I met with Ariel Coro today, a Cuban internet guru, a Cadillac-sized lost brother, with a Don Juan-grade hunger for life. He reminded me about why America’s greatness depends on our ability to serve as a magnate for those, like him, who are willing to build rafts to come here, to flee the locked door of tyranny, and devour their dreams with a knife and fork. Years ago I went to Stuyvesant High School in New York, and it was there—surrounded by kids getting their families out of Chinatown and Harlem—that I learned what a privilege learning is (after that experience I resented my class mates at Stanford who drank their way through four years of their parents’ money, knowing who else could have taken their seat). When the bell would ring at Stuyvesant, kids would race to the front of the room to sit in desks that had inkwells they were so old. None of it mattered—not the desks, not the pillars in the middle of the gym, not the fact that many kids had to travel for hours each way from the five boroughs to get there (my hour-and-a-half commute by bus and two trains was one of the shorter ones). Sometimes it didn’t matter how burned out the teachers were—although we had some incredible door-openers of the mind, like Frank McCourt (who thank God thought I wrote a decent book; I cried when I read his words about the Lost Diary, thinking that the decades of writing in stolen midnight hours might not have been wasted). Ken Tewel, a great principal said, “At Stuyvesant, we open the door, and get out of the way.” Ariel Coro reminded me of my friends at Stuyvesant—brilliant, incredibly motivated, and growing up fast out of necessity. His stories about getting his mother and himself out of Cuba were moving and inspiring. A man who can build a satellite dish out of rebar and make a raft out of oil drums and a Buick car engine can do anything he wants in life.
I feel honored that he wants to devote some of his neurons to helping to get the word out about the Lost Diary, that he feels that the book might be good for Latinos and for Spanish culture in America. Today, as we sat laughing and swapping stories and he devoured his tri-tip sandwich con gusto, I thought to myself: I want to hang out with guy for years, until we’re both old and gray(er). Sometimes you have that feeling right away—like here’s a guy from a different world, but who you could have grown up with (wish you had grown up with), getting into trouble and watching each other’s back. As the sun fell, and I watched him drive off to the airport I thought: we’re going to have to talk about that tri-tip, I’ve got long term plans for this friendship.
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