Cuba Before Castro: A Century of Family Memoirs by Jorge J. E. Gracia

Author:Jorge J. E. Gracia [Gracia, Jorge J. E.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Biography & Autobiography, Personal Memoirs, undefined
ISBN: 9780761872139
Google: -y5TzQEACAAJ
Publisher: Hamilton Books
Published: 2020-07-27T00:13:59.678523+00:00

Chapter 40

The Consolation of Giving

One of the things compassionate people with means do is to help those who are less fortunate than themselves. Helping takes many forms. There is lending money. Those who have accumulated some capital are constantly beseeched by others for loans which they generously provide. The money is ostensibly borrowed, and therefore is supposed to be returned, but the unspoken understanding is that lent money is lost money. Father was regularly pestered by acquaintances and friends asking for loans. He dutifully kept a list of the sums he lent, but the money was never returned while he was living. After he died, we found the list of loans and timidly tried to pry some of the money out of borrowers who appeared to be in fine financial circumstances. The result was not only that we did not get any of it back, but our relations became cold to us, and in some cases picked a quarrel so that they could feel justified in not returning any of the money they owed us. Never mind that some of the borrowed money involved substantial sums; most debts to father were in the thousands of pesos, which at the time was significant.

Another way of helping the needy is in response to occasional requests from the poor that appeal to pity. Father was quite hard about these. His idea was that if you give money to the poor, they often use it for purposes other than buying food and the things they need the most. And there is some reason to what he believed. Father and mother had arguments about this frequently, because mother could not resist helping anyone in need. And when father complained that the money was not being used properly, her answer was that making sure the money was used properly was not her responsibility. She saw her responsibility as responding to a voiced need, how the money was used was someone else’s problem.

The worst abuse I know of mother’s generosity occurred one time, after father’s death, when she had hired a cab to take her from Havana to our sugarcane plantation. Mother was traveling with Nena, and carrying a substantial amount of money to pay the wages of the workers at the plantation. From her talk, the cab driver realized that she had cash with her and that she was vulnerable. So he made his appeal. His sick child needed surgery; his wife had abandoned him; there was no work. The usual con stories. Having gathered that mother was a very pious woman, he threw in some comments about his prayers for divine help.

Mother could not resist the appeal, particularly because she felt that God had brought her to him in order to help. Nothing in her world happened by chance, everything was part of God’s Providence. Nena told me that the driver asked mother for the cost of the surgery which turned out to be 1,000 pesos. So, when they arrived at their destination mother took out the cost of the fare and added 1,000 pesos to it.

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