In 1950, my Cuban father was born in Sancti Spíritus and raised in Santa Clara, just north of the Escambray Mountains. Like many wealthy, educated professionals, his parents supported the revolution completely. My grandmother was an attorney who attended law school at the University of Havana with her classmate, Fidel Castro. My grandfather, a physician, smuggled money, food, and medical supplies to the rebel fighters in the mountains, where he treated Che Guevara’s asthma on multiple occasions. Throughout the war the fighters came down from the Escambray to eat at my grandparents’ table and sleep on their floors—Che, Camilo Cienfuegos, Ramiro Valdés—so malnourished that when two of them collapsed after a meal, Che feared they had been poisoned. On the last day of 1958, Che took Santa Clara. Batista fled the country within hours and the war was over. As my father’s family fought to rid their homeland of American interests, they were unknowingly tugging on a thread that would lead to the complete dissolution of their familial and cultural universe.

At the other side of the island, and the opposite end of history, my American mother was born in Banes in 1951. Banes was the hometown of the US-backed Cuban dictator Fulgencio Batista, which made it prime ground for American multinationals including United Fruit—where my mother’s father, a poor Scottish immigrant, took the opportunity of his life as a machinist at the sugar mill. My mother spent her formative years on the plantation campus: household staff, wrap-around veranda, company swimming pool. When the American companies pulled out because of growing revolutionary strife, her family left with them, and my grandfather found work as a machinist at the Domino Sugar refinery in New Orleans. Never again would her parents experience the luxuries afforded by their chapter in Cuba. They considered those years the greatest of their lives.

After the initial triumph of the revolution, my father’s parents were offered senior positions within the Castro government, but chose to remain in the private sector. In time, they realized that Castro’s promise of freedom would not be kept. In April of 1961, during the Bay of Pigs invasion, my grandmother found my father on the roof of their home with a toy gun, watching Cuba’s Revolutionary Air Defense come in low to repel the invasion. A pilot saw him. She spent that day certain the plane would turn back and bomb their house.

The chance at freedom came through a patient my grandfather had cured of skin cancer. Her husband was a high-ranking army officer with intel that there was room for my father on a plane leaving for the United States the next morning. They packed his Sunday best, took him to say goodbye to his grandparents, and drove from Santa Clara to Havana. He did not understand that his parents would not be coming with him, but the Pan Am stewardess did. He was one of 14,000 unaccompanied children evacuated on the Peter Pan flights. My grandmother followed six months later, after petitioning her old classmate—by then prime minister—for permission to leave. My grandfather was refused: his profession as a physician was deemed necessary to the revolution. Carrying only his medical satchel, he eventually escaped by boat with the help of a fisherman who was his patient.

He never reached Florida. Intercepted in the Bahamas, he was held as a suspected Soviet spy, because years of compounding medicines by hand had worn the ridges off his fingers. The FBI cleared him only after physicians in Miami vouched for him. In the United States he completed medical school a second time, in a language not his own, and the only work available to him afterward was at Florida State Hospital in Chattahoochee, among the most abusive psychiatric institutions in the country. He stayed fifteen years. Formally a physician, treated as an orderly. My father grew up in employee housing on the asylum grounds. What happened there was never discussed.

Years later, my parents met in New Orleans at Charity Hospital. My father had followed his own father into medicine and was a resident at Tulane; my mother was a nurse. In my blood, I carry both sides of the same revolution: the guerrilla and the plantation.