My grandmother was still a young woman in 1959. The morning she was supposed to pick up my grandfather from one of Castro’s gulags in Havana, where he had been imprisoned for the “crime” of serving as a naval physician under the previous government, she received a phone call. Change of plans. She would be collecting his body instead.

Abuela fled her country immediately with their two children. Never to return. Never to remarry. She wore black every day for the rest of her life.

My father, then just 20 years old, devoted what remained of his days to Cuba’s freedom. First at the Bay of Pigs. Then in Miami, aiding other exiles and refugees of other dictatorships as a........

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