My art and my story are intertwined; so, to tell you about my art I must tell you my story.
I was born on the island of Cuba to Francisco Jose Santisteban y Santos and Ines Maria Garcia y Ruiz. I was nearly still born weighing only 4-3/4 pounds. My mother crawled on her knees from our home to the Cathedral of Lazuras in La Habana to pray to the saint and make a promise that as long as I lived I would observe the saints every religious holiday with candles, flowers, aqua adiente (burning water), and appropriate ritual.
We had a manny who was a six foot plus Afro-Cuban woman who would carry my brother, Arturo (two years younger) and me on her hip while she helpped our mother with the daily chores. We lived next to the old colonial city of Havana and would go to the country to our grandfather's sugar cane plantation for holiday. Grandfather's plantation was located on the eastern side of the island in Santiago de Cuba where my father's family first landed on the island in the early 1500's.
One time while we were there when I was an infant sleeping in a crib at the open window, the workers noticed a python climbing up to my window for lunch. It took several of them to save my life by chopping the snake up.
I have always been blessed and as a child I was always dressed in white because I was considered a very spiritual person. My mother would have to walk me around the colonial cemetery in my stroller to get me to sleep. It was the only place to which I would respond. She considered it a little odd!
New Year's Eve, 1959, there was a great change on my island. Fidel Castro became the President of Cuban when he overthrew the government of Batista. Many people supported a change, including my father, but he was not a supporter of the change that Castro brought. Because of that, on 17 December 1960 at 7:00 am five military soldiers (G2's) burst into our tranquill home, when I was only four years old, and dragged my father away to a prison cell.
I would not see him again for 29-1/2 years.
My mother was arrested shortly after for interrogation for fourteen days; a sign was posted on our door that no one was to come near our house. There were only the three boys left alone: Angelo, 11, me, and Aurturo who was two. No one to feed us and we didn't know what might be happening to our parents. There were three spinster seamstress sisters living next door who would bring us a pitcher of water with sugar and a loaf of bread with sugar in the darkness of night.
It was our only care until our mother was released.
Mother tells us that she was terrified to open the door when she returned fearing she might find us dehydrated, or worse, dead.
After she was released she began making plans for us to move from the island to the United States. She had not passport because it was taken from her during the interrogation. It took two years of planning. During this time we suffered by being ostracized by the supporters of the revolution. We would be jeered at in the street and if it was for our manny, who had been appointed to the women's revolutionary movement, protecting us we might not have survived.
During this two years, at Epiphany in 1961, our maternal grandmother gave to Arturo and me each a cocker spaniel. Mine was golden and Art's was black. Because our mother would not allow us to keep the dogs because of the difficult times, we were returning them to our grandmothers when three military jeeps frightened the dogs which ran into the street. My puppy was ran over. I always felt it was on purpose.
Finally my mother booked us on the last of the Freedom Flights out of the island on 8 September 1962, a religious holiday. As we waited in the airport sitting on out little luggage, chain smoking and talking to Angelo and crying. As we headed down the runway to the plane, we were stopped at check points. The first took away our luggage, the second our jewelry and the third was checking passports. At this moment Angelo was carrying Arturo into the plane and I was waiting with Mother as she argued with the athorities. They claimed she was an impostor and not the mother of the children. She was given the option to keep the children with her on the island until a trail was held to prove her identity or to send the children by themselves to the land of the yankees. She chose for her children to be sent to freedom; she was sentenced to four years of hard labor. On the airplane Arturo and I sat in one seat together and Angelo sat next to us. The stewardess said one person per seat so I was moved over and five seats down. We were all very frightened. We didn't know what was happening to our mother. We didn't know what to expect in the land ahead of us. Angelo tells me that I cried all the way, screaming for him.
I remember I was seated by two American seniors who didn't speak spanish.
When we arrived in Miami, Florida, we were taken to Liberty Tower which was the Ellis Island of Florida. We were kept there for three days not knowing what would happen with us. Finally, our father's brother, Pedro and his wife, who never liked us, came to get us and take us to their home. This was not the pleasant experience you would have thought it to be. The three os us were given one room. Because the situation was not a pleasant one, Angelo ran away and hitch hiked to New York City where our mother's youngest sister, Ramona, and older sister, Gladys, lived.
Three years later our paternal grandmother arrived in Miami and took us to live with her.
Finally, in 1965, our mother was allowed to leave the island and arrived in New York City. We were sent to her by the Welfare Department. Times were very tough, but there are no words to discribe the joy on seeing her again after so many uncertain years.
We lived on 104th Strret and Broadway and went to PS 145 until the social workers began to theaten our mother that they were going to take Arturo and me away from her and place us in an orphanage because they felt, in 1966, that a single woman was not capable enough of raising children on her own. Times were difficult. We found it necessary to move around constantly to avoid the social workers who were trying to take our mother to court. Sometimes we would move in the middle of the night. When they finally caught up with us, our mother agreed, under protest, to divorce our father and remarry so that there would be a "provider" in the family. Our mother married a man, Abilio Ramon Pena, she had grown up with in the island who was sent from Cuba to Spain, and then made his way to the United States.
Finally, in 1970, we moved as a family, except for Angelo who had married an Italian woman, to Culver City, California on the outskirts of Los Angeles. We moved to Glendale, California, where Pena opened a Cuban meat market where we all worked.
I attended school in California, working in the market, until 1975 when I got my first job in a factory making windows. I quickly figured out that factory work was not for me and got a job with United California Bank as a encoder. I worked at several jobs until I moved again to Miami in 1984 for two years. I moved back to Los Angeles in 1985 and then moved to Montana in 1990 where I lived until 2000.
I now make my home in Tampa, Florida.