August 23 is a kind of Independence Day for my family and me. That date in 2022 is something like the 4th of July for the American nation. It does not have the same implications, I know, for a country to sign its Declaration of Independence from the British Empire, as it does for a couple and their child to disembark on a Havana-Miami flight to request political asylum. But after almost a decade doing journalism inside the totalitarian Cuban State where I experienced arrests and threats of jail and death, it felt like fresh air on my face, like Washington crossing the Delaware River.

As a 32-year-old Cuban who had lived his entire life under Castroism, I was clear about something: a person’s first homeland is the family. In Christian ethics, it is the first ministry. For those who live in a country diluted by socialism, it means immediate refuge. Building a strong family, with compassion and values, is a good way to make the community and the nation better. And wherever the family was, there was the homeland of the expatriates.

Living in the United States brought changes. Football is soccer, kilometers are miles, Celsius is Fahrenheit.

Time, or rather the valuation of time, changed. Under freedom, where a person has hope, time is money. How much does your time cost? So many dollars per hour. Here your hours are worth it, the same ones that in the centralized socialist economy someone could lose standing in lines and in unproductive and counterproductive activities such as acts of revolutionary reaffirmation or volunteer work. Where there is no hope, time passes slowly. Under freedom, time passes quickly.

Freedom can be understood by some as a spatial issue: moving away from the regime that promotes slavery and distorts the natural law. On the other hand, my compatriot José Martí stated that “being cultured is the only way to be free.” I believe that freedom is in the sum of both scenarios, the spatial and the interior, because we are flesh and spirit at the same time, the soul and the body cannot be separated.

If the emigrant’s fate is to begin again, the fate of the Cuban is to be reborn. Learn to drive amid honking horns and monstrously large avenues, process life digitally and efficiently, rearrange your possibilities in a job market and country that opens its arms, but to which you have not yet contributed a minute or a dollar in your life.

It reminds me of the stories of former Cuban government ministers who, arriving in Florida in the 1960s, had just become elevator operators; doctors became gardeners; businessmen cleaned floors. Everything with honor, with the culture of effort that made Cuba great, and with the American freedom that allowed them to rebuild their lives until they got ahead or lent their shoulders so that their children and grandchildren could achieve success in the new society.

Mine is one more story in that growing choir of Cuban exile, a dead body that will leave only anecdotes, but will build a cornerstone for the next generations of exiles.

Once I arrived in Miami, I worked on whatever appeared. This country owes me nothing and I owe everything to my family. I met the most varied range of people cutting grass and hearing the stories of giant Burmese pythons on a farm in the Redlands, stacking fruit, making changes, carrying high-impact windows (which, before withstanding hurricanes, fatigue the strength of the most willing men), putting carpets in warehouses, giant rolls that weighed as much as two men, with a Guatemalan man, his teenage daughter and a Venezuelan woman in her forties.

The young girl arrived in the United States with a study scholarship, but she had no qualms about helping her father, strengthened by years of straight and hard work. A lot of effort, and no Instagram or TikTok. People like that inspire.

The Venezuelan spoke at length about the Chavista disaster while she shredded the chicken at lunchtime. Learning and friendship made up for the knee pain the job imposes on newbies. Decent people are good company.

Being reborn to freedom was also for me a crash course in the credit system, with its cards and credit scores, bank loans, health insurance, the processing of taxes that in socialism were simply taken away from you. Add to that a new family calendar to teach with love, along with all its new habits: Halloween, Thanksgiving, Christmas, Saint Patrick’s Day. Receiving postal mail (what a surprise!), not standing in 10-hour lines in front of a store without food or medicine in the hope that you can buy something.

Miami, in addition to its conversion into a megacity that expands every day with its chaos and evils, is also a symbol where millions continue to find a future.

The Cubans made a refuge for themselves here, but with a view to the south, beyond Key Largo, where the road ends that strings the islets together like necklace shells. Cuba is their longing, but in the wait they gave the world the great metropolis of exiles. Lakes everywhere, tamed into soft shapes, remind us that men provided with initiative and in a climate of freedom can make the swamp a wonder.

In Miami there is a survival of Cuban culture. From the guava pastry, the tamal, the congrís, the materva, the marks of nostalgia, to writers defenestrated by socialism, festivals of the country taken away, monuments to its heroes of yesteryear and modern patriots.

If for some building the city has been their offering to freedom, for me it has been taking care of my family.

The contradiction of founding and letting go, loving what is founded more than oneself and watching over its height with hope and trembling describes the restless backwater of the family.

Before my wife and I loved each other, our son did not exist. By loving each other, that peaceful volcano emerged that disrupted our lives. The new stem greened the tree completely, from the flower on its forehead to the embraced roots of two different worlds.

The joy of the son is now cardinal. Not essential or primordial, but cardinal: that he guides and gives certainty to guide and form. Our happiness, to a large extent, is more focused on him enjoying the sea than on walking along the shore holding hands; for him to run, jump and sing, than to dance and go to the movies.

He is another bridge that connects our hands through his. He does not dismember our union, he strengthens it; It does not impoverish the happiness that we have treasured, it expands it to a new area that was not there before, which was born when we knew that it was a flash of life within another life.

That fragile connection between vertex and vertex produces strength in the family that is proof against anything: that of sacrifice. We know that the one who loves oneself is fragile, human in falling and getting right, getting up and making mistakes, and one’s own life, also fragile, must come first to protect that of the other. Life by life. It has been done, and so parents, siblings, and grandparents will do it until the end of days.