María C. Werlau

“My mother had been suffering from severe headaches and went to see a doctor. It was only a few weeks after the Bay of Pigs Invasion. There was a Life magazine in the waiting room which was very relevant at that time. There were pictures in it and a coverage of the Bay of Pigs. My mother started leafing through the magazine and when she turned one of the pages she saw a picture of a dead soldier. He looked dead, maybe he was injured, what do I know. It was my father. I had not learned about the existence of this photograph until my sixteenth or seventeenth birthday. Mother had never brought it home; she didn’t want me to see it. I learned about the picture in junior year of college in Puerto Rico. Then I left to study in Washington but before that, during the entire first year in Puerto Rico, I had searched for that magazines. In the end I found it but I didn’t tell my mother about it.”

“I try to imagine how dreadful it must have been… The betrayal. They had dreamed of freeing Cuba from communism, leaving their families behind. My father died when he was 28 or 29 years old, he was so young. My mother was even two years younger than that, left with two small children. It must have been really terrible. My mother’s friends – I remember that – all her closest friends were widows of the men who had died during the operation in the Bay of Pigs. No one has ever seen them since. All that has influenced my childhood greatly. Even though we didn’t talk about it every day, it was something that we constantly felt.”