A Young Immigrant’s Poem to America

In the late 1960s, a boy left Havana in the middle of the night, and days later, he was standing on Merritt Island, Florida.

Luis Gonzalez | September 7, 2026

In the late 1960s, a boy left Havana in the middle of the night, and days later, he was standing on Merritt Island, Florida.

I didn’t know anything about American exceptionalism, about the great argument over liberty and government.  I knew I had come to America, and almost immediately America began showing me things I had never seen: a new bicycle, chewing gum, Superman comics newer than 1960, ordinary pleasures that felt like evidence of a larger freedom.

And there were rockets.  They rose almost every night.  I didn’t understand the science.  I only knew something extraordinary was happening, and that the future had been waiting for my arrival before roaring across Merritt Island on columns of fire.

For thousands of years, the world was an old place.  Human beings walked, rode animals, sailed with the wind, cooked with fire, and lit the darkness with candles.  Civilizations rose and fell, but the basic human experience remained stubbornly familiar.

Then, in 1776, the world roared.

America was where the Age of Discovery, the Scientific Revolution, and the Enlightenment became a living experiment.  And with America came a question that changed the human condition: What if?

What if the old limits were not limits at all?  What if a human being were free to wonder, experiment, invent, fail, and try again?  What if a person could look at the world as it was and imagine it as it could be?

America didn’t invent curiosity.  It created a place where curiosity could run.  A thought became an experiment, an........

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