He eats the Cuban food I grew up on, Arroz con pollo, ropa vieja, arroz con camarones. All the good stuff I began to eat on Sundays when the family went to The Columbia. The original owner was a pal of my grandfather. Now it belongs, I think, to some chain. The rest of Ybor City, the only interesting part of Tampa, was bulldozed by city fathers who wanted no part of history or culture or the "spics" who brought it to Tampa.

But no matter how much time I lived in Ybor City nor lived in Puerto Rico, I am not part of Spanish culture. No Catholicism. Less fiestas; no piñatas and when I stopped being told that Santa Claus brought some of my presents these were not my thoughts, "The veil lifted, and I beheld, virginally, the dreadful treasure unearthed by my ancestors. Desengaño. Disillusionment. The scorching, incandescent cornerstone of Spanish culture... (which) is built upon one warning: beware, all is illusion... nothing you can embrace in this world will ever fill that yawning void in your soul. Nothing. No thing. No one. Nada. Ninguna cosa. Nadie."

And "waiting for snow"? I waited years to see the stuff with the same expectation of its' pristine goodness and, perhaps, the fun it would be. He waits in Havana with his Galician Spanish grandparents asking "What does snow look like? What does it feel like when you touch it? Does snow smell like the frost in our freezer? What does it feel like to wear coats and hats all the time...?" I waited at the train station for my great-aunt from New York to arrive on the Silver Meteor with her fur coat and ask the same kind of things.

In 1966 he is in Chicago where "The air was a huge, all-enveloping knife... the wind coming off Lake Michigan... would plunge the blade deep into you...". I was there in '67 on the elevated platform in my Florida version of an overcoat in the blizzard of '67 waiting for a train to the law firm where I worked thinking that this was the way Yankees always spent winters. Finally, frozen through, I called the partner I worked for to be told to go home since even the courts were closed and the train was not going to come. Crazy Yankees!

I have a whole different view now of Cuba, Cuban refugees, if not of the Cuban community, which, like the Mexican; I often feel I fit into a little too well. But I never had times when "Quite a few bombs went off in Havana those last few years of Batista's regime. To this day, as I am drifting to sleep I often expect to hear a bomb or two going off in the distance."

Eire, however, wasn't lulled to sleep by flights of B-47's from the airbase nearby carrying their loads of nukes, nor the sirens as the convoys of stockpiled arms and bombs were brought through the city in the small hours to MacDill Air Force Base. His friends' fathers didn't tell him that they had returned from Cuban overflights with holes shot through their planes' fuselages. He didn't look at the sky that fall of '62 in high school checking contrails for the missile heading for us.