Often, world history compounds the nature of internal paradox. For me, the origin of this compounded paradox traces back to Cuba.

In 1950, my Cuban father was born in Sancti Spíritus. My Cuban grandmother was an attorney who attended law school at the University of Havana with her classmate, Fidel Castro. As a physician, my Cuban grandfather delivered money and medical supplies to the guerrilla fighters in the Sierra Maestra under the repeated guise of a picnic in the mountains. Like many, my grandparents’ initial support of the Cuban Revolution as wealthy, educated professionals was all-encompassing.

Nearby on the island, my American mother was born in Banes in 1951. Banes was the hometown of the US-backed Cuban dictator Fulgencio Batista, making it a prime location for US multinationals including United Fruit—where my blue-collar American grandfather worked as a machinist at the sugar mill. My mother would spend her formative years in the tropical cocoon of colonial bliss growing up on the United Fruit plantation. Never again would my American grandparents experience the luxuries afforded by this chapter in Cuba. They considered these years the greatest of their lives.

As my father’s family fought to rid their island nation of American interests, they were unknowingly tugging on a thread that would lead to the complete dissolution of their familial and cultural universe. In time, my father would be covertly evacuated from Cuba on the Peter Pan flights wherein 14,000 unaccompanied minors were sent to the United States. While my grandmother was able to join my father six months later, my grandfather was deemed necessary to the revolution. Carrying only his medical satchel, my grandfather would eventually escape by boat with the help of one of his patients.

Many years down the road, my parents would meet in New Orleans. It was a seismic union where both sides of history’s coin would converge in my heritage as a doubly-lived paradox awash in humanity’s geopolitical fallout.