Uh, we were captivated by the romance of the Sierra and the sense that people like, uh, Fidel Castro and Che Guevara had found ways to live very meaningful lives with a kind of drama that seemed absent from our all to perfected American lives.

I think there was some, uh, moral envy of the of the people of the Sierra and ah ah, good deal of romanticism in our perception of the Cuban Revolution, if not sentimentality.

In any case, I found it very easy to identify with with the Cuban Revolution, as did my friends, even people who worked at Bendix.

We all started out thinking what a rat Batista had been for the Cubans.

How could how could anyone not be a revolutionary in a Cuban situation?

It was a Ziff the Cubans of that moment.

We're living through historically speaking the same choices and options that belonged to the men and women of 17 76 in what became the United States, and to the extent that one supported in principle, what George Washington and Thomas Jefferson and Betsy Ross and the rest of them did for our time of revolution.

In that same way, one hand to support the Cuban revolutionaries of the 19 fifties 19 sixties.

I was surprised and a little shocked that not everybody saw things this way.

Of course, I ran into a lot of people at the place where I worked the defense plant, who saw the Cuban Revolution as a great threat.

Actually, there was, ah, guard there by the name of Julio, uh, who was a refugee from the Cuban Revolution.

And Julio and I usedto have great rollicking arguments about all this, all in good fun and good spirit, but with an increasing edge of seriousness and riel confrontation.

The missile crisis of October 1962 really shook me up, shook my family up, shook my neighbors up.

People who hadn't thought two seconds about politics were glued to that radio as we heard the report of the Russian ship bearing the rockets getting closer and closer as we knew that our destroyers were out there to challenge them and shadow them on their way.

And we wrote letters to the White House.

We said, Dear Mr President, please, let's not have a nuclear war about this.

This is crazy.

They live with it.

Why is it so different in this case?

Well, a lot of people saw and as as different and the argument was on, I think that was very key moment.

It politicized us.

To the extent that we saw.

We just couldn't afford to pay attention.

It could not pay attention to these problems.

They were upon us even when they seemed remote.

They were not literary and and abstract philosophical or historical questions.

They were real questions that could hit your life very hard and could emerge in a split second to a crisis level.

We lived at the edge of crisis, and the missile crisis is the event that brought that home to us.