For a long time I kept my views on US policy towards Cuba a secret from my family.
My parents were both born on the island, and I grew up hearing tales of how their families had escaped the newly entrenched regime of Fidel Castro in 1959.
Throughout my childhood — I was born in Florida two decades after Mr Castro assumed power — I especially loved the stories of the underground network run by my maternal grandfather to help his capitalist friends flee to the US in the early 1960s — stories occasionally told to me directly by those same friends. On my father’s side two uncles were Operación Pedro Pan kids, sent to the US on flights with other orphaned children, later to be reunited with their parents and elder siblings.