This is an I-Heart podcast.

This is Lee Habib, and this is Our American Stories, the show where America is the star

and the American people.

Up next, a story from our True Diversity series, sponsored by the great folks at the Philanthropy

Roundtable, the leading association for charitable giving in America.

Their true diversity campaign is a clarion call for valuing all of us as the unique

individuals that we are. Today we meet Mike Gonzalez, a member of their campaign and a senior

fellow at the Heritage Foundation. He was born in Cuba. Here's his family's story. I have a photo of my great-grandparents in my study,

taken in 1921, and this is my only set of Cuban great-grandparents. And they were really the Cuban

establishment. They went back to the first Spanish ships to arrive in Cuba in 1511.

My great-grandfather was elected to the first Havana City Council in 1905 after the war

with Spain and in the U.S. intervention.

And none of their descendants are Cuban.

None of their, all of the descendants are here in the United States, and they're all one-fourth Cuban,

one-half Cuban, one-eighth Cuban.

They have disappeared as a Cuban family.

This is a very Cuban establishment family that has given their offspring to the United States and they're all happy

Americans. In a way, that is a success story. That's a very good story. But it also means

that that has been lost.

Cuba, the reason why I talk about this is that you had, what can only be described as cultural genocide.

A friend of mine in New York two weeks ago described it this way.

He said if you walk along the streets of Havana and you point to a beautiful

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