POSTCARDS FROM THE PAST
My great-uncle owned a motel in Cuba. Ernest Mortimer Ash — “Morty” to his friends and family — lived there most of his adult life, working first for the Cuban railways, and then using his pension to build the motel he ran with Catalina, his Cuban wife. How a boy from Leeds ended up working on a Caribbean railroad and owning a plot of land and some cows midway between Havana and Santiago de Cuba is one of those unexplored family mysteries.
In his letters to my grandfather — 15 years’ worth of aerograms thumped out on a temperamental Underwood portable — he talks mostly of Cuba, Catalina and Betty, his daughter living in unhappy exile in Miami.
His privations were real: almost every letter includes a shopping list of vital medicines and basics such as Bovril and Royco soup cubes, which helped Morty and Catalina get by in Fidel Castro’s post-revolution Cuban paradise.
In one letter he writes: “We have not seen bacon for several years, nor ham neither for that matter, until a couple of days ago when a friend killed a hog and made Catalina a present of a leg. More precious than gold or diamonds, at this moment, and I am looking forward to having a slice one of these days.”
For all that, Morty was reluctant to heed his daughter’s urgings to apply for an exit permit for him and Catalina. In a letter to his brother, he wrote that “as long as I receive the pension and we are allowed to remain in our comfortable home, I do not feel up to all the red-tape formalities required to get a permit”.
In the end, only the difficulty of getting his medicines and enough food persuaded him to try. It was not to be: Morty died in his sleep in February 1969, just days before the exit permit was granted.
Now that it’s easier for travellers to visit Cuba, maybe it’s time for me to see where he rests, in a little town halfway between Havana and Santiago de Cuba ...