The death of my grandmother: a story about women, economics, and abuse.

Poverty is a cruel incendiary of suffering and abuse.

Alone in a dark room, still hot in the shade, my grandmother probably laid in a rickety bed as she died sometime during the COVID-19 quarantine. Her name was Senaida. She likely died of starvation and thirst, whittled from the 90 pounds she was last September. She had fallen before and simply stayed there, on the floor, for days. When ill, she ate a little fruit, if she had it, and nothing more.

The last time we were there, we moved the bed into a better position for her, so she could tug the sheets in each corner. Under one corner are a few books her son, Gustavo, left when he passed away (she could not read, but she could count a little). The legs had nearly fallen off the old bed frame, rotted from bugs and humidity. The small worn pillow was a brown lump hidden in the new blue sheet set we brought. A tufted bathmat, garishly new and still creased from our bag, hovered proudly over the well-scrubbed but grime-stained floor.

We could not find a new bed or pillow to buy on the island. We bought her ice cream and 100 pounds of food and nice things we lugged from the States. Arthritis creams, perfumed talcum, socks and underthings, cool clothing, and clip on earrings to make her feel pretty. Staples Cuba does not have—Sazon, herbs, and beans. We knew we could not stay. And there was no packing a 94-year-old woman into a bag and smuggling her to a country she didn’t know in a world she was tired of. I knew it was likely I would never see her again, but we promised and planned to come back this year, nonetheless.

I say she probably died on the bed because we don’t know. She died, as she lived, alone in the decayed home and life set in motion many years before her. No telephone. No friends, because “they rob me.” She sat on an old chair like you find at a cafeteria every day for most of the hours, next to a large cardboard box she used as a table, fanning herself with a paper fan. She had a small radio the size of a block of cheese and a television my mother bought her the year before. Sometimes she could find a show on one of the three government channels. Every few days, she would putter down the common stairs, along the dirt road, past the tired dogs and piled trash of Havana, to wait in line for bread that would be stale by tomorrow. She would then go to the market for fruit and whatever beans were available. Meat was too expensive. I would send money, but was never sure it stayed in her hands and the stores had nothing to buy anyway.

The story of my grandmother, Senaida, is not just a tragic death. It was a tragic life. And while there is much more story and even more to blame, it starts as it does for many women—with a man who promised her love and condemned her to poverty and loneliness.

When my mother was five years old, her mother disappeared. And for many years, her and her three younger brothers knew nothing of the young woman who had born them on the kitchen table. There was a single umber photograph given to my mother by a neighbor years later. The woman in the photo looked like me, down to the gap in the teeth. She was the link between my mother’s brown hair and my face.

My grandfather, Jose, was a hard man. No one dared ask him what happened to Senaida. Why would a woman leave her children? In Cuba, this is as unheard of as it is unforgivable. I’ve talked to prostitutes who work the streets at five dollars a trick to earn for their children, rather than see them gone to orphanages like my mother went to.

For years, we did not know what happened to my grandmother. Rumors in Guanajay, the town my mother grew up, swarmed and buzzed like bored bees. Some said she left with another man. Some whispered that perhaps Jose killed her, known as he was for his violent temper.

After many years, my mother shared her picture of Senaida with her brothers and their wives. That started the search for Senaida—for answers to questions that had left holes that could never be filled. It took a long time, but we tracked my grandmother down. She was a widow with an adult, mentally challenged son who lived for her. She made homemade candies by hand to sell until her hands got gnarled by arthritis. She cooked over a pot of charcoals on the floor of the single-room dwelling they shared. And for many years, she had cleaned houses or taken in hand washing to stay afloat.

You may have to be Latinx to understand why, but on finding out that his mother had another family she had abandoned, her son, Gustavo, was terribly upset. Gustavo couldn’t understand or process this unforgivable truth. He felt she was a lie. They fought. One night, the police were called and he was thrown in jail to calm down after he ripped the sink from the wall. He died there, suffering an asthma attack in a dismal cell. Died alone without his mother. And I think Senaida died there with him, as well.

It took a few years to get my mother to go to Cuba. My mother had suffered a lot over the years—abandonment doesn’t make a very good foundation. Things happen to people who are not loved. This woman, whose face my mother could not remember, haunted my mother nonetheless. When we found her, grieving her son in an old rundown apartment in Havana, the legacy my mother inherited was clear. Abuse is never contained; it seeps into the rafters and groundwater like fallout. Everything that is built on it, eventually falls apart at its base and dies from the inside. It is hard to grow a flower in poisoned water.

Here is what I learned about why mother was abandoned and why her mother never returned:

When my grandmother was a young, beautiful woman she met a man and his brother who were in Cienfuegos for business, where my grandmother lived with her family. It was 1945. Like most women, she had no education and could read and write very little. Senaida was excited by the handsome man. He promised her a life and quickly took her away to his city, Guanajay, many miles away. She had no family or friends, but she had the hope of a young woman eager to start a bigger life. Soon she had a child. Then another. And another. And another.

The revolution came and she was afraid. The money became less, as they were not communists. The business he ran died. The man she had promised herself to, Jose, was still handsome, but his unkindness became known and harsher with every stress, pushing out like steam on a pressure cooker. He would come home with pockets full of condoms, though he refused her any contraception of her own. It was not her body. She could say nothing. Nothing she said mattered anyway. The luck of a woman is irreversible. “That’s the way it was,” she said. “What could I do,” she shrugged at 93 years-old, “I was young and knew nothing. I was stupid. And then I was pregnant.” Once, he had seemed nice. Now, he was a controlling man with a temper as sudden as the local storms. 

Senaida tried to leave him. She took the children and went to Havana, where she had a distant relative. Uneducated and illiterate, she could not find work and raise her little children. Scared but desperate, she went back. She expected the denigration and humiliation. But what could she do? He took her in and told her, “If you ever try and leave again, you will never see your children again.” She thought he might kill her. In those days, a woman had no rights. She knew if he had her, he could take anything and everything she had. Nothing was hers. But, she had children to feed.

Sometime later, by the time my mother was five, Jose changed his mind. This is not terribly surprising. Men who seek power over women rarely forget the indignation of being disobeyed. Once you try to leave, you are always a traitor. They are like dictators who imagine people as treacherous possessions they win with lies and control with propaganda.

Jose had heard that Senaida had a friend in town. He was an older man. “He was kind to me and I had no one. We were never more than friends. I wasn’t that kind of woman. He just felt sorry for me and listened,” she told me. She knew the man fancied her, but “he was a gentleman and old. I was not interested, but we were friends.” He was the man who had given her a ride to the city, Havana, when she tried to leave before. But someone had seen them talking—and they talked. Words are as dangerous in these sorts of moments as they were in the revolution. Even a whisper can trigger an abuser.

Jose came home and simply packed a small bag of Senaida’s things, including the photo of herself (a rare thing then) that sat by her bed until the day she died. He accused her of sleeping with the man she knew. Then, he put the bag in her hands and threw her out into the street. She begged him to at least take two of the children. She had failed at all four before. What about the girl, Susana, and one of the babies? He told her no. And she was gone.

Sadly, Jose did not love his children. He never hugged them. Even after his stroke, when he had half a body, he beat his son for trying to help him up. The children lived in terror and neglect. The two eldest were put in an orphanage and military school, coming home on the weekends. The youngest were cared for by their aunt, Eva. They were simply his unwanted spoils of a war he waged on those who crossed him or tried to love him.

The night Senaida was put onto the street, torn away from her children, my great aunt Eva found her in the town square. I can imagine her slight frame crumpled, bag in hand, with no money for food. It was 1953. There were no care services. There was no community. The same reasons she had stayed with an abusive man was the same reason she now had no choices but to sit crying alone and destitute. Eva gave her five dollars, about fifty dollars today, to go to Havana. Eva died never telling anyone the story. It was not allowed. Senaida was never to come back, though she tried to once. She tried to see the children—even just see them with her own eyes. They were hidden from her and never knew. Then again, she had her mother go, begging to see them. Jose simply said no. Senaida gave up, though she was never the same. She buried her children in her heart, turning it into a grave and a prison she lived in until she died.

My uncle, Pepe, once said to me, “You see that mango tree out there?” And I nodded. “You can cut down a mango tree and no one can tell what it is. What makes a mango tree a mango tree is its roots. And it will always grow back into a mango tree.” That is what family is, especially in Cuba. It is our roots. It is what allows us to grow and thrive and continue. Even when we are poor, oppressed, and estranged. Family is the soil, the water, and the sun that connects us to a meaningful life. We exist as what we are because we are loved. But for Senaida, those roots were poisoned and cut apart by the person who was supposed to help her grow.

Senaida’s is the life of a woman with no means—no education, no community, no rights, and no contraception. No good love. It’s an old story. But it is a story that continues. Every day, women die at the hands of partners. They stay because of their fear of losing their children and basic security. It is not just a poor country thing. Even here, in this country full of boxed cakes where no one dies of starvation, the largest reason women stay in abusive relationships is because they have no support or fear for economic destitution.

My grandmother died, likely of starvation and thirst, alone in a dark, moldy room in the 21st century. There are governments and histories I can blame. But in the end, the catalyst of all this pain was abuse. That abuse was only possible because of the lack of opportunity she had.

How many women are out there now, denied the basic knowledge that they will be safe? How many families are torn apart, healing around the imperceptible fissures and scars that happen when women are abused?

The fissures and scars of abuse tremble through generations. They continue, softening us to accepting, as my grandmother did, “this is just the way of things.” That abuse is normalized. One woman’s only option becomes a model for her children, or a lack of modeling for those children who go motherless. Too often, we still hear that a woman’s only calling is to become a mother, young and dependent. Her body is public property. Her rights are contingent. Her value is derivative and commodified, only borrowed while she is pretty or useful and then demanded back. We consider education, career, and interests embellishments that up her chances of making due until she duly arrives at wife and mother.

Where does that leave women? It does not allow a revision, a real choice where a woman decides the course of her life—and continues to be the captain of her own destiny until she dies. It does not allow for the creation of an understanding community that supports and reinforces those options. 

It is not just poverty that perpetuates abuse. Abusers always find a reason, a stress or a trigger. Abusers are not the children of strife. However, when I think of Senaida and so many women like her, I know how heavily money plays in their ability to escape abuse. Abusers know this, too. There is nothing novel in my grandfather holding my grandmother hostage, weaponizing her children and survival for control. There is no small accident that she was an uneducated vulnerable woman who ended up isolated from family, discouraged from having friends, continually pregnant, and totally dependent. In order to save people like my grandmother, we have to give victims access to people and opportunity. We need real solutions.

Today, I grieve for my grandmother. Somewhere in this pandemic, she died and was buried or cremated anonymously—severed from family, hardened to people. I also grieve for the many men and women whose lives are broken and wrongly set by abuse. No one deserves to be alone, robbed of their sacredness and inviolability as a person. How many unmarked graves walk among us, silenced and chased from the lives they could have had, every day?

Notes on photos:

Credit to Ian Armstrong for the photos of Senaida and her home, 2019.

Photos from our visit in 2015 are also included, including my mother Susana meeting her mother and three generations together (my grandmother, my mother, and myself). The last photo is from Guanajay, the last house my mother grew up in. It's the one with the dog in front, though the top wasn't built yet. That was an addition built by and for my uncle and his wife.