Worth the time to read 

CUBAN REFUGEE GOES TO HARVARD UNIVERSITY

Truly touching and very well drafted...as the person who sent it to me
wrote: demuestra el espiritu luchador cubano - G.

Miguel Arguelles is a kid in Hialeah who came from Cuba 7 years ago and
graduated yesterday from Barbara Goleman High School and was the
Valedictorian of 2002. He appeared in Oprah last week and president Bush
invited him to the White House and quoted part of this essay in one of his
speeches.

 He has great dreams and made it to Harvard with a full scholarship.  The
Essay that got him to Harvard:

I was born at 21.60 degrees latitude and 78.88 degrees longitude, where the
cold Gulf of Mexico espouses the ardent Caribbean Sea, where the sun shines
brightest and drowns in tears, where Santa Claus has not the visa to enter
and dreams cannot escape their prison of nonexistence, where hopes are
shattered and religion is an endangered species, where freedom is in
shackles.

 I was born and raised in a land that for over forty years now has been
flooded with red, where food is rationed, where to the populace, a
color-television is a luxury and an apple a delicacy ... It is a land whose
paradisiacal beauty is worthy of John Constable's brush strokes, but is
nonetheless undermined by its swelling penury.

It was in Cuba where I said my first words, took my first steps, learned to
write and multiply, and kissed a girl for the first time. It was there where
I met my first true friend and saw my first true friend drown. It was there
where I broke my chin three times: the first riding a bicycle; the second
climbing a tree; the third playing baseball. It was there where a dog bit
me, where I got chicken pox, where I read my first book, in Spanish, of
course. My first school, my first house, and my wooden bed still stand,
refusing to succumb to dilapidation, in that land where I said good-bye to
my childhood and began my voyage toward young adulthood.

 It is there where I left my family -- my grandmother Chucha's kisses, my
grandfather Pepe's stories, my aunt Lisette's hugs and tireless efforts to
get my dad to take away my punishment when I misbehaved.

 It is in the Cuban soil where my roots can be found, planted deeply, where
none can extricate them. It is there where I walked a great and key distance
of my existential quest for an identity. But it was also there where I had
to recite Communist pledges on a daily basis, and where I was taught only
what Castro's dictatorship believed appropriate; where relatively every
child's idiosyncrasies are molded to its distorted vision. It is likewise

there where a professional earns much less than a prostitute, where the
economy seems ever more susceptible to the effects of gravity; where
freedom of expression is silenced; where you can be not all that you
can be, but rather all that you are allowed to be; where preoccupations only
rise exponentially and disseminate, and much human potential is thrown to
waste.

This country has given me new wings, of which I've made the best use the
possibility to fly as high as I wish, to soar the heavens if I propose
myself to do so; and for this, I will forever be thankful and love it
greatly. However, despite it all, I would be a hypocrite to deny that my
heart and my soul will always belong to that little island that witnessed my
birth.

HOME