Also in Maclean's, a fantastic obituary for Mary Conception McCarthy Gomez Cueto, who died on April 3 at the age of 109. Cueto was born on April 27, 1900, to a wealthy Irish Catholic family living in St. John's, Newfoundland. While she was studying at the Boston Conservatory of Music, she met Pedro Gomez Cueto, a Spaniard a dozen years her senior with business interests in Boston and Havana, Cuba. The pair married on May 21, 1922, and they set up house in Havana, where Mary helped establish the Havana Philharmonic Orchestra and, perhaps because she could not have children, an orphanage. When Pedro died in 1950, Mary stayed in Havana, running his business. Fidel Castro's 1959 revolution nationalized the factory and her other properties, valued at $4 million, but Mary remained despite the exodus of wealth from Havana.
Mary eked out a living teaching English, piano and singing. Two decades on, she had become as dilapidated as her villa, with its peeling walls, boarded windows, dust, overgrown garden and decrepit Steinway. “She was wildly painted, she wore a foxstole with a face on it and a tail whenever she came out in the evening, and vintage dresses,” says one-time neighbour Cita Pilgrim. Mary never refused a party invitation, and played the organ at church until it broke. There were hints of her past glory—an antique Cadillac, with tires shipped in from St. John’s, a chauffeur who doubled as a gardener, a herd of peacocks patrolling her grounds. She eventually received a modest stipend from the Cuban government, as well as the odd sum liberated from Boston. Yet the pearls she wore around her neck were fakes.
My favourite line in the obituary, however, is the revelation that Elio Garcia, her former student and godson, blames the U.S. embargo for her death.
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