An American Son: A Memoir by Marco Rubio Read Free Book Online Page B

abdomen would have to be opened and the affected area resected. After surgery, I would be fed through a tube for three days, and would need to spend another week to ten days in recovery. As the doctor explained the procedure, Barbara began to cry. I don’t remember my mother’s reaction, but I do remember my father’s. He told me he would promise to give up smoking in exchange for God seeing me safely through surgery. I learned later he had returned to the other hospital and searched for the doctor who had claimed I was faking the ailment, intending to give him a piece of his mind.
    I was operated on the next day. Those first few days after surgery weren’t particularly comfortable, but I was released from the hospital in less than two weeks and was back at school within the month.
    For a few months all was well, or as well as could be expected, until my father lost his job managing the apartment building in Hialeah. The owners had hired a management company to maintain the place at a lower cost. My dad went to work for Adria’s husband, my uncle Manolito, who owned a small house-painting business. He would have preferred to work as a bartender again, but by the late seventies the tourist industry in Miami Beach was in decline, and the hotels weren’t hiring. While he was grateful for the work Manolito gave him, my father knew it wasn’t a long-term solution to our troubles.
    The city of Miami was entering a difficult period in its history. By 1978, it was experiencing a rapid, significant increase in murders and other violent crimes. Cocaine traffickers had begun using Miami as the primary point of entry into the United States and as the distribution center for their highly lucrative trade. As rival gangs and dealers began competing for territory and business, they commonly employed violence to settle their disputes.
    We weren’t directly affected by the increase in crime, but it was one more concern added to my parents’ growing fears that their changed circumstances would rob them of their hard-won security. The disco-centered social scene in Miami, which they considered a decadent lifestyle for young people, was yet another worry. Their predicament felt more serious than a temporary setback in a tough economic time. They worried my mother would have to go back to work and my father would again work weekends and holidays. They would have neither the time nor the resources to provide us a better childhood than they had given my brother and older sister.
    It was never in my parents’ nature to become paralyzed or stymied by fear. They acted decisively, even precipitously, whenever they felt their aspirations threatened. A quarter century before, they had reacted to a stagnant economy and growing violence and instability in Cuba, leaving their family and the only world they knew to follow my aunt Lola to Miami. They believed emigration was the only course that would allow them to give their infant son a decent chance in life.
    Now they concluded Miami no longer promised a better life for their children, and they would have to leave home again. They looked for a place with better job opportunities, better living standards at a more affordable cost and a more wholesome environment for children. Then they packed our belongings and followed Lola, once again, to Las Vegas.

CHAPTER 5

A Brand-new Life
    L AS VEGAS IS NOT OFTEN THE FIRST PLACE THAT COMES to mind for people looking to raise their children in a wholesome environment. Yet in many respects it would prove to be the family-friendly community my parents hoped it would be. It was a smaller city in those days, with 160,000 inhabitants, and about a half million people in the metropolitan area. Today, metropolitan Las Vegas is nearly four times as populous. Of course, it was the established capital of the gaming industry, with the less than wholesome reputation its nickname, Sin City, implied. But while it had many big-city amenities and vices, beyond the Strip, Vegas