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children believed their parents when they were informed that anyone who called himself a Communist was evil and that Fidel was an absurd, strutting madman. My parents instructed me that anyone who said the Cuban revolution was bad, including the President of the United States, was wrong and I believed them. At eight, those were my politics.
    However, at eight I was not passionate about politics. I was passionate about the New York Yankees. Unfortunately, even that commitment wasn’t free of ideological scrutiny. My grandfather Pepín was a Dodger fan and a Yankee hater. I didn’t understand the reason why until years later when I learned the sociology of baseball for his generation. The working class rooted for the Dodgers and Giants (or the Sox or the Indians) while the middle and upper classes were Yankee fans. What I saw as virtues about the Yankees, namely their wealth of talent and consistent success, made them symbols of privilege to Grandpa Pepín. Sure, they won more games than anybody else, he conceded, but they had bought their championships, not earned them. Besides, they were a racist franchise, unwilling to use “the colored ballplayers.” I didn’t argue with the old man. After all, the reason I became a Yankee fan wasn’t so high-falutin: in 1960 they were the only baseball team in New York City.
    Anyway, Grandmother Jacinta didn’t allow Pepín to bother me about my team for very long. If Grandpa berated me for more than a sentence or two, she would mumble at him in rapid Spanish, too fast for me to understand. I heard the word “chico,” indicating me, and I saw the dismissive wave of her hand, which meant he was to shut up, an order that—to my surprise—Grandpa obeyed. Standing beside his small wife, made smaller by her hunched back, Pepín looked able to step on her, but she ruled him and everyone in her house without contradiction or even fear of it.
    This dictatorship was to my liking: Grandma seemed to think I could do no wrong and that everyone else was too hard on me. She was fiercely demanding of the others in her family (and their friends, too) but all she required of me was that I eat the delicious food she cooked. Even that demand was flexible: if I didn’t like what she cooked, she would make something else. Freud, in one of his rare optimistic moods, wrote that “happiness is a childhood wish fulfilled.” Grandma Jacinta managed to fulfill many of mine while I was still a child. In that respect she fit the only generalized description one can make of good parenting.
    My mother and I arrived in Tampa midday on July 1st. That evening we listened to my father on a Miami radio station whose signal was powerful enough to be heard in Tampa. He sounded happy and smart. I moved close to the speaker of my grandparents’ old-fashioned receiver and felt his voice resonate in me. The house was full of relatives and friends. They mumbled their agreement with my father’s arguments; they talked aloud their approval the way the parishioners of Martin Luther King Jr.’s church amened and called out, “Teach it, Martin,” as he sermonized.
    [Remember, these Latins were not the exiles who now dominate the Cuban-American community. These 1960 Tampa Latins were not middle- and upper-class refugees from the terrors of socialism, or fleeing officials and officers of Batistas government and army, but the children of poor 19th century immigrants. Their parents had fled the inequities of Spain’s monarchy. They had been wounded by Franco’s defeat of Republican Spain and had to bear the ongoing heartbreak of his facism. In the United States—their adopted country, Franco’s ally and Fidel’s enemy—they were regarded as only slightly more respectable versions of niggers. These Cuban-Americans believed that Castro’s army consisted of people like themselves, oppressed workers and peasants, whose only motive was to rescue their beautiful ancestral island from its status as the premier whorehouse