My grandmother was still a young woman in 1959. The morning she was supposed to pick up my grandfather from one of Castro’s gulags in Havana, where he had been imprisoned for the “crime” of serving as a naval physician under the previous government, she received a phone call. Change of plans. She would be collecting his body instead.
Abuela fled her country immediately with their two children. Never to return. Never to remarry. She wore black every day for the rest of her life.
My father, then just 20 years old, devoted what remained of his days to Cuba’s freedom. First at the Bay of Pigs. Then in Miami, aiding other exiles and refugees of other dictatorships as a leader and activist in our community. The years passed. He never lost hope, but the battle scars took their toll. He died in 1999, his dream still deferred. At his funeral Mass, we draped a Cuban flag over his coffin. He would have wanted it that way.
Similar stories played out on my mother’s side, with my grandparents leaving everything behind to start anew when they were nearing 60. My wife, who was born and raised on the island, never got to kiss her own father goodbye, an engineer who died of a heart attack while dispatched to work on rural farms outside Caracas.
Our story is tragic, but it is not unique. I was raised in a community of decent men and women who held the noblest aspirations for their homeland, only to watch the world’s most fashionable elites romanticize their tormentors while their friends and family were tortured in prisons and drowned at sea. Millions have gone to their graves, and countless others sleep at the bottom of the Florida Straits, after risking everything for the freedom and dignity that so many take for granted.
The same dictatorship that destroyed them sank its claws into other lands, using the meager resources it plundered from its own people to sustain machineries of torture and oppression in places like Angola, Nicaragua, Grenada, and Venezuela. Too often, the world stood idly by. No more.
Today’s capture of Nicolás Maduro marks a glorious day for human freedom, one that rekindles the flame that lit the lives of those who never lived to see their dreams fulfilled. But our parents and grandparents worked, organized, bled, and died so that we, and the heirs they would never meet, might one day. They did not die in vain. Their hope lives on, and it falls to our generation to see it through.
I am now in my early 40s and became a father last year. My daughter, my wife, and I are Americans, but we celebrate today knowing our little girl may one day come to know the place, under a new banner of freedom, that her family once called home.
Que viva Venezuela libre — y pronto, si Dios quiere, Cuba.