This Land Is Their Land Now : With a Little Help From Pint-Size Pen Pals in Orange County, an Immigrant Cuban Couple Turns Its American Dreams Into Realities

Luis Abreu savors a shrimp cocktail and sips an American beer from a chilled glass. It’s a sunny fall afternoon, and he’s enjoying a day off from his job driving a big-rig produce truck.

“If I like,” he says eight months after making a remarkable journey from Cuba to Southern California, “I can enjoy what presidents enjoy: a steak, good wine, shrimp.”

It was friendship found in a sea-drifting bottle that brought Abreu and his wife the 3,000 miles from their coastal hometown of Caibarien to Santa Ana--and helped them fulfill the immigrant’s dream of building an American way of life.

The bay-side eatery where he sits is on Balboa Peninsula, a place Abreu recognizes from a postcard sent to him by his grade school pen pals in Corona del Mar. It was in 1990 that teacher Judy d’Albert and her fifth-grade students put the note into the bottle that drifted to Cuba. A year ago, d’Albert and her new students pooled their resources to enable the Abreus to make their journey.

It was one of many acts of kindness and improbable circumstances that have touched their lives, an odyssey that unfolds daily.

Like the seemingly random currents that put the bottle with a message in it in his hands six years ago, the lives of Abreu, 52, and his wife, Miriam, 47, have shifted drastically over the past year.

“People say I’m the luckiest man alive,” Luis Abreu said when he arrived in the United States. So lucky, he said recently, that he knows he will one day win the California lottery. “Ya veras,” he says. You’ll see.

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“Against astronomical odds . . . ,” began television newscasts the night of March 6 as pictures were beamed around the world of the Abreus listening to the Harbor Day School fifth-graders’ welcome song, “This Land Is Your Land.”

The Corona del Mar children crowned Luis Abreu with an Angels baseball cap. They had known through correspondence he once played semiprofessional baseball.

“You are my family,” he said after pulling from his pocket the original message he found in the oceangoing bottle.

On that very first day, the Abreus met with people who have become anchors in their lives.

Oscar Nunez, 46, who emigrated from Cuba at 11, was at the airport to tell the Abreus he would try to help them find work through a friend who is a supermarket executive. The parents of one of the Harbor Day students offered job contacts too.

Cuban natives Jose and Nora Cueto offered to host the Abreus at their five-bedroom Santa Ana home. The Abreus, who came from the same city as their hosts, stayed with the Cuetos for five months until they were able to get out on their own in August.

Francisco F. Firmat, an Orange County Superior Court judge and Cuban immigrant, helped the Abreus through the immigration process.

Nunez and the Cuetos helped form what became known as El Club del 200. The dozen families in the “club” donated $200 or more each to finance Luis’ truck-driving schooling, which cost $2,400.

“We have to be grateful to be able to help,” says Jose Cueto, 72, a physician who emigrated from Cuba in 1952, seven years before the Cuban Revolution. “It was easy for us to come here. I believe the more you have, the more you owe to society.”

Besides sharing their home, the Cuetos helped the newly arrived couple cope with what most people here take for granted.

“It was shocking to go into a market for the first time,” Miriam Abreu says, recalling seeing America’s abundance: She wept upon seeing the variety of fresh produce and meat in stores.

In Cuba, Miriam had worked in a bodega, a small neighborhood grocery, where she would check customers’ ration cards and parcel out the limited stock available that day. When she arrived, Miriam had been suffering from malnutrition. But now, bare food shelves and empty stomachs come only in letters from Cuba. Miriam and Luis have each gained weight--the gauntness is gone from their faces.

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Before they arrived here, Luis and Miriam Abreu lived for 25 years in Cuba in a drafty house the size of a two-car garage.

Today, they live in a $500-a-month, one-bedroom apartment in a Santa Ana complex called Villa Clara--the namesake of the Cuban province where they lived. Most of the couple’s furniture is secondhand--gifts from well-wishers. A sewing machine in the bedroom is on loan until Miriam can afford her own. She’s hoping that when her English improves, she can become a seamstress for a department store.

Although their walls are bare, the rooms are furnished with the things found in most American homes: a TV, a radio, a kitchen table.

On Luis Abreu’s desk is a portrait of Jose Marti, a poet and hero of Cuba’s independence from Spain. Next to the painting is a photograph of Luis and Miriam’s two adult sons standing with their half sister, a daughter from Luis’ first marriage. A son from that marriage has been missing for a decade--since he made the dangerous boat trip to Miami in hopes of immigrating to the U.S.

While Luis’ daughter is content to remain in Cuba, his and Miriam’s sons--Luis Jr., 24, and Ricardo, 23--wanted to come to the United States with their parents, but could not. The Abreus won their visas through a U.S. government lottery permitting some legal immigration from Cuba. But because they are no longer minors, the sons were not covered.

“No hay nada que puede hacer aqui para nosotros, papa.” There is nothing you can do for us here, Dad, the eldest son had said to Luis Sr. “At least in the United States you have a better chance to live, and you can send us money to survive.”

The couple have sent their sons $800 in the last eight months.

“Sometimes I can’t enjoy anything because my sons aren’t here,” Miriam says. “The little bottle has brought us far, but it has also separated our family. Sometimes nothing impresses me no matter how beautiful it can be.”

Luis is optimistic.

“I know they’ll join us some day,” he says.

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The couple revels in preparing hearty dinners with fresh ingredients on modern appliances.

They each have jobs--both evolved from contacts made the day they landed at John Wayne Airport.

Last month, they finished making their final payment on a 1984 red Pontiac Firebird, a new friend’s old car.

Miriam works at a deli counter at a Northgate Supermarket in Anaheim and is learning how to drive.

Luis Abreu delivers enough produce each day in his job as a truck driver to feed a third of the 40,000 people in Caibarien.

He says that when he drives, he listens to an oldies radio station because it reminds him of his youth and his earliest yearnings to come to America. At 19, he tried to escape Cuba during the revolution to come to the United States. He spent three years in prison for making the attempt.

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The tradition of displaced Cubans in the United States helping each other has given the Abreus good friends to talk to.

“We can speak our minds here,” says Miriam, who is always quick to serve a Cuban espresso to visitors.

“There is a great satisfaction to be able to express one’s opinions,” Luis interjects. “Before the elections, I heard someone call President Clinton a liar. . . . That startled me.”

At social gatherings, it’s difficult to escape talk of politics, of immigrant experiences linked to the Cuban exodus of the 1960s, the Mariel boat lift of the 1970s or the Cuban balseros--rafters--of the ‘80s and ‘90s.

“When Fidel falls, everything will improve,” Luis says at a dinner party where Miriam has cooked a rich stew called ajiaco.

Jose Cueto takes the conversation in another direction: “No one’s to blame, and everyone is to blame. We are all responsible for what is going on in Cuba.”

Someone knocks on the door, and Luis opens it without hesitation. He welcomes the unexpected visit by the apartment complex manager, Ramon Casate, a Cuban who immigrated two years ago. Casate, 43, who was a philosophy and history teacher in Cuba, is filled in on the conversation and adds his perspective.

“Many people benefited from the revolution. The black Cuban and the peasants, primarily. And many believed in what was going on.” He has everyone’s attention. “I believed what was happening.”

A former Communist, he says to the Abreus’ guests: “Now I have gone through so much suffering that I don’t know what the politics are, and I don’t want to know.”

They all agree they’d rather be here than there.

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“Hello, stranger! Congratulations for finding this message,” said the note in the bottle that Luis found floating in the seaweed while he was walking along the shore of his hometown.

Corona del Mar schoolteacher Judy d’Albert, 56, wrote the message on behalf of her fifth-grade students in the summer of 1990 while vacationing with her husband, Pierre, on the Caribbean island of Anguilla, British West Indies.

Since 1985, D’Albert, a British immigrant of 22 years, had been using drift bottles to teach students how early explorers used currents to navigate the sea. Nearly 300 bottles have gone out, and over the years her classes have made contact with people as far as the Philippines and as close as Santa Catalina Island.

She had asked an Anguilla fisherman to drop the bottle in the Atlantic, anticipating it would catch the Gulf Stream to Europe. D’Albert’s miscalculation was the Abreus’ good fortune.

“I didn’t know what to expect, really,” D’Albert said recently at Harbor Day School, the private school where she now teaches science instead of fifth grade.

Luis was one of few in the village who spoke English. For five years, he developed a pen pal relationship with D’Albert and her students.

Then, in the summer of 1995, the Abreus won their visas. They did not have enough money to pay for transportation to the United States, so Luis decided to ask his pen pals for help. D’Albert’s fifth-graders came through, asking their schoolmates to look in their hearts and piggy banks to help raise $1,800. By Christmas, the children had sent the money to the Abreus.

The couple’s luck continued: They were on the last charter flight out of Cuba to Miami.

Their flight left the morning of Feb. 24, the same day that two Cessnas being flown by Cuban Americans were shot down off Cuba; the Abreus saw the wreckage from the air. The planes’ downing caused the Clinton administration to cease the charter flights.

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Sitting on the patio atop the Balboa Peninsula restaurant overlooking Newport Bay, Luis Abreu says, “I can’t believe I’m here. I have so much to give thanks for. I have the opportunity to build a better life for my sons.

“While people my age are thinking about retiring, I’m just now beginning the American dream,” he says and raises an American beer to his lips.