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Mission to Cuba

For many Bostonians in 1959, Castro was a romantic figure.

Plowing through a driving rain, a minivan pulled up to the former Soledad sugar-mill estate house three hours east of Havana. The rain carried the sweet scent of the tropics. It splashed against the fading yellow paint of the stately dwelling and on the wrought-iron fence that surrounds it. The van door slid open, and out rushed 14 members of an extended family who were here for their first visit to Cuba. These were no ordinary tourists, however. Their own New England ancestors, Katherine and Edwin Atkins, had once owned the big yellow house and the sugar mill. But it was confiscated in 1961, when Fidel Castro's revolutionary government nationalized most foreign properties.

The bedraggled tourists' first stop was a small building next door to the house, the one-room Pepito Tey Museum, named after a fallen revolutionary hero. The Americans listened quietly as a young Cuban woman nervously recited the history of the objects in the room: a portrait of Pepito Tey, photographs of the Atkins family, a photo of revolution icon Che Guevara, and, chillingly, slave shackles. Two elderly workers, clad in large work overalls and rain slickers, accompanied the family. They had been laboring at the mill as harvesters and mechanics since they were teenagers, after attending a community school in the 1940s that Katherine Atkins had set up years earlier.

The tourists hovered around the display cases, eagerly trying to identify the people in the old photos. But what grabbed the attention of 17-year-old Casey Atkins, the youngest of the party and a student at Concord-Carlisle High School, were the slave shackles. It was sobering to realize that her great-great-grandparents might have been the owners of that rusty metal.

"It made me think a lot about the way my family had lived in Cuba," she says. "Maybe even if they didn't use the shackles, they were still prospering off the slave labor."

This was not just Cuban history but her legacy, her family's history, an entwined saga of the United States and Cuba. This was the first trip for the Atkins family since the confiscation, and they had come to find out more about that which had been unspoken for 40 years.

Also in the family party, off in the corner looking at the artifacts, was the organizer of the trip, Chester G. "Chet" Atkins, a former US congressman from Massachusetts's 5th District and a former state senator and state representative.

"It's such an essential part of our family history and our family mythology," he says of the links with Cuba. "I think as you get past 50, family history for some reason becomes important. The first part of your life, you spend not trying to be like your family. And the second half, you kind of give up and realize that, for all your fighting, a lot of your genetic proclivities - like pear shapes and baldness or whatever it is - you can't fight, but you have to try to understand it."

The Atkins trip came about because of one Cuban's passion for history. Orlando Garcia, the director of the Cienfuegos Provincial Archives, a research facility in the town of Cienfuegos, has long been intrigued by the story of the Atkinses: How a Unitarian family from far-off Belmont, Massachusetts, ended up buying a sugar plantation in 1884 that had several hundred slaves. Since slaves in Cuba were freed over a period of time, according to age and other criteria, there were still slaves at Soledad until at least 1886.

Garcia knew that the Atkins family papers, which were held in Massachusetts and only barely alluded to in the crumbling provincial archives, contained much information on Cuban history, from the Spanish-American War to the time of the country's industrial development.

As a historian, he knew that in 1806, the first Atkins to be involved in Cuba, a Truro resident named Joshua, sailed to the island, bringing back hides, sugar, and molasses. One of Joshua Atkins's sons, Boston merchant Elisha Atkins, established a more formalized sugar business with Cuba in 1838. In 1869, Elisha's son, Edwin, started spending winters in Cienfuegos, which was then the third most important trading port in Cuba, to learn Spanish. He described his impressions of the Soledad region in a letter to his mother: "You can imagine about the same country as Belmont with sugar cane planted all over the valley as far as Arlington and Cambridge, and nearly up to Waverly."

Orlando Garcia also knew that shortly after Edwin Atkins bought Soledad in 1884, the family started a sugar research station that gradually became involved in other kinds of botanical research. Even from the early days, scientists from Harvard had gone to investigate tropical plants there; in 1919, Atkins donated the land for the Atkins Institute for Tropical Research to Harvard. Generations of Harvard professors and students journeyed to Cienfuegos to do research, until Harvard nervously abandoned the project in 1961, shortly after the confiscation of the neighboring mill.

"For me, as a historian and as an investigator, my dream was to rescue that unknown part of pre-revolutionary history to which the Atkins family belonged," Garcia says. "After the revolution, I felt as if that part of history had disappeared."

For Garcia, Boston might as well have been on the moon: The United States had imposed a travel and economic embargo on Cuba in the early 1960s after a military attempt to overthrow Cuba's revolutionary government failed at the Bay of Pigs. Throughout much of Garcia's life, there was no mail to or from the United States, no direct flights, no easy telephone access. Americans couldn't visit, except those few who chose to defy the travel ban.

He could not imagine how he could ever get access to information he sought in the United States.

Exchange between Cuba and the United States had always been a two-way street, until the US embargo and revolutionary rhetoric closed off communication between the countries. In the 1800s, Cubans settled in New York and Florida, moving back and forth between the States and the island. The Cubans who fought against Spain's rule in the 19th century were led by what was known as the New York Junta, Cubans who had become naturalized US citizens. America and its ways were seen as an antidote to the colonizing Spanish.

And Boston had its own bit of Cuban history: More than 1,300 Cuban schoolteachers traveled to Cambridge in 1900 to study the US educational system at Harvard University. That year, on the Fourth of July, the teachers were greeted on Boston Common by 3,000 area schoolchildren waving Cuban flags, symbols of Cuban independence from Spain.

While the political relationship between the United States and Cuba was often ambivalent - as evidenced by the 1901 Platt Amendment passed in the aftermath of the Spanish-American War, which reduced Cuba to quasi-colonial status - the cultural, educational, and personal relationships remained strong.

Even during the 1960s, when anti-American slogans were rife in Cuba, its official media still noted, "We are talking about the government, not about the people." Baseball continued to be Cuba's national pastime, and Cuban television showed a vast quantity of American movies. By 1994, state-controlled Radio Taino was filling the airwaves with American rock.

Over the years, restrictions on US journalists and academics traveling to Cuba began to soften on both sides. In the early '90s, Rebecca J. Scott, a professor of history at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor, began extensive research at the Cienfuegos Provincial Archives.

Scott worked closely with Garcia and describes him as a "pragmatic idealist."

"His tenacity in protecting and preserving documents is legendary," she says. "They say that the truck drivers in town tip him off when an office is throwing away papers that might have historical value, and Orlando has them bring the truck to the archive instead of the garbage dump."

Scott encouraged Garcia to reach out to people in the United States who could help preserve the nations' mutual history.

So, in March 1996, on a battered typewriter, Garcia hammered out an invitation in English to Chet Atkins to visit Cienfuegos and the old sugar mill.

"Dear Mr. Atkins: It has recently come to my attention that you are a descendant of the family of Edwin Atkins. As you know, the Atkins family and the Soledad estate are a central element in the history of our region. . . . In this epoch your family gave to Cuba what is now a national historical monument, the botanical garden. Several scholars, both Cubans and North Americans, have done research on the Atkins estates, and have worked in our archives. It would be a great pleasure for us, and for the staff of the botanical garden, if you were to visit Cienfuegos, the Central [sugar mill] Soledad (now called Pepito Tey) and the botanical garden."

In the invitation, Garcia pointed out that the Provincial Archives contained documents from the 1830s as well as material from 1864 to 1961, the period "in which the Atkins estates were innovators in agriculture and technology in the region."

Not knowing Chet Atkins's address, he sent the letter to Harvard professor Jorge Dominguez, an acquaintance of Scott's, to be forwarded to Atkins.

For the Atkins family, the trip last November was a combination of family reunion and political fact-finding mission. "La Familia Atkins" included three generations, the oldest being Edwin's grandchildren. On the former sugar plantation, family members chatted with old-timers who had worked there, then explored area coffee plantations and checked out the music at a nightclub in Cienfuegos.

Cuba had always seemed a long way off, exotic and filled with mixed emotions, tinged not only with political struggles but with family drama. After Chet Atkins's grandparents split in a bitter divorce, the sugar-mill property fell into the hands of another branch of the family. Before the complicated financial dealings of the divorce could be straightened out, the 1959 revolution intervened.

Chet Atkins was 14 years old when the Soledad mill was confiscated two years later, in 1961. Since the revolution, he and his family had been meeting with Cubans coming to Boston to live, people who had worked closely with the family business and seemed to be bitter about what was going on in Cuba. His parents' sympathies initially were with Fidel Castro, who had not yet declared himself a Communist. Many Bostonians were raising money for the revolution, and to them, Castro was a glamorous, romantic figure of rebellion.

"I had a real sense of the horrors and the corruption of the Batista regime, and there was a sense of fascination with Castro, with his progress," Atkins recalls. "There was a certain level of fascination with what was going on. When Castro expropriated the property and turned against America, at that point I was disappointed and puzzled."

"Growing up in the '60s, for people like Chet and me, meant that coming from a family owning a sugar plantation in Cuba was nothing we really wanted to talk about or acknowledge," says Elisha "Skip" Atkins, a physician at Massachusetts General Hospital and Chet's first cousin.

But that would change. After he was elected to Congress in 1984, Chet Atkins took particular interest in issues involving relations between Cuba and the United States. For example, he introduced an amendment to a 1992 appropriations bill that would have withdrawn funding from TV Marti, a US propaganda station aimed at Cubans on the island.

When Orlando Garcia's letter came, Chet Atkins was surprised but receptive. "I was interested [in Cuba] because it was fascinating," he says. "How could you not be interested in Cuba?"

In 1998, Atkins visited Cienfuegos for a week. There he met Tomas Perez y Perez, a man in his 90s whose mother had been a slave on a neighboring plantation; both mother and son ended up working at Soledad.

"He was one of the most dignified people, with an extraordinary memory, and I spent a whole afternoon with him," recalls Atkins. "He had worked on the plantation all his life under the family and then under Communism. This guy was a real leftist, and he had been a union organizer and subsequently a very active Communist.

"He was incredibly excited, and one of the high points of his late life was to just sit and be with us. He couldn't have been more gracious or welcoming to us. And, of course, his family had nothing, just absolutely nothing - just dire human poverty," Atkins says. But his host "brought out all of the best foods that they had. He wouldn't say anything except just the nicest things about the family. We had to stop him and say, `Hey, look, we appreciate all of your fine comments, but I'm interested in the whole story.' "

Perez y Perez told him that none of the other Afro-Cuban workers could get jobs in the mill and were relegated to work in the fields. But Perez y Perez was intelligent and strong, and Katherine Atkins insisted that the foreman at the mill give him a job as a carpenter. They battled; she won.

Some of Chet Atkins's family had been unhappy with his decision to explore their ties to Cuba, but his tales of his welcome on the island won at least some of them over. He urged them to take advantage of an upcoming conference at the botanical garden in Cienfuegos that would bring together Harvard academics and their Cuban counterparts to discuss research in tropical economic botany and environmental education.

Around this time, travel to Cuba was becoming easier. In January 1999, President Clinton announced the "relaxation of some US restrictions," including the possibility of flexible group licenses to travel to Cuba for "people-to-people contacts." Direct mail service between the United States and Cuba was reestablished, as were increased direct charter flights.

Josefina Vidal, who handles exchange programs for the Cuban Interest Section in Washington, D.C., says that groups from 40 different universities, as well as 10 university presidents, have traveled to Cuba since the restrictions were eased.

Despite the warmness of the welcome by the Cubans, there was a bittersweet quality to the homecoming. There were the shadows on the family's history that had to be confronted. Chet Atkins, who calls his great-grandfather "the capitalist ethic personified," thinks out loud about some of the contradictions exhibited by his ancestors.

"The Boston Unitarian didn't free his slaves until the last possible moment, because they were an asset on his books, and he [Edwin Atkins] wanted to be able to depreciate the asset," Atkins says. "I think the whole thing is coming to grips with a crazy set of contradictions that he was a paragon of American imperialism, that he in fact developed and refined some of it, bought governments and elections, bent US policy and presidents to achieve his end, which was greater profitability for operations. He busted labor unions.

"He was also an extraordinary philanthropist. . . . I talked to children of the slaves, and they had enormously fond memories - I was really amazed to find - of Edwin Atkins, and particularly Katherine Atkins, good feelings." They would tell stories about acts of kindness, he says, about the fact that Edwin and Katherine "would collect things and bring clothing to people. She provided medical care when no one else did. It was an extraordinary contradiction."

After a while, Atkins says, he just listened to people and stopped hearing the contradictions.

The Cambridge streets near Central Square were icy under gray-white snow. The storefront on Norfolk Street was the new home of Common Ground, the first travel agency in New England to issue travel licenses to Cuba since the easing of restrictions.

Owner Merri Ansara, once the English-language voice of the Cuban revolutionary station Radio Havana, welcomed an enthusiastic crowd to the opening of Common Ground this past January. The guests mingled and sipped champagne and nibbled on carrot sticks and Caribbean snacks. A santero, a priest of the Afro-Cuban religion, blessed the agency, sprinkling scented water throughout the office.

Jarrett Barrios, the first Cuban-American state representative in Massachusetts, came; so did a delegation from the Cuban Interest Section in Washington, D.C.; Chet Atkins was there. So were many Cuban-Americans, of many ages and colors.

Massachusetts Superior Court Judge Maria Lopez, who was brought to the United States from Cuba at age 7, approached Atkins. "Chet, I have something I want to ask you: Do you feel cubano?"

"Maria," he said. "I sometimes asked myself about that when I was in Cuba. I'm not cubano; I couldn't be, not like you. I can't even dance. But it is part of my history, and I want to know it better."

The family trip has spawned a host of opportunities for the Atkinses and others in the near future. Atkins is helping speed academic exchanges with the botanical garden and with the archives. He sponsored a talk in April by Louis A. Perez Jr., a professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill who wrote On Becoming Cuban: Identity, Nationality, and Culture, to celebrate a photo exhibition on Cuba at the Massachusetts Historical Society in Boston.

The Atkins family has also organized a group of students, teachers, and educators who will spend 10 days in Cienfuegos beginning June 25. The group will focus on music education and will help develop a program to provide used instruments to Cuban youth-music groups.

Other plans include visits to the Cienfuegos historical archive and local health centers to develop connections between schools here and in Cuba. Casey Atkins, the high school student, is starting an unofficial sister city program between Concord and Cienfuegos. "I had the idea even before I went to Cuba, but the trip made me much more excited about it," she says. "I want to create educational links, particularly with teenagers. We plan to bring some teenage musical groups to Concord, and to collect education and medical supplies for Cienfuegos."

One couple who went on the Cuba trip last November, Lee and Henry Atkins of Brunswick, Maine, are also starting a sister city program with Cienfuegos.

And Orlando Garcia will at last get access to the documents relating to Cuban history that the Atkins family holds. "This is like a dream come true to have this exchange become a reality," he says. Garcia has an invitation from Scott, the University of Michigan professor, to visit in November and will likely travel to Boston after that.

"There may be an embargo," says Chet Atkins, "but there can be no embargo on understanding. I think it's important that we understand that the history [of Cuba] isn't just the history since 1959, with the good and the bad."

He adds: "There's just a sense that this is our history. . . . It is what it is, and we're going to accept it and celebrate it."