will ever get.

The earliest recollection that I have of Cuca is my third birthday party and I have the picture to prove it. She is standing two rows behind me the second person from the left. That event was a mere 67 years ago. To put it into a historical context which people can easily understand, the attack on Pearl Harbor by the Japanese had occurred the month before the party. So the date that we are describing is January 25th 1942.
The place that Cuca and I lived in was the Cuban sugar mill town of Chaparra in the province of Oriente. We lived a block away from each other and I usually was the one that went to visit her to play. Memory is a strange thing but I have very vivid recollections of the mud pies that we made in the back of the house in which she lived. The back yard had a Papaya tree and I recollect that we made tubes from the stem of the leaves through which you could shoot spitballs.Cuca lived in the house of Alfredo Martinez (Chichi) and his wife Jacobina (known as Chiky to me), you have to keep the names simple when you are three or four years old. The house had a common wall separating it from the house of my uncle Fermin Alamo and his terrorist wife Paulina (a description of someone as a terrorist in 1942 requires the explanation that to us kids she was a stern, dictatorial person who shooed us away for any slight infraction). She did have one saving grace however, and that was that she made the best ice cream in the world which we periodically got to eat.
Recollections of our idyllic existence brusquely terminated in the Summer of 1944 when my father, Gabriel Alamo, transported my friend Cuca to the United States where she was to live for the rest of her life. I guess that we really had two great years of playing house, producing mud pies and spitball shooting before it all came to an end.
We did not see each other for one year when in 1945, I was transported to the United States by my mother. We teamed up again in New York City but all was different, Cuca was now 11 and I was 6 years old. A vast difference in age by any measure and one that precludes the production of mud pies (the New York City concrete sidewalks do not lend themselves to that type of activity.)
Cuca lived on 139th Street and I lived near 125th Street and that precluded me from going around the block to play. Time has a way of moving along and bringing new players into one’s life and the next thing that I remember is that my cousin Arturo Alamo came up from Cuba to live with my aunt’s and grandmother. Over time I heard that Arturo had gotten a girl friend that was very much loved by the family. The name of the girl did not ring any bells with me but it was Enedina Infante. It took a while for me to get curious and ask who the heck is Enedina Infante? Well, you dummy I was told that is Cuca’s real name. I never knew her by that name; to me she will always be Cuca. Well my friend Cuca married my cousin Arturo and the rest is history.

Juanito Alamo