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TI: And when you were born, what was the name that was given to you by your parents?

CS: Well, my, my name is as it is: Charles Zellender Smith. Now, the explanation for the "Smith," for a Spanish-born, a Cuban-born person, is amusing, and it has to do with immigration. My father's family name was Delpino, and when his parents came from Cuba and came through immigration, apparently the clerk who registered them could not spell it, so they gave him the name of Smith. And that happened very frequently with immigration throughout the country, but especially also with reference to persons with Spanish names. If the clerk couldn't spell it, they'd give them a name. And so the wonderful name of "Smith," which is an all-American name, more people in the United States are named Smith, perhaps, than any other name. And it was (...) never (of) any great concern to me.

I knew that my father was Cuban because he couldn't speak English. [Laughs] But my father was illiterate in English, and semi-literate in Spanish. He could read Spanish and speak Spanish, he could speak English with a very, very distinct accent, but he couldn't read it. But he was twelve years old when they left Cuba, and I suppose that the only schooling he had was before he left Cuba. And I am not of the opinion that my father went to school after they came from Cuba and settled in Key West. Maybe he did and maybe he did not. But if he did, he never learned to read English, and that was an embarrassment to my mother, who was very, very particular about the English language, and wanted her children to speak perfect English, and not speak English with the accent that their father was speaking. And I remember growing up, my mother drilling us -- literally drilling us -- on pronunciation of English words. My mother could not speak Spanish, and I think it was her intolerance of the Spanish language, simply because she could not speak it or understand it, that caused her to be so adamant that her children would grow up speaking perfect English and not sounding like their father. Now that I look back on it, it's sort of absurd. I just wish we could have, back in those old days, grown up essentially bilingual. I tried to learn Spanish as a child with my father. I'd listen to Havana radio with my father -- we didn't have television in those days.

TI: So, so how did that affect your relationship with your father? I mean, how would you describe, in those early years as you were growing up, your relationship with your father?

CS: It was perfect. I, I never... it's only looking back on it that I realized that my life was any different than anybody else's life. I just assumed that it was perfectly natural that children would grow up with two parents, which it is, that it was perfectly ordinary that one parent could be an African American -- we called them "blacks," or something else in those days, I think we called them "Negroes" -- and that one parent could be a Cuban. And I never thought of Cubans as being black or white. I thought of Cubans as being people who had an origin in Cuba, and most of whom spoke Spanish rather than English, and that was my personal definition of a Cuban. And that's what my father was. He was a good father, a good role model. He loved his children, he loved his wife, he sacrificed himself to make sure that they were comfortable. And it never occurred to me that there was anything unusual or different about that, except that in the neighborhood, the kids would always talk about my father as being "that Cuban who speaks funny." But it was not derogatory at all. It was their children's way of identifying him, and I never felt in any sense that there was anything bad, wrong, or unusual about our family relationship.

TI: Okay, good.

<End Segment 2> - Copyright © 2004 Densho. All Rights Reserved.