The Eldest

Aunt Pura is my great-aunt on my father’s side. She has 99 years of age. This automatically makes her the oldest relative I have alive.  

Tia Pura is the youngest of five sisters born in Valladolid, Spain, daughters of Fabiana Ascencio and Andres Valero. In 1935 the Valero family decided to immigrate to America, seeking a better future. They choose Havana, Cuba, as their new home, where they got installed and start working and producing. Nevertheless they didn’t get intergraded with the Cuban mainstream society, socializing mostly with Spanish immigrants, and marrying three of their daughters to the sons of these Spanish, except Carmina who married a doctor politically attached to the Cuban revolution.  Maruja married Luis Vallalta, born in Sitges, and had a son (who is my grandfather Luis); Pilar married Jose Ramon Mendez Fort and had two children, Edelma, and Jose Ramon, who married Anita, a beautiful mulatto woman. Tia Pura married Jesus Perez.

 Life was good in Cuba, but this quiet life, of peace and honest work, was interrupted by the Cuban revolution. Fidel Castro and his gang of Communists came to power in a coup d’état. The new government expropriated - without paying - the family property, land and full-productive factories.  Except Carmina, the Valero Ascencio sisters and their families were then forced to flee the island to Miami in a Red Cross ship, carrying as allowed baggage only what they were wearing. There is an anecdote about my Great-great-mother Fabiana, who was a slim and petite lady - and at the time was expecting his first great-grandson (my father); since they were not allowed to take luggage out of Cuba, she tried to hide four dresses, wearing them in one on top of the other. But the military government agents “caught her” and made her remove three ... Outrageous, isn’t it?  From Miami the family is dispersed throughout the world.

After this sad episode, aunt Pura returns to Madrid with her husband's family, and there they started over again. They didn’t have direct descendants.

Today she is 99 years-old and is already senile; she neither remembers nor recognizes us when we call her to say hello. Aunt Pura currently lives in a nursing home in Madrid, visited only by her husband's nephews who live nearby.