The following story was published as part of the book FOREVER TEXAS, depicting my family's saga from Cuba to Texas. Enjoy!
From Havana to Silicon Hills
It all started with a bang. The date was April 17, 1961. The place was Havana, Cuba. I was born as bullets and mortar shells zoomed overhead during the failed CIA-backed invasion at Bay of Pigs. In the middle of my cesarean delivery, while the distant sound of artillery rounds rattled the hospital windows, Castro's militia burst inside the operating room and arrested the surgeon on treason charges--never mind that he had still not completed the procedure, leaving my fate--and my mother's--in the hands of nurses. I guess in retrospect that shouldn't have been too surprising. Though I didn't know it then, I had just been born into a family of fighters, men and women with fire in their hearts and steel in their fists. My exciting delivery fit right in with my family's tradition. Take my dad, for starters, a young engineer with a beautiful wife and an infant son, trying to get us out of the country while Castro still allowed one daily "freedom" flight to Miami for gusanos--the worms opposing his revolution. But Castro wasn't letting professionals out, gusanos or not. He wanted to hang on to the doctors, the industrialists, the scientists, forcing my dad to resort to desperate measures: sneaking into the university at night--at the risk of getting five years in prison--and stealing his school records. "I burned them," he once told me. "So no one would know that I was an engineer." For him, as for so many other Cubans, the choices were clear: libertad o muerte (freedom or death). His trick worked. Six agonizing months later he boarded a plane to Miami, but without my mother and I. That was another one of Castros's ploys to deter gusanos from fleeing his regime: not letting families leave together. Undaunted by this threat, determined to live by his own rules, my dad chose to call Castro's bluff and left anyway. Hi gamble paid off: my mother and I joined him 6 weeks later. Of course, we all reached freedom with nothing but the clothes we wore. If Castro's militia caught you trying to snuggle anything out of the country, even your own wedding band, they would take your children away from you to be raised by the Communist system--a risk neither of my parents was willing to take. But that episode wasn't nearly as exciting as my dad's youngest sister's saga to leave Cuba. The freedom flights were cancelled before my aunt's turn came up. Three months pregnant at the time, she was forced into a more radical approach: together with her husband and a friend, they hijacked a Cuban airliner and forced the pilot to fly to Miami at gunpoint. Unfortunately, none of them knew much about navigation. The pilot tricked them by circling over the ocean for twenty minutes before doubling back to the island, landing at a nearby airport, where local officials had stretched a banner reading, WELCOME TO MIAMI. Somehow the pilot had managed to notify the authorities and they sprung this spontaneous trap. All three were arrested as they ran away from the plane thinking that they had reached freedom. Instead they were all sentenced to 30 years in prison. My aunt served 17 years (she gave birth in her cell) before being paroled. She then managed to get a temporary visa to visit Nicaragua, and from there she fled north, by foot, through Central America and Mexico, crossing the Rio Grande and obtaining political asylum in the United States. Fire in our hearts and steel in our fists. Someone once told me that good judgment comes from experience. The problem is that experience often comes from bad judgment. In hindsight, one could argue that my father used poor judgment when he opted to move to Argentina instead of remaining in Florida. But at the time he needed a job (he was into plastics in those days) and his only immediate prospect was in Buenos Aires. So off we went, with my mother already pregnant with my twin sisters, to a land that soon fell into the economic depression of the Peron years--and the rapidly devaluating peso that made my father's savings worthless. We only lasted two years down there, before starting our slow migration back north, with a supposedly six-month pit stop in El Salvador, Central America, where the chance to launch a new plastics factory presented my dad with a unique short-term opportunity. Back in 1965 El Salvador was quite the tropical paradise with plenty of growth opportunity--so much that we stayed there for 16 years. And I think my parents would have settled there permanently had it not been for the unrest that precluded that country's 12-year-long civil war. Having lived through the Cuban revolution, my dad saw it coming again in El Salvador and started making preparations to come to the United States. This time around he would not leave with just the shirt on his back. In my years growing up in El Salvador I saw my fair share of death and destruction that so often comes with living in Third World countries, and more so as the nation spiraled into a bloody civil war between Marxist rebels and the right-wing government. Civilians, of course, are always caught in the middle in such conflicts. Rebels would often stop traffic to collect donations for their cause. They smiled as they produced an empty can and asked for your pocket change. They continued to smile while patting their AK-47 assault rifles hanging from their shoulders. Later on government forces would question those caught supporting the rebels and label them as Communist sympathizers. You were really stuck between a rock and a hard place, destined sooner or later to become a victim of either the right-wing death squads, or the leftist rebels. It was really time to pack it up and head north. But we couldn't all leave at once. Many preparations needed to be done before leaving, so I volunteered to come up first. I'd always wanted to move to the U.S. and saw the unrest in El Salvador as my chance to start living life by my own rules, just like my father had. I'd known for some time that I would come here for college, so why not do it a little sooner and finish high school in the States? So I did, coming to this country (Florida of all places ) in 1977 at the age of 16 to start my new life, alone, and in a country in which I didn't speak the language. But I adapted quickly, and within one year I had not only mastered the English language, but was one of the highest ranking students in my high school, plus I had earned my private pilot's license by my 17th birthday. I guess some of that fire and steel did live within me after all. By 1979, civil war finally erupted in El Salvador, and my parents and sisters could no longer remain there, so they joined me in Baton Rouge, where I had just begun attending college at Louisiana State University. I always tell people that two good things came out of the four years I spent at LSU: my computer engineering degree, and my wife, Lory Anne, with whom I'll be celebrating my 17th wedding anniversary soon, in the company of our ten-year-old son, Cameron. Joining the emerging high-tech industry in Austin seemed like the next logical step after LSU. In hindsight it turned out to be one of the best decisions I've ever made. When I begun my career at Advanced Micro Devices in 1983, the personal computer was a little more than a novelty and the Internet was a pipe dream. But it was here that our battle begun in the growing field of microprocessors, the heart of the personal computer. As I write this, seventeen years later, I realize just how blessed I've been to have participated in this incredible revolution in speed and performance--a revolution equal to the birth and development of 20th-century aviation. Those old 8-bit, 1st-generation microprocessors that I worked on as a young engineer, and which powered the original IBM PCs at frequencies of 2 MHz, were the fragile contraptions flown by the Wright Brothers at Kitty Hawk--good concepts with little immediate practical application, but with a lot of potential. By contrast, today's 64-bit, 8th-generation, GHz microprocessors can be equaled to the latest airliners. But while it took 40 years for air transportation to become a practical reality, it only took half that time for computers to change the world. But the change didn't come without extreme personal sacrifice. There are tens of thousands of unsung heroes in this high-tech race, the brave men and women fighting daily battles at places with names like AMD, Motorola, IBM, and Gateway. These are the unknown warriors, the faceless teams that invent the technology of our times, paving the way for the future, oftentimes at the cost of failed marriages and deteriorating health. They are the ones who created Silicon Valley, as well as its recent sibling in Austin, Texas, Silicon Hills. There is also another aspect of my life that I've failed to mention. While my love for technology propelled me into a career in engineering, I also discovered another passion ten years ago: writing. I begun writing fiction almost overnight, from the heart, finishing my first novel in 6 months. Getting published, however, turned out to be the single most challenging thing I've ever done. But some of the old family determination that flows through my veins kept me going, chipping away at each roadblock, until my writing career finally took wing. From Havana to Silicon Hills. At times I think of all the forces that got me here, of all of the sacrifices my parents made to give us a better life. This is indeed a wonderful land, whose virtues are often overlooked by those focusing on petty things. They should be kissing the ground they walk on. I know I do it every day.
