CHAPTER

1

Ientered the world on April 23, 1945, in La Habana, Cuba. My mother, Blanca, claims she had to spend three months in bed prior to my arrival. She was twenty years old when she was forced to suffer through eighteen hours of excruciating labor in my paternal grandparents’ home.

After my parents married on June 2, 1944, they could not afford a residence of their own, so the newlyweds settled into my paternal grandfather’s house. It was verging on cramped, with just two bedrooms and one bathroom in the Vedado section of Habana but they all lived comfortably together until I was born the following year.

My father was born Luis del Carmen but he was a macho man and, being another name for the Mother Mary, del Carmen was gradually phased out and replaced with a list of monikers such as Luis, Papi, Pipo, mi Socio, Abu, el Tigre, Big Guy and other choice names my mother will not permit me to mention. It wasn’t until his 80th birthday that he would proudly reclaim his birth name as a salute to all the women in his life.

Referring to his mother Carmen, his sister Tete, his beloved Blanca and all of his daughter-in-laws, he told me, “You know, Luis, I have been blessed by having so many wonderful women around me that I am proud to have the name del Carmen as part of my first name.” From then on, all his notes and correspondences to me were signed Luis del Carmen.

My father was somewhat of a child prodigy. I don’t know how he managed it, but he got into MIT to study civil engineering when he was just fifteen years old—a miraculous accomplishment for a Cuban in America. He didn’t graduate because he wanted to join the American army and fight in

World War II, at which point his parents pulled him out of the country. He ended up graduating in civil engineering from the University of Habana just two years later.

I’m not sure many people would describe me as an innocent cherub, but when I was born I looked like an angel. I had white blond hair, fair skin and big dark inquisitive eyes. My mother would parade me around town as if I were her Fabergé egg—and I demanded to be treated as such.

Apparently no one was eager to give me the attention I thought I deserved and I would drive the whole neighborhood crazy by shrieking at the top of my lungs to rectify my sense of neglect. Little did I know someone was about to come to my rescue and I would unwittingly wind up returning the favor.

We lived with my grandmother Carmen “Minina” who had been paralyzed by severe depression after losing her daughter, Maria Teresa, (Tete). At the age of eighteen, she had become terminally ill with meningitis and one month later she died.

It was a devastating illness at the time as it was highly contagious and there was no cure. It was unbearable for my grandmother Carmen to helplessly watch her daughter suffer through extremes of vacillating fever and chills, migraines and convulsions, and deteriorate before her very eyes.

The antibiotics Maria Teresa needed had been invented but did not reach Cuba until a month after the disease had claimed her young life. Grandma Minina was only forty-eight years old herself and after the trauma she sunk into deep depression.

She spent her days sitting quietly in a dark room or on the porch, staring into space. With the exception of visiting her beloved daughter’s grave and going to the doctor, Carmen had given up on life. She did, however, place a setting for her daughter at the table every single day.

To Grandma Minina’s dismay, after I was born, my parents would frequently go out and leave me behind to scream the house down. They would tactically place me in a bassinette on the porch where my grandma had become a permanent fixture and sneak out. Without fail, as soon as the door shut, I started shrieking at the top of my lungs, hoping to get a rise out of someone, but my efforts were in vain as the maids had their arms full and Minina was as catatonic as a statue. It didn’t take long for my outbursts to hit the desired nerve and within days of my birth, Grandma Minina miraculously emerged from years of self-imposed solitude to see to me herself. Scorning everybody in the house for being too incompetent to attend to a screaming child, Grandma Minina decided to take action—and so her depression vanished and we became almost inseparable until theday she died.

My maternal grandparents were not quite as malleable. My grandmother, Clara, was seventeen years younger than my grandfather, Jose. She had an intense social life, and caring for a baby required a great amount of time and sacrifice.

Jose was good-natured, but since he was a much older man, he adhered to the Latin tradition that men do not involve themselves with little children—that’s what nannies are for. He was consistently immersed in his business affairs and so all I got from him was an occasional pat on the head and sporadic words of wisdom. It wasn’t until his retirement and battle with leukemia that I was able to spend a little more time with him.

Jose was the second generation in a family from the municipality of Cangas de Onis in the Asturias region of Spain. As the eldest of his siblings, he was forced to join a convent and train to become a priest. However, once at seminary school, Jose escaped, jumped into a boat and made his way to Cuba.

Eventually he landed in Habana and proceeded to El Surgidero de Batabano, a city in the southern coast of the province of Habana. There he met a Greek man who turned out to be the “King of Sponges” in Cuba. Jose ended up joining the sponge business and acquiring three sponging boats during a time when sponges were popular and people paid a lot of money for them. However, DuPont soon manufactured a synthetic sponge and that was pretty much the end of the natural-sponge business.

Jose and his partner kept the boats as fishing vessels and Jose determinedly sought out new business opportunities. He moved to Habana, where he acquired a lumber and supply yard. I can recall him taking me to see trains in his lumberyard. As a kid I loved trains and enjoyed watching the big cars roll on the rails. The education I got from the man would prove to be invaluable. He taught me that in an argument, you must hit your opponent first with everything you’ve got —both literally and metaphorically— and talk later. This was one of my first life lessons and one I would never forget.

Jose lived well from this business because of his favorable relationships; the huge crowd that showed up at his funeral was a testimony to how popular he was amongst his peers.

Jose and the Greek “King of Sponges” had married two sisters from Surgidero de Batabano. They were lower-middle-class women from Galicia, Spain, who had emigrated to that part of Cuba. I recall a funny story about Jose when he was courting my grandmother, Clara Veiga.

Jose had purchased a motorcycle and would drive by the Veigas’ house, which was near a dock, over and over again. Sometimes he would go right onto the dock but once, while looking back at Clara, he forgot to brake and —fully clothed in his Sunday’s finest— he and the motorcycle ended up in the water.

Clara and my grandfather had four children —Rolando, Emma, my mother Blanca, and Oscar. The eldest son, Rolando, apparently suffered from paranoia. He was unusual and challenging to identify with. No experts could provide our family with an accurate diagnosis and we couldn’t figure out how to handle him. As nobody knew what they had on their hands, Rolando was socially ostracized. Even though he was harmless, his own mother was confused by his erratic behavior, and didn’t know how to deal with him.

Later in life, after he had fathered five children of his own, doctors discovered that Rolando had schizophrenia and he ended up in a psychiatric hospital in Pennsylvania for many years. He was separated from his wife and children, and ultimately died while living alone.

My mother had invited Rolando to visit us on many occasions and I couldn’t figure out what the big deal was. I just thought he was a bit of a slob but he was amicable and kept to himself. I always felt sorry for him, especially since he was so lonely.

A similar scenario happened with Clara’s daughter, my Aunt Emma. Aunt Emma —who was also my godmother— was very close to me when I was a child. I used to spend Fridays with her and sleep over at her house, but things changed after her husband, Remigio Fernandez, left her. He was the oldest son of one of the wealthiest landowners and cattle ranchers in Cuba, and when he hit the road, Emma ended up living alone, exiled in Miami. Emma supported herself and her two children and ultimately came to live with us. She was a very sweet lady, and it was so sad when she died in our house from untreated breast cancer.

My parents “adopted” her two sons, Remigio and Javier, and thus, my mother ended up with seven children —all boys! Fortunately for me, I was already out of the house by then and away at university.

When I was born at the end of WWII, life in Cuba was good. The country had not been affected by the war, even though Cuba was an ally of the U.S. I had a privileged upper-middle-class childhood, even by Cuban standards. We didn’t have a ton of cash to throw around but we lived very comfortably with the luxury of maids, cooks and drivers.

My father’s father, Jorge Luis Echarte Mazorra, was a reputable architect and civil engineer. He served as Secretary of Public Works for Cuba’s short-lived president, Miguel Mariano Gómez, in 1936.

Gomez served for seven months before he was impeached in December and removed from office by a group led by the future dictator, Fulgencio Batista. Federico Laredo Brú served the concluding years of Gomez’s term, leading the corrupt way for an ambitious Batista. My grandfather quit his presidential assignment because he deemed the contracts he dealt with to be dishonorable and he couldn’t turn a blind eye to the preferential treatment friends of the new regime received over others.

Like me, my grandfather, Jorge Luis, was a self-motivated man quick to separate himself from his father. My great-grandfather was a notorious womanizer and lived to play rather than work. Jorge Luis, on the other hand, was a pragmatist with very little time for frivolities. He took his work seriously and labored tirelessly to attain a better life for his future family. He excelled in mathematics and to subsidize his university education, he walked five miles each way, every day, to teach.

He was a diligent entrepreneur who reaped the benefits of his sheer hard work and determination by successfully running his own construction business and making his fortune. As he developed his business, he first invited his oldest son, Jorge, and later my father, to partner with him.

In addition to roads and civil engineering projects, he built houses for a number of Cuba’s upper crust. He also built Cuba’s first brewery and the first two ice manufacturing plants. As a result, he forged invaluable relationships that would enhance his professional and financial status. However, that would all change with the ascent of Fidel Castro.

Jorge Luis didn’t have any option but to like me because of the strong relationship I had with my grandmother. He was deeply devoted to his wife, and Minina was devoted to young me. I used to go to their house and spend a great deal of time in his office, which was upstairs above the garage. I would use the room to study and make lengthy phone calls to my friends —or, more often, relentlessly pursue girls— and I brought many of them over to “study” or hang out.

Apparently, Jorge did not mind, except when I repeatedly dragged in a crowd of local street kids, but he never said a word about it to me, only to Minina, who told him to shut up and trust me. She liked my non-discriminating attitude and encouraged it, even if my friends did look like they were about to raid the house.

It was in Minina and Jorge’s house that I became very close to yet another woman who worked as a nanny, named Elena Lombillo. Out of all the people from all walks of life in my periphery, it was Elena Lombillo, a mulata woman with barely anything to her name, who has stood out to me as being the happiest person I’ve ever met. Elena was the daughter of a Cuban slave who had worked for my grandfather after she was freed. Elena was born in my grandfather’s house and was brought up there until her mother passed away. She had nowhere to go, so by default she continued living at the house and received a weekly allowance with nothing expected of her in return.

When my mother needed her to, she would babysit me and would come to our house every day and tell me old folktales, sit by my bed and watch me go to sleep. Elena used to endearingly call my dad Chucho, which means mutt, and me Chuchito, which means puppy —or tamale in Guatemala!

She had a strong belief in God and had full faith that He would always take care of her no matter what happened. Even though Elena was poor, she never complained and always occupied herself by helping others, whether it was teaching the neighborhood kids, assisting the nuns in the community or working at the church. She exuded love and gave nearly every peso of her allowance away for any cause she believed to be better than her own, never expecting anything back. She was such a force of life that we adopted her into our family, and when we emigrated from Cuba, we took her with us.

As a refugee, she got a Social Security number and the government provided her with housing in Florida. My father continued to support her and later on I had her pampered in a home for rich retirees. At the retirement facility, Elena had her own room and kept to herself, so when a Cuban half her age, dressed up to the nines in business attire, turned up with a chauffeur and laden with gifts to see a modest mulata, all the well-to-do busybodies had enough gossip to keep their tongues in overdrive until my next weekly visit. It was so moving to see Elena being treated like a princess and being repaid for all the kindness she had bestowed onto others throughout her life—even though she probably would have been happy living the rest of her days in a shed.

We moved from my grandparents’ home when I was two years old, first into our own apartment in El Vedado and then three years later we upgraded to a much more comfortable house in Miramar. I remember very distinctly that my father created a toy room for me, which had a huge train set on a table that occupied the entire room. He sat me on the table with the train encircling me as I spun round and round, mesmerized for hours. I loved it but I was never allowed to touch the actual train. I guess I was too young and clumsy then. By the time I had grown up, the family had expanded and my toy room was sabotaged, along with my father’s trains, to make room for my brothers Jose Ignacio, Raul and Carlos.

My mother would take me to the beach often. We lived three blocks from the ocean, and I remember being violently bashed by each monstrous wave during the hurricane season. She used to take me to el malecon —the open oceanfront area of Habana that was very rocky. As the waves splashed on the rocks, the water would rise ten to forty feet, depending on the force of the wave. I have a profound recollection of the ice-cold water wildly splashing against my skin. To stop me from freezing, my mother would prescribe a gulp of cognac and send me on my merry way.

One time, my mother decided to make a man out of me. She heard a hurricane was imminent and made me race to our spot on the rocks. When we got there the winds were so intense that the waves looked like they were going to eat us up. The terror is still engrained in me. Not only do I clearly recall the month-long cold I caught that day with respiratory problems that have lasted the rest of my life, but I have never been able to shed the fear I felt upon witnessing those monstrous waves. Years later I almost jumped off of a ship anchored in Habana Bay. It was so huge; I’d never seen anything like it and as I walked around the attraction with my parents the horn blasted, nearly bursting my eardrums. I thought it was about to take off and I flew like a bat out of hell down the ladder and into the boat that had taken us from the harbor.

When I turned five, kindergarten held a new world of intrigue —and the first of my many great loves: my teacher at Margot Parraga´s . Then I moved on to a strict Catholic school where I studied hard year in and year out, finishing almost at the top of my class and practicing baseball obsessively.

When I got to high school, I loosened up a bit and partied away at the exclusive Habana Yacht Club, chasing girls unashamedly and wreaking havoc on my parents’ psyche.

To stop me from getting into mischief when I was younger, my parents sent me off to military camp in Culver, Indiana. They decided that I should learn English and get used to being away from home, so I spent the next four consecutive summers at the Culver Military Academy.

Culver prided itself on being a breeding ground for confident young achievers. The military regimen was extremely challenging, constantly pushing my limits, both mentally and physically, but without ridicule if I failed. The staff offered unconditional support and encouraged us to get up and try again until we got it right.

Later in life, I realized just how vital that experience was for me. Culver’s unique military system was designed solely to provide the structure for teaching principles of leadership, integrity, self-discipline, manners and respect for myself as well as others. Initially, I struggled with some major culture clashes. I was nine when I first went to the camp and a fellow camper informed me that my father had made love to my mother in order to have me. It ended up in a fist fight. The counselors did not know how to handle me as I remained adamant that I had been given to my mother by the grace of God.

Another cultural difference was swimming after lunch. In Cuba I had always been told that you should wait about three hours after a meal to completely digest before getting in the water. Apparently that was not the case in the U.S., but I made a huge fuss until I could be convinced that the rule didn’t apply in America.

Every night I battled with the 10 o’clock curfew because I wasn’t used to going to bed that early and when the time came, I was always wide awake and restless, plotting ways to escape the dorms. The rigid discipline was also a shock and I hated having to march everywhere to an empty audience. On Sundays, all the boys paraded in front of the headmasters, a ritual I dreaded. But except for the marching and the birdwatching classes, it wasn’t too bad. I learned a lot of valuable lessons from those summers at Culver.

But back at home in Cuba, the lessons I learned from my father were of a different nature. My father taught me that in order to get anywhere in Cuba you had to be able to play baseball, dance and win at pool—especially if you wanted to get anywhere with the girls.

My father was a die-hard baseball fan and because it was drilled into me and my brothers the second he could get to us, and then in turn our children, baseball will no doubt be engrained in our family for generations.

Luis Sr. was an ardent Red Sox fan because of his MIT days, but to his dismay I became a Yankees supporter. Even on his death bed, when he came out of a coma for two days, he called for Blanca and asked, “What time is the season opening game being televised?”

Most of my father’s advice would be delivered in terms of baseball analogies. “Always keep your eye on the ball, always take the first strike, and never go out not swinging” was a mantra he often prided himself in repeating.

My father started hurling anything from balloons to baseballs at me from the moment I could open my eyes. I could barely walk and he would wrap my hand around a baseball bat and start throwing air balloons for me to hit, screaming encouragement every time I did, so that I would scream and laugh even louder. We repeated this practice tirelessly day in day out, and on the days he had to go to work, he’d come home for lunch to get in a few extra hours of practice with his boys.

With my mother’s added ocean-survival training during hurricane season, by the time I was nine, I was a lean, mean sportsman. But baseball was my pride and glory. On the local scene, I was a famous pitcher. I scored a perfect game, striking out the entire opposition single-handedly—a feat that has been achieved only twenty times in the history of Major League Baseball—although unfortunately at thirteen I wasn’t playing with the big boys quite yet!

For two consecutive years I pitched perfect no-hitters and when I was not pitching, I was either an outfielder or playing first or third base, and in the offense, I was a good long-ball hitter, always batting third or fourth in the lineup. The scouts kept a close eye on me, and when I moved to Miami, they tracked me down and tried to convince me to try out for the Cleveland Indians. They dangled a contract in my face, seducing me with the irresistible perks that would come with being a professional U.S. baseball player—like a lover whispering sweet nothings in my ear—but I was determined to make a lot of money no matter what the cost, even if that meant sacrificing one of my biggest passions to spend more time studying. In the back of my mind I knew that if I pursued a baseball career, I would be skating on thin ice. Already early on, I had incurred an injury from pitching and throwing curve-balls, and knew that it was only a matter of time before the pain got the better of me.

My athleticism worked to my advantage those summers at Culver, though, as I took the top honors in swimming, track and field, diving, badminton, table tennis, baseball, volleyball—almost every sport one can think of except shooting and boxing. I was so good at sports that they were forced to grant me the rank of athletic lieutenant and, although I would never have admitted it to my parents, I even grew to like the military. At the end of four years I prided myself on returning home adorned with all my medals and stripes just like a military hero.

Who was to know that those four years would serve as a means of survival when I fled Cuba shortly after? It not only helped with my English, but with the understanding of completely foreign customs.

In Cuba, if a respectable boy took a girl out, they would have to be accompanied by a chaperone. Some of the adults were better than others, giving you room to breathe, but others stuck to you so tightly they may as well have used a chastity belt. It didn’t take me long to figure out that the best escape was the dance floor.

When I told my mother that I wanted to take dance lessons, it was so out of character that she gave me a strange look, probably thinking it was a euphemism for coming out. She didn’t say a word, and to my surprise I was promptly given dance lessons.

The following week I enrolled in dance school where there was an abundance of good-looking girls. I learned to dance almost overnight and from then on during each date I spent the entire night glued to the dance floor with the fun girls that would let me dance cheek to cheek with them.

The girls I met in my dance class were so great that next I decided to take a typing course—an “in” I would recommend to any guy who wants to meet girls. Now that computers are taking over our lives, it was a ploy that has served multiple purposes.

When we moved to Miami, the tradition of having a chaperone sadly followed us out the country and, no matter where we went, the kids would usually be escorted with one chaperone for every five or six couples.

One evening, I took a girl to see a show at one of Miami’s nicer nightclubs. The tables were small and our chaperone was sandwiched between us. We were up against the wall and she was facing us, so once the show started she turned around to watch the performers too. The second her back was turned, my date’s foot attacked my leg, aggressively working its way up as if it had a life of its own. I was terrified. I could never have imagined that I could inspire such passion in a woman and sadly it didn’t last when I couldn’t afford to keep taking her to night club acts, which she seemed to respond to more than me.

For as long as I can remember, my grandfather, Jorge Luis, consistently drummed in me that there isn’t anything as important as studying and without an education I would be nothing. His words trained me to believe that the only tool for success was knowledge and I therefore concentrated fastidiously on getting good grades in Catholic high school, falling in the top ten in a class of forty.

Yet it was the Catholic schooling that showed me the first faces of fear I would experience in my life. It is ironic that the organized belief systems we have created to help us cope with life can also exacerbate our fears. The very religion we turn to, to help us with the complexities of our lives, teaches us to question every move for fear of being punished later on in life, or even after we die.

Like many children who attended highly religious schools, I was encouraged to live each day bulging with guilt and was constantly forced to repent for so much as breathing without God’s permission. Catholic school ingrained fear in me from as far back as I can remember and it has clung to me to this very day.

Later, in 1959, when I was a shy fifteen-year-old boy attending La Salle, a strict Catholic high school in Vedado, I had another experience that would turn me from the church forever. Every Thursday a bunch of priests from the nearby parish were called in to hear the students’ confessions because the Brothers who ran the school were not qualified to forgive people for their sins. The Brothers’ role was predominantly to indoctrinate young, impressionable boys, using fear and guilt to drive them to join their Order.

I didn’t mind confessing to this one Father because whether you told him you had stabbed your baby brother or drowned your neighbor’s kittens, he would always tell you to pay your penance with five Our Fathers and five Hail Marys and send you on your way. However, one particular Thursday, I was in a hurry because I had baseball practice and we were getting ready for an important game that coming Saturday. When I got to the school chapel, there was an unusually long line queuing for the avuncular Father, but I spotted another priest who was alone and decided to test him out. What the hell, it was the same spiel every week, and it didn’t make a difference to me who was delivering it.

I knelt down in front of the Father and told him the usual: Yet another beautiful woman had led my sinful thoughts astray and I had masturbated at least three or four times in the last week. I was just about to recite my five Hail Marys when the Father went off on a self-righteous diatribe that involved me burning in hell for my sins. The gluttonous hypocrite pontificated for the next fifteen minutes as I sat there in silence, simmering with fury. When the time came for me to say my act of contrition, I had reached my boiling point.

I stood up and ran. I had no idea where I was running to, but then I spotted the bus that I usually took to baseball practice and headed for it. The Father attempted to chase me but he had clearly eaten way too many suppers as if they were his last and I was a trained athlete. I vanished into the rickety safe haven of the bus and promised myself that I had just endured my last confession. Judgment Day was still far off, and I had plenty of time to repent once my sex drive calmed down.

True to my word, I have not set foot into a confessional since.

I was way too busy with school and adhering to my father’s mantra in an attempt to impress the girls to realize that there was a revolution taking place on my doorstep. Fidel Castro led the country’s rebel army to victory in 1959, defeating Batista’s iron-fisted dictatorship. At the time, my family refused to think that Castro and his communist regime would last. Like everyone else, they were certain it was only a matter of time before the great superpower to the North came to the rescue.

So just about the time I conquered my fear of going straight to hell, Fidel Castro threw a monkey wrench into any sense of security I had reestablished. In August 1960, Castro’s new government created Committees for the Defense of the Revolution, which implemented neighborhood spying in an effort to weed out “counter-revolutionary” activities. By employing fear tactics, Castro kept a firm stronghold as leader of the one-party communist rule in Cuba, which he would continue to sustain, even as I write this book. I was just fifteen years old at the time but, as I would soon discover, my age didn’t protect me from becoming a target of the communist witch-hunt.

Living in a police state meant that everyone had to look over their shoulder in fear of being labeled a Batista supporter. My parents warned me not to express any opinions to even my closest friends, in case they ratted me out for being anti-revolutionary. The consequence was jail time or, in the extreme, supporters of the overthrown dictator, Fulgencio Batista, were herded into remote jails or gulags, never to be seen again.

Hundreds of suspected Batista-era agents, policemen and soldiers were put on trial for human rights abuses and war crimes, including murder and torture. Most of those convicted of murder were executed by firing squad and the rest received long prison sentences. Although no precise numbers exist as to how many political executions, disappearances and extrajudicial killings took place during the early days of the new revolutionary government, the Historical Atlas of the twentieth Century cites somewhere between 5,000 and 12,000. One of the most notorious examples of “revolutionary justice” is the execution of more than seventy captured Batista-regime soldiers, directed by Raul Castro after capturing Cuba’s capital, Santiago. This was part of a large-scale attempt by Fidel Castro to cleanse the security forces of Batista loyalists, who could possibly launch a counter-revolution.

No one was invulnerable—as I would soon find out the hard way.

Despite the political turmoil presiding at the time, Cuba was a safe place to bring up your children. When I was ten, I would take the bus everywhere, and if I had to wait too long, I would just hitchhike with no qualms.

The Habana Yacht Club was a fifteen-minute bus ride from my house, so I could go and meet my friends from school any time without my parents having to drive me. My parents had met each other there, so they felt particularly comfortable knowing that I was safe.

It was impressively fancy, with every activity a child could hope for. There was tennis, baseball, basketball, squash and a gym facility, even bowling. It was situated right by the beach, so sailing, swimming, rowing and boating were also at our disposal. It was like a young boy’s wet dream and, because there was no threat of danger, our families were more than happy not knowing our exact whereabouts, as long as we made it back home at a reasonable hour.

It was dawn, August 1960—the same month the defense of the revolution was initiated—and I was fast asleep. I had only just returned home from the Yacht Club’s party of the year a few hours prior when the police came banging at the door.

There was a construction site next to our house and the local kids used to throw stones at the site, just short of conking out the night watchman. The uniforms told us that this time someone had succeeded. The watchman was unconscious in the hospital, and he was deliriously saying that the kid next door had knocked him out. Me.

Even though my father knew that I had been at the party all night, and most likely hadn’t left my friends to knock out a total stranger, he also knew that the son of the night watchman was a captain in Castro’s army and was not to be messed with.

The police arrested me and I placidly let them escort me to the local jail. My family came and bailed me out shortly after. Afraid that I would wake up in one of Castro’s gulags, almost overnight my parents shipped me off to Malvern, another Catholic school, in Philadelphia. Later the truth came out: Elena Lombillo, the woman who lived with us, who was like a mother to me, was a friend of the guard’s. She used to take Cuban coffee to him at the construction site every day and, when he was in the hospital, Elena spent hours at his bedside praying for his revival. Eventually, the guard came out of his coma and told her that he had fallen off his chair backwards and hit his head.

No kid was implicated. But by then, I was long gone.

I wasn’t an isolated case. Thousands of Cuban parents feared that their children would be sent to the Soviet Bloc, so they joined forces with the Catholic Church in Miami to set up an operation called Peter Pan—otherwise known as Operation Peter Pan. Children were placed with friends, relatives, boarding schools and other places in the USA, not only in Miami, that would keep them safe until the revolution blew over.

My parents had some friends who had already organized to send their children away, so they bypassed Operation Peter Pan, opting to join them and pay a fortune to send me to Malvern.

In early September 1960, I flew to New York City with another Cuban friend called Harry Fanjul. Our arrival was perfectly synchronized with that of “Deadly Donna,” one of the all-time greatest hurricanes. Having blitzed the Leeward Islands, Puerto Rico, Hispanola, Cuba and the Bahamas, the storm was working its way up every state on the East Coast and was fast approaching New York, just as we landed in the city.

Fortunately, Harry Fanjul’s parents had arranged for their friends to welcome us into the foreign country and we stayed put for a couple of days until the strong winds blew over. Eventually we were sent on to our final destination: Malvern, just outside Philadelphia.

My parents told me that that I would be boarding at the American Augustinian school for just one year and then it would be safe enough to return to my school in Cuba. Instinctively I knew that would not be the case, and sadly my gut was right. Like most of the other thousands of Cuban evacuees, that was the last time, to date, that I laid eyes on my homeland.

So many Hispanic kids attended Malvern that it was nicknamed Rancho Malverno. The anglo students used to joke that Malvern must be a great school, since “20,000 ‘spics’ couldn’t be wrong” in choosing to go there. I was nearly entirely surrounded by other children in similar situations to me and it felt like we were one big family. Harry’s cousin, Pepe Fanjul, who I also vaguely knew back home, was already boarding at the school when we got there. Pepe Fanjul’s mother was from one of the wealthy Cuban families that were fortunate enough to escape the transition to America predominantly unscathed. Pepe and his brother Alfi have since become one of the largest sugar growers in the nation, with a net worth of $500 million, according to Forbes.

I felt safe and at home at Malverno. Although I missed my real family and was concerned that they might not reach Miami, I was way too busy to pine after Cuba. I perfected my English and the school work was a piece of cake as I’d already covered most of the material in Cuba. The area was full of young people. I learned to ice skate and played football for the first time—until I got hit so hard that I became incapacitated for the rest of the year.

As Malvern was an all-boys school, when we had school dances, the priests had to round up girls from the local town, Villanova, and herd them into the hall. We were scavengers let loose in full force, but the girls were more than willing to be our prey. I met a Quaker girl named Jill at one of our dances and fell madly in love with her. Even though we were only sixteen, it was not long before she announced that she wanted to get engaged. She told me that her father would put us both through university at the University of California-Berkeley if I agreed to marry her, but the prospect scared the shit out of me and I put an end to the relationship immediately.

Jill kept visiting me at school and even converted to Catholicism because she thought her religion was getting in the way of our marriage. I would soon discover that my life would have been a lot easier if I’d just obliged and gone to Berkeley for free, but I wasn’t ready to sacrifice my life for a girl quite yet.

Shortly after I left for Malvern, my family fled Cuba and set up residence in Florida. My father left Cuba first with my brother Jose in October 1960, leaving the rest of the family behind temporarily. He strategically went first to set up a base for the others, and also because he was living on borrowed time in Cuba. The wealthy men were under increasing threat of being arrested or having their possessions expropriated.

My mother followed with my brothers, Raul and Carlos, and my father’s parents a few weeks later. My mother was pregnant with her fifth boy, Arturo, and, upon boarding the plane, my mother’s name was called out for further inspection by the border police. She was so terrified that they wouldn’t let her out of the country that she graciously vomited onto the floor. The police took mercy and let her get back on the plane departing for Florida—just in the nick of time. By the end of November, the gate out of Cuba was closed.

It was a temporary plan and once America came to the rescue we were all going to move back and resume our lives. How on earth could Castro and his communist regime survive on America’s doorstep? It seemed impossible that the world’s superpower could be defeated by Cuba’s guerilla tactics.

The moment of defeat was finally on the horizon when a small army of C.I.A.-trained Cuban exiles covertly joined forces with the U.S. military to invade the Bay of Pigs in southern Cuba. The plan was launched in April 1961, less than three months after John F. Kennedy had assumed the presidency in the United States. But then, the impossible happened: within three days, they were defeated. The Americans pulled the plug, leaving the Cuban opposition to fend for itself, equipped with nothing but a vehement hatred towards the American president—Kennedy had fucked us all.

My parents were just two of the many “Golden Exiles” of the early 1960s who emigrated to Miami and paved the way for an onslaught of Cubans yet to come. As Castro’s true intentions saw the light of day, hundreds of thousands of emigrants congregated in Miami-Dade County, where they clung on to their Cuban customs and established a community as similar to the one they had just left behind as possible.

I didn’t see my family until Christmas, when I flew to Florida for the holidays. They had settled into their new home in a wealthy neighborhood on Riviera Drive, in a city called Coral Gables, just southwest of downtown Miami. Their house was located right in front of a baseball field that belonged to Coral Gables High School, which—unbeknownst to me at the time—I would attend the following year. My parents, brothers and grandparents all lived under one roof, which proved to be too claustrophobic to endure on a long-term basis. The relationship between my mother and her mother-in-law lived up to the stereotype. My father’s mother was -over controlling and stubborn, and my mother was terrified of her. By the time I moved in with them the following summer, the tension had reached a climax and they had gone their separate ways.

Unlike most refugees whose only assets were lost in Cuba, my grandfather had $300,000 stashed in a U.S. bank account from a construction job he had done a few years prior. It was about one percent of my grandfather, father and uncle’s combined worth back in Cuba and they invested it in a 20-unit apartment complex in Coral Gables.

Having put every last cent into their business, my family struggled to make ends meet from one day to the next. All the frivolities I had taken for granted in Cuba, and even during my year at Malvern, were now a distant memory. I tried to earn my keep to the extent I could, and when I moved to Miami at the end of the school year, I took on all kinds of summer jobs—a paperboy, a gardener and doing handyman work in the apartment complex my family had invested in. The apartments were filled with rich students from the “Playboy University” of Miami, as it was known then. I reveled in ogling by the pool, which was brimming with rich Lotharios, whom I aspired to be, and their immaculately groomed girlfriends, whom I longed to be with.

No longer a privileged kid whose parents could afford an elite private school education, I convinced my father to send me to the local public high school. I told him it would be ridiculous for me to go back to Malvern when it was well beyond our means. Coral Gables Senior High was equally good, free and just across the street.

Boy, would I eat my words. Everyone at the school had already formed their cliques and I wasn’t welcome into any of them. I clung to the other few kids from Cuba, but even then it was difficult to get into the groove in the one year of school I had left.

The harsh reality came plummeting down like a ton of bricks. I was an outsider catapulted into alien territory. English was my second language, and instead of living an affluent childhood in Cuba, I was a refugee segregated in a Cuban community in what felt like a planet away from my home turf. In the back of my mind, I kept fantasizing that any day now I would be a baseball legend back in Habana, where my grandmother Minina would once again treat me like the sultan of Brunei and stuff me with candy until my teeth fell out.

I wasn’t the only one going through turmoil. There was a huge community brimming with Cubans in my situation and many were much worse off. In the summer of 1960 alone, there were about 75,000 new Cuban refugees in Miami and many of them only had the clothes on their backs and the $5 they were allowed to take out the country.

We clung tightly to each other and our former way of life—a safety net with which to camouflage ourselves. Only we didn’t do a very good job of blending in. We all thought that it would be a temporary situation and therefore didn’t see the point of assimilating ourselves into the alien culture when we would be going home soon anyway—but after the Bay of Pigs failure and the Cuban Missile Crisis, it became glaringly apparent that we were very much mistaken.

With the realization that they were going to live in Miami for good, hundreds of thousands of middle-class exiles set about creating a new Cuba in the United States. Almost overnight businesses sprang up everywhere. Church services were held in Spanish, there were at least a dozen Cuban newspapers printed in 1960 and by the end of the year, the old owner of the Dulcería Mignon del Vedado in Habana opened what might be the first Cuban restaurant in the Miami area. There was even a man selling Cuban liberty bonds.¹

Little Havana, just northeast of our house, became the capital of Cuban America, bursting with street life and every conceivable type of Cuban restaurant and shop. The street signs were mostly in Spanish, on the rare occasion bragging, “English is spoken here” as if it were a novelty.

Even my friends were reluctant to immerse themselves in American culture. When some of my friends came over to my house for a party, they made no effort to speak English for the sake of the “Gringos” I had invited. I figured that in order to be accepted into the non-Hispanic community that would have to change. I forced myself to integrate by making friends with the local Americans and, even though I felt estranged from their customs, I made a huge effort to be open-minded and understand them without judging. My persistence paid off as, soon enough, speaking English (or Spanglish, if I’m totally upfront!) became instinctive among our group of friends. It mattered less and less whether you were black, Jewish, Italian, Hispanic or any other race, and more about what you could bring to the table as a person.

The Miamians weren’t exactly thrilled that Cubans were taking over their territory and freely expressed their discontent. The local news commentator Wayne Fariss echoed the opinions of many when he said: “Miamians view the Cubans as house guests who have worn out their welcome, who feel it is now time for them to move on… [The Cubans] are a threat to our business and tourist economy. It would appear that the hand that holds Miami’s torch of friendship has been overextended.”²

Being thrown headfirst into a totally foreign world that may not be as welcoming as I had anticipated was one of the biggest challenges I have had to face in life. All the fears I had been able to brush under the carpet while I was in the cocoon of Malvern came racing to the forefront of my consciousness. I realized that the decisions I would make in response to those situations then, as a teenager, would affect me the rest of my life.

Even before I left Cuba, I had anxieties that haunted me. I was practically afraid of my own shadow, constantly worrying about the future and the quagmire of unknown possibilities it represented. My imagination ran wild, bombarding my head with potential scenarios.

When I was twelve, my father took me to New York to see the Yankees play in the World Series. One afternoon in our hotel room, he took his daily nap, and after a few minutes the incessant guttural sound of his snoring stopped dead. Panic gripped me and I had to fight my lungs for air.

The sequence of events following my father’s death ran through my head. Whom I would tell, how I would get back home, who would plan his funeral, what would happen to our family after the reality of his death kicked in? Would my mother blame me? I crept over to the still corpse and prepared myself for the worst, but my father was still very much alive and breathing quietly—for the first time in his life. My imagination had had a field day. It’s always terrifying to confront unfamiliar territory but, instead of doing everything in my power to avoid it, I’ve always tried to rise to the challenge. In America, I saw communities of fellow emigrants around me. They were terrified of breaking out of their comfort zone, many refusing to even learn the language. I made a definitive promise to myself not to get trapped in that vicious cycle. I didn’t want to be pigeonholed as another “Spic,” reluctant to change my ways and adopt new customs because they were unfamiliar. I knew I couldn’t let my fear of failure hold me back.

At the young age of fifteen, I learned to accept fear for what it is. I became aware of the powerful emotion I was feeling and used it to drive me. Instead of letting fear be my master, I was determined to master fear—and even though I couldn’t overcome my anxieties altogether, I used them to push me further. It was my fear of failure that served as my strongest propeller, motivating me to shed my safety blanket, work harder, learn more, and dive into scary situations because that is where the real potential for growth is.

We are all confronted with challenges every day but, instead of retreating from them and staying in your comfort zone, you need to confront your fears. Act with a sense of urgency, as if every moment is your last, and you will no longer have the time to be enslaved by the power of fear and regret.

The most glaring instance of not just one person but an entire community being afraid of breaking out of its comfort zone occurred when I witnessed the mass exodus from Cuba after Fidel Castro came into power.

On January 8, 1959, when Castro’s revolutionary army rolled victoriously into Habana, his new government got straight to work, establishing communism in Cuba just as Lenin had done in the U.S.S.R. after the First World War. One of Castro’s first steps was to confiscate all property held by religious organizations, without compensation. The Roman Catholic Church was the only institution with asmuch power in terms of organization and ideological following as Castro’s government, so the country was declared atheist, with hundreds of members of the clergy permanently expelled from the nation.

The socialist regime was intended to empower the working class but by nationalizing industry, redistributing property, collectivizing agriculture and forming new policies in favor of the poor, Castro alienated almost everybody else. As a result, over a sixth of the country’s inhabitants fled the country—a mass exodus of the middle and upper class. On August 6, 1960, Castro nationalized all foreign-owned property and in return the United States placed a blockade on Cuba, which would remain intact for more than four decades.

The post-revolution climate in Cuba was uneasy. Regardless of their class or religion, everyone lived in a state of terror and uncertainty. The military had taken possession of all the land available for agriculture and any real estate that was not in personal use. Much of the business activity came to a complete standstill since there were no new investments and many people were living off their savings, naïvely hoping for a miracle to come from America.

When that didn’t happen, thousands came to America, sticking together and forming insular communities. I knew that this was the easier option, and the option my family chose, but I had to break out of the vicious cycle my parents and their friends had engulfed themselves in. The Cuban community is like a Mafia that I was destined to join and I had to make a definitive decision to break away from that insular network of Cuban Godfathers. They may have been well educated and many would go on to have successful careers, but it was a success inextricable from Cuba. I was proud of my roots but I wanted a success that exceeded limitations.

I would break out of my comfort zone. And as I did I would look for examples in life around me to keep me on my path—people who took that step and were better off for it.

Great performers, for example, isolate specific aspects of what they do and focus on just those things until they have wholly grasped them, and then move on to the next element. You may have to be wrong often to finally know how to do it correctly but that’s better than sticking to your comfort zone and remaining only adequate at a skill you know you can master.

Tiger Woods has been seen to drop golf balls into a sand trap and step on them, then practice shots from that near-impossible position, preparing for the one or two times in his entire career he might need to call on that skill.

When Plácido Domingo set out to be an opera singer, he was a baritone. Then in 1959, he auditioned for the Mexican National Opera, and the panel suggested that maybe, just maybe, his voice was more suited to being a tenor.

True tenors are a rarity—even choral societies and church choirs have trouble finding enough of them—and so it was in his interest to concede when asked to improvise as a tenor. He is the first to admit that it did not come naturally to him and that he has had to fight every step to gain the tenor tessitura and to manufacture his voice. As published by the New York Times, “Many tenors, like Pavarotti and Kraus, were born tenors. They open their mouth and tessitura is there. I had to fight for it; I had to gain it step by step.”

He garnered an unprecedented tenor repertoire of 134 roles and then, after 50 years, the Opera King made headlines by venturing out of his comfort zone yet again, transforming himself back into a baritone. At an age most opera singers would be put out to pasture, this is almost the equivalent of turning water into wine but, again, through rigorous training and determination, he appeared in his first U.S. performance as a baritone in a full opera. He sang the title role in Verdi’s “Simon Boccanegra” three days before his 69th birthday.

Many people in their careers reach a plateau because they reach a level of success and then find they can’t improve any more. Some people even get worse at their job because they repeat the same task so often. Domingo has continued to defy odds, always pushing himself to break new records, perform more roles, in more languages, at more venues. He is a man driven and consumed with the need for constant challenge and self-renewal. Stepping out of his comfort zone gave Domingo not only the path to greatness, but the ability to face any fears he may have had.

Stepping out of my comfort zone, facing my fears head on and making my way in my new home, the United States, became a way of life for me and a way to achieve the goals that I knew would lead me to success. But it wasn’t always easy.

I thought long and hard about my future and knew that in order to accomplish my goals I would have to integrate myself among non-Cuban Americans and work my way up their ladder. I knew that if I was going to make something out of my life, I would have to cut the umbilical cord and move away from home.

I finished high school with grades good enough to apply to the University of Florida. Finally, I would be able to leave the Miami-Cuban microcosm behind and start my quest to master my future… but unfortunately my timing was all wrong.

Shortly after my family moved to Miami, a business opportunity in Cocoa Beach came along. As America’s space program was centered there, with the Kennedy Space Center located fifteen miles north, the city became a boom town almost overnight. There was a 1000 percent population increase between 1950 and 1960 as everyone rushed to partake in the potential gold mine. My father bought into the escalating real estate industry and set up his own small business. He commuted every weekend to spend time with us and over the summer I would travel with him and help with the labor. But by the beginning of the academic year, he decided it was easier to move us to where work was flourishing, so we packed our bags and moved to the Beach.

It was too much to ask my parents to put me through university when they were already struggling to make ends meet, so begrudgingly, my sense of duty got the better of me and I decided moving to Cocoa Beach with them was the right thing to do. My father wanted to keep me close and envisioned that one day I would continue his legacy. My decision to stay made him extremely happy.

I withdrew my application to the University of Florida and enrolled in the local community college to get an associate degree in science which could then be converted into a bachelor degree down the line. Brevard County Junior College was only about 20 miles from Cocoa Beach, so I could continue to help my father out or work in construction as an errand boy and bricklayer, or do any other manual labor thrown my way.

After a year of sticking it out at Brevard County Junior College, I reapplied to the University of Florida, Gainesville, to study architectural engineering. I was granted a student loan to pursue a Bachelor of Science degree but my father didn’t want me to move away from home, and when I did anyway he was livid. He was a hermetic character and struggled to express himself, until he’d had a few drinks and then nothing could hold him back. Whenever I phoned home, instead of confronting me directly he would passive aggressively cut me short and hand the telephone over to my mother before I could get a word in edgeways.

At Gainesville, I felt a huge sense of relief. I was about to start a new life, finally shedding my fear of losing Cuba forever. However, the integration into the mainstream culture wasn’t as easy as I had anticipated. I lived off campus with a roommate—a friend from Cuba named Juan Galan— in an extremely depressing rooming house. Our cheap apartment was tiny and always dark. The sun had to fight its way through the huge trees surrounding the building and it didn’t stand a chance of getting through our one small window. Due to the low land, and it being Florida, I felt like I was living in a swamp. The air was so humid and sticky that I wanted to take another shower the second I stepped outside. The room was so claustrophobic, I felt like a dog trapped in a kennel, so I avoided going in there except to sleep.

My breakfast usually came straight out of the small fridge in my room and on the best of days I splurged in a diner on two eggs with bacon, grits and toast with coffee for 89 cents. Lunch was whatever junk food I could lay my hands on between lectures and for dinner a Cuban lady would charge a bunch of us next to nothing to have a home-cooked meal at her house. It was too cheap and convenient to pass up, even though what I really wanted was to detach myself from my Cuban friends and gorge on a burger at the local diner every once in a while, like everyone else.

Even though I was desperate to escape the clutches of my Cuban roots, I was broke and didn’t know a soul. It was much easier to fall into the same trap I had just dodged and befriend the Cubans who were in the same boat as me. I studied relentlessly day and night, so when I had a second of leisure time I would go to a fellow Cuban’s house to drink beer and seek solace in reminiscing about the good old days, regressing to my fantasy of living back in Habana. We’d spend the weekends horsing around the town, often aspiring to do some of the things that the students with cars and great apartments were doing. We would long to go to the parties they had been invited to, but we didn’t have the same contacts they had established by going to schools in the state or from knowing each other prior. Or perhaps we weren’t invited purely because we were Cuban.

Cuba is in my blood and I knew then that I could never detach myself from my native country—nor did I want to—but at the same time I was desperate to branch out and integrate with the other students. Being pigeonholed as Cuban was holding me back and I envisioned joining a fraternity as my winning ticket into the social scene I longed to be a part of.

One of the brothers on campus took me to his frat house, where the guys invited me to be a pledge. I leaped at my big chance at acceptance. I would finally be a part of an all-American brotherhood. Literally. There were no other Hispanics in the fraternity.

I was treated well as I was a bit older than the rest of the pledges and had more life experience than most of the other brothers. It went smoothly for about a year but then the initiation week came around—or hell week as they called it—and my fantasy went horribly wrong.

They tied me and one other guy to a tree in a remote location in the woods. The knot was tight enough for them to have time to get away and weak enough for us to wrangle out of—just the right strength to really piss me off. I thought they would stay around to make sure nothing happened to the two of us tied to a tree in the middle of nowhere, but they ran off back to the city and we were stuck there for nearly an hour.

We frantically battled with the ropes until they came loose and found a road where we could hitch a ride back to Gainesville. We entered the frat house and nearly the entire group stood there and applauded, but I had totally lost my sense of humor and proceeded to beat the living hell out of the guy who had tied us up. He had been picking on us the entire week and clearly everyone thought it was deserved as they just stood there and gawked. Eventually a couple of the brothers pried us apart and I stormed out, reeling off every cuss word I could think of.

Later, one of the brothers came by my shitty room to see if I had cooled down and even asked for forgiveness but I told him to pass on a message: They could all go and fuck themselves. I didn’t care if I was the first or last Cuban to join the fraternity. I didn’t have the patience to be abused like that or to mistreat others in a similar vein down the line.

I would have to find another way to fit in.