When I returned to Cuba in 1999 after 29 years, it took me days to gather the courage to drive up to Cuabitas, our old neighborhood in the mountains above Santiago, to see what had become of my mother's childhood home. Divided between two families, it was a shadow of the graceful, mustard-colored mansion I remembered, a happy place surrounded by fruit groves lovingly tended by my grandfather, Santiago Parladé, and his daughters.

Though many of the fruit trees were gone, my grandfather's favorite mango tree was still standing, its sprawling branches covered with lacy, golden flowers. Seeing it going strong after so many years lifted my spirit; it was the one hopeful sign on a painful and depressing visit.

That tree was my grandfather's proudest creation, a prolific bearer of peach-shaped fruit with juicy, saffron-colored flesh and delicate yellow skin suffused with a gorgeous pink blush. It was my childhood guide to the seasons, blooming in time for Christmas, bearing green fruit when my May birthday was near and supplying us with what seemed to be an endless bounty of gorgeous, ripe mangoes just before summer vacation.

Though my slender, silver-haired grandfather was a shipbuilder by trade, he was a gifted amateur pomologist, and that tree was the last and most successful of his mango breeding experiments. A cross between the Corazón and other types I can't recall, it was known in our area as the Parladé.

Each morning, he would search his trees for ripening fruit, carefully pulling them down with a long, forked pole and placing them on a windowsill. When the Parladé mangoes were ripe, he would massage them between his long, bony hands until the flesh practically melted within. Then he would puncture the skin and hand us the fruit so we could suck out the juice.

The huge bizcochuelos with their turpentine-smelling sap were reserved for dessert, and we would cut into long, fat slices after lunch with a certain degree of ceremony. There was no etiquette to eating the Toledo mangoes that grew on a dwarf tree near a side patio. Tiny, fibrous and especially sweet, they had large, roundish seeds that we sucked like lollipops, juice dripping down our cheeks.

How I would have loved to take budwood from those precious trees back to Miami. If I had dared, I would have been following a well-trod path that is at least a century and half old.

The first documented mango in Florida, the so-called No. 11, came from Cuba in 1861. It was followed in the 1880s by a Cuban variety with a penetrating, resinous aroma called Turpentine here and mango de hilacha on the island.

It's believed that an English physician working for a slave-trade company introduced a single mango seed from Jamaica to Cuba in 1789. The origin of that fruit is uncertain, but it most probably came from India through Brazil via the Portuguese.

''The great majority of Florida mangoes have been grafted on rootstock belonging to the sturdy Cuban Turpentine,'' says Richard Campbell, senior curator of tropical fruit at Williams Grove at the Fairchild Farm in Homestead, a scientific and outreach facility of Fairchild Tropical Botanic Garden.

A chance encounter between the Turpentine and the Mulgoba, a beautiful Indian mango with red skin introduced in West Palm Beach in 1898, gave rise to the prized Haden and its progeny, a long line of important commercial cultivars including the prolific Tommy Atkins.

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