This is an I-Heart podcast.

Guaranteed human.

And we continue with our American stories.

And as you know, we love telling immigrant stories, stories about folks who came here to

get their piece of the American dream. And today, Joey Cortez brings us a story of an immigrant

who would make his mark on the American advertising industry. Here's Joey. Mark Barrios lives

in Colorado, and he designed the arts for a product all of us know and many of us

love. But before he became a successful commercial artist, his journey began somewhere far warmer

than the Colorado Rockies. Here's Mark. I was born in 1944 in Havana, Cuba, way before the revolution. My parents were divorced at an early age, but life in Cuba was like a regular teenage kid. I mean, we were raised in a middle class. I was able to go to a private school. We spent the time, summer in the dish.

And to me it was kind of paradise.

And then I was 14 years old when Castro took power.

And that's basically when my life completely changed.

Within weeks, he started nationalizing the industry, like the electrical industry, the sugar.

After my grandfather had passed, he have left my grandmother, like a total six houses, and

she lived in one, and she was renting the other five.

Well, right away, they confiscated those five houses and they said, well, we're going to keep

giving you the rent that you're collecting from the houses, but those houses now belong to the

state. So I was not going to inherit the houses, my mother or my uncle, those houses were

taken by the state.

A lot of the books were burned in some of the major streets,

and they were introducing new books into the school system.

My school was confiscated and turned into friends of the Soviet revolution.

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