With a generous smile and a playful attitude, Spanish instructor Mevelyn Romay Fernandez might just fool you into believing that she has had an easy life.
Above her desk hangs a small Cuban flag, and around her finger and neck she wears tiny gold dolphins. These items and a heavy Spanish accent offer clues to a life Fernandez once had. Thanks to a couple Mississippians and a strong dose of steadfastness, she has long since left that life behind.
“Repeat after me,” Fernandez says to a classroom of eager students. “Cuando era una nina, yo viajaba a la playa.” They mimic their professor, Southern accents tainting her perfect Spanish words. She giggles and makes a quick joke, her lighthearted and outgoing nature a draw for many students.
Today, the 39-year-old teaches intermediate-level Spanish at The University of Mississippi.Her journey from Cuba to Oxford has been tumultuous and exhausting, but Fernandez now feels like she is finally traveling in the right direction.
Born in Havana in 1974, Fernandez had a less-than-ideal childhood.
“We were very poor. We didn’t have anything,” she said. “It was a time in Cuba when it was very hard to find food.”
In mid-December of 1995, after a long day of class at the University of Havana, Fernandez was feeling melancholy and began to pray.
All she wanted for Christmas was a nice meal for her family. As she was leaving the school, a friend of Fernandez’s from freshman year called to her.
“She said, ‘Mevelyn, Mevelyn, come here! There is a group of Americans here, and they’re looking for somebody to interpret for them,’” Fernandez recalled. “So I went to talk to a group of about four or five very tall, older American guys and said, ‘Hey, are you from the United States?’”
Fernandez smiled as she recounted her first memory of Bob McCustion.
“They said, ‘We are. We are from Mississippi.’” Her Spanish accent paused as she jokingly mocked the men’s thick drawl. “I was used to more academic accents.”
Most Cubans at that time were Catholic or practiced Santeria, and some were a mix of the two. The missionaries, from Tupelo, were looking for a Protestant who could speak Spanish to help them minister to the people of Havana.
“It was all heaven-sent, I’m telling you,” she said. But what the Mississippi men were asking her to do wasn’t as simple as handing out Bibles.
“They were very bold,” she said. “They would approach crowds and start talking about the gospel, and I was interpreting for them, and that is illegal in Cuba. Thank God we never got in trouble. Sometimes we got scared, but we never got in real trouble.”
Although risky, the work was fulfilling for the then-college student. The men left a few days later, but they kept Fernandez’s contact information. For the next five years, she, Bob McCustion, Frank Scott and their team spread their message throughout the country one mission trip at a time.
By 2000, Fernandez was fed up with the Cuban government and was unable to earn enough money for her family. She decided to do whatever it would take to escape her home country, even though it meant leaving her mother, sister and sick grandmother behind. Two years later, and after a few months in Canada, Fernandez’s Mississippi connections came to her aid. She moved to Tupelo and worked as a nanny for a while, but when a house fire burned almost all she owned, she decided to start over in New York City.
The Big Apple taught Fernandez many things, but life was hard and expensive for her there. Finally, McCustion and his family convinced her to move back to Tupelo. It was after she had come back to the South and had applied for a driver’s license that Fernandez first visited Ole Miss.
“I had to take my Cuban birth certificate to The University of Mississippi to be translated so I could get my learner’s permit,” she said. “When I arrived, the woman, who is now my boss, Julia Bussade, told me that the school was starting a new program with native speakers and that I should consider getting my master’s.”
With help from her Tupelo friends and employer, that’s exactly what Fernandez did. She has been teaching at Ole Miss for two and a half years now.
And she still wears the gold dolphins to remind her of a time back in Cuba, when she took a dolphin trainer’s course at the Havana aquarium.
With a grin and a gleam in her chestnut eyes, she explained that the experience has inspired her to write a children’s book.
An inspiration herself, Fernandez often quotes Tolkien:
“The greatest adventure is what lies ahead. Today and tomorrow are yet to be said.” She grins. “I’m not finished yet.”
