One Immigrant Boy’s Journey from Cuba to the CIA

I can’t remember the moment I started thinking in English.

I was 11 when I arrived at Miami Airport with my parents and sister, one more family among the multitudes seeking to escape Fidel Castro’s Cuba. I knew a few words of English—“home run,” for example, and “strike three.” Beyond baseball, I was at sea.

It was October 1960, and I was dropped, without much ado, into a sixth-grade class at a school called, for some unknown reason, Merrick Demonstration. (What did we demonstrate? To this day, I have no idea.) My father, knowing how foreign students were treated in Cuba, warned me that I would be bullied mercilessly.