Myles, the subject of Cuban tyranny and the suffering of the Cuban people, including my relatives who remain imprisoned in the island gulag, have been in the back of my mind from the time of my arrival in Miami at age 13 in 1966, from my graduation from medical school through my post-graduate training in neurological surgery at Emory University in the late 1970s, to my professional life in the 1980s and 1990s.
You can say that I have been researching and pondering the troubling subject for decades. Whenever I could, I questioned my parents (who sometimes wanted to forget) and I read articles about Cuba that sporadically fell into my hands. Practicing neurosurgery, writing and editing medical articles and journals took a lot of time.
But then, a miraculous event took place on Thanksgiving Day 1999 a 6-year-old Cuban boy, floating on an inner tube, was rescued from the treacherous waters of the Atlantic Ocean. It was said that dolphins protected Elián González from the roaming sharks. That event, which later became a cause célèbre, changed my life.
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