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. I was that boy. 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...