Among the musicians I was privileged to interview was the incomparable Buddy Guy. By the time we were scheduled to film, it was nearly 11 o’clock at night. Buddy hadn’t performed that evening, but he had spent weeks on the road before boarding the ship. As he settled into his chair, it was clear he wasn’t in the mood for an interview. The miles had caught up with him, and he wore the unmistakable expression of a man who simply wanted the day to be over.

Looking back, I wasn’t worried about my questions. I was worried about my timing, so I turned to my production crew, and they immediately understood what I was asking. Without saying a word, they set about looking busy—checking cameras, adjusting lights, coiling cables—without changing a thing. The set had already been carefully prepared. We weren’t buying time for the equipment. We were buying time for Buddy.

Rather than begin with my first question, I decided to begin with an observation.

“Mr. Guy,” I said, “I’ve seen you perform a number of times. In Miami, New York City, Los Angeles and at Jazz Fest in New Orleans. And here’s my take on you.”

He looked at me like a man thinking, “Who are you, again?”

I continued.

“After watching the way you connect with the women in your audiences, I’m not sure I want you around my wife.”

I paused.

“And not because I wouldn’t trust you... but because I wouldn’t trust my wife.”

For a brief moment, there was silence.

Then Buddy Guy burst into laughter.

“You know what time it is, baby!” he exclaimed.

The tension melted away and the interview had begun.

Next week, I’ll share the remarkable conversation that followed, along with a few reflections on why every interview begins long before the first question is asked.

Beyond the trees, Sharon saw vehicles moving.

She followed the strangers ahead of her toward the road, hoping that one of the drivers would stop. The first cars continued past them. Perhaps they were already full. Perhaps the drivers were terrified. Perhaps they simply did not see the people running toward them. Sharon had no time to wonder.

Then she saw a van.

Make Room

Sharon ran toward the vehicle and struck the door with her hand.

“Please,” she shouted. “Please let me in.”

There were already about twelve people inside. Faces filled the windows, and bodies were pressed against one another. There was no empty seat waiting for her, no open space into which she could easily climb.

As the van began to move, Sharon grabbed onto the outside. Another young man from the festival clung beside her as the vehicle accelerated and the ground began moving beneath their feet.

Her hands were weakening. She had already run farther than she believed her body could carry her. Her lungs were burning, and her legs had little left to give. If she fell, she did not know whether the van would stop—or what was coming behind it.

She kicked the door with her boot. “Please let me in,” she cried. “I’m falling. I don’t want to be left behind.” For a moment, nothing happened. Then the door opened.

Hands reached toward her. The people inside shifted their bodies, creating space where there was none. Someone grabbed Sharon’s arm, and someone else pulled her farther into the van.

They did not know her name. They pulled her in anyway.

The young man who had been hanging beside her climbed onto the roof. From there, he tried to see beyond the road ahead and help guide the driver away from danger.

Inside the van, Sharon was surrounded by strangers. Their bodies were pressed together. Everyone was frightened, and everyone was trying to see through the windows. No one knew which road was safe.

They drove for nearly half an hour, turning and doubling back, following other vehicles and then losing sight of them. An abandoned car could mean that someone had escaped. It could also mean that attackers were waiting nearby. A figure in the road could be another survivor—or someone preparing to fire.

Someone would shout that the road ahead looked dangerous, and the driver would change direction. Then another obstacle would appear.

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For those inside, the world had narrowed to what they could see through the windows and what the young man on the roof could see from above. They trusted no one beyond the people in the van, and even among them, most had never met.

The attack had stripped away everything that ordinarily separates one life from another. There were no introductions, explanations or questions about who belonged where.

There was only one urgent question: How do we get everyone out?

“I Had Already Seen Too Much”

Eventually, the van reached a road leading toward Netivot. Sharon looked back and saw black smoke rising from the fields she had crossed only minutes earlier. Cars were burning, bodies lay along the roadway and people were still trapped in the place she had escaped.

She closed her eyes.

“I couldn’t see anymore,” she told me. “I had already seen too much.”

But closing her eyes could not erase what was already there. The images had followed her into the van: the people falling behind her, the bullets striking the ground, the rockets crossing the sky, the black smoke and the screams.

The young woman who had arrived at Nova to dance beneath the open sky was now sitting inside an overcrowded van, covered in dust and surrounded by strangers, trying to understand how the world could have changed so completely in only a few hours.

As the van approached Netivot, police officers raised their weapons toward it. In the confusion, they did not know who was inside. The road was nearly empty, and the survivors were arriving from the direction of the attack.

The people in the van shouted that they were Jewish and had escaped from the festival. They asked where they could go and what they should do.

The police told them to find shelter wherever they could.

Moments after the van continued, an explosion erupted behind them. The driver took the first available exit and entered a residential area. When the van stopped, the survivors spilled out and ran toward the first apartment building they saw.

The Doors That Stayed Closed

Smoke filled the building, and the walls shook as rockets continued falling nearby. Sharon and the others entered the hallway and began knocking on doors.

No one answered.

They knocked again, but the doors remained closed. The residents inside were frightened. They had heard the explosions and warning sirens, but many did not yet understand the scale of what was unfolding outside. They had no way of knowing who was standing on the other side.

The survivors continued upward. On the second floor, they knocked again and called out that they were Jewish, had escaped from the festival and needed somewhere to hide.

After everything Sharon had endured in the fields, her life had come down to another closed door.

Then she heard movement on the other side.

A lock turned.

The door opened.

A religious family stood before them. They did not know Sharon or the other people crowded into the hallway. They did not know whether allowing so many strangers into their home might place their own family in danger.

But they stepped aside and invited everyone in.

The Family Who Said Yes

The family took in Sharon and approximately ten other survivors. They offered them the safety of their home, although safety had become an uncertain word.

The building continued to tremble as rockets fell. Every few minutes, another warning sent everyone rushing toward the protected room. From the balcony, they could see armed men attempting to enter other buildings.

Even inside the apartment, Sharon did not feel entirely safe. She had escaped the fields, but the attack seemed to have followed her. There was no clear border between danger and refuge. A road could become a killing ground. A van could become a lifeline. An apartment could become a sanctuary—or another target.

Yet inside that home, Sharon encountered something that stood in direct opposition to the violence outside.

A family made room for strangers.

They did not stop to calculate whether they had enough space, food or certainty. They opened their door because frightened people were standing on the other side of it.

“They were angels,” Sharon told me.

On a morning when armed men had crossed into communities to hunt people they had never met, this family made the opposite choice. They protected people they had never met.

There are moments when a great moral question arrives disguised as a simple knock. Someone is outside. Someone is afraid. Someone needs shelter.

Do we open the door?

That family did.

Six Hours of Silence

Sharon’s telephone was nearly dead. When she finally found a charger, she connected it long enough to contact her family.

Approximately six hours had passed since she had sent a message to her mother in Venezuela:

Ma, si me pasa algo, te amo. Aquí hay guerra.

Mom, if something happens to me, I love you. There is a war here.

For six hours, her mother had called again and again. There had been no answer.

As a parent, I find that part of Sharon’s story almost unbearable. I imagined receiving such a message from my own daughter in the middle of the night. I imagined calling repeatedly, hoping each time that she would answer. I imagined staring at the telephone, willing it to ring, and searching the news for anything that might tell me where she was.

Six hours can be a small portion of a life. For a mother waiting to learn whether her child is alive, it can feel like a lifetime.

Then Sharon called.

She told her family that she had survived.

The message she believed would be her last was no longer the final word between a mother and her daughter.

Near Baba Sali

Sharon sent her mother her location. The apartment where she had found refuge was near the burial place of Baba Sali, a revered rabbi who had long held deep spiritual significance for her family.

To Sharon, this did not feel like an ordinary coincidence. She believed that something had accompanied her through the fields and placed people in her path at the moments when she most needed them.

She had decided to leave the road. She had chosen to run rather than remain hidden. She had kept her heavy boots on because she feared injuring her feet. She had forced herself to stand after collapsing, followed strangers through the trees, held onto the outside of a moving van and kicked the door when her hands began to fail.

Each decision had mattered. But Sharon also believed there had been something beyond her own choices.

“For me, every person who survived that day was a miracle of God,” she said.

Her faith had always been part of her identity. After October 7, it became something deeper. While running through the fields, Sharon had spoken to God. If she survived, she promised, she would tell the world what had happened.

She now believed that survival had given her a responsibility.

The Wounds No One Could See

Sharon emerged from the attack without a physical wound. That fact astonished her. She had heard bullets pass beside her, seen them strike the ground and watched people fall only a short distance away.

Yet she had survived without a scratch.

The absence of a visible wound did not mean she was unharmed. The sounds and images came home with her. She remembered the bullets, the screaming and the rockets each time she looked toward the sky. She remembered the people killed behind her and beside her.

Sharon told me that she remained in shock for days. She could not cry at first. Her mind had not yet found a way to understand what her eyes had witnessed.

Perhaps the mind sometimes protects us by delaying what the heart cannot yet bear.

When I interviewed Sharon, only about two months had passed. She was still processing the experience and discovering what it had taken from her—and what she refused to surrender.

What They Could Not Take

Before October 7, Sharon loved music festivals. She loved the openness, the dancing, the connection to nature and the freedom she felt among other young people.

After the attack, those same experiences could become triggers. Music, crowds and open fields might carry her back to Nova. But Sharon did not want fear to make her world smaller.

She wanted to attend festivals again. She wanted to dance, listen to trance music, spend time with her friends and feel the freedom she had known before the music stopped.

“They are not going to take away our youth, our freedom or our happiness,” she said. “That is what they wanted.”

Her words were defiant, but they were not filled with anger. They were filled with life.

The people who gathered at Nova had come to celebrate. They came to dance beneath the open sky, connect with nature, meet strangers and share happiness. The attack attempted to turn those things into sources of terror.

Sharon’s answer was to continue living—not without fear, grief or memories that may remain with her forever, but fully.

She would not allow those who chased her through the fields to keep chasing her through the rest of her life.

Someone’s Daughter

Throughout our conversation, I kept returning to the resemblance between Sharon and my middle daughter. They were the same age, with similar hair and something familiar in the way they carried themselves.

When Sharon first walked into the room, I was struck by how easily one could have been mistaken for the other. But it was while listening to her describe the six hours her mother waited that the resemblance became almost painful.

Sharon was not my daughter.

But she was someone’s daughter.

Every young person at Nova was someone’s child. Many were also part of immigrant families whose histories crossed borders, cultures and languages. They were Venezuelan and Israeli, Argentinian and Israeli, Mexican and Israeli. Some had immigrated themselves. Others were the children or grandchildren of people who had left Latin America and built new lives in Israel.

Their families carried the immigrant hope that somewhere in the world there might be a place of safety, possibility and belonging.

On October 7, that hope was attacked.

But Sharon’s story is not only about what was taken. It is also about what remained: the will to keep running, the stranger who helped her stand, the people who made room in an overcrowded van, the young man who climbed onto its roof, the family that opened its home, the mother who never stopped calling and the young woman who refused to surrender her future.

Life Is a Gift

When I began the interview, I knew almost nothing about Sharon. I had not researched her childhood. I did not know the details of her immigrant journey. I did not even know her age.

I knew only that she had survived.

By the time our conversation ended, I understood that survival was only part of what she had come to share. She had come to bear witness.

She wanted the world to remember the people who did not make it out of those fields. She wanted others to understand what happened to the young men and women who went to Nova to celebrate music, friendship and freedom.

She also wanted to reclaim the life that had nearly been taken from her.

Sharon had sent her mother a message she believed would be her last. Instead, she lived to call her.

She lived because she kept running. She lived because, at the moment her body failed, someone helped her stand. She lived because people who had no room made room. She lived because, when so many doors remained closed, one family opened theirs.

“The small things have a solution,” Sharon told me. “Everything has a solution except death.”

She had learned that lesson at twenty-six years old, in a field filled with gunfire.

For Sharon, every day since October 7 carries a different weight. Every conversation with her family matters more. Every moment of freedom matters more. Every open door matters more.

Life is no longer something she intends to take for granted.

She remains determined to return to the things that brought her joy—to music, friendship, celebration and the freedom to live without allowing fear to govern her choices. What happened will always be part of her, but she refuses to let it become the boundary of her life.

Looking back on this interview, I learned a great deal about the power of the human spirit—and about our capacity to choose life even when the odds appear insurmountable. Throughout the entire ordeal, Sharon never stopped searching for a way to save herself: one more place to hide, one more path forward, one more chance to keep moving.

And after she miraculously survived, she stood just as firmly in her determination not to let the experience rob her of her happiness. Terror had already taken enough from her. She would not allow it to claim her future as well.

Sharon’s story taught me that survival is not merely escaping death. It is refusing to let what happened dictate the terms of the life that remains.

Life, she says, is a gift—and she intends to keep living it.

Read Part One: “She Could Have Been My Daughter.”

I have conducted thousands of oral-history interviews, and I have approached nearly every one of them in much the same way: I prepare. I learn as much as I can about the person who will be sitting across from me—the family that raised them, the country they left behind, the life they built and the experiences that shaped them.

Preparation is more than research. It is an act of respect. It allows me to enter the room with some understanding of the road the person has traveled.

But when I sat down to interview Sharon Truzman, I knew almost nothing about her. I knew only that she had been born in Venezuela, now lived in Israel and had survived the October 7, 2023, attack on the Nova music festival.

Our conversation took place in Florida, approximately two months after the attack.

When Sharon walked into the room, I was stunned. She was the same age as my middle daughter. They had the same hair color, a similar sense of style and something remarkably familiar in their demeanor. They could almost have passed for twins.

For a moment, I was not simply looking at a young woman who had survived an unimaginable act of terror. I was looking at someone who could have been my daughter.

I tried not to let my reaction become something Sharon would have to carry. She had come to tell her story, not to manage my emotions. My responsibility was to put her at ease, listen carefully and create a space in which she might feel safe enough to return to a hellish morning that had taken place only weeks earlier.

Still, the resemblance remained with me throughout our conversation. It made emotional distance impossible.

A Latino Story in Israel

Off camera, Sharon explained something I had not fully understood before meeting her: Israel is home to a large Spanish-speaking community. Some, like Sharon, were born in Latin America and immigrated to Israel as young adults. Others are the children and grandchildren of Latino immigrants who carried their language, culture and traditions with them.

That community was also present at Nova. Among the thousands of people who gathered in the desert to dance were young Israelis whose families had come from Venezuela, Argentina, Mexico and other parts of Latin America. Many of those killed, wounded or taken hostage were Latino immigrants or the descendants of Latino immigrants.

They were Israeli and Latino. Their families waited for news in Hebrew and in Spanish. Mothers, fathers, siblings and grandparents followed the unfolding horror from Israel, Latin America, the United States and elsewhere. Some eventually received the call they had prayed for. Others did not.

Sharon’s testimony was therefore not only the account of an attack in Israel. It was also an immigrant story—a story about identity, displacement, belonging and the search for a place one can call home.

A New Life at Eighteen

Sharon was born and raised in Venezuela. At eighteen, after finishing school, she traveled to Israel to participate in what was supposed to be an eight-month program. She wanted to meet people, experience the country and learn more about the place that had long been connected to her Jewish identity. Then she planned to return home.

But Venezuela was deteriorating. The country was descending more deeply into dictatorship, and Sharon began to question the future that awaited her there. Because she was Jewish, she was eligible to remain in Israel.

She decided to stay.

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The transition was difficult. At eighteen, Sharon was not merely adapting to another country, another language and another culture. She was beginning her adult life thousands of miles from her family.

She missed the warmth of Venezuelans and the easy familiarity of Latin culture. Israeli society felt very different from the world in which she had been raised. Over time, however, she adapted.

Israel, she told me, became “a university for life.” It taught her to work, make decisions and stand on her own. People welcomed her and helped her. She learned the language, found employment and slowly created a place for herself in Israeli society.

The young woman who had left Venezuela at eighteen had built a new life in a country connected to her faith and identity. She could not have known how severely that country would one day test her—or how fiercely she would have to fight to remain alive.

A Festival of Freedom

Sharon and two friends arrived at the Nova music festival at approximately three o’clock on the morning of October 7. Once there, they met up with a larger group of friends. Thousands of young people had gathered in the desert for what was intended to be a two-day celebration.

There were tents and camping areas, food, lights, artwork and multiple stages where DJs played trance music beneath the open sky. To someone unfamiliar with that world, the gathering might have resembled Burning Man. But for Sharon, festivals like Nova represented something deeper than music or entertainment.

“It is freedom,” she told me. “You feel free.”

There was a sense of connection—to nature, to other people and to oneself. Strangers danced together. They shared space, music and happiness. The atmosphere was open and peaceful.

But that night, something did not feel right. Sharon and her friends could not identify anything specific. It was only a feeling, a subtle discomfort in the atmosphere. Other survivors would later describe sensing something similar.

Around 5:30, Sharon and her friends returned to their car to get sweaters, change clothes and take a short break. Then they went back to the festival.

At approximately 6:30, Sharon was dancing near the front of the stage when the music suddenly stopped. She looked toward the sky and saw rockets rising from Gaza.

They were so close that she did not initially hear warning sirens. An announcement came over the sound system instructing everyone to leave.

At first, Sharon and her friends did not panic. Rocket attacks, tragically, were not unfamiliar in Israel. They believed they would get into their car, drive away from the area and return home.

But thousands of people were attempting to leave at the same time. Traffic slowed to a standstill, and police had blocked the roads in both directions. No one understood why.

Then Sharon saw a vehicle riddled with bullets. She saw a police officer who had been shot in the chest and leg. In the distance, she began to hear gunfire.

This was no longer only a rocket attack. Something else was moving toward them.

Into the Fields

Sharon told her friends that they had to abandon the road and move into the surrounding agricultural fields. The terrain was uneven and difficult for vehicles to cross. It appeared to be their only possible escape route.

At first, they tried to hide. But the gunfire continued drawing closer, and soon everyone began to run.

Sharon heard bullets behind her. She saw people falling in the fields. Rockets continued crossing the sky as black smoke rose from vehicles burning near the festival.

Only moments earlier, she had been surrounded by music, friendship and freedom. Now she was running for her life through the same landscape.

She kept expecting the army to arrive. She believed that someone would come and bring the attack to an end.

No one came.

“We were alone,” she remembered.

The attackers were moving through the area on motorcycles and in vehicles, faster than the people fleeing on foot. Sharon could hear the gunfire growing louder. She saw people being killed behind her and beside her.

She did not know where she was going. She knew only that she had to keep moving.

The Message

At approximately eight o’clock in the morning, Sharon stopped running long enough to take out her phone. Her mother was in Venezuela, where it was still the middle of the night.

Sharon typed a few words:

Ma, si me pasa algo, te amo. Aquí hay guerra.

Mom, if something happens to me, I love you. There is a war here.

Her mother began calling repeatedly, but Sharon could not answer. There was no time to explain where she was or what was happening. There was barely enough time to say goodbye.

She put the phone away and continued running.

Sharon was wearing heavy boots. With every step, they became more difficult to carry. She considered taking them off, but worried that she might step on something sharp, injure her feet and lose the ability to run. She thought about abandoning her telephone and anything else that added weight.

Every decision mattered. Every second mattered.

She considered hiding or lying among the bodies and pretending to be dead. Some people survived by doing exactly that. She also spoke candidly about a moment of such terror and hopelessness that she considered taking her own life rather than risk being captured and killed.

It is difficult to imagine the desperation required for such a thought to enter the mind of a twenty-six-year-old woman who, only hours earlier, had been dancing with her friends. But in that field, the choices before her were no longer ordinary choices. They were calculations about how she might die—and whether there was still a way to live.

Sharon chose to keep running.

She thought about her mother and father. She thought about her sister, her nieces and nephews, and the people she loved. She wanted to see them again.

She also wanted to survive so that she could tell others what had happened.

As she ran, she began speaking to God. If she survived, she promised, she would do something meaningful with the life she had been given. She would tell the world what had taken place in those fields.

When Her Body Gave Out

Sharon ran until her body could no longer endure it. She could not get enough air into her lungs. Her strength disappeared, and for the first time in her life, she fainted.

People continued running around her. No one could safely stop. In that field, stopping for another person might mean surrendering your own life.

After approximately a minute, Sharon regained consciousness. She was dizzy and disoriented, but she forced herself to stand. Someone reached toward her and helped pull her forward.

The gunfire was still coming.

Sharon no longer knew where her friends were. She could not tell which direction offered safety, or whether safety still existed. She saw a group of strangers moving toward a line of trees and began following them.

She was exhausted. Her lungs were burning. Her legs had little left to give.

But she was standing.

And as long as she could stand, she could keep moving.

“That was not going to be my ending,” she told me.

In Part Two, Sharon follows a group of strangers toward the possibility of escape, clings to the outside of a moving van and reaches an apartment building where one family must decide whether to open its door.

At first, there was nothing remarkable about it. We were neighbors who worked out at the same spot, and over time we bonded over a shared passion for weightlifting. Gyms have a wonderful way of stripping people of their résumés, and when you’ve trained religiously for decades, you’re impressed less by what people do than by how they carry themselves.

For the longest time, I had no idea what Tony did for a living.

I knew that he was Brazilian. I knew that he was funny, intensely disciplined and incapable of entering a room without making his presence felt. He had an easy warmth about him—a combination of mischief, curiosity and natural charm that made conversation effortless.

What I did not know was that he was still racing in the IndyCar Series.

I did not know that he had already become one of the most recognizable and beloved drivers in American motorsports. I did not know that hundreds of thousands of people had once stood and shouted his name. I certainly did not know the story of the promise that had carried him from Brazil to Europe, from Europe to America and, eventually, into the winner’s circle at the Indianapolis 500.

To me, he was simply Tony.

That may be why, when I eventually interviewed him, I was less interested in the machinery than in the man inside it.

A father, a son and a secret go-kart

Tony grew up in a Brazilian household where Sunday mornings often revolved around racing. Formula One occupied a place in Brazilian culture not unlike football in the United States. Beginning when Tony was about five, he and his father would sit together and watch the races on television.

By the time he was eight, watching was no longer enough. One Sunday, after becoming particularly excited by a race, Tony asked his father whether he could have a go-kart. His father bought him one that very day.

There was only one problem: they had no way to get it home. The kart would not fit inside the family car, so they tied it to the roof. Then they encountered an even larger problem. With the kart on top, the car would not fit inside their garage.

And they could not tell Tony’s mother what they had done.

They found a nearby racing shop willing to store the kart and returned home as though nothing had happened. For the next several weekends, Tony’s father would announce that the two of them were going out together for the day.

A father-and-son outing.

A boys’ day.

After six or seven weekends, Tony’s mother became suspicious. She did not imagine that her eight-year-old son was secretly racing go-karts. She feared that her husband might be using the boy as an alibi for something far worse.

When father and son finally confessed, the truth came almost as a relief. Tony had begun racing. What started as a shared adventure soon became something much more serious. Tony showed talent, and his father recognized it. But talent alone, he taught his son, would never be enough.

If Tony wanted to become a great athlete, he would have to make sacrifices. He would have to eat properly, go to bed early, avoid parties and dedicate himself completely to the work. While other children went home after school, Tony went to the kart track.

Racing became the language through which father and son understood one another.

It also became the way Tony’s father prepared him for a future neither of them wanted to imagine.

Two promises

Tony’s father became ill when Tony was still a boy. Cancer gradually made the hospital part of the family’s routine. What had once seemed frightening became familiar.

During those years, his father began speaking to him about responsibility. Tony would need to take care of his mother and younger sister. He would need to be strong. Tony listened, but he was still a child and the warnings felt distant.

Then, one Thursday afternoon, his mother told him that his father wanted to see him at the hospital.

They sat together and talked about school, racing and the coming weekend. Then his father became more serious. He asked Tony to make two promises. Take care of your mother and sister. And never stop racing.

Tony promised.

The following morning, he woke to find his mother at home rather than at the hospital. She sat him down and told him that his father had died during the night.

Tony was thirteen years old.

He asked whether the funeral arrangements were being handled. When his mother told him that they were, he said he was going to school and then to the kart track.

He had made a promise.

That weekend, Tony started the race from the pole position and won. The trophy remains in his mother’s home, on a nightstand next to his father’s side of the bed.

When I asked whether racing kept him connected to his father, Tony explained that nearly every meaningful memory he had of him was tied to the sport. They had watched races together. They had traveled to tracks together. His father had stood beside him as the dream began.

Years later, someone pointed out something Tony himself had never noticed. When most drivers win, they raise a fist in celebration. Tony points toward the sky. Every victory is an acknowledgment. Every finish line is part of the promise.

Learning what it means not to belong

Before coming to the United States, Tony left Brazil to race in Italy.

He arrived with very little money and spent three years living inside a racing shop. His boss’s office became his bedroom after six in the evening. He slept on a mattress on the floor and had to clear out each morning before the workday began.

Then he started winning.

During one championship season, Tony was the only Brazilian competing against twenty-two Italian drivers. After he won the first two races, he learned that some of the other drivers’ fathers were circulating a petition to have him removed from the series.

Their argument was simple: a Brazilian should not be allowed to take prize money and opportunities away from young Italians. Tony’s response was equally simple. He stayed. He won eleven of fifteen races. And, as he told me with unmistakable satisfaction, he took the money anyway.

The experience left a scar. It taught him that success can make people uncomfortable, particularly when it comes from someone they regard as an outsider. It also shaped the expectations he carried with him when an opportunity brought him to the United States.

Tony arrived in Phoenix in 1995 speaking virtually no English. A Brazilian friend prepared a sheet of essential phrases for him: where he was, where he could find food, how to locate a restroom—the language of basic survival.

After what he had experienced in Europe, he was prepared to be treated as an intruder. Instead, he found a country that seemed willing to let the competition take place. The opportunity was not guaranteed. Victory was not guaranteed. But he believed that, in America, the door was at least open. If he was good enough, he would be allowed to prove it.

For an immigrant, that distinction can mean everything.

The champion I had not recognized

By the time I understood what Tony did for a living, I had already come to know what made him special. That became even clearer when we worked together on a television show I produced called Motor Culture with Tony Kanaan. Tony literally carried the show.

He was witty without trying to be clever. Curious without pretending to know everything. He had the confidence of a champion but none of the stiffness that sometimes comes with fame. He could ask the question everyone else was thinking, laugh at himself and make the person beside him feel immediately at ease.

The cars were compelling, but Tony was the show.

It was the same quality I had encountered at the gym. Long before I understood the scale of his accomplishments, I had already begun to understand why people loved him.

That affection became most visible at the Indianapolis Motor Speedway.

Tony first competed in the Indianapolis 500 in 2002. Over the years, he led laps, came close and finished in nearly every position imaginable except the one that mattered most. He finished second. Third. Fourth. Fifth. Year after year, the questions followed him. Would he ever win it? How many more chances would he have? Could he accept retiring without an Indianapolis 500 victory?

Tony refused to believe the track owed him anything. He had won an IndyCar championship in 2004. He had built an extraordinary career. He understood that great drivers sometimes spend their entire lives pursuing one race without ever winning it.

Still, Indianapolis remained unfinished business.

The race was woven into his earliest memories. As a child, he had watched it with his father every Memorial Day weekend. He had seen the winner pose beside the car and the prize money. He had imagined himself there.

The dream survived his father’s death, the loneliness of Europe, his arrival in America without the language and all the years in which Indianapolis seemed determined to deny him.

The son who had not seen him win

Before the 2013 season, Tony took his son Leo go-karting. As fathers sometimes do, Tony allowed him to win their first little race. Then Tony beat him in the second. Leo did not take the loss well.

On the drive home, Tony attempted to offer a lesson. Losing, he explained, could be useful. It could make a person stronger. It could create the desire to work harder and improve.

Leo listened and then delivered the kind of observation only a child can make. His father, he said, must understand a great deal about losing. Leo had heard many stories about races Tony had won, but he had not personally seen him win very often.

Tony was stunned. Then he made another promise. He told his son that he would win the Indianapolis 500 and give him the trophy.

A few months later, on his twelfth attempt, Tony Kanaan won the 2013 Indianapolis 500.

He did it with a smaller team competing against organizations with far greater resources. After years of coming close, he crossed the line first as the speedway erupted around him. Approximately 400,000 people were there, and most of them were chanting his name.

For Tony, the sound carried a meaning that extended far beyond racing. He was the Brazilian who had once been told that he did not belong. The immigrant who had arrived without English. The outsider who had spent years earning the affection of American fans.

Now they were standing for him. He had reached the place he had once watched on television with his father. And his son was old enough to see it.

Tony later reflected that perhaps the victory had come at exactly the right time. Had he won on his first attempt, would he have valued it in the same way? Had he won years earlier, before Leo was old enough to remember, would the moment have carried the same meaning?

The twelve-year wait had transformed the victory. It was no longer simply the fulfillment of a professional ambition. It connected a father Tony had lost with the son who now stood beside him.

BorgWarner, the company behind the Indianapolis 500’s famous trophy, created a one-of-a-kind miniature version for Leo, complete with his father’s likeness and a personal inscription. Tony had kept his promise.

What remains after the trophies

Tony and I remain friends long after our days as neighbors. He eventually moved to Indianapolis to be closer to his wife’s family. Over the years, I have watched his family grow and his career continue to evolve.

He has accumulated hundreds of trophies, helmets and mementos. His face appears on one of the most revered trophies in sports. His name cannot be omitted from the history of IndyCar racing.

But when I asked how he hoped to be remembered, he did not speak primarily about records. He spoke about the young boy who lost his father and could easily have lost his way.

He understood how differently his life might have unfolded. At thirteen, he suddenly carried enormous freedom and enormous responsibility. He could have surrendered to anger, grief or temptation. Instead, he concentrated on the promise.

He wanted young people to understand that committing themselves to something worthwhile could lead them toward possibilities they had never imagined. The original goal might change. The plan might collapse. The road might bear little resemblance to the one they had envisioned. But the effort would not be wasted.

Tony once planned his entire career as a child. Almost nothing happened according to that plan. Yet he arrived at the destination.

Toward the end of our conversation, he looked at the helmets and trophies surrounding him and acknowledged what every champion eventually understands: one day, those objects will remain after he is gone. Some will be preserved. Others may gather dust.

They cannot contain the life that produced them. They cannot measure the mornings in the gym, the nights spent sleeping on an office floor, the humiliation of being told he did not belong, the years of disappointment at Indianapolis or the love that passed from one generation to another.

I knew Tony Kanaan before I knew who Tony Kanaan was. Perhaps that is why the trophies have never been the most interesting part of his story to me. Long before I understood the magnitude of what he had accomplished, I had already seen the qualities that made those accomplishments possible: discipline, loyalty, humor and an uncommon ability to remain fully himself.

Over the years, I have watched his career evolve and his family grow. And I came away from our conversation believing that Tony kept going not simply because he wanted to win. Stopping would have felt like abandoning both promises he had made—to continue racing and to care for the family his father had entrusted to him.

A promise rooted in something larger than personal ambition can give perseverance its deepest strength.

Ambition may begin the journey, but love, duty and responsibility can sustain us when the destination remains impossibly far away. For Tony, racing became more than a profession. It was the means through which he honored his father, supported his mother and sister, and remained faithful to the thirteen-year-old boy who had given his word.

That promise did not guarantee that he would win the Indianapolis 500. It gave him something more enduring: a reason to continue through every setback, every disappointment and every moment when stopping would have been easier.

And every time Tony crossed a finish line and pointed toward the sky, the boy was speaking to his father once more:

I am still here.
I did not stop.
I kept my promise.

Carlos Quintela arrived in America with a piece of paper that reduced his life to two words: Political Refugee.

The words were true, but they were not large enough to hold everything they had to carry. They did not contain the life he had known in Santiago de Cuba, or El Castillito, where a metal gate closed behind him and, against all logic, he felt the weight of pretending fall away. They did not contain Boniato, or the cane fields, or the moonless night when he entered Guantánamo Bay with other men tied to him by rope, tide, fear, and faith. They did not contain the Marine who reached down from the American side and pulled him from the water.

On paper, Carlos was one more political refugee. In his body, he was a survivor still learning what freedom would ask of him next.

After ten or twelve days on the base at Guantánamo, he was flown to Opa-locka and transferred to La Casa de la Libertad. The Freedom House. The name was almost too large for the small, practical needs that waited for him there. He needed work, money, clothes, and a command of a new language if he was to begin again in a country that had saved his life but could not live it for him.

Freedom had delivered him to safety, but it had not promised certainty.

And yet, almost as soon as he arrived in the United States, Carlos did something that says a great deal about him, and about so many Cuban refugees who came during those years. Out of gratitude to the country that had received him, and out of a desire to combat the communism he had risked his life to escape, he registered for Selective Service during the height of the Vietnam War.

It was not a small gesture. Carlos had just fled a system that claimed ownership over the individual. Now, in the country that had taken him in, he was willing to place himself at the service of another. For Carlos, freedom was never merely comfort. It carried obligation.

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In Miami, the rebuilding began quietly. Carlos worked in a factory. On weekends, he cleaned gardens in Coral Gables. There was no romance in those first jobs, no grand arrival scene after the dramatic prison escape. There was only work, and then more work, and the discipline of placing one day after another until something resembling a life began to form.

Years later, he would return to one of those same streets where he had once cleaned gardens and purchase an apartment building. He remembered the emotion of that moment. A place where he had once labored as a newly arrived refugee became part of the life he had built. The memory did not disappear because success arrived. It remained there, beneath the achievement, like the foundation under a house.

When Carlos eventually left for New York, he was warned not to fly. It was a time when airplanes were being hijacked and taken to Cuba, and he was told that if that happened, there might be little the American government could do to protect him. After everything he had endured to escape the island, the thought of being returned by force must have felt unbearable.

So he boarded a train north with the paper that identified him as a political refugee, and somewhere along the way, in the dining car, Carlos met a woman named Martha McVeigh.

He never forgot her name.

Martha’s husband worked for Con Edison in New York, and on that train she treated Carlos not as a young exile being passed from one place to another, but as a man entering a country he did not yet understand. She and the others at the table gave him advice. They told him what to see, what to avoid, how to begin finding his way. Martha gave him her phone number and told him she could help him look for work when he arrived.

In its own quiet way, that moment belonged to the same moral universe as the Marine’s hand. Carlos was discovering that America did not arrive all at once. It came to him through people. A soldier at the edge of the bay. A woman on a train. A stranger willing to recognize him before the world had decided what he was worth.

Years later, after his English improved and his life had begun to take shape, Carlos called Martha McVeigh more than once simply to tell her how he was doing. That detail stayed with me. Gratitude, for Carlos, was not sentimental. It had memory. It had discipline. It returned to the people who had helped him stand.

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New York did not make things easy. Carlos wanted to work in construction because he believed that was where money could be made, but construction required union connections he did not have. Instead, he was directed toward a special program at Citibank for newly arrived Cubans. It was an opportunity, but even an opportunity can humiliate a man when he has nothing proper to wear.

He needed a suit and tie, and Carlos had neither. Someone sent him to a Jesuit church clothing room on 32nd Street, one of those places where exile and charity meet in racks of donated garments. There, among the used clothes, he found a suit that fit him. It was stylish, he remembered, the kind of suit that should not have been left behind. Then he saw why it was there. Beneath the right shoulder, part of the sleeve had been torn away, as if a dog had chewed through it.

Carlos wore it anyway.

At Citibank, after the interview, he was introduced to the head of the department, Mr. Weinberg. The man stood, welcomed him, and extended his hand. Carlos stood too, but he was ashamed of the hole in the suit. He tried to shake Weinberg’s hand in a way that would hide the damage.

Weinberg noticed.

Later, he asked whether Carlos had a disability. Carlos had to explain that no, he was not disabled. It was only the suit.

The suit of a man who had escaped a dictatorship and arrived at a bank interview still trying to cover the evidence of how little he had.

There is a particular kind of courage required in such moments. It is not the courage of crossing a bay or facing a prison guard. It is quieter and, in some ways, more exposed. It is the courage of standing before strangers while vulnerability shows at the seam. It is the courage of accepting help without surrendering dignity. It is the courage of beginning at the bottom when you know what it cost you simply to arrive.

Carlos got the job. And as he remembered it, he began to work de igual a igual.

As an equal.

Still, one job was not enough. Carlos needed money quickly, so he and a friend arranged to buy and operate a gypsy cab. His friend used the car during the summer to help pay for medical school in Spain. Carlos worked it the rest of the year.

By day, he was inside the order of a bank. By night, he learned New York from the street.

The cab took him through Upper Manhattan, the Bronx, Brooklyn, and Queens. It carried people whose lives briefly intersected with his own: workers, students, immigrants, tired women, talkative men, people in a hurry, people who wanted silence, people who wanted to tell the driver everything. The city entered him that way, block by block, fare by fare, through accents and addresses, through danger and kindness, through the private weather people bring with them when they climb into the back seat of a car.

Long before Carlos would help preserve the stories of Cuban dissidents and political prisoners, he was already learning to listen.

He had learned in prison that survival depended on other people. In New York, he learned that dignity could be restored through work, but also through recognition — through the banker who gave him a chance, the stranger who offered him a phone number, the passengers who slowly taught him the city, and the community of exiles who understood without explanation what had been left behind.

Over time, Carlos built a life that would have been almost impossible to imagine when he was pulled from the bay. He did not remain at the margins of the country that had taken him in. He worked his way into corporate life, learned the language of business, earned promotions, survived professional setbacks, and kept rebuilding.

There was always, in Carlos, the instinct to build.

He traced some of that instinct back to childhood, to the influence of Rafael Gutiérrez, a civil engineer who had entered his family’s orbit in Santiago de Cuba. Carlos admired the fact that engineers made things, but what stayed with him was larger than buildings. It was the idea of constructing anything: a project, a business, a future, a life strong enough to shelter a family.

In America, that instinct found room.

By the early 1980s, Carlos’s career had advanced significantly. Later, when the company where he worked entered bankruptcy, another opportunity opened almost immediately, with better terms and a better position. He moved through the worlds of development, finance, real estate, consulting, and investment with the same discipline that had helped him survive prison: study the terrain, understand the risks, trust the right people, and keep moving.

Eventually, Carlos opened companies of his own. He advised major real estate interests. He expanded his investments. He became not only a man who had escaped Cuba, but a man who had learned how to build in America.

That mattered.

Because when Carlos eventually entered the world of the University of Miami’s Cuban Heritage Collection, he came with more than memory. He came with experience. He knew how institutions worked, how boards worked, how money, planning, relationships, and persistence could turn an idea into something durable. The former prisoner had become a builder, and he brought that builder’s mind to memory itself.

His introduction to the Amigos came through another of those turns in life that Carlos seemed to remember with a sense of wonder. During a presentation to a board of directors, he met Henry King Stanford, a former president of the University of Miami. Stanford heard his accent and asked what part of Cuba he was from. A conversation followed, and from that conversation came a recommendation that Carlos become involved with the Amigos of the Cuban Heritage Collection.

It would become one of the defining commitments of his later life.

During Carlos’s tenure as Chair, the Collection’s oral history work took root in a more formal and lasting way. Amigos fundraising led to the creation of the Luis J. Botifoll Oral History Project, giving the memories of Cuban exiles a permanent home inside the archive. It was a natural extension of everything Carlos had lived. He understood that history is not preserved only through documents, photographs, letters, and official records. It is also preserved through the human voice — through the pauses, the emotion, the names remembered decades later, the details no government file could ever contain.

For Carlos, oral history was not simply an academic method. It was a form of rescue.

That conviction would remain central to the Amigos’ work in the years that followed. The Human Rights Oral History Project documented the experiences of Cuban dissidents, particularly those connected to the Black Spring of 2003. Later, the Movimiento San Isidro Oral History Project preserved the voices of artists and activists who challenged censorship in Cuba. And in 2025, the Amigos facilitated an oral history interview with José Daniel Ferrer, one of Cuba’s leading dissidents and founder of UNPACU.

Carlos championed that larger mission because he understood what was at stake. These were not merely interviews. They were acts of preservation carried out against the machinery of erasure.

To Carlos, a dissident like Ferrer was not simply an important historical figure or a subject worthy of documentation. He was a man living the moral consequences of dissent inside the same system Carlos had once resisted, suffered under, and escaped.

That is why these interviews mattered so deeply to him.

Carlos did not arrive at the Cuban Heritage Collection as a scholar or collector in the ordinary sense. He came as someone who understood, in his bones, what happens when a regime tries to control memory. He knew how quickly a life could be flattened by official language. He knew the difference between testimony and propaganda because he had lived inside the machinery that produced both.

And he knew something else: exile can scatter memory almost as effectively as repression can bury it.

People leave with photographs, documents, recipes, letters, fragments of stories, and the names of the dead carried silently from one generation to the next. They arrive in new cities and go to work. They raise children. They learn new languages. They pay bills. They survive. And survival, necessary as it is, can become its own kind of forgetting if no one stops to ask what it cost.

Carlos understood that danger.

So, when the work of the Cuban Heritage Collection turned toward preserving the voices of exiles, dissidents, political prisoners, artists, and witnesses, Carlos did not hear an academic question. He heard a moral obligation.

He had been one of them. And in rooms where others could speak passionately about the importance of preserving history, Carlos carried the authority of someone whose own life had once depended on whether truth could outlast power. That is what made him different — not better, not more devoted, but different.

He was the only one who had been there.

There is a temptation to think of archives as quiet places, rooms where the past is arranged, catalogued, boxed, and stored. But for people like Carlos, an archive is not quiet at all. It is full of voices that were almost lost. It is full of people a regime tried to frighten into silence. It is full of testimony that refuses to remain buried.

To preserve those voices is not only to remember suffering. It is to return dignity to the person who suffered, and to an entire diaspora shaped by history. It is to say: you were not only a prisoner number, not only a defendant, not only a counterrevolutionary in somebody else’s file. You were a son, a daughter, a mother, a father, a dissident, a witness.

In 2025, the University of Miami honored Carlos with the Henry King Stanford Award, given by the Amigos of the Cuban Heritage Collection to those whose service has meaningfully strengthened the Collection. It was a fitting honor, not because Carlos merely supported an institution, but because he understood what the institution was protecting.

He knew that archives are not only shelves and boxes and carefully preserved documents. They are defenses against disappearance.

And Carlos knew disappearance from the inside.

Near the end of our interview, I asked how he wanted to be remembered. His answer was simple.

“Como un ferviente amante de la libertad.”

As a fervent lover of freedom.

That is the sentence I keep returning to.

Not because it is dramatic, but because it is precise. Carlos did not speak of freedom as an ornament, or a slogan, or a word to be placed in speeches and forgotten in practice. He had known freedom as something personal. But he had also learned that freedom does not survive by remaining private. It has to be carried. It has to be taught. It has to be protected from those who would empty it of meaning.

And that is why the archive matters.

In time, Carlos offered his own hand back — not by pulling someone from the water, but by helping make sure that the voices of those who had suffered would not disappear beneath it.

That became one of the deepest expressions of his freedom: to remember, to preserve, and to help leave behind a record strong enough to outlast the lie.

This is the final essay in a four-part series on the remarkable life of Carlos Quintela.

The hand appeared at the edge of exhaustion.

Before Carlos Quintela saw it, there had been prison: hunger, interrogations, informants, overcrowded cells, staged humiliations, and the slow education of a young man learning what a totalitarian system does to the body and the soul.

There had been forty days at El Castillito, where Carlos first felt the strange freedom of no longer pretending.

And then there was Boniato.

Boniato was something else entirely. It was a sprawling maximum-security prison complex, notorious long before Carlos arrived there. It dwarfed El Castillito in size, history, and institutional weight. The prison’s past carried its own dark irony: Fidel Castro himself had been held there briefly after the failed Moncada attack, before serving his better-known sentence at Presidio Modelo on the Isle of Pines.

The irony was almost too large to name. A prison that had once held Castro now held men like Carlos Quintela — men accused of betraying a Revolution that had already betrayed them.

By the time Carlos arrived there, his body had been diminished by hunger. He remembered weighing about 120 pounds when the ordeal began. By the time he reached Boniato, he was closer to 90. He and Jorge Rivera Pimentel were so weak they nearly fainted.

But inside that sprawling institution, Carlos found something the regime had not managed to destroy: a society of political prisoners who had learned to survive together.

Inside Boniato, there was a language of signs, passed from pavilion to pavilion. There was el ratón, the hidden package system prisoners used to move food, messages, and small necessities through the prison. There were men from every corner of Cuban society — rich and poor, educated and uneducated — men who outside prison might never have shared a table, but inside had become part of the same moral community.

Carlos learned that prison could reduce a man. But it could also reveal him.

It revealed who could be trusted, who could stay silent, who would share food, who would risk punishment to help another man survive. Those years taught Carlos something essential: freedom might begin inside the self, but survival depended on others.

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So when the opportunity came, he was ready to recognize it.

Cuba was preparing for La Zafra de los Diez Millones, the massive sugar harvest through which the regime hoped to prove the power of revolutionary mobilization. Political prisoners were being moved from prisons like Boniato into work camps to cut cane. Men who had been locked inside a prison complex would now be transported, counted, watched, and sent into fields.

In the work camp, the prisoners were still watched. They were still counted. Guards stood at the edges of the fields, rifles in hand, making sure the men entered and came out. But a cane field is not a cellblock. The rows were high. The work spread men across distance. The guards could see the outline of obedience, but not every gesture inside it.

Carlos understood the difference. Inside Boniato, the prison surrounded you. In the cane fields, the prison had edges. And edges could be studied.

The regime understood the danger too, so it created another kind of prison: a punishment waiting in advance. If a prisoner attempted to escape, or failed to return from a permit, fifteen years would automatically be added to his sentence. There would be no trial, no appeal, no hearing — just fifteen more years added to whatever sentence remained.

The message was clear: do not even think about running.

Carlos thought about it anyway.

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By then, he had already received his sentence: five years. Not a lifetime, perhaps, but long enough for a young man to feel his future being taken apart piece by piece. After the sentence, Carlos remembered, something in him settled. He wanted out. Not someday. Not in theory.

Out.

So he began looking for a way.

That was when he reached out to Paco Pinar, an old friend who knew of an escape route through Guantánamo Bay. Paco had once been part of a similar plan, but illness had forced him to abandon it. Carlos could not simply walk up to him and speak openly. A plan like this required people who could move between worlds.

Quintela’s girlfriend at the time, Nery Vásquez, became one of those quiet links in the chain. She carried messages between Carlos and Paco, moving through the outside world with information that could have destroyed all of them if it fell into the wrong hands.

When Carlos sent word that he wanted to leave, Paco’s answer was immediate.

Count on me.

From that moment, the desire to escape began to become a plan. Carlitos Falla took responsibility for transportation. Jorge Rivera Pimentel and people close to him worked on obtaining equipment. Others helped in smaller, quieter ways. No one person could hold the whole operation. That would have been too dangerous.

The escape depended on a shared commitment. Paco knew the route. Carlitos could help arrange the car. Jorge and others could help find what the crossing required. Nery could carry a message. Someone could hide supplies. Everyone would remain silent.

In prison, that silence was not emptiness. It was protection.

The plan depended on complicated calculations and unbreakable bonds. It depended on the moon, the tide, and men willing to risk their lives for one another.

Among the men Carlos trusted was Dr. Carlos Peña Juste, a defense attorney from Santiago de Cuba, a family friend, and, in Carlos’s memory, one of Cuba’s unspoken heroes.

Peña Juste had once defended aviators who had served under Batista after they were accused of bombings and killings. Castro wanted them tried as a group, but Peña Juste managed to win the case before a military tribunal headed by Félix Peña. After the tribunal freed the men, Castro denounced the proceeding as a fraud and demanded a new trial. Félix Peña later took his own life. Three months after the verdict, Peña Juste was accused of treason and sentenced to thirty years in prison. The aviators he had defended were later sentenced to terms of fifteen to thirty years.

By the time Carlos knew him in prison, Peña Juste had already learned what it meant to pay for the truth.

So when Carlos told him they were preparing an escape through Guantánamo Bay, Peña Juste did not offer encouragement in the abstract. He asked for the lowest point of the tide, the highest point of the tide, and the day and hour of each. From that, he prepared what Carlos remembered as a table of movements — a prison-made science of escape.

The calculations pointed to a moonless night, around nine o’clock, when the tide in Guantánamo Bay would begin to empty. That was the window. They would have to enter the water in darkness and let the bay itself carry them away.

But the tide was only part of the plan. Others had gone ahead of them. The things they would need for the crossing had to be gathered, hidden, and placed where the men could reach them without drawing attention: shirts and shorts dyed black, flotation devices, ropes, a knife, a bottle of honey for strength.

In a police state, even that was an act of courage. Someone had to risk being seen. Someone had to leave behind the small instruments of escape and trust that the men who needed them would arrive in time.

The transportation itself had to look ordinary. The car was connected to an officer of the Rebel Army, which gave it a kind of protection if they were stopped. Each of the men dressed as a miliciano. The disguise had to belong to the moment: blue shirts, olive-green pants, the appearance of men being sent toward the national labor of the harvest.

If they were stopped, the answer was ready.

They were going to cut cane.

That was the disguise — not a dramatic lie, but an ordinary one, useful because it belonged to the country’s official rhythm. In a Cuba mobilized for La Zafra de los Diez Millones, men moving toward cane fields did not automatically look like fugitives.

The regime had turned the harvest into a national demand. Carlos and the others turned it into cover.

They reached the area near Guantánamo Bay early in the morning and waited in the mangroves. The mud came up to their knees. The smell was terrible. The mosquitoes were relentless. Behind them were the work camp, the guards, the sentence, and the fifteen additional years waiting if they were caught. Ahead of them was water, but not yet.

First, they had to wait for the moonless night. First, they had to trust the tide. And before they could trust the tide, they had to sit with the decision they had already made.

Then came a voice.

A group of young men from Guantánamo appeared. They had tried to cross before and failed. More than once. Now they were turning back.

For Carlos and the others, they could have been an omen. Instead, they became witnesses.

Carlos had already given his last money to the driver who brought them there. Now he removed the clothes he would no longer need and gave them away too. The group shared what food they could with the young men heading back. The gesture said what no one needed to say.

Carlos was not going back.

The decision had passed from intention into fact.

When darkness finally came, they prepared for the water. They dressed in shirts and shorts dyed black. They carried a bottle of honey, a knife, flotation devices, and ropes. The ropes tied them to one another, but not absolutely. If the group broke apart, if panic came, if survival required separation, each man would have to cut himself loose.

Each man for himself.

But only if there was no other choice. Until then, they would move together.

Paco led the way. Carlos followed. Behind him came Carlitos Falla, Jorge Rivera Pimentel, Marcelino, Andrés, and the others.

Then they entered Guantánamo Bay.

At first, the water resisted them. Peña Juste’s calculations, Carlos remembered with awe, had been off by only an hour. Only an hour — an astonishing margin for a plan made inside prison, with limited information, by a man turning tide points into a table of escape.

But in the water, an hour is not a small thing.

They had to swim against the incoming tide. Every movement cost them. Every minute stretched. The bay did not yet want to carry them.

Then the tide changed.

When the outgoing current took hold, the center of Guantánamo Bay became, in Carlos’s memory, like an overflowing river. The same force that could kill them could also save them.

The current began pulling them toward the American side. Cuban patrol boats avoided the strongest part of the channel. And if they came near, their engines would travel through the water before the boats themselves appeared.

So the men listened.

They put their heads beneath the surface.

No engine.

No patrol.

Keep going.

Somewhere behind them were El Castillito, Boniato, the work camp, the sentence, and the life they were refusing to surrender to. Somewhere ahead was Guantánamo. Between the two, Carlos and the others moved through the dark, tied together by rope, calculation, exhaustion, and the fragile mercy of the tide.

Then, through the darkness, they made out a small structure, a flag, and a soldier.

He wore olive green and held a rifle.

For a moment, Carlos did not know what he was seeing. Was this Cuba? Was this another post? Had they come all this way only to be returned?

The men disagreed. Some believed they had reached safety. Others were uncertain. The current was fierce. The water had already taken too much from their bodies.

Carlos made the decision they had prepared for.

Each man for himself.

They cut the ropes. The bond that had held them together had carried them as far as it could. Now survival required separation.

One group moved toward the small structure. Carlos, Jorge Rivera Pimentel, and Andrés pushed toward the larger ships they could see in the distance — ships so large Carlos knew they could not belong to the Cuban navy.

Then a voice came through the darkness.

They had arrived.

The post was American.

But arrival was not yet safety. The current was so strong that even turning back toward the structure became its own struggle. Carlitos Falla was nearly unconscious, too exhausted to keep going, and Carlos and Jorge understood that he would not make it on his own. So they went back for him. After everything they had endured — the prison, the hunger, the waiting, the water — freedom still required one more act of loyalty. Together, they pulled Carlitos through the current.

Andrés disappeared into the dark, and that, too, remained part of the memory. Escape stories often move toward triumph, but real escapes carry shadows. Not everyone arrives in the same way. Not every name comes out of the water cleanly into the light.

Carlos remembered the soldier with the reflector. He remembered reaching the post. He remembered the Marine.

The Marine extended his hand.

“Bienvenidos a la tierra de la Libertad,” he said.

Welcome to the land of freedom.

And then he pulled Carlos from the water.

When I asked Carlos what he felt when the American soldier said those words, he did not answer as though the moment belonged only to the past. His voice trembled. His body stiffened. For an instant, the room where we sat seemed to give way to the water, the darkness, the current, and the hand reaching down.

“La misma emoción que me viste sentir en este momento,” he told me.

The same emotion you saw me feel in this moment.

Decades had passed. But the words had not faded into history. They were still there, still capable of reaching him.

The Marine was one man. But in Carlos’s memory, he also became something larger. He became the first human form America took after prison, hunger, darkness, water, and fear.

For Carlos, and for hundreds of thousands of Cubans who fled during those years, the United States was not an abstraction. It was not only a flag, a policy, or a promise spoken from a distance. It was a place that received them.

A shore.

A harbor.

A hand reaching down when the body could go no farther.

Carlos was finally a free man. Yet the struggle to get back on his feet and create a new life had only begun. After ten or twelve days on the base, he was flown to Opa-locka and transferred to La Casa de la Libertad — the Freedom House. But before the rebuilding came the receiving.

Before the papers, the shelters, the jobs, the separation from family, the loneliness of exile, and the long labor of becoming whole again, there had been a stranger’s hand, a Marine’s voice, and the words Carlos would never forget:

Welcome to the land of freedom.

By then, Carlos knew something that would stay with him for the rest of his life: freedom is personal, but survival is rarely solitary. The crossing had been made possible by many hands. Paco knew the route. Nery carried the messages. Carlitos arranged transportation. Peña Juste calculated the tide. Others hid supplies. Someone kept silent. The men tied themselves to one another in the dark. Carlos and Jorge turned back for Carlitos.

And at the edge of exhaustion, a Marine reached down and pulled Carlos from the water.

That was the crossing.

From a country that had tried to disappear him into a country where, for one unforgettable moment, a stranger’s hand became the first proof that he had arrived.

This is the third essay in a four-part series on the remarkable life of Carlos Quintela. The final essay, “The Only One Who Had Been There,” explores how Carlos’s own experience as a political prisoner shaped his later commitment to preserving the voices of Cuba’s dissidents and political prisoners.

The first thing Carlos Quintela noticed was not the shouting.

It was not the panic in the crowd, or the blows falling on people who had gathered for a Holy Week procession in Santiago de Cuba.

It was the batons.

The men carrying them were not dressed as soldiers. They wore no police uniforms. At first glance, they looked like ordinary citizens — men who might have stepped out of any doorway, joined any crowd, blended into any street.

That was the point.

But the batons gave them away. They were all the same color. They were all the same size. And that’s how Carlos knew.

Whatever the newspapers would say the next day, the attack had not erupted spontaneously. It had been prepared. The men may have worn civilian clothes, but they were not acting as civilians.

Their uniform was the baton.

In 1960, Cuba was beginning to change in ways many people could feel before they could fully name. The euphoria of 1959 had not disappeared entirely, but something colder had entered public life. Promised elections had not arrived. Questions had become dangerous. The Church and the revolutionary state were moving toward confrontation.

Carlos remembered the atmosphere as one in which the air itself seemed to be changing. Things were beginning, as he put it, to smell bad.

In Santiago de Cuba, Holy Week had always carried particular weight. The city moved with ceremony. One procession came from the Church of Dolores, carrying the crucified Christ. Another came from the Cathedral, carrying the Virgin. At a midpoint in the city, the two processions met: mother and son, grief and sacrifice, faith and public memory converging in the street.

Carlos was not especially religious at that time. He had not grown up devout. He had not even been baptized as a child. But he understood what the moment meant to the city. He was about fifteen then — old enough to understand fear, young enough for the lesson to mark him for life.

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The men appeared from a side street carrying batons. And they began to beat the people in the procession.

This was not a riot. It wasn’t a clash between two equal crowds. It was an attack on a religious procession, on citizens gathered in public.

Carlos watched.

And then he noticed what he could not unsee.

The next day, the official story appeared. The press described the attack as a spontaneous manifestation of the people against counterrevolutionaries. But Carlos had seen the evidence with his own eyes.

What he witnessed that day was not only violence.

It was choreography.

There is a Cuban saying for this kind of cowardice: tira la piedra y esconde la mano — throw the stone and hide the hand.

What Carlos witnessed that day was the political version of that saying. The regime wanted the blow delivered, but not by the visible hand of the state. It wanted the fear produced, but not the responsibility. It wanted citizens beaten in public, then wanted the next day’s story to suggest that other citizens had carried out the beatings on their own.

But the batons unmasked the lie.

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Their sameness revealed preparation. Their uniformity exposed coordination. The men carrying them may have been dressed as civilians, but the weapons told another story.

For Carlos, this marked the beginning of a new stage. The Revolution was no longer only breaking promises. It was teaching Cubans how to fear one another. It was learning to divide families, turn class against class, faith against ideology, neighbor against neighbor. It was learning how to make intimidation look like participation.

That day, in Santiago de Cuba, Carlos did not lose his innocence all at once. Something more precise happened.

He learned how to read the lie.

Years later, when Carlos Quintela would find himself inside the regime’s prisons, that lesson would serve him well. He would already understand something essential about the system that held him: it did not only punish dissent. It manufactured consent. It did not only silence people. It recruited others to perform the silencing.

The batons were the lesson.

They showed Carlos that repression can arrive without insignia. That a totalitarian regime does not need to confess its violence when it can place the blame in civilian hands and call it justice.

They also taught him something that would stay with him long after that Holy Week procession had disappeared from the streets of Santiago: how to see power when power is trying to conceal itself.

Carlos did not become an opponent of the regime all at once. First, he became a witness — a young man trained by experience to notice the detail that gave the lie away.

The uniformity of the weapons. The choreography of the gesture. The thing everyone else was too frightened to name.

Sometimes, that is enough to reveal the machinery behind the mask.

This is the second essay in a four-part series on the remarkable life of Carlos Quintela. The next essay, “The Hand That Pulled Him From the Water,” follows Carlos from political imprisonment to the dangerous crossing that finally carried him toward freedom.

As America celebrates its 250th anniversary, I find myself thinking back to 1976.

I was old enough then to remember the Bicentennial — the flags, the fireworks, the school programs, the television specials, and the red-white-and-blue imagery that seemed to appear everywhere. The country had been through a great deal: Vietnam, Watergate, inflation, distrust in government, and deep cultural change. It was not a simple or innocent time.

And yet, as I remember it, the feeling was much more upbeat than it is today.

There was a sense, maybe fragile but real, that the country had come through something difficult and might still find its footing. The mood was patriotic without feeling quite so angry. The celebration felt broad and local: towns, schools, libraries, museums, churches, and neighborhoods all seemed to find their own way to mark the occasion.

In retrospect, one of the biggest differences between 1976 and today is that we did not yet view our fellow Americans as the enemy.

When I was in school, we had bomb shelters and civil defense drills. The threat we were taught to imagine came from outside the country — from a foreign power, from missiles, from a Cold War adversary. Whether those drills could have saved us is another question. But the fear itself was pointed outward.

We could not have imagined that one day our children would no longer need bomb shelters, but would instead need active-shooter drills. We could not have imagined that schools would become places where children practiced hiding from American-born mass shooters.

That change says something terrible about the distance between then and now.

The Bicentennial was not perfect. Many Americans were already asking hard questions about whose freedom had been celebrated in 1776, and whose had been postponed or denied. Those questions mattered then, and they matter even more now.

But what feels different today is the heaviness. As America turns 250, the anniversary feels less like a shared civic occasion and more like another battlefield in our national argument. We are not only debating how to celebrate America. We are debating what America means, who belongs to it, and whether our democratic institutions can still hold us together.

In 1976, America was far from innocent. We had lived through assassinations, Vietnam, Watergate, racial conflict, and deep distrust in government. But there was still a broader sense that the country’s wounds were something we had to repair together.

Today, too many Americans have been taught to see one another not as neighbors with whom we disagree, but as threats to be defeated.

Maybe that is why 1976 feels, in memory, so different. Not because the country was unified. It wasn’t. Not because the past was simpler. It wasn’t. But because there seemed to be more room then for a common hope.

That may be the darkest difference between the Bicentennial and the 250th anniversary. In 1976, the fear many of us carried was that an enemy might come for America. In 2026, the fear is that we have learned to turn on one another.

The Fourth of July has always asked something of us. It asks us to remember the promise, but also the exclusions. It asks us to love the country honestly, not blindly. And it asks whether we still believe that the American experiment can be made larger, fairer, and more true.

In 1976, amid all our troubles, many Americans still seemed to believe the answer was yes.

In 2026, that question feels much harder — and much more urgent.

Halfway through my oral history interview with Carlos Quintela, he told me about the first time he ever felt free.

It was not the day he arrived in the United States, or the moment an American Marine pulled him from the water near Guantánamo Bay. It was not in New York, where he would rebuild his life, raise a family, and make a future for himself in the country that had taken him in.

The first time Carlos Quintela truly felt free came much earlier, after he had been arrested for trying to escape Cuba, when a metal gate closed behind him inside a State Security detention center known as El Castillito.

The Little Castle.

Before the Revolution, El Castillito had been a private residence, the home of Pepín Bosch, one of the principal figures associated with Bacardí. After Bosch left Cuba, the Castro regime took the house and converted it into a detention center. A once opulent home became a cage.

Carlos was brought there in handcuffs. He was weighed, given a prison uniform, separated from his friend Jorge Rivera Pimentel, and taken upstairs to a small space in one of the towers. There was a regular door, and beyond it, a metal gate.

When the gate opened, he saw gaunt men pressed against the bars, men who looked as though hunger had already begun removing them from themselves. And yet, in that moment, standing before those men, stripped of his clothes, his safety, and any control over what would happen next, Carlos felt something he did not expect.

“A pesar de estar yo en la cárcel,” he told me, “yo nunca me sentí tan libre como en el momento que esas puertas se cerraron.”

Even though he was in prison, he had never felt as free as he did when those doors closed.

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He was surrounded by desperate men, cut off from his family and friends, and placed entirely in the hands of a state that could decide when he ate, when he slept, when he spoke, when he disappeared. But something inside him had shifted. He had been relieved of a burden he had carried for too long.

“El peso de pretender,” he said. “El peso de doble vida.”

The weight of pretending. The weight of living two lives.

For Carlos Quintela, prison did not provide freedom. It revealed the captivity he had already been living under: the daily performance required of anyone who refuses to surrender inwardly but must still find a way to survive inside a dictatorship.

Behind that locked door, the performance ended. He had lost his freedom of movement, but in the process, he had recovered something of himself.

Carlos had not always opposed the Revolution. That is essential to understanding the wound.

He grew up in Santiago de Cuba hearing the adults around him speak about dictatorship, suspended constitutional rights, corruption, and the need for change. His family was part of a city that had turned against Fulgencio Batista. In the Quintela household, the Revolution did not arrive as an enemy. It arrived as a promise.

Members of his own family became involved in the revolutionary movement. His uncle Luis Pedrón was wounded in the struggle against Batista. Carlos remembered his family’s home becoming part of that world: a place where wounded men were treated, supplies were gathered, money was raised, and hope moved quietly through rooms and conversations.

When Batista fled and the Revolution triumphed, Carlos was there with his family in Santiago de Cuba. He remembered the city overcome with joy. For a boy who had grown up amid fear, curfews, arrests, bombs, and political violence, 1959 felt like an opening. There was a sense of space, of euphoria, of possibility returning to daily life.

His father wanted to send him away to study, but Carlos refused. He wanted to remain in Cuba. He wanted to live through what he believed was the beginning of a new country.

The betrayal came slowly at first, and then all at once.

Fidel Castro had promised elections in six months, Carlos remembered. That promise mattered. It gave shape to the hope. It suggested that the Revolution was not an end in itself, but a bridge back to constitutional life.

Then the months passed, and the elections never materialized. The press began to ask questions. Others inside and around the Revolution wanted answers too. What had happened to the promise? When would Cubans be allowed to choose their leaders?

Carlos remembered the answer arriving in a famous phrase:

“Elecciones, ¿para qué?”

Elections, for what?

With those words, the Revolution that had spoken in the name of freedom no longer felt obligated to submit itself to the people. What had been presented as a way to restore civic life became the thing that replaced it.

For Carlos and his family, this was not an abstract political disappointment. They had believed in the movement against Batista. They had supported it, sacrificed for it, opened their home to it, because they wanted freedom, not another dictatorship.

That was the wound. Castro betrayed Cuba, but he also betrayed the hope of those who had helped bring him to power.

By then, Carlos understood that he had to find a way out.

He had refused to join the Communist Party. He had tried to continue with his life, even working for a time as a teacher at the José María Heredia school. But in a system built on ideological obedience, refusal itself became visible. You did not have to shout your opposition for the state to notice. Sometimes it was enough not to bend.

Eventually, Carlos tried to escape with his friend Jorge Rivera Pimentel. Others helped them, including the Garays, a married couple from Santiago, and a former Rebel Army captain who assisted with transportation.

Carlos and Jorge understood that if they were caught, they had to protect the people who had helped them. They agreed on a simple story. They had not been trying to escape. They had only gone out with the Garays for a meal, a party, nothing more.

Then they were arrested.

There was no heroic declaration, no dramatic final stand. Just the machinery of the state closing around them.

Carlos knew what had been lost. Even under Batista, he said, when constitutional guarantees had not been suspended, there had been an expectation of habeas corpus. A prisoner had to be accounted for. A lawyer could appear. A family could know where someone was being held. By the time Carlos was arrested, those protections existed only as memory.

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After fifteen or sixteen days at El Castillito, he and Jorge were given clean uniforms, placed in jeeps under armed escort, and driven away without explanation. At one point, the convoy stopped in a small town. The guards entered a café. Carlos and Jorge, prisoners in uniform and handcuffs, stood under watch as the men responsible for them ordered refreshments for themselves.

The room went quiet.

No one knew what to do with the sight of two prisoners standing there, hungry and silent, while the guards ignored them. Then a man at the bar — a guajiro, Carlos remembered — quietly ordered two sodas and placed them before Carlos and Jorge.

Carlos never forgot it.

The man did not free them. He did not denounce the guards. He did not make a speech. He simply bought them two sodas.

In that small act, Carlos saw something the regime had not conquered. The country was frightened, but not every conscience had been silenced. There were still people capable of recognizing another human being across the distance fear had created.

Later that day, Carlos and Jorge were taken before a crowd of students from la Universidad de Oriente for a staged juicio popular. The point was not justice. It was spectacle. The regime wanted condemnation performed in public, wanted fear to become participation, wanted the crowd to help turn two young prisoners into enemies of the people.

Some called for the firing squad. Others demanded the maximum penalty.

Carlos was afraid. But fear did not own him. He crossed his arms. He looked upward. Somewhere inside that terror, he felt his conviction harden. What he had done was legitimate. His opposition to the system was true. The path he had chosen, however costly, was his.

Then came the moment the regime seemed to be waiting for.

Carlos and Jorge were led out through the crowd of students toward the military vehicles. The expectation was clear. The students were supposed to descend on them, to strike them, insult them, punish them with their bodies before the state took them away.

But that did not happen.

Instead, the students parted quietly.

No one touched them. No one beat them. No one allowed the staged fury to become real. Carlos and Jorge passed through the crowd without consequence, their physical dignity intact, until they reached the vehicles.

For Carlos, that silence was not emptiness. It was a verdict. The students had refused the role assigned to them. In a moment designed to humiliate two prisoners and demonstrate revolutionary unanimity, they had withheld their violence. Their restraint became a form of respect, and that respect was a blow to the regime.

It was, Carlos understood, a triumph.

Carlos was afraid. But fear did not own him.

He crossed his arms. He looked upward. Somewhere inside that terror, he felt his conviction harden. What he had done was legitimate. His opposition to the system was true. The path he had chosen, however costly, was his.

That is why El Castillito remained for Carlos not only a memory of captivity, but of release.

The regime had taken his clothes, his safety, his privacy, his control over time, and perhaps years of his future. But it had also taken away the need to pretend.

There is a kind of prison built with walls, bars, guards, hunger, and locked doors. And there is another kind built from silence. Carlos Quintela had experienced both.

Only one of them ended when the metal gate closed behind him. That was the freedom he remembered. Not comfort. Not safety. Not escape. The freedom of no longer living divided against himself.

The weight of pretending had finally fallen away.

This is the first essay in a four-part series on the remarkable life of Carlos Quintela. The next essay, “The Batons Were the Same Color,” returns to Santiago de Cuba, to a Holy Week procession, and to the moment a young Carlos saw the Revolution begin to reveal the machinery behind its mask.

Lunchtime, for most children, is a pause in the day. A tray, a table, a cluster of friends, a little freedom from the classroom. For Lisset, it became the part of the school day she feared most.

She was a Mexican girl in an American school, still learning the language, still carrying an accent the other children could hear before they knew her name. They mocked her coke bottle glasses, threw food at her, spat at her, and made sure she understood that she did not belong.

“Me trataban exactamente como un extraterrestre,” she told me.

They treated me exactly like an alien.

So she made a child’s calculation. If lunch was where the cruelty happened, she would avoid lunch. If eating made her visible, she would try to disappear.

“Hasta que por fin decidí dejar de comer,” she said.

Until finally, I decided to stop eating.

By then, Lisset had already learned too much about fear.

She first came to the United States when she was five years old, traveling north with her mother and younger siblings. Before they ever reached the border, the train they were riding collided head-on with another train near Mexicali.

She remembers the sound of grinding steel, the heavy rain, children crying. She remembers people trapped between crushed seats, unable to free themselves. Her mother rushed them off the train, carrying the baby, holding her younger sister’s hand, while Lisset carried what bags she could.

Outside, her mother told her to stay with her younger siblings while she went back for the money they had left behind. So Lisset waited. Five years old. Holding her baby brother. Watching adults carry the injured out of the wreckage.

One image never left her: a woman with a severed leg being carried by two men, her children following behind her, crying.

Lisset began screaming for her mother.

“Mamá, apúrate,” she remembered.

Hurry, Mom.

Before Lisset crossed the border, before she entered an American classroom, before the other children mocked her accent or threw food at her, she had already seen what no five-year-old should experience.

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The journey north did not end with the train. They crossed at night, through darkness, water, hills, and fear, urged forward by coyotes, hiding when they had to hide, running when they had to run.

For a child, migration was not an argument on television. It was not a campaign slogan. It was rain, mud, mosquitoes, strangers, silence, and the sound of adults telling you to move.

In San Bernardino, there was shelter, but not really refuge. Lisset’s family lived in a small room in a house where several men also lived. Her mother cleaned, cooked, cared for others, and worked to buy the children food, clothes, coloring books, crayons.

Small things. Necessary things. The kind of things that tell a child someone is still trying.

Still, Lisset longed for Mexico. For her cousins, aunts and grandparents. For familiar food and simple games. The ordinary belonging most of us do not know how to name until it is gone.

But immigrant families do not always move according to longing. They move according to work, opportunity, fear, and hope.

So Lisset’s childhood became divided between two countries. In Mexico, she missed the possibilities of the United States. In the United States, she missed the warmth and familiarity of Mexico. She was always arriving, always leaving, always adjusting.

At school, she tried to be good. She studied. She worked hard. She was proud of doing well. But effort did not protect her from cruelty.

Then one teacher noticed.

Her name was Carol Kirkbride.

At first, the gesture was small. Once a week, the teacher returned to the classroom during lunch and invited Lisset inside. Then twice a week. Then three times. Eventually, Lisset spent every lunch period in the room.

The teacher brought her food. Helped her read. Helped her practice English. Listened.

Carol Kirkbride did not erase what Lisset had lived through. She did not change the family’s circumstances or silence the children who mocked her. But she opened a door. And for a child who had learned to expect humiliation, that door became refuge.

“Esa maestra para mí fue como una mamá,” Lisset said. “Me escuchaba, me ayudaba.”

That teacher, to me, was like a mother. She listened to me. She helped me.

Lisset’s story reminds us that immigrant children often carry more than adults can see. They are learning a new language while translating fear. Sitting in classrooms while worrying about parents, siblings, money, papers, and home.

All too often, immigrant children cross into adulthood before they are ready.

“Yo me sentí como si hubiese sido madre a los diez años,” Lisset said.

I felt as if I had been a mother at ten.

That line is hard to forget because it is not only Lisset’s story. It is the story of many children growing up inside families under pressure. Children who become translators, caretakers, witnesses, negotiators. Children who absorb the stress of adults and mistake it for normal childhood.

Lisset’s story matters today because immigrant children are still being asked to carry adult burdens in silence.

They are still entering classrooms with histories their teachers may never fully understand. Some are learning English while carrying trauma. Some are being mocked for their accents, their clothes, their food, their names, or the countries their families came from. Some are caring for younger siblings, translating for parents, worrying about money, work, papers, and whether they belong.

We often talk about immigrant children as if adaptation is only a matter of time. They will learn the language. They will catch up in school. They will adjust.

But adjustment is not the same as healing.

What Lisset needed was not only time. She needed someone to notice. Someone to understand that the child standing outside the classroom was not withdrawn or difficult or strange.

She was afraid.

Carol Kirkbride could not undo everything Lisset had survived. But she interrupted the lesson the world had been teaching her. She became evidence that the world was not only cruel. That someone was paying attention. That Lisset had value.

Years later, Lisset would find herself drawn to work that required authority. Today, as a correctional officer, she carries herself differently. The girl who once waited outside a classroom door hoping not to be noticed became a woman whose work requires presence, discipline, and respect.

But what matters most is not that Lisset now has authority. It is what she chooses to do with it. She treats inmates with dignity.

That detail stayed with me. Because dignity is not sentimental in a prison. It is a choice made inside a place where people are often reduced to their worst decision, their worst day, their worst mistake.

Lisset knows what it means to be reduced. She knows what it means to be looked at and not seen. She knows what it means to be frightened, mocked, dismissed, and made small.

Perhaps that is what Carol Kirkbride gave her all those years ago. Not simply lunch. Not simply shelter from the cruelty of other children. She gave Lisset evidence that she mattered.

But Lisset’s story is not only about what one teacher did. It is about what any of us can do. We don’t have to be educators to become someone’s refuge. We only have to pay attention. To notice the person standing apart. The child who has gone quiet. The neighbor carrying more than they can say. The stranger whose dignity is easier to overlook than defend.

And perhaps that is the lesson: all of us, if we are willing to see, can become that kind of refuge for someone else.

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“My innocence is real.”

Todd Fener, a mutual friend, had introduced me to Johnny’s story, and I was fascinated by it before I ever met him. I knew the broad outlines: the Colombian immigrant from Queens, the infamous 1990 subway killing, the coerced confession, the 25 years in prison for a crime he did not commit. But knowing the outline of a story is not the same as sitting across from the person who lived it.

What struck me first was the absence of anger and bitterness. Johnny had lost most of his adult life inside some of the toughest prisons in America, and yet he spoke with a kind of gentleness and restraint that made the injustice feel even heavier. He was not interested in performing his pain. He simply wanted the truth to be understood.

When he told me his innocence was real, he spoke as a man who had come to understand that freedom and innocence are not the same thing. Freedom meant walking out of prison. Innocence meant having the world finally know that he should never have been there in the first place.

Johnny was born in Medellín, Colombia, and raised in Bay Terrace, Queens, in a neighborhood he remembers as mostly Irish, Italian, and Jewish. His family was one of the only Colombian families there. His mother was an interior designer. His father had a travel agency and worked in real estate. Like so many immigrant parents, they believed in work, discipline, respectability, and the promise that if their children did things the right way, America would make room for them.

Johnny absorbed that lesson. He played baseball and soccer. He shoveled snow for money in the winter. He loved music. In 1980s New York, he discovered breakdancing and became a B-boy, spinning on cardboard in front of the garage with his brother and friends. Later, he got into DJing and promoting teen nights at clubs. He loved the energy of it: the music, the dancing, the possibility that a kid from Queens might find his way into entertainment.

His father had come to the United States with dreams of becoming an actor. That dream never came true for him, but Johnny felt some part of it passed down. He imagined a future in music, dance, film, or business. He was 18 years old, newly standing at the edge of adulthood, still close enough to childhood to believe in infinite possibilities.

Then came the night of September 2, 1990.

A popular DJ was throwing a birthday party at Roseland Ballroom in Manhattan. Johnny went out with friends, though “friends” is too simple a word for the loose collection of people who gathered that night. Some he knew well. Others were friends of friends. By the time they met at the train station in Queens, the group had grown into something much larger and less familiar.

Johnny was not thinking about danger. He was thinking about music, dancing, and getting into the club. He remembers even the smallest details, including the jeans he had bought in the Village: covered with pockets that looked cool but were not real pockets at all. Because he planned to dance, he gave his wallet to a friend with a fanny pack. When they arrived in Manhattan, Johnny went looking for that friend so he could get his wallet back and pay his way into Roseland.

That small decision, that ordinary teenage inconvenience, became part of the line between the life he expected and the life that was taken from him.

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While others moved through the subway station, Johnny says he was upstairs, away from the platform, flirting with two girls and looking for his friend. Below, a robbery turned fatal. Brian Watkins, a 22-year-old tourist from Utah, was stabbed while trying to protect his family. The crime horrified the city. New York was already raw from violence, fear, and racial tension. The Central Park jogger case was still fresh in the public imagination. The city wanted arrests. It wanted certainty. It wanted someone to blame.

The next night, detectives came to Johnny’s home.

He had nothing to hide. That is one of the most painful parts of the story. Johnny believed that if he cooperated, if he told the truth, if he answered their questions respectfully, everything would be cleared up. His mother believed the same. She did not understand the legal system. She did not know how quickly cooperation could become vulnerability. She had raised her son to respect authority, and now authority was standing in her home asking to take him away.

When she asked whether she could go with him, she was told no. He was old enough, they said. Johnny had just turned 18.

That is where the immigrant story enters the wrongful conviction story. Not as decoration, but as cause and consequence. Many immigrant families teach their children to keep their heads down, work hard, respect the police, respect teachers, respect bosses, respect anyone with a title or uniform. It is a survival code. It is also a way of showing gratitude to a country that has given you refuge or opportunity.

But in Johnny’s case, that code became dangerous. He had been taught to trust authority. He had been taught that the truth would protect him. He had been taught that if he behaved properly, the system would recognize his innocence.

Instead, he was taken from his home, interrogated, and, according to his account, beaten and coerced into memorizing a statement that was not true.

Later, Johnny would explain the shock of that betrayal in words I have never forgotten. He said that, as an immigrant, he had grown up believing he was American in every way that mattered. He thought like an American. He lived like an American. His parents had taught him to respect authority. And then someone in authority laid hands on him.

“It was like the person that got stabbed in the subway that night,” he told me. “I felt that I was stabbed in the precinct that night.” And in that moment an 18-year-old immigrant kid realized that the rules he had been taught to live by, had betrayed him.

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He asked for a lawyer. That detail matters. Johnny was not silent because he did not know enough to ask. He asked. According to his account, the detective told him that if his lawyer were there, he would tell Johnny to do the same thing the detective was telling him to do. Memorize the story.

Johnny says he was told he could go home if he repeated what they wanted him to say. He says he was threatened with prison, with death, with being found in an alley. He was 18 years old, frightened, handcuffed, and alone. His parents were not there. No lawyer was there. Only the people questioning him, and the promise that if he cooperated, the nightmare would end. So he cooperated.

That is one of the hardest things for people to understand about false confessions. From the outside, we imagine innocence as a shield. We tell ourselves, If I didn’t do it, I would never say I did. But that assumes calm, safety, knowledge, power, and time. Johnny had none of those things. He had fear. He had exhaustion. He had a lifetime of respect for authority. And he had a detective telling him that the only way home was through a lie. So he memorized the story.

Only later did he understand that what he thought was cooperation had become confession. What he thought was a way out had become the door slamming behind him.

By the end of that night, Johnny was not home in his own bed. He was on his way to Rikers Island.

He remembers it as dark, violent, and terrifying. At 18, he had gone from his family’s house to a jail cell in a matter of hours. He was skinny, frightened, and surrounded by men who seemed to understand the rules of that world far better than he did. Someone told him that if he wanted to survive, he would have to fight. So he fought.

That, too, became part of the tragedy. Prison did not merely take Johnny’s freedom. It tried to teach him a new way to be human. A way built on suspicion, violence, reputation, and fear. He had been raised by parents who taught him discipline and decency. Now he was being taught that survival required something else.

For a while, he believed it. But over time, something in him resisted. He saw what constant violence did to people. He saw men become consumed by the very brutality they thought would protect them. And he made a decision that may be one of the most remarkable parts of his story.

“I’m just going to be Johnny,” he told himself.

He would focus on his freedom. He would focus on his innocence. He would go to school. He would get an education. He would try to remain the person his parents had raised him to be, even in a place designed to strip that person away.

That choice did not make prison safe. It did not erase the fear, the threats, or the years ahead. But it gave him a way to survive without surrendering the last thing the system had not yet taken: himself.

When I asked Johnny how he let go of bitterness, he did not begin with himself. He began with his family.

His parents never stopped showing up.

They visited him wherever he was sent. They brought food when they could, clothes when he needed them, small comforts that could never make prison bearable but reminded him that he had not been forgotten. They had come to this country like so many immigrant parents, working to build a life their children could inherit. His father had started from nothing. His mother worked hard. Together, they had built a foothold in Queens, a home, a business, a version of the American dream.

Then the dream was drained away by legal bills.

Johnny says his parents lost their savings, their business, and their home trying to defend him. The cost of his conviction was not measured only in the years he spent behind bars. It was measured in everything his parents had built, and in the quiet humiliation of watching friends turn away.

But they kept coming.

That love became a kind of guardrail. Johnny had seen what prison could do to men. He had seen anger harden into identity. He had seen violence become language. But when he thought of his parents, when he saw what they were enduring for him, he knew he could not let bitterness become the final version of himself.

Faith entered the story there, too.

Johnny told me that in prison, one way or another, a person finds God. When the cell door closed, when the lights went out, when no lawyer, parent, girlfriend, or friend could reach him, he had no one else to turn to.

So he prayed.

He also suffered. Faith did not make him immune to despair. That is important. Johnny did not describe prison as a place where belief made everything bearable. He described waking every morning and wondering whether that would be the day he took his own life.

One night, after years of appeals had failed, he knelt and asked God not to let him wake up.

But he did wake up.

And when he opened his eyes, the bars were still there. At first, he was angry. He could not understand why he had been kept alive. Only later did he come to believe there was a reason. His case, he said, began to turn after that night.

Whether one understands that as faith, providence, coincidence, or the stubbornness of hope, it marked a shift. Johnny had reached the edge of what he could endure. And somehow, impossibly, the story was not over.

The truth did not return all at once. And at first, it did not return because Johnny had found a way to force the world to listen. It began quietly, almost without his knowledge.

It began in a prison theater program.

After earning his college degree, Johnny joined a production of West Side Story. He was cast as Tony. His vocal coach, a woman named Kimberly, noticed something about him. He seemed different from the others she had met inside. He did not seem to belong there.

“Why are you here?” she asked.

Johnny tried to avoid the question at first. He told her they could talk about that another day and focus on the work in front of them. But eventually, he told her his story.

What happened next began without Johnny fully knowing it. Kimberly spoke to someone she knew, who connected the story to Bill Hughes, a journalist who had reported on corruption in the justice system. Hughes took an interest in the case and began reading through the trial record. A former parole official, Bob Dennison, later joined the effort. Eventually, Ron Kuby, a lawyer Johnny describes with deep gratitude, took the case and fought for him with the conviction Johnny had waited 25 years to see in someone representing him.

None of it happened in a straight line. None of it happened quickly. But after years of being ignored, Johnny’s story had finally reached people willing to ask the question the system had refused to ask seriously enough:

What if he was telling the truth?

Part of the answer had been sitting in Johnny’s own hands for years.

When he first arrived at Rikers, another incarcerated man gave him a piece of advice: whenever you write to your lawyer, keep a copy. Use carbon paper.

Johnny did. He wrote letters describing what had happened to him. He sent the originals to his attorney and kept the carbon copies. Years later, those copies would matter. They showed that the story Johnny was telling decades later was the story he had been telling from the beginning.

And then came the witnesses.

A woman who had been on the subway platform that night eventually came forward. She had seen the attack. She knew Johnny was not there. Another witness confirmed Johnny had been upstairs, away from the platform. One of the men involved in the crime had said there were six attackers, not eight, and that Johnny was not one of them.

Piece by piece, the story that had been used to bury him began to collapse.

For years, Johnny had carried the truth almost alone. He had no money. No power. No audience. No reason, at times, to believe anyone would ever listen. But the truth had not disappeared. It had been waiting in letters, in memories, in witnesses, and in the conscience of people willing to look again.

That may be one of the cruelest things about wrongful conviction: the truth can exist and still fail to save you.

For Johnny, it finally did. But only after 25 years.

When the judge threw out the case, the courtroom was full. Johnny’s parents were there. His brother, his niece, family, friends, the press. But even then, freedom was not simple. Because Johnny was not yet a citizen, his conviction had triggered a deportation order. The court wanted to release him, but immigration law stood in the way.

His attorney suggested a solution: one dollar bail.

In the confusion of that moment, people believed Johnny was being released on that symbolic dollar. But by the time he walked out, his immigration attorney had already taken the judge’s decision to immigration court and had the deportation order nullified.

Johnny was finally a free man.

Outside the courthouse, after 25 years, the first person waiting for him was his mother.

That is the image I keep returning to. Not the headlines. Not the legal arguments. Not the machinery that failed him. His mother.

Johnny said that when he saw her, he felt like a little boy again. He cried. She cried. He had been taken from her as an 18-year-old. Now he was a grown man, carrying the years that had been stolen from both of them. But they were together. Alive. Sound-minded. Physically present. Not separated by prison walls.

For Johnny, freedom mattered. Of course it did. But freedom was not the whole of it.

Twenty-five years later, the truth was still there. In the letters. In the witnesses. In his mother’s faith. In his own refusal to let prison turn him into someone else.

That is what Johnny meant when he told me, “My innocence is real.”

He was not asking for sympathy. He was asking for restoration.

And maybe that is why his story stays with me. Because the immigrant experience is often described in terms of courage, sacrifice, and hope. But Johnny’s story reminds us that it can also be fragile. A family can do everything it was told to do: work hard, respect authority, believe in the system, trust the truth. And still, in a single night, the life they built can be taken from them.

Johnny Hincapie survived decades in prison. But the boy who walked into that precinct never stopped telling the truth.

The tragedy is that it took the world a quarter of a century to hear him.

Some stories should be read. Others need to be heard. Johnny Hincapie’s is both. To hear him tell this story in his own words, listen to our full conversation on the Immigrant Archive Project podcast: Episode 1: Wrongfully Convicted: Johnny Hincapie

That may sound like a strange place to begin. Father’s Day is supposed to be about fathers, about the men we become, the examples we follow, the lessons we pass down.

But the truth is, long before I became the father of three daughters, I was the son of a woman who taught me what strength looked like when it was quiet, daily, sacrificial, and absolute.

My mother, Mabel was 25 years old when she arrived in the United States from Cuba in 1967 with my father and me. At the time, she was just three years older than my youngest daughter is today. In an interview I recorded with her years ago, she described those first days as arriving with “una maleta de sueños y esperanzas” — a suitcase filled with dreams and hopes.

But what I hear now, listening back, is not only the story of an immigrant woman starting over. I hear the story of a mother becoming larger than fear.

She told me that when we arrived here, she felt she had suddenly grown. Not just as a woman, but as a mother. In Cuba, she had lived with the anxiety of what might happen to her child. Would I be sent away to a school chosen by the state? Would she know if I was sick? What I had eaten? Whether I was safe?

Leaving Cuba was not simply a political decision. It was maternal instinct sharpened into action.

In our first apartment in Hackensack, NJ, we had to share a bathroom with another tenant. My mother told me she never bathed me there. Not once. Every night, she took me to my grandparents’ home to bathe me because she did not know who else was using that bathroom.

“I was capable of bathing myself in that unsafe bathroom,” she said, “but not you.”

That is the sentence that still catches in my throat today.

Before I had daughters, before I understood the particular ache of wanting to protect a child without limiting her, my mother had already given me the model. Protection was not control. Protection was devotion. Protection was inconvenience accepted without complaint.

Years later, when she spoke about my sister becoming a lawyer, her pride had a different texture. She said there was something about raising a daughter that worried her more deeply, something connected to “el sexo nuestro” — our sex, being a woman. She and my father had sacrificed so my sister could study, graduate, become a professional, and have “alas” — wings — to become whatever she wanted to be.

Wings.

That may be the finest definition of parenthood I know. Give them roots strong enough to know who they are. Give them wings strong enough to leave you. When I became the father of daughters, I did not have to invent that philosophy. I had inherited it.

My mother taught me that girls should not be made smaller by the fears of the world. They should be prepared to meet them head on. Educated. Encouraged. Protected when necessary, but never diminished. She taught me that love is not proven by how tightly you hold on, but by how bravely you help your children become themselves.

In that same interview, I asked her what her greatest pride was, other than her children. She did not hesitate. Her granddaughters.

“My life revolves around them,” she said. “Or maybe I revolve around their lives.”

At the time, her grandson Alec had not yet been born. Today, I know, her answer would make room for him too. But the meaning would be the same: her life has always orbited the children and grandchildren she loves.

That is Mabel. Always orbiting love.

On Father’s Day, I am grateful for my father as well. But this year I find myself especially grateful for the mother who helped form the father I became.

She crossed an ocean of uncertainty with a five-year-old boy and somehow taught him, through the way she lived, how to one day raise girls.

To protect without smothering; guide without possessing; sacrifice without keeping score. To believe that daughters deserve wings.

And if I have been any kind of good father to my girls, it is because before I was their dad, I was her son.

He was an extraordinary entrepreneur, a generous philanthropist, a proud U.S. Army Green Beret, and a man who loved America deeply. In South Florida, he was a friend to countless individuals, families, institutions, and organizations. His name carried weight because his life mattered. He built. He served. He gave. He showed up.

But when I had the privilege of interviewing Mike, what stayed with me most was not only the scale of his achievements. It was the spirit behind them.

Mike understood that a life is measured not simply by what we build, but by what we give away. His story began, in many ways, between two worlds. He remembered childhood summers in Cuba, surrounded by grandparents, family, and a life that seemed permanent. Then came 1959, and everything changed. His family lost properties, money, security, and a world they thought would outlast any government.

But Mike did not tell that story as a man consumed by bitterness. He told it as a man formed by loss.

“My greatest education came from not having,” he said.

That line reveals everything you need to know about him.

Loss did not make Mike smaller. It made him more determined. Struggle did not harden him into cynicism. It deepened his empathy. Being helped along the way taught him to help others.

He remembered the mentors who challenged him, the strangers who came to his aide, and the moments when he had to summon courage he did not yet know he possessed. He remembered driving toward his Army future with almost no money, once offering a watch in exchange for enough gas to keep going. He remembered a father who gave him a crumpled twenty-dollar bill at graduation and apologized because it was all he had.

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Mike understood that his father had given him something far greater than money. He had given him the ability to stand on his own two feet. That belief carried Mike through military service, through the discipline and sacrifice of Army life, through the grief of losing his brother in Vietnam, and through a business career defined by boldness, persistence, and vision.

He admired America because he believed this country gave people the chance to become something through work, sacrifice, faith, and responsibility. He loved this country not casually, but deeply. He knew freedom came at a cost. He knew service required sacrifice. And he understood that gratitude was not something to be expressed only in words, but in the way one lives.

In business, Mike was a builder. In the community, he was a rainmaker. In family, he was an anchor.

When I asked him what he was proudest of, he did not begin with companies, honors, or accomplishments. He spoke about his children.

“My greatest assets are my kids,” he said.

That, perhaps, was the truest measure of the man. For Mike, legacy was not a title, a building, or a balance sheet. Legacy was family. It was showing up. It was making time. It was keeping traditions alive. It was gathering the people you love and reminding them that they belong to one another. He believed families had to make an effort to remain families.

And when I asked what advice he would leave for his grandchildren’s grandchildren, Mike answered with the clarity of a man who had lived long enough to know what mattered. He would tell them to give. He described giving as a beautiful cycle: the more you give, the more you receive; the more you receive, the more you have to give.

That was Mike Carricarte.

A man of strength who understood tenderness, who remembered hardship.

A man of conviction who believed in country, family, faith, and service.

A man who built success, then used it to lift others.

Mike Carricarte’s passing this week is a profound loss for his family, his friends, and the South Florida community he helped shape in so many ways. But the measure of a life like his is not only found in what ends. It is found in what continues.

His example continues. In the family he loved. In the people he helped. In the institutions he strengthened. In the country he served.

And in the beautiful cycle of giving he believed in so deeply.

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South Florida has lost a giant. But Mike Carricarte gave enough of himself to ensure that his legacy will keep moving through the lives of others.

At the time, it seemed like a simple editorial decision. I had no idea that the photograph would soon begin telling a story of its own.

Days later, I received an unexpected message. The sender was a woman named Silvia Fonseca. She recognized herself in the photograph. The teenage girl staring back from the image was her.

For nearly sixty years, Silvia had never seen that photograph. She remembered the journey. She had vivid memories of leaving Cuba. She remembered the day she arrived in the United States. But she had no idea that someone had captured those moments on film. Nor did she know that the photographs had survived.

Yet there she was, staring at a younger version of herself on a computer screen nearly six decades after the picture had been taken.

I immediately reached out to Amanda Moreno, Gladys Rossie Gomez, and Juan Antonio Villanueva at the Cuban Heritage Collection and arranged a private tour for Silvia and her family.

What followed was something none of us could have anticipated.

This morning, Silvia, her husband, and two close friends arrived at the Collection. I joined them. As archivists began pulling materials from the Collection’s holdings, Silvia made an astonishing discovery. There was not one photograph documenting her family’s arrival in America. There were fifteen.

Fifteen photographs from one of the most consequential days of her life. Fifteen moments preserved without her knowledge for six decades. The images captured a teenager standing at the threshold of a new life.

The young parents beside her were embarking on the same journey that brought hundreds of thousands of Cubans to America’s shores during the Freedom Flights.

They had left behind family, friends, careers, possessions, and a country they loved in exchange for uncertainty, freedom, and hope.

Today, those parents are gone.

The teenager in the photographs is now a grandmother.

And standing in the Cuban Heritage Collection, surrounded by loved ones, Silvia came face to face with a version of herself she had not seen in sixty years.

There were tears. There was laughter and wonder. And above all, there was gratitude.

As I watched Silvia study those photographs, I found myself staring not only at her past, but at my own.

I arrived in the United States on a Freedom Flight in November of 1967. I was five years old. Like Silvia, I belonged to a generation that crossed a threshold between two countries and two lives. Unlike our parents, however, we were blessed by youth.

Our parents paid the highest price. They left behind homes, professions, friendships, and a country they loved. They arrived in a new land and were asked to begin again. Many learned English but never spoke it comfortably. Many succeeded, but never entirely stopped feeling the ache of exile.

The children experienced something different. We arrived young enough to adapt.

We learned English. We attended American schools. We made American friends. We absorbed American culture almost by osmosis. While our parents often remained Cuban living in America, we became Cuban Americans. Not because we loved Cuba less. But because we arrived young enough to embrace America completely while still carrying Cuba within us.

In many ways, we were the fortunate generation.

We arrived during one of the most turbulent and transformative periods in American history. The United States of the late 1960s was wrestling with Vietnam, civil rights, women’s rights, political assassinations, social upheaval, and profound questions about who belonged and who could fully participate in American life.

At precisely the same moment, America was opening its doors. The Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 reshaped the nation and made possible the arrival of hundreds of thousands of newcomers, including Cuban families like ours. As America reimagined itself, we were becoming Americans.

The children of the Freedom Flights grew up alongside a changing nation. We learned its language, embraced its opportunities, and benefited from its freedoms, while carrying with us the values, traditions, and memories of the country our parents left behind.

Standing in the Cuban Heritage Collection, Silvia was looking at a teenager just beginning her American journey. Standing beside her, I realized that the children in those photographs are today’s elders. The young parents who brought us here are largely gone.

The children they carried across borders have become parents, grandparents, community leaders, and custodians of family memories. And the generation that once inherited history is now responsible for preserving it.

For years, I have devoted much of my life to recording oral histories through the Immigrant Archive Project and the Cuban Heritage Collection, because I believe these stories matter.

Today reminded me why.

The photographs preserved in the Cuban Heritage Collection are not simply historical records. They are invaluable pieces of people’s lives. They are fragments of family histories. They are evidence of sacrifice, resilience, and hope.

Most importantly, they remind us that history is not something that happened to strangers. History has names. History has faces. History is a teenage girl arriving in America in search of a future. And sometimes history is that same woman, sixty years later, standing before photographs she never knew existed.

As I watched Silvia wipe away tears while looking at the young girl she once was, I realized I was witnessing something far greater than a reunion with the past.

I was witnessing the power of preservation.

And for one remarkable morning, the distance between Cuba and America, past and present, memory and history, seemed to disappear.

It was a beautiful thing to witness.

Speaking from Santiago de Cuba, Ferrer openly discussed censorship, political repression, prison conditions, fear, and the daily realities faced by those who challenge the Cuban government. He did so fully aware that every public statement carried risk.

Weeks after our conversation was published, Ferrer and his wife were arrested. After months in prison, he was released on one condition: that he leave the country. The Castro regime had attempted repeatedly to force this outspoken critic into exile. Each time, he refused. This time, fearing for the safety of his wife and young son, he accepted.

That sequence of events gives our conversation a significance that neither of us could have fully anticipated at the time. What follows is not simply the testimony of a former political prisoner reflecting on events long past. It is the voice of a man who, shortly after sharing his experiences, once again found himself confronting the very system he was describing.

As I revisit our interview, I realize that Ferrer’s story offers something more than a chronicle of opposition politics in Cuba. It offers a series of lessons in resistance. Not lessons drawn from theory or ideology, but from lived experience.

For decades, Ferrer has endured surveillance, imprisonment, solitary confinement, intimidation, and exile. Yet throughout our conversation, he returned repeatedly to a handful of ideas that illuminate not only the Cuban experience, but the broader challenge of confronting authoritarian power wherever it exists.

These are some of those lessons.

Lesson One: How People Discover the Truth

Every authoritarian system begins with the same fundamental objective:

Control the narrative.

Before governments can control behavior, they must first shape what people know, what they believe, and ultimately what they are willing to accept as truth.

José Daniel Ferrer encountered this reality as a child growing up in rural eastern Cuba. Like many Cubans of his generation, he quickly discovered that there were two versions of reality. One was taught in schools, repeated in official media, and reinforced by the state. The other was discussed quietly at home, behind closed doors, among trusted family members and friends.

“At home, I was told that I should never repeat outside the house what was being discussed inside the house.”

In that single sentence lies one of the defining characteristics of authoritarian rule. The existence of a public truth and a private truth. A child learns that certain truths cannot be spoken publicly. The regime doesn’t need to be present in the room. Its power has already entered the home.

For Ferrer, the gap between those two realities widened as he gained access to information beyond the state’s control. Through foreign radio broadcasts and conversations with relatives, he encountered facts, perspectives, and interpretations that contradicted the official narrative. The experience was transformative. It taught him that information is not merely knowledge—it is power.

Authoritarian systems understand this instinctively. That is why they censor journalists, restrict access to independent media, rewrite history, and punish those who challenge official accounts. Their survival depends not only on controlling people, but on controlling the stories people tell themselves about their society.

What Ferrer discovered, however, is that information has a stubborn tendency to escape confinement. A radio signal crosses a border. A conversation takes place. A document circulates. A question is asked. And once individuals begin comparing the state’s version of reality with their own lived experience, the foundation of authoritarian power begins to crack.

That is why truth is so threatening to authoritarian regimes. Not because it immediately topples governments, but because it gives ordinary people the ability to see clearly. And the moment people can see clearly, they become far more difficult to control.

For Ferrer, resistance did not begin with a protest, a petition, or a prison sentence.

It began with a realization:

The story he was being told was not the whole story.

Every act of resistance that followed grew from that first discovery.

Lesson Two: How People Find the Courage to Act

Authoritarian governments do not need to imprison everyone. They simply need enough people to believe they might be imprisoned.

Fear is among the most effective tools of social control ever devised. It persuades individuals to censor themselves before the state has to. It isolates citizens from one another and convinces them that silence is safer than honesty.

Throughout our conversation, José Daniel Ferrer returned repeatedly to the role fear plays in maintaining authoritarian control. Yet he also offered a profound insight into how fear begins to lose its grip.

“The loss of fear is a process. It is a process of maturation.”

Reflecting on the thousands of Cubans who signed the Varela Project despite the risks, Ferrer explained that many participated with tremendous apprehension. They expected retaliation. They feared losing their jobs, being harassed, imprisoned, or worse.

Yet something unexpected happened.

When they discovered that taking one small step had not destroyed them, they found the courage to take another. Some who began as signatories became collaborators. Some collaborators became activists. Some activists became leaders.

As Ferrer observed:

“People signed with great fear. Then they saw it was possible to take another step. And from one step to another, they ended up running.”

That observation contains a profound truth. Courage is rarely born in a single dramatic moment. More often, it grows gradually. A question asked. A conversation shared. A petition signed. A truth spoken aloud.

Authoritarian systems understand this dynamic all too well. That is why they work so hard to make examples of those who challenge them. Their objective is not simply to punish dissenters. It is to persuade everyone else not to follow.

But Ferrer’s experience suggests that fear is not invincible. It weakens every time an ordinary person chooses conscience over silence. And once enough people stop being afraid, even the most powerful regime begins to lose its most effective weapon.

Lesson Three: Why Authoritarians Fear Peaceful Citizens

One of the greatest misconceptions about authoritarian regimes is that they fear violence. In reality, what they often fear most are peaceful citizens acting together.

José Daniel Ferrer’s experience offers a powerful illustration.

In the late 1990s and early 2000s, Ferrer became involved in the Varela Project, a citizen-led initiative spearheaded by Oswaldo Payá that sought democratic reforms through mechanisms already permitted under Cuba’s own constitution. The project called for basic freedoms: freedom of expression, freedom of association, freedom of assembly, free elections, and the release of political prisoners. It did not advocate violence. It did not seek insurrection. Its primary tool was a pen.

Thousands of Cubans signed. And that is precisely what made it dangerous.

Authoritarian systems derive their power from the belief that ordinary people are isolated, powerless, and alone. The moment citizens begin organizing peacefully around a shared purpose, that illusion begins to unravel.

What frightened the Cuban government was not the signatures themselves. It was what those signatures represented. Each signature was evidence that another citizen had overcome fear. Another citizen had chosen to participate. Another citizen had discovered that he or she was not alone.

As Ferrer recalled, many people signed with tremendous apprehension. Yet once they took that first step, many found the courage to take another. Some became collaborators. Others became activists. Still others emerged as leaders. What began as a petition evolved into a civic movement.

The regime understood the implications immediately.

Rather than engaging the demands, it targeted the people promoting them. In 2003, during Cuba’s Black Spring crackdown, Ferrer and dozens of other activists were arrested and sentenced to lengthy prison terms. Prosecutors sought extraordinary penalties, including the death penalty in Ferrer’s case.

The response revealed a profound truth about authoritarian power. Governments confident in their legitimacy do not fear petitions. They do not fear signatures. They do not fear peaceful citizens gathering to discuss the future of their country.

Authoritarian regimes do.

Because they understand that every democratic movement begins with ordinary people discovering their collective strength. A peaceful citizen armed with the truth may appear powerless. Thousands of peaceful citizens acting together become something far more difficult to control. That is why authoritarian systems work so relentlessly to divide, isolate, intimidate, and silence.

And that is why peaceful civic action remains one of the most powerful forces for change the world has ever known.

Lesson Four: The Goal Is Not Punishment—It’s Surrender

When most people think about political repression, they think about punishment.

Prison.

Interrogations.

Harassment.

Surveillance.

But José Daniel Ferrer’s experience suggests that punishment is rarely the ultimate objective. The real goal is surrender.

Following Ferrer’s arrest for his involvement in the Varela Project and the growing democratic opposition movement, prosecutors sought severe penalties, including the death penalty. He would ultimately spend eight years in prison.

What followed was not merely incarceration. It was a sustained effort to break his will.

During our interview, Ferrer described spending six of those eight years in solitary confinement. Family visits were limited to a few hours every several months. Isolation became a way of life. Human contact became a privilege. The separation from loved ones was itself part of the punishment.

Yet the prison cell was only one instrument of pressure. Again and again, authorities presented him with a choice:

Leave Cuba.

Abandon your activism.

Stop resisting.

The objective was not simply to imprison a dissident. The objective was to transform a dissident into a former dissident. To persuade him that the cost of conscience was too high. To convince him that freedom was not worth the sacrifice.

Authoritarian regimes understand that a prisoner who refuses to yield can become more dangerous than one who was never arrested at all. A dissident who emerges from prison with his convictions intact becomes living proof that fear does not always prevail. That is why the struggle is ultimately psychological. The regime seeks to convince the individual that resistance is futile. The dissident struggles to preserve the belief that it is not.

Throughout years of imprisonment, Ferrer refused to renounce the beliefs that had placed him there. He endured years of isolation. He endured beatings. He endured torture. He endured repeated attempts to force him into exile. But he refused to surrender his convictions.

And therein lies one of the most important lessons of resistance.

Punishment can be imposed. Suffering can be imposed. Exile can be imposed. But surrender remains a choice.

That is why authoritarian systems devote so much energy to breaking the human spirit. And it is why individuals who refuse to surrender become such powerful symbols of resistance.

Lesson Five: Service Is a Form of Resistance

When we think of resistance, we often imagine protests, petitions, speeches, and acts of political defiance.

José Daniel Ferrer’s life suggests a broader definition.

Sometimes resistance looks like feeding the hungry.

Throughout our conversation, Ferrer spoke not only about political prisoners and democratic reform, but about the humanitarian crisis unfolding around him. He described families struggling to obtain basic necessities, elderly citizens living in poverty, and vulnerable Cubans facing daily hardships that had become all too common. In response, he and his colleagues organized efforts to provide food, medicine, and assistance to those in need.

What struck me was that Ferrer never viewed this work as separate from his activism.

To him, they were inseparable.

“We cannot live indifferent to so much pain, so much poverty, and so much misery.”

That simple statement reveals something important about the nature of authoritarianism. Authoritarian systems do not merely seek to control political power. They often leave people isolated, dependent, and focused on survival. When daily life becomes a struggle, civic engagement becomes more difficult. Fear and hardship reinforce one another.

Acts of service disrupt that cycle. A meal shared. Medicine delivered. A neighbor helped. A family supported.

These may seem like small acts, but they accomplish something profound. They strengthen the bonds of community that authoritarian systems often seek to weaken. They remind people that they are not alone.

Throughout history, some of the most enduring resistance movements have been built not only on opposition to injustice, but on solidarity with those who suffer under it.

Ferrer understood this instinctively. His work suggests that resistance is not only about confronting power. It is about affirming human dignity. It is about refusing to accept that poverty, hunger, fear, or neglect are normal. And it is about recognizing that every act of compassion becomes a declaration that another kind of society is possible. In that sense, service is more than charity. It is an act of hope. And hope, in the face of oppression, is itself a form of resistance.

Lesson Six: Conscience Cannot Be Imprisoned

Authoritarian systems can control many things. They can control newspapers. They can control television and radio stations. They can control classrooms, courts, and prisons. They can confiscate property, restrict movement, and silence critics. But there is one thing they can never fully control:

The human conscience.

That truth lies at the heart of José Daniel Ferrer’s story.

Over the course of his life, Ferrer has experienced surveillance, harassment, imprisonment, solitary confinement, and exile. He has been separated from his family, deprived of his freedom, and subjected to repeated attempts to force him into silence. Yet throughout our conversation, what struck me most was not his description of suffering.

It was his refusal to surrender his convictions.

Time and again, he was offered a choice: remain silent, abandon the cause, leave the country, or stop resisting. Time and again, he refused. Not because he believed himself extraordinary. But because he believed certain principles were worth defending.

Freedom.

Truth.

Human dignity.

The right of every person to speak openly, live honestly, and participate in shaping their own future.

Authoritarian regimes often appear powerful because they possess institutions, laws, police forces, prisons, and armies. But history suggests their power contains an inherent weakness. It depends upon compliance. It depends upon convincing ordinary people to abandon their convictions.

And whenever an individual refuses to do so, the limits of authoritarian power become visible.

A government can imprison a person.

It cannot imprison an idea.

It can silence a voice.

It cannot silence a truth.

It can force someone into exile.

It cannot force them to believe a lie.

That is why conscience remains one of the most powerful forces in human history. And it is why authoritarian systems fear it so deeply. Because a conscience that refuses to yield becomes a reminder to everyone else that fear is not inevitable, silence is not mandatory, and dignity is not theirs to grant or withhold.

Conscience cannot be imprisoned.

It can be tested.

It can be threatened.

It can be isolated.

But it cannot be confined by prison walls or driven into exile.

And that may be the most important lesson José Daniel Ferrer has to teach us.

Final Thoughts

One quote from my conversation with José Daniel Ferrer has stayed with me ever since: “The best defense we have is that the free world knows what is happening in Cuba.”

When Ferrer spoke those words, he was still living in Cuba. Weeks later, he and his wife were arrested. Looking back, it is impossible to miss the irony.

Ferrer did not simply describe the machinery of repression. He became evidence of it. Yet if there is one lesson that emerges from his story, it is that authoritarianism ultimately depends on fear, silence, and surrender.

José Daniel Ferrer’s life offers a different path.

Seek the truth.

Find the courage to act upon it.

Stand with others.

Endure.

Serve.

And never surrender your conscience.

Because history has shown that even the most powerful and repressive regimes cannot indefinitely withstand ordinary people who refuse to abandon the truth.

Author’s Note

This essay is based on my oral history interview with Cuban dissident José Daniel Ferrer García, conducted while he was still living in Cuba.

The complete interview has been preserved as part of the oral history record and may be viewed here:

[LINK]

I encourage readers to watch the full conversation and hear Ferrer’s testimony in his own words.

When slogans—however noble—begin to feel distant from the reality they attempt to describe. Freedom. Justice. Dignity. We invoke them often, sometimes too easily. But every so often, a voice emerges that forces us to confront what those words actually cost.

Angelica Garrido is one of those voices.

A former Cuban political prisoner, arrested during the July 11, 2021 protests, her testimony—captured in an oral history I had the privilege to produce for the University of Miami’s Cuban Heritage Collection—does not ask for sympathy. It demands witness. (Watch her full interview here)

On July 11, 2021, she was at home when word spread that the people of Cuba had taken to the streets. She left everything behind and joined them. What began as a moment of collective expression quickly revealed itself to be something else entirely. By the following day, she and her sister, María Cristina, were in custody.

There were no charges. No formal process. They were intercepted on the road and taken. What followed was not confusion or excess. It was method.

Angelica describes a violent arrest that escalated inside the transport vehicle—her body restrained, her head forced downward until she could no longer breathe, her consciousness fading as the officers tightened their control. At one point, her fingers were bent back until the tendons gave way. The pain was so severe she lost control of her body.

There was no medical attention waiting for her. There was only the next phase. They were taken to a holding facility where conditions were designed to disorient. A small, windowless cell. Artificial light that never turned off. Time collapsed into something unrecognizable—no day, no night, only interruption. Interrogations at irregular hours. Sleep deprivation as routine.

At the same time, another form of punishment began to take shape. Separation. Her sister disappeared. For eighteen days, there was no information. No acknowledgment of where she had been taken. No way to know whether she was alive, injured, or worse. When María Cristina was finally returned, the evidence of what had happened was visible across her body. Bruises. Weakness. The physical imprint of sustained abuse.

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Later, Angelica would learn more.

Her sister had been isolated, targeted specifically because of her political role. Beaten. Humiliated. Degraded in ways meant not only to inflict pain, but to strip away dignity. She was kept apart from other prisoners, denied even the minimal solidarity that proximity might provide. The system understood something fundamental: isolation weakens resistance.

But it was not always effective.

The two sisters, even when separated, remained aligned in purpose. They organized hunger strikes. They resisted the conditions imposed on them. They spoke, whenever possible, to other prisoners—explaining what it meant to be a political prisoner, reframing their presence not as criminal, but as conscious.

That resistance came at a cost.

Angelica was placed in a punishment cell for sixty-five days. It was a space designed for erasure. A confined cell with no sanitary conditions. A hole in the ground for basic needs. Constant surveillance. No privacy. No relief. The humidity aggravated her asthma. Her body began to deteriorate—fungal infections on her feet, lice, respiratory distress. She was never treated.

She was woken every few hours. Not for questioning or process, but to simply prevent sleep. A form of torture that leaves no visible marks, but accumulates over time—breaking rhythm, thought, and stability.

There were moments when even the most basic human needs were denied. No proper access to water. No medical assistance, even as her condition worsened. She describes bathing with the same container used to clean her cell. Existing in a state where dignity is not simply challenged, but systematically removed.

And still, something remained intact.

“I am not going to negotiate my principles.”

Outside the prison, life continued—but not as it had before. Her parents died during her incarceration. First her father. Then, months later, her mother. She was not there.

No final goodbye. No presence in those final moments. Only the knowledge, delivered from a distance, that loss had occurred—and that it would have to be carried without closure.

This, too, is part of the cost. Not only what is done to the body. But what is taken from a life in progress. And still, the Cuban regime pressed further.

Within the prison, common inmates were used as instruments of control—some coerced, others incentivized to act against political prisoners. Angelica recounts being poisoned through her food. The act was reported. Nothing happened. The message was clear. There were no protections.

At some point, the question shifts—from how to survive, to how to be heard.

For Angelica and the women imprisoned alongside her, the answer was collective.

She wrote a letter documenting their reality. Their conditions. Their demand to be recognized. The words were written in ink. The signatures were not. Each woman pressed her thumb into blood and marked the page.

“The blood symbolizes our sacrifice… and our commitment to the Cuban cause.”

It was not a gesture. It was a declaration.

That letter made its way out—carried by those willing to assume the risk of transmission. Her husband became a critical link, ensuring that what happened inside did not remain hidden.

And yet, when Angelica Garrido reaches the end of her testimony, she does not return to what was done to her.

She looks forward.

“No tengan miedo.”

Do not be afraid.

She speaks not from theory, but from experience. Of what she has seen. Of what she understands the system to be.

“Que no esperen por un Mesías libertador.”

She calls for unity—not as an ideal, but as a necessity. For responsibility—not as something abstract, but as something immediate.

And then, a final image:

“Que las ovejas salgan del redil y se conviertan en leones.”

It is not a call to anger. It is a call to transformation.

Her testimony begins with a step into the street. It passes through confinement, loss, endurance, and resistance. And it ends with a question—unspoken, but unmistakable.

What is a people willing to become in order to be free?

Because the cost of freedom is not only what one is willing to endure.

It is what one is willing to become.

I’ve come to believe that over a lifetime spent listening—to others, and eventually, to my own.

I arrived in the United States from Cuba as a child, part of a generation carried across uncertainty with little more than what our families could hold onto—memories, values, fragments of a life left behind. Like many who came in those years, we moved forward quickly. We built lives, careers, families. We adapted.

But something remained just beneath the surface. A quiet sense that our story—our collective history—was still unfolding, and in many ways, still unrecorded.

Years later, that realization would shape the course of my work.

Through the Immigrant Archive Project, I have had the privilege of sitting across from thousands of individuals whose lives were defined by movement, resilience, and reinvention. I came to understand that history does not live in textbooks. It lives in people—in their voices, in their memories, in the details they carry for decades, waiting to be heard.

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That understanding led me to the University of Miami’s Cuban Heritage Collection.

To walk into the Collection is to encounter something more than an archive. It is a living repository of a nation’s memory—letters carried across oceans, photographs that outlived silence, documents and recordings that hold the weight of personal and collective history.

What distinguishes it is not only its scope, but its intimacy. These are not distant artifacts. They are deeply personal traces of lives once lived—yet still connected to who we are today. And yet, for all its richness, the Collection has remained largely unseen beyond academic circles.

That realization led to a simple idea:

What if we could bring people back to these stories—not as observers, but as participants? That idea became a Television documentary series titled Inside the Cuban Heritage Collection.

Each episode begins with an intimate conversation, where our guest reflects on the life experiences that shaped their identity and sense of legacy.

From there, we enter the Collection together—exploring a curated list of materials that echo and expand those memories. In these moments, something shifts. The past is no longer distant. It becomes immediate. Personal.

In the final act, each guest contributes a meaningful artifact of their own—transforming memory into record, and personal history into something preserved for the future. An act of legacy.

We begin filming on May 15th, marking the first step in what we hope will become an enduring body of work. Each episode will be produced in both English and Spanish, reflecting the dual identity of a community that has always lived between languages and cultures.

The Spanish-language episodes will air on MegaTV in Miami and across its streaming platforms, bringing these stories to audiences in ways that extend far beyond the walls of the Collection.

Our guests will be individuals whose lives have helped shape the Cuban-American experience in meaningful ways.

I am honored to share that Andy Garcia has confirmed his participation. His body of work, and his enduring connection to his heritage, reflect the very themes this series seeks to explore.

In many ways, his involvement affirms something I have come to understand:

These stories are ready to be told.

For years, this collection has safeguarded the fragments of a nation’s story with extraordinary care. Now, for the first time, we open the door.

Not just to scholars, but to a much broader audience—to anyone willing to step inside and discover that these stories are not distant at all.

They are ours.

We hope you’ll join us on Inside the Cuban Heritage Collection.

During a recent March Madness broadcast, Charles Barkley did something that deserves to be recognized and commended. He spoke up after a feature on University of Connecticut star Alex Karaban, whose parents immigrated to the U.S. from Eastern Europe.

At a moment when many choose silence—especially on subjects this sensitive—he chose clarity. He chose honesty. And that matters. More people in positions of influence should be willing to do the same.

“I want to be very careful with my words right now. Cause this is a really touchy subject for me. I love that kid and his family, but the way some of these other immigrants are getting treated in our country right now, is a travesty and a disgrace. I think there’s a difference between amazing immigrants and criminal immigrants. And I think what’s going on in our country, what we’re doing to some of these amazing immigrants is really unfortunate and it’s really sad. And that’s a great immigrant story, we have a lot of great immigrant stories out there that still need to be told, but some of the stuff that’s happening to immigrants in our country right now, is really unfortunate and is really unfair. But immigrants built this country and we should admire them and respect them.”

It wasn’t polished, and it wasn’t calculated. It was honest. And honesty, especially now, carries weight. Too often, the conversation around immigrants is shaped not by what people believe, but by what they are unwilling to say. That is why moments like this matter. Because real change in this country has never come from silence. It has come when voices—credible, visible, and respected—are willing to speak plainly and push back.

Strip away the setting—basketball, television, commentary—and what remains is something far more uncomfortable: a country that celebrates immigrant success while turning a blind eye to the injustice.

That contradiction isn’t new. It is part of our history.

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For nearly 250 years, immigrants have made outsized contributions to this country—building businesses, industries, communities, and institutions. We have fueled its growth, expanded its reach, and strengthened its identity. And yet, recognition has always been conditional.

We are celebrated when we succeed. We are embraced when our stories are complete—when they are safe, resolved, and easy to admire. But too often, we are overlooked—or worse—when we are still in the process. That is where the hypocrisy lives.

Because the same society that proudly points to immigrant success stories often refuses to acknowledge the conditions that make those stories necessary in the first place. Our contributions are praised, but our treatment is ignored. Our outcomes are respected, but our humanity is too often questioned.

Barkley used the phrase “amazing immigrants.” It’s a phrase that resonates—but it also reveals something deeper. Who decides which of us are “amazing”? Is it only after we have proven our worth—after we have succeeded beyond doubt? Or are we willing to recognize the dignity and value of those who are simply working, contributing, and trying to build a life?

Because the truth is, most of us will never be headlines. We are workers, builders, parents, entrepreneurs. We are not the exception. We are the continuation of a story that has defined this country since its founding.

“Immigrants built this country,” Barkley said. That is not a slogan. It is a fact. But it becomes hollow when it is not reflected in how we, as a nation, treat immigrants in the present.

It is easy to honor our contributions in hindsight. It is harder to stand up for our dignity in real time. And yet, that is the test.

Not whether our stories can be celebrated once they are complete, but whether our humanity is recognized—and defended—while they are still being written.

Because what is happening now is not just a matter of policy. It is a matter of character. A measure of whether this country is willing to live up to the history it so often claims to honor.

And this is why what Charles Barkley did matters. Because too many know better—and say nothing. To those who are willing to speak anyway, who refuse to look away, who push back when it would be easier to stay quiet—thank you.

That is where change begins.

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I once came across the idea that we die twice. The first time is when our bodies give way. The second is the last time someone speaks our name.

There is something deeply human in that thought. It suggests that memory—spoken, shared, carried forward—is what keeps us alive beyond our years.

And if that is true of a single life, it is also true of a people.

Cultures do not disappear all at once. They fade in the same quiet way. When the stories are no longer told. When long held traditions are no longer celebrated. When the memories are no longer passed down.

We tend to believe that memory is inherited. That it moves effortlessly from one generation to the next. That the stories we grew up hearing will somehow remain intact long after we are gone.

But memory doesn’t work that way.

Memory is fragile. It depends on repetition. On context. On care. It lives in conversations at the dinner table, in the pauses between sentences, in the way a story is told for the third or fourth time—each telling reinforcing not just the facts, but the meaning behind them.

And then, slowly, those moments begin to disappear.

The first generation carries the culture because they lived it.
The second generation understands it because it was passed down to them directly.
By the third, it becomes something more distant—something abstract.

Details fade. Names, language, traditions, recipes, blur. The emotional weight softens.

And eventually, what was once lived experience becomes little more than a footnote.

When that happens, something deeper is lost.

Because cultural memory is not just about preserving the past—it is about preserving understanding. It is what allows one generation to recognize the sacrifices of another. It is what anchors identity, giving context to who we are and how we arrived here.

It is also where we find our bearings.

Within the fabric of every culture are the principles that guide how we live—how we face adversity, how we define success, how we treat one another. These are not always written down, but they are passed along through stories, through example, through lived experience.

And when cultural memory is lost, those principles often disappear with it—leaving behind a sense of direction that is harder to recover.

Without it, we begin to lose more than stories. We lose perspective, empathy and connection.

And eventually, we lose something even more fundamental.

The customs that shaped daily life. The traditions that gave meaning to gatherings and rituals. The foods that carried memory from one generation to the next. The core beliefs that defined a people.

What was once lived and practiced begins to disappear—quietly, almost imperceptibly—until an entire way of life risks being reduced to fragments.

And yet, history also reminds us of something else.

That cultural memory does not survive by accident. It survives because people choose to protect it. Across generations, and often against tremendous odds, communities have found ways to carry their traditions forward.

Families arriving in a new country with little more than what they could carry—yet somehow holding on to recipes passed down over generations, recreating them from memory in unfamiliar kitchens.

Parents insisting their children learn a language that the outside world does not always value—because they understand that within that language lives a way of seeing the world that cannot be translated.

Celebrations observed quietly at first, sometimes in private, before they reemerge in full color and confidence—holidays, music, rituals that refuse to disappear.

These are not small acts. They are acts of preservation. Acts of resistance. A quiet but powerful insistence that identity will not be erased—that memory will endure, even in the face of displacement, assimilation, and time.

In my own work, I’ve had the privilege of sitting across from individuals who carry entire worlds within them—stories shaped by migration, sacrifice, reinvention, and perseverance. Stories that, in many cases, were never written down. Never formally recorded. Stories that lived only in their voices.

What becomes clear, very quickly, is how easily those stories could be lost. Not out of neglect. But out of time. Because time moves forward, whether we choose to capture these stories or not.

And if we don’t, they go with the people who carry them.

Which brings us back to that simple, haunting idea:

We die twice.

Once when we leave this world.
And once when our name is spoken for the last time.

Cultural memory works the same way.

It survives only as long as it is spoken. As long as it is shared. As long as someone takes the time to listen—and then to tell the story again.

The question is not whether cultural memory can survive.
History has shown us that it can.

It was passed on to us by those who came before.

Now, we are the stewards.

And what happens next is up to us.

In the world of Hispanic marketing, Roberto Madan was widely respected as one of the early figures who helped shape how a major American company engaged with the U.S. Hispanic market.

At McDonald’s, he was more than a successful owner-operator. He was part of a small group of pioneering Hispanic leaders who helped the company understand that reaching Hispanic consumers required more than translating advertisements. It required cultural understanding, trust, and long-term commitment to a community that was rapidly becoming one of the most important forces in the American marketplace.

His work helped open doors for Hispanic entrepreneurs within the McDonald’s system and contributed to a relationship between the brand and the U.S. Hispanic community that continues to this day.

But the story of Roberto Madan did not begin in a boardroom.

It began in Havana.

Before becoming a respected figure in Hispanic marketing, Roberto Madan had lived a life that seemed pulled from a novel. As a young man he knew Fidel Castro personally. After the revolution, he was arrested by the new regime, imprisoned, and eventually escaped from prison and fled communist Cuba.

When he came to the United States, he arrived with little more than determination.

At his side was his wife, Ana María, the love of his life and an essential partner in everything they would build together. Ana María had earned a Ph.D. in Cuba, and like Roberto, she understood that education would be their path forward.

Together, they rebuilt their lives in New Jersey, both finding work as educators and teaching at the same high school. It was a partnership defined by shared values, discipline, and a belief in the future they were creating for their family.

His first job paid a dollar and a sandwich in a factory. From there he slowly rebuilt his life. He bought a gas station in New Jersey, became a high school teacher and coach, and decades later—well into his mid-fifties—began the business career that would ultimately define his legacy as a McDonald’s owner-operator.

Roberto Madan lived to be one hundred years old.

Years ago, I had the privilege of sitting with him and asking him to tell me about his life. What followed was not a lecture or a set of carefully prepared lessons. It was simply a man recounting the chapters of his journey—his youth in Havana, prison, exile, the early years in America, and the long climb that followed.

When I recently revisited the transcript of that conversation, something began to stand out. Threaded throughout his life story—his youth in Havana, the years of upheaval, the long process of starting over in America—there were moments that revealed his unique approach to life.

Sometimes it appeared in a passing remark about work. Other times in the way he described adversity, family, or opportunity. At first they seemed like simple observations.

Only later did I realize that those remarks, taken together, revealed something far deeper.

The ten principles of Roberto Madan.

1. Move through life step by step.

“Paso a paso,” he said.

Roberto believed success rarely arrived in dramatic leaps. It came instead through steady progress—small victories accumulated over time.

“If you set small goals,” he told me, “you reach them quickly and you feel victorious.”His own life reflected this philosophy. When he arrived in the United States, there was no grand opportunity waiting for him.

Over time he built stability. He eventually bought a gas station in New Jersey, learning the rhythms of American business one day at a time. His education from Cuba opened another door. He became a high school teacher and coach, helping guide young people while continuing to search for the next opportunity.

None of it resembled the mythology of instant success often attached to immigrant stories. Roberto Madan’s life unfolded slowly, across decades.

And then, in his mid-fifties, long after many people imagine their path is already set, he began yet another chapter. He became a McDonald’s owner-operator, opening a restaurant near Wall Street and building a business that would sustain his family for decades—a legacy his daughter and granddaughter continue today.

2. Never measure your life against someone else’s.

“Never look at what the man next to you has,” Roberto said.

Comparison, in his view, was the quickest path to frustration. Every person’s journey unfolds under different circumstances—different starting points, different obstacles, different opportunities.

The only path that truly matters is your own.

In many ways, that advice feels even more relevant today, as we now live in an era where social media constantly invites us to compare our lives to carefully curated versions of other people’s success. But he understood something fundamental: progress rarely happens on a schedule that looks like anyone else’s.

His own life was proof of that. Measured against someone else’s timeline, that path might have looked slow. Measured against his own determination, it was exactly right.

Because in Roberto’s view, success was never about keeping pace with others.

It was simply about moving forward.

3. Education is the one thing no one can take away.

For a long time Mr. Madan believed he had arrived in America with nothing. Then one day he realized he had brought something invaluable. “I thought I came with nothing,” he said. “Then I realized I came with my education. And education is everything.”

It was that education that eventually allowed him to leave factory work and begin building a new life. After losing everything to a totalitarian regime, Roberto came to understand something profound: education is the one thing that can never be taken from you.

4. Accept reality and work with it.

Roberto did not waste time resisting circumstances he could not change. “When something bad happens,” he said, “I don’t cry. I ask how to fix it.” That mindset shaped the way he approached the enormous changes that came after leaving Cuba.

In Havana, he had lived a comfortable life. His days revolved around tennis matches at the Vedado Tennis Club, afternoons by the pool, and evenings at cabarets listening to artists like Benny Moré and Olga Guillot. It was a world of social clubs, friends, and familiar rhythms.

All of that disappeared the moment he left Cuba.

When he arrived in the United States, the reality was very different. There were no social clubs waiting for him, no familiar status, and no easy path forward. For many people, that kind of fall—from comfort to hardship—might have produced resentment or bitterness. Roberto saw it differently.

He accepted the new reality and went to work.

There was no sense of victimhood in the way he described those years. He and his family simply understood that their lives had entered a new chapter. And rather than dwelling on what had been lost, they focused on what could still be built.

5. Do not live in nostalgia.

When we spoke about Cuba, Roberto said something that stayed with me. “My Cuba died.” It was not said with bitterness. It was simply a recognition that the world he had once known no longer existed.

Many exiles preserved the past as a permanent refuge, holding tightly to the memory of a country that had disappeared. He chose something different. He honored the life he had lived in Havana, but he refused to freeze his future inside it.

Instead, he reframed the experience of exile entirely. “I didn’t emigrate looking for opportunity,” he told me. “I emigrated to change my life.” That distinction mattered to him. It meant accepting that the past had ended and that the only meaningful path forward was to begin again.

For Roberto, America was not the end of one story. It was the beginning of another.

6. Work is not a burden—it is a privilege.

Well into his late nineties, Mr. Madan continued getting dressed in his trademark suit and tie and driving himself to the office each morning. Once there, he remained engaged in every aspect of the business, reviewing the numbers with the careful attention to detail of a seasoned CPA.

Roberto always spoke about work with enormous appreciation. For him, work represented something larger than a paycheck. It meant independence. It meant the ability to support his family, rebuild his life, and shape his future in a country that had given him the chance to begin again.

Whether he was working long hours after buying his gas station, teaching and coaching students, or later running his McDonald’s restaurants, he approached work with the same quiet enthusiasm.

For Roberto, work was never something to escape. It was the privilege of having the freedom to build a life.

7. Never spend money before you earn it.

His philosophy about money was simple and disciplined.

“Spend the money however you want,” he said. “But only after you earn it.”

That mindset was shaped during the early years of his life in the United States, when every dollar mattered. At one point he found work in a vitamin factory in Philadelphia. Each week he traveled there and stayed through Friday before returning home to his family. Before leaving, he packed five sandwiches—one for each day of the workweek. By Friday, he admitted, the sandwich wasn’t very good anymore. But he ate it anyway.

What mattered was not comfort. What mattered was responsibility. Those early years reinforced something Roberto never forgot: financial discipline is not about deprivation. It is about independence.

Spend what you want, he believed—but only after the work has been done and the money has been earned. Never spend money before you earn it.

8. Family is the true measure of success.

For all of Roberto Madan’s accomplishments in business, the subject that animated him most was his family.

“My family is my world,” he told me.

Everything else—his success as a McDonald’s owner-operator, his influence within Hispanic marketing, and his efforts to open doors for Hispanic entrepreneurs—existed within that larger purpose.

Nothing reflected that more clearly than the pride he felt when speaking about his daughter, Ana Madan. Over time she developed into a highly respected McDonald’s owner-operator in her own right, eventually becoming the first female president of the McDonald’s Hispanic Owner Operators Association.

His son, Pepe, also followed in his footsteps, becoming a McDonald’s owner-operator and continuing the family’s presence within the system.

He also spoke with deep satisfaction about his grandchildren. Education had always been central to his philosophy of life, and he took enormous pride in the fact that every one of his grandchildren understood its importance and had graduated from college.

For Roberto, this was the true measure of a life well lived. Not simply the businesses he built, but the people who would carry forward the values that shaped them.

9. If you succeed, create opportunity for others.

Roberto believed success carried an obligation.

Over the years I saw this commitment firsthand.

One example that has always stayed with me involves Steve Samuel, whom I know personally. Steve’s career began in an untraditional way. In 1984, he was a teenager when he got his first job at one of Roberto’s McDonald’s restaurants. He was fired on his first day. But Steve came back and asked for another chance.

Roberto agreed—but on one condition. Steve had to re-enroll in school and finish his education.

It was a pattern that defined the way Roberto helped people. He was willing to open a door—but only if the person walking through it was willing to do the work.

Steve did.

Over time, he built a career within the organization. He became a supervisor on January 1, 1990, and eventually rose to serve as Director of Operations, a role he held for more than three decades. After years of what was described as exceptional commitment and drive, Steve began the process of becoming an owner-operator. He completed the program in just five months—a process that typically takes several years.

In 2023, Steve Samuel became a McDonald’s owner-operator in Atlanta, Georgia.

For Roberto, success was never simply about the businesses he built. It was about the lives that could change when someone was given a chance—and when someone else cared enough to insist that they rise to meet it.

10. Enjoy the life you are given.

Near the end of our conversation, Roberto reflected on the long arc of his life—from Havana to prison, from exile to opportunity, from factory work to business success.

He spoke with pride about his daughter Ana. He spoke about his grandchildren and their commitment to education. And I could not help thinking about people like Steve Samuel, whose life had also been shaped by Roberto’s belief that opportunity must always be paired with discipline and education.

Then Roberto said something simple.

“I enjoyed my life every day.” Few people can say that honestly. Fewer still after one hundred years.

But Roberto Madan could.

Because in the end, the meaning of a life is not found in the circumstances we inherit, or even in the successes we achieve. It is found in the paths we open for others—and in the values that continue long after we are gone.