Cuban-exile teacher Olga Ruiz Santiago dead at 91 in Miami

Without her, I am unmoored, incomplete, lessened by the loss.

Mami, mi mamita, my first forever love, the one who always had my back, is gone.

She died in the care of Catholic Hospice on Dec. 12 from heart disease, the leading cause of death for American women. She was 91 and also had struggled with Alzheimer’s and dementia for years.

Unable to embrace her for nine unimaginable months because of coronavirus restrictions, I was able to spend her last day on this Earth at her bedside with my brother, George Santiago, and our families, all of us in protective gear.

I was there when she slipped away at 1:15 a.m., so gently at the end, like the drizzle outside, that it was otherworldly.

She was the family matriarch, born Olga Fabiola Ruiz González, who gave up a country, a family and the teaching career she loved so that my brother and I could be free people.

She would give up a second career in bookkeeping later in life when she became an abuela to take care of her five grandchildren, pick them up from school and, so often during my late shifts as a journalist, bathe and feed my three girls, too.

The abuelas of yesteryear, a generation leaving us, were the unheralded heroes of our community, sentinels of heritage who kept language and culture alive.

Mami made beautiful scrapbooks of Spanish lullabies she wrote from memory and of Cuban history, geography and patriotic symbols. She adorned her writing with newspaper and magazine cut-outs, long before there were craft stores in every neighborhood. In annotations, she explained what the cultural tidbits meant to her and the role things, like a song to mothers, played in her life.

These are treasures now more than ever, the finest inheritance.

Early exile in Miami

In the early days of exile, I saw what my mother — a respected teacher in Cuba forced to resign over her refusal to teach Communist dogma to her students — was made of.

She hated sewing, but she took a job in a sewing factory and brought home additional piece work to earn five cents per collar, cuff and hem.

I went to sleep listening to the hum of the sewing machine into the night.

She loved to cook but only for her family. Yet — as if she didn’t have enough to do sewing and raising two kids in a new country — she kept single Cuban-exile men well fed with weekday cantina dinners my father would deliver.

Her Cuban dishes were so perfectly seasoned that I hated for years going to Cuban restaurants in Miami. Nothing measured up to Mami’s cooking, especially her ropa vieja, shredded beef in tomato sauce.

I learned to cook watching her, and when she and my father, who worked in a window-painting factory, were working overtime to buy a house, I made dinners.

“This is the most delicious chicken fricassee I’ve ever had,” my father complimented me one night.

The next day my mother said, ”no more cooking for you. Your job is to study and get an education so that you’ll have a career.”

She would let nothing derail her dream of a professional career for me, not even my father’s early idea of opening a Cuban restaurant in Miami while we waited for the fall of Fidel Castro.

Instead, Mami spent a lifetime cooking for me, even after I married and had children, until she developed Alzheimer’s in her 80s and kitchen duty became too dangerous. It was only then I became a cook — for her.

Original storyteller

The original storyteller in the family, a poet at heart and voracious reader, all the jobs she held in Miami were beneath her intellect, but she never complained.

Once, we were shopping at the department store Zayre’s in Miami when a young man ran over to us screaming with joy, “maestra, maestra!”

When he finally stopped hugging her, he told me my mother was the best teacher in Matanzas. He told me that he had been headed down the wrong path, abandoned by other teachers who couldn’t see a thing worth saving, until my mother came along.

“I’m a good man because of her,” he said.

I only regretted that she didn’t become certified to teach in the United States, disheartened by the stories she was told about students not respecting teachers here and parents suing educators.

Alas, four of her five grandchildren are teachers.

All say they, too, were inspired by her — and those achievement certificates she displayed proudly on a wall for studies in English, bookkeeping and accounting alongside her teacher’s college diploma from Escuela Normal de Matanzas and her U.S. naturalization certificate.

All she was, who she was, kept me focused during challenging years at college, during tough stints at the Miami Herald and, I suspect, will guide me for the rest of my days.

“Her name will remain forever in the memory of the children of those who passed through her classrooms, because I know that this generation of great teachers was talked about forever in Matanzas,” my cousin Amelio García, also a teacher, wrote to me. “With her, go a lot of precious memories of my childhood.”

For us, too.

She was funny even when she was being tough.

Like the time my nephew, Sean, said a bad word, and as my girls describe it, she took him by the top of his bleached hair and literally washed his mouth with soap. Or, when my two youngest daughters, Marissa and Erica, bitterly fought and she tied them back to back on chairs in punishment, asking them to reflect on what they had done and telling them how lucky they were to have each other when she was far away from her beloved sister, Maria.

But we got the best laughs from her cultural misunderstandings.

One time she gave my oldest, Tanya, a card addressed to “my great-granddaughter” and she couldn’t understand why we were all laughing out loud.

“She is great!” she would insist.

To my niece, Nicole, she read in her broken English an entire article on her teen idol, Justin Bieber.

And one Christmas, Mami wrapped presents in Hanukkah paper because she loved blue and pretty candles.

“I was tired of all the red and green,” she said.

We will miss her more than words can express.

I owe everything I am to her. She was my wing woman — and the only critic I truly feared.

In my dreams, she is reunited with my father, A. Teodoro Santiago, her one and only love, who preceded her in death in 2012.

If there’s a heaven, it has a beach named Varadero, and there, on the softest, whitest sand and in the clearest waters, a young couple frolics in a forever honeymoon.

RIP, Mami.