An American Son: A Memoir (13 page)

Despite my talkativeness, Jenny’s report the next day was encouraging: Jeanette was interested in me. I worked up the nerve to ask her out, and she accepted. We spent our first date at a Mexican restaurant, El Torito, and we continued dating for the rest of the summer. As the middle of August approached, I prepared to go back to Gainesville. Our summer romance had been fun, but we didn’t know if it would survive our separation. We would spend time socializing on the weekends with couples while a distance of 350 miles separated us. We would both be tempted to see other people. Nevertheless, we decided to give it a try and see what happened. Maybe absence would make the heart grow fonder; maybe it wouldn’t.

I was out of sorts almost from the moment I arrived at the University of Florida. I had no interest in going out with friends or meeting new people. I didn’t enjoy parties or any social activity. I missed Jeanette constantly. I tried to put her out of my mind, but I only thought about her more.

Running low on money, I didn’t have the luxury of making frequent, expensive long-distance phone calls. So I wrote Jeanette numerous long letters, sharing with her the most insignificant details of my day in the hope that the comprehensive chronicle of my existence would somehow secure her affection for me. By the middle of October, I couldn’t take it any longer. I jumped in my car one Thursday afternoon after classes and drove five hours straight to Jeanette’s house. She was having dinner with her family when I arrived, but seemed neither surprised nor displeased by my sudden
appearance. We spent all the time we could together that weekend. I went home to see her several more times that semester, including a trip at Halloween just a couple of weeks after my first surprise visit.

My disinterest in a social life in Gainesville gave me ample time to concentrate on my studies. I stayed in on weekends and worked. It was all I could think of to pass the time until I saw Jeanette again. I had worried I wouldn’t be able to meet Florida’s higher academic standards. But by the time I went home for the winter break, I was certain I would. My grades were excellent. My second-semester grades were even better.

With newfound academic confidence, I began to consider my future. I decided I wanted to go to law school, and looked for a major that would help toward that end. I got a great piece of advice from a professor who told me the smartest thing I could do is not worry about majoring in a subject that was considered good preparation for the law, but choose a major in the subject that most interested me. I would make better grades in classes I liked than in classes I felt obliged to take. Since Florida didn’t offer a major in football, I decided on a political science major. I enjoyed the classes and excelled in them. I let nothing interfere with my studies except Jeanette. My weekend visits to Miami became more frequent. And I looked forward to summer, when I could spend part of every day with her.

I took a math class at Florida International University that summer to help make up for the Tarkio credits that Florida hadn’t accepted. I worked on my first political campaign as well. I called the campaign office of state senator Lincoln Diaz-Balart, who was running for Congress, and asked to volunteer. I was told to come to the office in Hialeah and begin working that day. I spent the entire summer learning Miami politics from the ground up. I met people who would be of invaluable assistance to me someday, and I learned how to run a grassroots campaign in Miami’s Cuban exile community, which would serve me very well over the next decade. The rest of my time I spent with Jeanette.

Our relationship became very serious. I had now dated Jeanette longer than I had ever dated anyone. As the summer ended and I began my senior year of college, we were both more confident about the strength of our commitment and more relaxed about our necessary separation. I still hated being apart, but the end was near. I would be home by May, and for good, I assumed.

Our separation foreshadowed our future life together. I would always
be away from home for extended periods in pursuit of my ambitions. Jeanette would always stay behind to manage our most important responsibilities. My mind would always be focused on future challenges and opportunities. She would always have to attend to the demands of the present. Had she known then that our separation when I was a student at Florida would set the pattern for our future, I doubt she would have stayed in the relationship. Her parents had divorced when she was six; her mother had remarried and divorced again. Jeanette longed for a more stable married life, for a husband who would be a constant presence in her life and an equal partner in the responsibilities of marriage and parenthood. She wouldn’t get that kind of life. But she would get a husband who loves her deeply and can’t imagine life without her.

Just before I returned to Gainesville, local news stations began reporting the approach of a brewing hurricane. Having lived in the Miami area for seven years, I was accustomed to hurricane warnings, and to how predictions of their devastation were often exposed as unduly alarmist as the storms suddenly veered in another direction. People in Miami took hurricane warnings in stride if they paid them any heed at all. It became popular in Miami to hold hurricane parties to celebrate the newest natural disaster to threaten us, which would surely prove less fearsome than advertised. So, as usual, I didn’t pay much attention to the new warning.

But then the reports became graver and more urgent. We had forty-eight hours to prepare. The storm was coming. It would be massive and devastating. And nothing would change its course. Aunt Lola and Uncle Armando happened to be visiting us that summer, and the storm trapped them in Miami. They helped us prepare the house for the hurricane, although our preparations were woefully inadequate for the magnitude of destruction that might be visited on us. Then we all hunkered down and waited.

Hurricane Andrew made landfall later that night. I had never seen anything like it. I looked outside as the storm ripped trees from the ground and tore tiles off roofs. We lost power almost immediately after the storm hit. Andrew’s winds howled through our attic, and we were certain the storm would blow the roof off the house.

But it didn’t. The winds slowly subsided and the clouds eventually cleared. By early morning the storm had passed, and our house had been spared. In contrast to the historic devastation the storm left behind in the
southern part of the county, most of our neighborhood escaped serious damage.

I was worried about Jeanette and tried to drive to her house to make certain she was okay. But the roads were impassible. Immense trees that had stood for decades were uprooted, their massive bulk blocking all traffic. Downed power lines, some of which were still live, were strewn across the streets as well. I got out of the car and walked, and picked my way carefully around the obstacles until I reached her house. She was fine, although her neighborhood seemed a little worse off than mine.

Power wasn’t restored at my house or Jeanette’s for three weeks after the storm. But I escaped the inconvenience when I returned to Gainesville for my last year of college. I was back in Miami a few weeks later to help the Diaz-Balart campaign on Election Day. Lincoln won, and would serve in Congress for eighteen years until December of 2010.

I followed the presidential election closely and with great interest. I had tried to volunteer for the campus effort to help reelect President Bush, but I hadn’t received a callback. Early one cold autumn morning, as I rode my bike to campus, eight men ran up to me at an intersection, where we all waited for the light to change. After a few seconds I realized it was governor and soon to be president Bill Clinton and his Secret Service detail out for his morning jog. I attended his rally on campus later that morning, curious to see what kind of a campaigner he was and what a Democratic rally looked like. I don’t remember it making much of an impression on me.

As I considered what law schools to apply to, I briefly flirted with the idea of applying to schools far from Florida, like Georgetown and New York University. But the costs were prohibitive. I would graduate in the top 10 percent of my class at Florida, but that wouldn’t be good enough to win a scholarship that would pay all my tuition. I would stay in Miami, and live near Jeanette. I couldn’t ask her to put up with another three years of a long-distance relationship, and I was worried I would lose her if I didn’t come home.

I applied to two schools in Miami. The first, St. Thomas University, quickly accepted me and offered a scholarship that would cover half my tuition. My preference, however, was to attend the University of Miami School of Law, which had a more prestigious reputation than St. Thomas. But I had reason to be concerned that Miami wouldn’t accept me. The school prided itself on its national reach. It recruited students from all over
the country, which made it more difficult for a Floridian, especially a Miamian, to be admitted, even with good grades. It was also very expensive. If I was accepted there, I would graduate with sizable student loan debt. But I knew if I was accepted, I would borrow the money and go. I worked hard on my application. In my essay, I expressed my intention to use my law degree one day to help construct a new legal and political system for a free Cuba. Lincoln and Ileana wrote recommendations for me. I was accepted.

That summer was a quiet time of transition. The only important event that year was the news Veronica had won a place on the Miami Dolphins cheerleading squad. I had passionately followed the Dolphins my entire life. I had played football in high school and college. I had dreamed of playing in the NFL. And the only person in our family who would ever set foot on an NFL football field was my sister. I wasn’t envious, though. Each cheerleader received two season tickets for Dolphins home games. Veronica gave hers to me.

T
HE FIRST YEAR OF LAW SCHOOL IS THE INTELLECTUAL equivalent of boot camp. It’s not designed to impart new information to students as much as it is to teach them a new way to think. Before law school, if someone showed you a chair, you would acknowledge it’s a chair. After your first year in law school, you should be able to present a plausible, if not persuasive, argument for why it’s a stepladder with a backboard to prevent you from falling forward.

I had been an active reader my whole life, but I had never read as much as I had to read that year. It was the first time in my life I felt physically tired from mental exertion. I had little time for anything else. I lived with my parents a few blocks from school. I didn’t have to make my own dinner, shop for groceries or do my laundry. I saw Jeanette every day. And I read.

I set an ambitious goal for myself. I wanted to make the law review, an honor reserved for those who earned the best grades their first year. Law school grades are determined solely by your final exam results. The exams are essay form, and unlike undergraduate exams, your conclusions are less important than your reasoning. I didn’t grasp this difference in my first semester of law school. I prepared for exams as I had in Gainesville, and while my scores were fine, they were nowhere near the top of my class.

After my first semester, I prepared for exams by reviewing the exams my professors had given in the past. Law school professors have a habit of
asking the same questions year after year. I was better prepared for my exams in the spring, and my scores improved dramatically. It was too late to make the law review, but I set a new goal for myself: I wanted to graduate with honors.

I had been told if I survived the first year, the rest of law school would be comparatively easier. That year was the most intense academic experience of my life, and a great change from my checkered past as a student. I was glad it was behind me. My second and third years were considerably less intense, and allowed for elective courses and extracurricular activities.

I found a job the summer between first and second year as a law clerk for a personal injury attorney, a sole practitioner, who rented office space in a building owned by a small law firm. After a few weeks I started working for another sole practitioner, who had an office in the same building. I didn’t learn much from the experience. Both lawyers spent most of their time filing personal injury claims against insurance companies. My work mostly involved writing claim letters. But I earned enough to get through the summer and save a little spending money.

I was consumed by my studies and it affected my relationship with Jeanette. In February of 1995, she told me she wanted us to spend time apart for a while. We had had a few fights during our three years of dating. We had even broken up a few times, but quickly made up. Something was different this time. She was no longer certain our relationship was more than a comfortable habit we had both fallen into, and she wanted to find out whether our commitment to each other was genuine.

I know now that I had caused our estrangement. For three years our relationship had been ordered around my life. My school, my schedule, my plans for the future were the center of gravity of every decision we made. Naturally, she had begun to resent it, and this resentment had now reached the boiling point.