Cuban Essay

 

July 2012

 

 

 This kid from Hialeah who came from Cuba 7 years ago and graduated
from Barbara Goleman High School and was the Valedictorian
of 2002. He appeared in Oprah last week and president Bush invited him
to the White House and quoted part of this essay in one of his speeches. He has great dreams and made it to Harvard with a full scholarship. What a story.

>>The Essay that got him to Harvard

>>Miguel Arguelles came from Cuba 7 years ago, and just won a
>>Scholarship to Harvard. Pretty impressive...
>>Miguel Arguelles' college essay excerpt:


I was born at 21.60
degrees latitude and 78.88 degrees longitude, where the cold Gulf of Mexico espouses the ardent Caribbean Sea, where the sun shines
>>brightest and drowns in tears, where Santa Claus has not the visa
>>to enter and dreams cannot escape their prison of nonexistence,
>>where hopes are shattered and religion is an endangered species,
>>where freedom is in shackles.
>>
>>I was born and raised in a land that for over forty years now has
>>been flooded with red, where food is rationed, where to the
>>populace, a color-television is a luxury and an apple a delicacy ...
>>
>>It is a land whose paradisiacal beauty is worthy of John
>>Constable's brush strokes, but is nonetheless undermined by its
>>swelling penury.
>>
>>It was in Cuba where I said my first words, took my first steps,
>>learned to write and multiply, and kissed a girl for the first
>>time. It was there where I met my first true friend and saw my
>>first true friend drown. It was there where I broke my chin three
>>times: the first riding a bicycle; the second climbing a tree; the
>>third playing baseball. It was there where a dog bit me, where I
>>got chicken pox, where I read my first book, in Spanish, of course.
>>My first school, my first house, and my wooden bed still stand,
>>refusing to succumb to dilapidation, in that land where I said
>>good-bye to my childhood and began my voyage toward young
>>adulthood.
>>
>>It is there where I left my family -- my grandmother Chucha's
>>kisses, my grandfather Pepe's stories, my aunt Lisette's hugs and
>>tireless efforts to get my dad to take away my punishment when I
>>misbehaved. It is in the Cuban soil where my roots can be found,
>>planted deeply, where none can extricate them. It is there where I
>>walked a great and key distance of my existential quest for an
>>identity. But it was also there where I had to recite Communist
>>pledges on a daily basis, and where I was taught only what Castro's
>>dictatorship believed appropriate; where relatively every child's
>>idiosyncrasies are molded to its distorted vision. It is likewise
>>there where a professional earns much less than a prostitute, where
>>the economy seems ever more susceptible to the effects of gravity;
>>where freedom of expression is silenced; where you can be not all
>>that you can be, but rather all that you are allowed to be; where
>>preoccupations only rise exponentially and disseminate, and much
>>human potential is thrown to waste. . . ..
>>
>>This country has given me new wings, of which I've made
>>the best use the possibility to fly as high as I wish, to soar the
>>heavens if I propose myself to do so; and for this, I will forever
>>be thankful and love it greatly. However, despite it all, I would
>>be a hypocrite to deny that my heart and my soul will always belong
>>to that little island that witnessed my birth.
>>