The Inmates’ Interpreter

July 1986. In an Atlanta courtroom, the Judge sentences Gene Alvaro to six years, to be served in a federal prison. At the Fulton County Correctional Facility in Atlanta, there are a multitude of Cuban men incarcerated there for lack of documentation or for committing crimes. These men had arrived in the U.S. in the Mariel boatlift of 1980, when Cuban President Fidel Castro let thousands of countrymen leave the socialist nation. Gene proves himself useful by doing what he does best, teaching. He begins teaching English to inmates in a classroom in the library. Gene had paid for his education at the Universidad de la Habana, where he earned a Bachelor of Science degree in Finance in 1948, by teaching mathematics to students at Colegio San Eloy in Marianao, Havana, Cuba from 1945-1947. Surprisingly, Gene develops a sense of pride helping the men improve their grades using the study program "Where There Is A Will, There Is An A."

In his cell, lying on a narrow cot, staring at the ceiling, Gene Alvaro has lots and lots of time to think. In his isolation, this is where he reflects upon his life. Born in Camaguey, Cuba, his paternal ancestry traced back to Rodrigo Diaz de Vivar, the nobleman, military leader, and national hero of Castile, known as El Cid Campeador by the Moors in Valencia, Spain. In New York, his grandfather Joaquin Alvaro-Diaz, became a naturalized citizen of the United States, only to die in October 1896 in The Spanish-American War. A detachment of Spanish guerillas, under the command of their Captain, bound and forcibly took Joaquin from his house in Guayabales, in the Province of Santa Clara, Cuba and dragged him by a horse, strangling him to death.

Gene was an outstanding Track & Field athlete at the university, where he earned a spot on the Cuban Olympic Team for the 1948 Summer Olympic Games in London. But his mother, Alicia, made him bow out of the team. Envious of Gene’s talents and more loving to his disabled brother Enrique, Alicia Alvaro convinced him that it wasn’t fair that Enrique didn’t have the same advantages as him, because due to a bout with polio Enrique had a leg injury and walked with a cane. Later, though he was an outstanding player as a first baseman and catcher with the Marianao Tigres baseball team, Gene gave up his dream of playing professional baseball because his mother berated him constantly that it was a pipe dream, a waste of time. On another occassion, his future wife from a wealthy and prestigious family, Rita Ponce de Leon, who he met at the swimming pool of the Havana Biltmore Yacht and Country Club in Miramar, Marianao, is invited to dinner to discuss the wedding with his mother, who then slipped a sedative in Rita’s coca cola putting her to sleep, trying to prevent the next day wedding from happening. Yet, Gene brushed it off because he loved his mother, who favored his brother more. Worse comes when Fidel Castro seizes power of Cuba in 1959; he has to leave behind everything he knows in Cuba and start over in the United States. All seems well in Atlanta, when he rents a house for his wife and three children and plays catcher for a softball team of his insurance company, where he works in the bookkeeping department. But on the softball field is where another setback occurs. As Gene waits for the ball at home plate, a player on the other team slams into him full force, breaking his neck. He undergoes a successful surgery at St. Joseph’s Hospital in Sandy Springs. Gene looks like nothing ever happened, able to run and walk, but he is unable to play softball or baseball again. Watching his favorite New York Yankees and Atlanta Braves baseball games on television is not enough. Depressed, and for unexplainable reasons, he is obsessed with making money. First, moonlighting as a waiter at the Piedmont Driving Club in Atlanta, and then fantasizing about Georgia’s 1830s gold mining industry. A true cry for help, he wants to search for gold in a river in Dahlonega. One day in May 1986, he purchases a plastic toy gun at a Sears store which he uses the next morning, threatening a teller at a bank, where he makes off with a little over seven thousand dollars. Later that afternoon, the license plate of his car was retrieved from the recorded footage of a surveillance camera outside the bank. Police officers arrest Gene at his office in downtown Atlanta near the Hyatt Regency Hotel. All the stolen money is recovered from the trunk of his car.

Gene’s 14-year-old daughter Ana is a rising ballerina performing with the Atlanta Ballet and maintains a full-time class schedule at the prestigious Atlanta School of Ballet in the Buckhead uptown commercial and residential district of the city of Atlanta. The Atlanta Ballet hires the most talented dancers from all over the world, including Brazil, Croatia, Czech Republic and France. So, the ballet company ranks one of the top 10 in the United States of America. While coping with her father’s turmoil, Ana’s inner strength is put to the test from the pressures of the competitive ballet world she desires to be in. Music and the visual tools of dance, acting, colorful scenery and costumes used to convey stories evoked fantasy in this fairy-tale world controlled by wealthy ballet company benefactors, who gave better roles in shows to their less talented relatives, who also received a bombardment of regular publicity in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution newspaper.

November 23, 1987. Gene’s moment to shine comes when he participates in the longest takeover of a federal prison in U.S. history. In the cafeteria, Gene thanks Juan Gomez-Maya, an inmate in a brown uniform with a black hairnet over his head serving food trays from behind the counter, for giving him a tin of evaporated milk to mix in his coffee. Juan is an emotionally charged gay, Cuban who is always crying about one thing or another, especially about his serving time for lack of documentation. As Gene sits down to eat, a riot ensues. An alarm sounds as prisoners set fire to mattresses in their cells as a protest and in order to escape. Fires rage and burn down a substantial portion of the facility. Free to take hostages, these Cuban inmates overrun the prison stating their demands for better treatment and that they not be repatriated to Cuba. This standoff with police officers becomes widely publicized by the media. Gene, who is among the many hostages, is torn between his loyalty to his Cuban comrades and his desire to be an American with a good record in jail. To the shock of his family, when some of the hostages are freed, Gene refuses to leave with them. Rather, he musters up the courage to stay inside to serve as an interpreter until the crisis is resolved. Reverend Mack Reimer, who administers the word of Jesus Christ in the prison chapel, stands with Gene.

WSB television, an ABC affiliate, has a news crew on the site in southeast Atlanta 24/7. Claudia Prodgers, a WSB-TV reporter, is on the scene covering the situation and staying at the nearby Admiral Benbow Inn on Spring Street. She wants to enter the Fulton County Correctional Facility to interview the inmates’ holding hostages. A tall blonde woman in her fifties, Claudia envisions a Pulitzer Prize in journalism for her reporting on this story. And soon enough, negotiators and detainees begin to work out an agreement with Federal officials agreeing to delay deportations to Cuba and have a new round of hearings for Cuban detainees in federal custody.