The Beginning of my Relationship with Cuba

In the spring of 1959, my grandparents surprised my mom, dad and me with our first TV, a 25-inch Magnavox, for my parents’ twenty-fifth wedding anniversary.  Fidel Castro was in the United States and the first channel I flipped on showed his visit to Harlem and to the United Nations in New York.  Was I ever fascinated by this outspoken revolutionary speaking live on TV!  He wore fatigues and had a beard like my "bohemian" brother.  He was “liberating” a place I knew about because of my aunts’ and uncles’ gambling in the early 1950s on overnight boats to Havana.  But it wasn’t until twenty years later that I went to Cuba the first time for a week and came back convinced that I had visited paradise.