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I was born in Cuba, and my parents were tropical agronomists.

My dad came from Cuba when he was a teenager not speaking English. And I grew up here speaking Spanglish. That's the world in which I grew up, and that's a world in which a lot of second generation immigrants find themselves.

I was a first-generation college student as well as the first in our family to be born in America - my parents were born in Cuba - and we didn't yet know that families were supposed to leave pretty much right after they unloaded your stuff from the car.

My parents were founders of the Cuban Communist Party, and I grew up extremely poor.

I was born in Havana, Cuba and raised in Madrid, Spain. Then I moved to New Jersey.

I'm actually Cuban-born, born in 1956, the year Fidel Castro came into power, and my father moved my family to Miami a few years later when things were starting to look bad.

My dad left when I was a little boy and I grew up with my mother's family. There were foundations in the U.S. where Jewish people got together and sent money to Cuba, so we got some of that. We were a poor family, but I was always a happy kid.

My mother was one of seven girls whose parents went to bed hungry so their children wouldn't. My father lost his mother when he was nine. He left school and went to work for the next 70 years. They emigrated to America with little more than the hope of a better life.