In my Havana household in the last half of 1961, the main event was waiting for a “telegrama” that would announce that my visa was granted and I would be able to travel to the United States. It took months to get that telegram and it finally arrived one day in early 1962. My mother cried. My father was businesslike about it: “Let’s call your Uncle Kiko in Miami and let him know you are scheduled to arrive there Feb. 28.” I was all ears, at 14 years of age, with the house pet, our old cat Simon on my lap, and not all that sure that the rest of my life, rested on that short message on a telegram, (early Tweet, I guess), that announced when I would travel.

It was the early days of Cuba under Fidel Castro, but everything was already controlled by the government, including when one would travel and where. I remember that the choices of airlines out of Cuba were basically Pan American and/or KLM. I flew on Pan Am to Miami.

I have never waited for or received a telegram ever again, and I have not missed it.

But the mention of the end of telegrams in France took me back to our home in Havana, and that telegram that determined that I would be one of the lucky members of my generation to escape an oppressive Cuba and become a proud American.

Telegrams usually were associated with bad news. In my case, a visa to escape Cuba was quite the opposite.

According to Wikipedia, the average telegram was about 11.23 words long, a sort of Tweet, which is why it was ironic that the end of telegrams in France was announced in a Tweet (below):

Image courtesy of www.elpais.es

As for telegrams in the United States, Western Union is still there but mostly used for people to send money to their relatives around the globe. The actual telegram sending service in the US closed in 2006.

The British stopped telegram service in 1982, while in India, telegrams, which were sometimes handwritten messages, stopped in 2013.

As for me, and my generation of Cuban Americans, we will always keep the memories of that one yellow envelope that contained our wings to freedom. It looked something like this: