Geovani Rodriguez was 21 when he sailed away from Cuba on a homemade raft. He wasn’t afraid of the voyage, he says, even though his younger brother, Herminio, died when he left the island nation on a similar vessel just four months earlier. Rodriguez grew up in what was once the beautiful city of Havana, living only two blocks from the sandy beaches where he spent his youth swimming and fishing in the warm waters where the Atlantic Ocean collides with the Gulf of Mexico.
“My childhood was perfect,” he says. “I was aware of the limitations, but I was young.”
He was an infant in 1973 when his father was imprisoned for speaking out against the communist government. Seven years later that government sent his father to Florida upon his release, he says.
As he grew into adulthood, Rodriguez became frustrated with the politics of his country and began to follow in his father’s footsteps. He and his friends openly criticized President Fidel Castro’s regime.
“We were regular guys. We were just speaking our minds; looking for that change,” he says. “Eventually the police started getting on me because I was speaking about why it was wrong.”
It was August 1994 when Rodriguez, now a wanted man, boarded that homemade raft with four of his lifelong friends and set sail for Florida.
It wasn’t only political imprisonment he fled. Earlier that month, demonstrators filled the streets of Havana in protest of the country’s economic crisis following its loss of Soviet subsidies. Cuba’s economy had dived lower than ever before, with massive food shortages, daylong power outages and even common goods, like clothing and toiletries, were scarce.
“It was the worst it had ever been,” says Rodriguez. It was in the midst of that chaotic period that his friends approached him: “We just made a raft. You want to leave?” He didn’t hesitate. “I said OK. Let’s go.”
Because of his brother’s recent death from attempting the very same journey, Rodriguez decided it’d be best to leave without saying a word. “It was going to be too hard for my mom,” he says.
In the early morning hours, they boarded the raft, constructed from inner tubes and wooden planks, and pushed out into a calm blue sea. Homemade sails and paddles helped them navigate the waters. The weather cooperated and the small crew reached an island in the Florida Keys four days later without incident. To this day, Rodriguez doesn’t know which island they reached.
The U.S. Coast Guard took the new arrivals to Miami, where Rodriguez was reunited with his father. But adjusting to life in the United States wasn’t easy. “It was like a different culture, lifestyle – everything was new, and I got really depressed.”
He missed his family and his home. He phoned his mother upon his arrival in Florida and, predictably, she was angry he had left. But the two have remained in close contact in the years since, despite the 2,700 miles between them.
Rodriguez says the United States was not what he expected. He was especially surprised, he says, by the racism he experienced.
“People came here with an idea that everything was going to be OK,” he says. “It’s true, this is the best opportunities here, sbut people came here (and) they don’t know. They don’t know how to reach the right resource, so it’s easy to get trapped in gangs, in selling drugs, the party life.”
With no English language skills or work experience, for a 21-year-old Rodriguez, it was the path of least resistance. For the first time in his life he started selling drugs and engaging in criminal activity.
He had been living in Miami for about a year when he traveled to Portland to visit a friend. He needed a change, and his friend asked him to stay. He didn’t like the weather, but he says, “Portland was different.”
He never returned to Miami, but he soon fell back into the criminal lifestyle.
“I started doing the same thing I was doing in Florida,” he says. “Back in the '90s, my mentality was different. I started selling drugs again and getting in trouble, and I knew that I was poisoning myself, because I started using coke heavy, and I think it was part of how I was killing my depression.”
He was living in the Lloyd District and supporting a growing drug addiction, which now included heroin, meth and pills such as Oxycodone and Percocet, by selling cocaine. He learned English bit by bit, on the streets, “the bad stuff first,” he says, which helped him interact with his customers.
“Between 1995 (and) 2009, I wrecked my life,” he says. “In 1997 I had my daughter, and I tried to change, but I was already trapped in that life, I didn’t know there was a way to get out of that life back then.” For years he was in and out of jail and prison. “My everyday life was wake up, sell drug, consume drug, same thing. I was living in a self-destruction pattern.”
Repeatedly, he’d get released from prison and end up homeless and sleeping on the streets and under bridges. He checked himself into Hooper Detoxification Center on Northeast Grand so many times, he says, he lost count. Each time, Rodriguez says, “It was the end of the road for me. To get to that point, it was really bad. I was like, I do this – or I am going to die.”
Hooper Nursing Manager Deb Malsom knows the situation well.
“Everybody is looking at their own mortality when they are trying to come into detox.” Her staff monitors them through sometimes painful and life-threatening withdrawals, making sure their vitals remain stable and that they’re eating food and drinking water. She says Rodriguez detoxed at Hooper seven times over the years and, despite being at some of the lowest points in his life, “he was just a complete gentleman every time.”
Malsom says it can be humiliating for addicts when they return to Hooper again and again.
“It’s like admitting defeat,” she says.
◆◆◆
When Rodriguez was arrested in January 2009, he was 36, addicted to alcohol and heavy drugs, he was homeless and suffering from depression – and he had not been legitimately employed once in his entire life.
Facing another prison stint for delivery of a controlled substance, Rodriguez says he caught a break.
“The judge already knew when he look at my record that all my problems (were) drug related,” he says. “He told me, ‘I’m going to give you a chance. I’m going to try something different with you this time, I want you to go to treatment.’”
After serving 90 days in jail and then spending the summer months avoiding the inevitable, he gave in and entered a treatment program at Central City Concern’s Eastside Campus called Puentes. The program name is Spanish for “bridges.”
When he began treatment, he was still using. He had unsuccessfully attempted treatment before, but this time it was different. For one, he says, the program “was in my language.” But he was different too. After 15 years of struggling to survive a life of addiction and crime in a foreign country, he says, “I was tired. I was done.”
Rodriguez had to commit a full year of his life to his recovery program at Puentes, becoming heavily involved and immersing himself in the course material. His treatment program ran the gamut – from mental health counseling for his depression to anger management and drug and alcohol treatment.
“I wish I have words that I can express how grateful I am to Puentes,” he says. “To society, I was a drug addict and ex con, a drug dealer, a criminal, and when I got to Puentes, I was treated as a human being, and I was treated as a person for — really – who I am. I was treated with respect, love. It was the first time, I would say, in my life. There were people willing to do things for me, unconditionally.”
When he graduated, Rodriguez didn’t want to sever his ties to Puentes.
“When it was over, I was empty handed,” he says. “While you’re in treatment, you become part of that treatment. When you really want to get clean and you want to change your life, that’s your everything. But treatment (typically) is three to six months, after that you feel like you are alone.”
That’s why, he says, he and a few of his classmates decided to organize a Puentes alumni group.
For the past four years, the group has met once per month, and its members mentor students in Puentes’ treatment programs. “We keep guiding the newcomers in recovery so they still feel part of something,” he says.
The Puentes alumni group is unique. Often in Latino culture, there’s a stigma attached to receiving drug and alcohol or mental health treatment. It’s seen as “a kind of weakness” says Rodriguez. The alumni group works to help change that perception in Portland’s Latino community. Rodriguez says he explains to people in recovery that this cultural stigma, “It’s a myth.”
A common complaint is that participating in treatment will ruin a person’s reputation, to that he tells them, “You are just thinking of what people are going to think about you. But you don’t think what people are thinking right now about what you’re doing, and that’s worse.”
Rodriguez had overcome his addictions, but he still needed work. He couldn’t go back to selling drugs and now, at 37, he still had no work history to put on an employment application.
Puentes helped him land a six-month janitorial gig with Clean and Safe in downtown Portland, and after that he bounced around between temporary jobs for a couple years. It was during that time he found love and brought a handsome and bright-eyed little boy, Geovani Jr., into the world.
When Rodriguez graduated from Puentes, he assumed his days at the Hooper Detox were over, but in October 2013, he once again found himself walking through the doors of the clinic.
◆◆◆
“I didn’t believe it was really happening,” he remembers thinking when he walked in. He had worked diligently to stay clean in the years since his repeated bouts with defeat while detoxing at the clinic.
But this time was different. Hooper had moved to a new location on North Williams, and Rodriguez was a new man. He wasn’t there to writhe in the anguish of withdrawal; he was there to help others who were.
He was hired as on-call support and after two weeks of training he began work as a subacute technician (SAT). He was offered a union position within the month, and has worked there ever since.
Malsom, who remembers him from his visits as a patient, is now his supervisor. She says he carries that piece of empathy and compassion that she looks for in her SATs.
“When you’re withdrawing from any kind of substance, you know the story, they’re irritable,” says Malsom. “When you can have an SAT that can share their experiences to help get somebody through that, I think it’s beneficial.”
Rodriguez often works graveyard and swing shifts, helping to monitor and assist patients occupying the clinic’s 65 beds. “This is hard work. It isn’t easy by any means,” says Malsom. But you wouldn’t know that from speaking with Rodriguez.
“When you enjoy the job, there is not a day of work,” he says, beaming.
Malsom says she admires Rodriguez’s soul and compassion. “I’ve seen him offer support, and I’ve seen him go the extra mile and help patients and encourage them, as much as he can in his role,” she says.
Rodriguez knows exactly what his patients are going through. “When you get to a point where you are in a bed in a detox clinic,” he says, “most of the time, you (have) lost everything. That’s your last stop and from there, it’s a new beginning. And what I try to do is encourage people to go to treatment, to recovery, to the steps, to the books. I always tell people, ‘What is lost is lost, you know. But tomorrow is a new start.’”
For Rodriguez, tomorrow has come and gone. He’s lives life today as a dedicated family man, living with his girlfriend and their son in Southeast Portland. Most important now, he says, “My son’s education. Being an example for my son.”
“I have fun with my family. We go to restaurants, to movies – every weekend we have something to do as a family. That’s how I live my life these days,” he says, “Right now, nothing scares me.”
He’s also reignited his childhood passion for fishing, only now he fishes for sturgeon off the Bonneville Dam rather than for big-game tropical fish off the coast of Havana. This summer he’s looking forward to teaching Geovani Jr. to fish for the first time. He’s also getting ready to further his own education. Maybe, he says, he will study to be a drug and alcohol counselor, but nothing’s been decided yet.
“He is one of my favorite stories,” says Puentes Director Daniel Garcia, remembering Rodriguez fondly. “A true story of success.”
This story is an installment of Planet Portland, a periodic series by Street Roots on the personal journeys within Portland's immigrant communities.
emily@streetroots.org
