Mother and daughter who loved to teach and travel die in Surfside condo collapse
Elena Chavez and her daughter Elena Blasser — whose journeys wended through Cuba to New York to Puerto Rico to Miami — traveled many of the same pathways.
They were both teachers and shared a passion for travel that took them all over the world. Elena Chavez was fiercely independent and was still working in her second career as a travel agent at 88. Elena Blasser, 64, was a Miami-Dade Schools counselor and administrator who was known to spread her love and support to family, friends and colleagues alike.
On the night the tower collapsed, Elena had gone to stay at Champlain Towers to keep her daughter company while Elena’s husband was out of town. Their remains were identified in the rubble of the building’s collapse on July 5 and 6.
Pablo Rodriguez, son and grandson of the two Elenas, said that the two, valued “family above all else,” and described beloved family rituals, which included Saturday lunches and an annual family vacation, usually to a beach destination like Grand Cayman or Cancun. The family of four generations managed to coordinate work and school schedules to travel together once a year.
“No matter what, every year, we took a week vacation,” he said. “And mostly, we’d go to the beach and not doing anything. We’d just be together.”
The mother/daughter pair fled Cuba during Castro’s revolution when Blasser was a little girl. At the onset of the revolution, Elena Chavez’s husband found himself trading his job as a banker in Cuba to work in sugar cane fields in Jamaica to earn money to get the family off the island.
He reunited with his wife, daughter and son and moved to New York, where they relied on second-hand coats and furniture left out on the street. Eventually, they moved to Puerto Rico, where Chavez taught high school at Academia Santa Teresita in San Juan. The family moved to Miami in the late ‘70s and built their life here.
Chavez was so passionate about travel that she made it her second career after retiring from teaching. The two had been to Cambodia, Vietnam, Thailand and Ukraine and were planning to travel to Russia before the pandemic hit.
They’ve passed their love of travel and adventures to the rest of the family, even to their 6-year-old grandson/great grandson, John Rodriguez, who Pablo says already has his own little suitcase, loves airports and likes to check into flights and hotels himself.
“She did everything,” Pablo said of his 88-year-old grandmother, “She still worked, she had friends, they’d go to the theater, go out to dinner, travel to Europe, go on cruises.”
Chavez was working at her desk at JuliaTours travel agency in Miami when a man approached her and said, “Mrs. Chavez?”
She was stunned — she hadn’t been addressed as ‘Mrs. Chavez’ since she was teaching in San Juan. The man was a former student from Puerto Rico, Ernesto Camacho, whose mane had turned into a balding head.
“She looked at me and said, ‘Damn, look at you! You had long hair!” Camacho said of the chance encounter. “She got teary and said, Remember the good old days in San Juan?”’
Camacho, who was a classmate of Blasser’s, credits Chavez for turning around his lackluster school career when he was a sophomore and junior in high school.
“She got me interested in what she was teaching, her psychology class was something that opened up my mind,” he said. “She was fun, but she was firm when she needed to be.”
Camacho opened his own travel agency, General Wholesalers Travel and Tours, and eventually hired Chavez.
“Once my mom passed away a few years ago, she became my mother figure,” he said. Camacho is still in touch with his classmates in San Juan and has kept them updated about the two Elenas since the news of the collapse broke. From afar, Camacho helped organize a memorial service for them in San Juan.
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Blasser took after her mother and worked in Miami-Dade public schools for 15 years, starting as a counselor at Charles R. Hadley and Greenglade elementary schools, then moving on to assistant principal at Caribbean K-8, Zora Neale Hurston Elementary, Ethel F. Beckford/Richmond Elementary, back to Zora Neale and closing out her career as assistant principal at Vineland Elementary (now Vineland K-8) in Kendall from 2003 to 2006.
Blasser was the assistant principal at Hurston when Ody Lugo was hired as a second-grade teacher.
“She was a total breath of fresh air,” Lugo said. “Every day she was so funny and in such a happy mood. Teachers go through a lot of ups and downs; she was always so supportive and energetic.”
At the time, Lugo, now founder of the Giardino Gourmet Salads restaurant chain, was going through a difficult divorce. “It was hard not to take all that emotion to work,” she said. “She managed to call me in every day before the bell rang to make sure I was OK, give me a pep talk and let me know she was there for advice.”
Lugo said she cherishes memories of staff happy hours at a nearby restaurant on Fridays.
“We used to crack up, go into these attacks of laughing, she was contagious... She was such a great party animal,” Lugo said. “But for me, the biggest impact was how she was able to find time during work to truly carry me through the hardest time in my life.”
Pablo, Blasser’s son, described his mother as “a force of nature — very strong willed and passionate.” And said she was his “best friend,” talking every day.
After the initial shock and waiting to hear that first responders had found their remains, which he called a “living nightmare,” he’s trying to remember all the good times they all had together.
“I’m trying to just focus on the happy memories. And we really did have great memories.”
This story was originally published July 14, 2021 at 3:03 PM.
