Havana Homecoming
A year after the United States and Cuba normalized relations, one Club Member was finally able to visit the country of his parents.
Alfonso Albaisa sat on the manicured green lawn. He gazed at the ranch-style house his grandfather built in 1949. He imagined his mother as a little girl running through the front door.
The sprawling Havana estate was confiscated by the Cuban government following Fidel Castro’s 1959 revolution. Since then, it has hosted military officers, political dignitaries and foreign executives. When Albaisa visited Cuba for the first time last August, he discovered a meticulously maintained building and grounds.
“They did find out at that point who I was,” says the 52-year-old Member. “‘Hold on, this is Zayas-Bazán….’ It got uncomfortable.”
Albaisa’s maternal grandfather, Eduardo Zayas-Bazán, a descendant of one of Cuba’s oldest families, was a senator when the estate was built. At the onset of the revolution, he was governor of the central province of Camagüey, as was his own father, who was later assassinated as a presidential candidate in 1931.
In 1961, Zayas-Bazán was implicated in a plot against Castro and arrested. His Camagüey home was confiscated and repurposed as a headquarters for Cuba’s secret police. He was held captive in his own basement for 10 years, subjected to mental and physical torture, including mock firing squads.
Albaisa’s uncle served as a frogman in the 1961 Bay of Pigs debacle. His father, the up-and-coming architect Adolfo Albaisa, was part of the underground movement, assisting with the US-led invasion from Havana. An acquaintance warned him that his arrest was imminent.
In 1962, the 24-year-old Adolfo and his pregnant bride, who once hobnobbed with socialites at swanky Havana nightclubs, traded their Edsel sedan for a flight to Miami. Two years later, Alfonso Albaisa was born in the Florida city’s community of Cuban exiles.
“I did not speak English until I was 7,” says Albaisa, scrolling through photos of Cuba on his smartphone. “Because of the immigrant part, you see your parents working very, very hard. There is an intensity of struggle. Then there’s also this feeling, growing up as an American, that you can do anything. Your heart screams, ‘I am Cuban!’ but your head knows you are American and raised with the privileges your parents lost.”
Now head of design at automaker Nissan, Albaisa arrived in Cuba a few months after Barack Obama became the first US president to visit the country since 1928. Albaisa’s trip was for work, but it was also a chance to visit the origin of so many family stories.
He visited the iconic Tropicana Club, designed by his great-uncle, Max Borges-Recio. Albaisa marveled at the paper-thin, cast concrete arches of the Arcos de Cristal, built in 1952. The landmark frequented by the likes of Frank Sinatra, Humphrey Bogart, Ernest Hemingway and Marilyn Monroe now had jungle vines creeping up its façade.
From young industrial designers with an uncertain future to dilapidated homes, the effects of decades of economic stagnation were evident everywhere.
“The trip for me was mostly sad, to be honest,” says Albaisa. “I was impressed by the island itself: the climate, the people, the charm. And then you shake your head: ‘Wow, what happened? Why can people do this to each other?’”
Words: Nick Narigon
Image: Enrique Balducci
