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gave them to him. Walking home shoeless would have been more than an inconvenience to him. He wore a leg brace, and was embarrassed by it—we rarely saw him barefoot even around the house. He owned only two pairs of shoes: one for wearing in public, the other for wearing at home.
    I don’t remember him ever buying anything for himself. He drove a red 1973 Chevrolet Impala for twenty years. He wore a Seiko watch until the day he died, even though its gold plating had worn off long before. Every item of clothing he wore had been purchased for him by my mother or given to him as a gift. He wasn’t perfect, but I’ve never met another person in my life as selfless as my father.
    Life was changing in the States. The civil rights movement was reaching its zenith. America was increasingly involved in Vietnam, and the war’s unpopularity, particularly among the young, helped cause the social upheavals that gave the decade its reputation for radicalism. The changes demanded by social activists in the baby boomer generation, who weren’t content to be an exact replica of the preceding generation, would affect the values of every institution in America—education, lifestyles, laws, relations between the sexes, entertainment.
    Acculturation is never an easy process for immigrants, but it must have been all the more daunting when American mores seemed to be changing overnight. My parents were conservative by nature and in their politics. America was their haven. They had never expected the United States to be beset by so much turmoil, much as they hadn’t expected that the Castro regime would prevent them from living in Cuba again. But they raised their children to respect their new country, and the conservative values they held dear.
    My parents bought their first house in 1966, in Miami. All my mother’s sisters were now living in the United States, with her parents living in a nearby apartment building. In 1967, my grandmother suffered a fatal heart attack in her sleep. She was sixty-four years old, the beloved matriarch of the García family. Her sudden death devastated my grandfather and mother, and was a crushing blow to my father as well. She had treated him as her son, and he had loved her as his mother.
    The nation’s political and social unrest dominated the news in 1968.But after a decade of struggles, my parents had come to achieve some relative stability. My brother, Mario, was the quarterback of the local high school football team. My sister Barbara was enrolled in ballet lessons, and my mother doted on her like a little doll. After high school, my brother enlisted in the army, serving as a Green Beret in the 7th Special Forces Group, stationed at Fort Bragg. My parents couldn’t afford to send him to college, but after he completed his service in 1971, he used the GI Bill to finish his education.
    By the start of the new decade, my parents had much to be grateful for. Although he had failed at business, through hard work my father had achieved enough financial security that my mother, who had worked as a cashier at the Crown Hotel, could now consider staying at home. My father was forty-five and my mother was forty-one, an age when they could expect my brother, who would soon marry, to give them grandchildren. In October of 1970, my parents learned that a new member of the Rubio family was indeed on the way. But it was not my brother’s wife who was expecting.
    I was born on May 28, 1971. My younger sister, Veronica, was born the following year. My mother and father were starting over again as parents in the country they now called home.
    My parents had lived in America for nearly two decades. It was clear that Cuba had become a thoroughly totalitarian state, and would likely remain so for some time. They had endured many disappointments, and their lives would never be easy. But slowly and surely they made a better life for our family than they had had as children, or could have ever been possible for them in