MIAMI — I did not meet Fidel Castro in a history book like most American children. I met him in my house surrounded by “early exile” furniture, a term my mother favored. I bumped into him at the dining room table over a meal or in the living room while the grown-ups drank tumblers of whiskey or at the beach when my mother cursed him, toes in the sand, as she remembered Cuba’s idyllic beaches.  Worst of all, I ran into Castro in my childhood nightmares.  He was a version of the boogeyman and, even 220 miles away, he was impossible to escape.  Born three years after my parents, sister and brother were forced out of Havana in 1961, I, like others of my generation, was a child forged in loss and fury but raised on perseverance and indomitability. We were only as Cuban as the nostalgic stories and traditions that our parents passed on to us. So we pined for the imaginary — relatives we never met, houses we never lived in, mangos we never tasted, seawater we never swam in — and for the notion of what should have been.  But there was a bond that Fidel Castro inadvertently created between exiles that I could never share, one built on trauma and survival. Not a single memorable story my family told involved me or the world I lived in. It often felt as if I could have walked out of the room and nobody would have noticed. My life seemed so uneventful by comparison; my freedom wasn’t hard-won. (The Cuba I would come to know was Little Havana, right here in Miami, something I talked about in an article about a year ago.)  Even something as simple as an old blurred photograph from Cuba — my parents had only a handful — unspooled a film reel of adventures. Most Cubans fled the island with only a few clothes, their shoes and, if they were lucky, a little money. Mementos stayed behind. As a result, the simplest things inspired awe.  Once, at his home in South Miami, my brother, then middle-aged, retrieved a weathered cardboard box, smaller than a shoe box. The Red Cross had handed these boxes out to Cuban refugees as they arrived at the airport in 1961. It had contained a toothbrush, toothpaste, soap and Band-Aids. My mother and sister had long forgotten about it. To them, it was an artifact from a lost civilization.  After I heard the news that Castro had died, I smiled, then cheered, alone in a room, and got to work covering the reaction in Miami. With his brother, Raúl Castro, firmly in control for a decade, Castro’s death will do little to change Cuba, at least in the short term. (This is one reason the celebrations in Miami lasted little more than a day and did not shut down the city.) Fidel has become a symbol, an artifact of another kind, of a failed system, nothing more.  But, amid all the pent-up catharsis Castro’s death uncorked here, there was, for many of us, a flash of regret: Our parents had not lived long enough to hear the news.  So, like my brother did Saturday night surrounded by his loved ones, we raise a glass, in honor of their escape from a tyrant, finally gone.
A reporter born after her family was exiled from Cuba reflects on growing up in Miami, in Fidel Castro’s shadow.