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From Castro's Cuba to the U.S. Senate, One Man's Pursuit of the American Dream
Crown
August 2008
On Sale: August 5, 2008
256 pages ISBN: 0307405400 EAN: 9780307405401 Hardcover
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Non-Fiction
The swift and improbable rise of Mel Martinez to the top
echelon of America’s government began not with a political
race but with a burst of gunfire. In April 1958, an
eleven-year-old Martinez huddled on his bedroom floor while
Cuban soldiers opened fire on insurgents outside his
family’s home in the normally sleepy town of Sagua la
Grande. With that hail of bullets, the idyllic Cuba of his
boyhood was shattered. If political unrest made daily life disturbing and at times
frightening, Fidel Castro’s Communist Revolution nine months
later was nothing short of devastating. Martinez’s Catholic
school was suddenly shuttered as the Communist regime threw
priests out of the country. A sixteen-year-old boy from his
town was seized and killed by a firing squad. When armed
militiamen shouted violent threats at Martinez for wearing a
cloth medallion as a sign of his Catholic faith, his parents
made a heartrending decision: their son would have to escape
the Castro regime—alone. Under the greatest secrecy, the Martinez family arranged
through a special church program to have Mel airlifted out
of Cuba to America. After months of painstaking planning
(and a simple mistake that nearly scuttled the entire
arrangement), fifteen-year-old Martinez stepped on a plane
bound for Miami. He had no idea when—or if—he would see his
family again. A Sense of Belonging is the riveting account of innocence
lost, exile sustained by religious faith, and an immigrant’s
gritty determination to overcome the barriers of language
and culture in his adopted homeland. Martinez warmly recalls
a bucolic childhood in Cuba, playing baseball, fishing at
the beach, and accompanying his father on veterinary visits
to neighboring farms. He also vividly recounts the harrowing
changes under Castro that forced him to flee, as well as the
arduous years he spent in American refugee camps and foster
homes. And he captures the sheer joy of being reunited with
his family after four years of wrenching separation. Having
embraced life in America, he set about the delicate task of
guiding his parents through their struggles with
assimilation while also building his own family and career. Through it all, Martinez embodies the ideal of service to
others, whether comforting a younger child on the flight
from Havana to Miami or giving legal advice pro bono to his
father’s friends in the Cuban-American community. Though his
story ends in the hallowed halls of the U.S. Capitol,
Martinez has never forgetten the boy who experienced the
loss of liberty under Communism. A Sense of Belonging is a
paean to the transformative power of the American Dream.
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