My Maternal Grandfather: Felipe Naranjo De Montes De Oca

My maternal grandfather, Felipe Naranjo de Montes de Oca, was born on Decemeber 7, 1953 in Limonar, Matanzas, Cuba. His parents, Jose Naranjo Garcia and Delfina Montes de Oca, were very modest people who lived off the land. He grew up in a small house outside of Limonar that didn’t have anything but an empty field in its proximities. He would walk 2 kilometers to get to school every morning and only finished the 9th grade. As an adolescent, he moved back to Limonar city, where he found a job as a carpenter and met my grandmother. At the age of 17, he married my grandmother and they have two children, Martha and Raidel, He then gets a job running errands for a military office, which was a more stable form of income. At the age of 22 he divorces my grandmother and remarries a few years after. He then moves with his new wife to Manolito, an even smaller city further into the country for the promise of more work opportunity. There, he becomes the …show more content…
Since her grandmother only had a 6th grade education and was raised very sheltered, she didn’t have the ability to help my mom go to college. To this day, most people in Cuba end 12th grade with a career and are quickly placed in a workplace for training, and that’s the path my mom decided to follow. By the age of 19, she had received an Associate’s Degree in Commerce and had started working in an office doing paperwork for the Cuban governmental institution that offers food rations to the citizens. She didn’t grow up in a particularly religious family since neither my great-grandmother nor my grandfather went to church or spoke about religion and she was never baptized. But they did teach her the value of compassion and love. Her great-grandparents and father were good people who taught her that above all, being a good person is what counts. These are messages that she would later pass to