‘A move in the right direction,’ says local doctor, once a refugee

When Eugene’s Orestes Gutierrez heard the astounding news Wednesday, the first words he said to his wife, Pamela, were: “Do you want to go to Cuba with me now?”

Sure, the Eugene osteopathic physician was half-joking, but Gutierrez, a native Cuban who left the Communist island country as a 4-year-old in 1980 and has never returned, knows that Wednesday’s historic news makes it more realistic than ever that he will one day again set foot on Cuban soil.

“I think that in the future, I would consider visiting my homeland,” said Gutierrez, 38, who owns Gutierrez Holistic Family Medicine in south Eugene with his wife.

“I think it’s a move in the right direction,” he said of President Obama’s announcement that the United States will restore full diplomatic relations with Cuba and open an embassy in Havana for the first time in more than a half-century.

Gutierrez has lived in Eugene since 2010, moving here with his family (the couple have three children attending Eugene schools) from Jacksonville, Fla. But he first came to the United States with his parents on the Mariel boatlift in 1980.

The boatlift was a mass emigration of about 125,000 Cubans who departed from Cuba’s Mariel Harbor for the United States between April 15 and Oct. 31, 1980.

Following growing dissent, housing and job shortages as well as a plummeting economy, many Cubans requested asylum.

The Cuban government and then-President Fidel Castro allowed anyone who wanted to leave to do so during that six-month period.

“It’s incredible the amount of stress it has caused,” Gutierrez said of the 50-plus years of strained relations between the United States and Cuba.

His mother, Maria Perez of Miami, still visits Cuba regularly to visit her mother, sisters and other relatives, said Gutierrez, who was born in the capital city, Havana, and then spent his first few years of life in Guanajay, just south of Mariel.

“Every time she visits, she says it’s gotten worse,” he said. The quality of life, the poverty, the crime — all worse.

“A lot of the families there want to leave,” Gutierrez said. “They want to come to America.”

Gutierrez was raised by his mother in inner city Miami after his parents divorced not long after arriving in the country. He later became the first in his family to attend college and is a veteran of the U.S. Navy.

Until now, he has always feared returning to Cuba because of his veteran status and the circumstances in which his family left.

Gutierrez said he does not know any other Cuban-Americans living in the Eugene-Springfield area.

“There’s not that many,” he said. “You might be talking to the only one I know.”

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