My Story

My Roots

A Story Written in Survival

Before I built a single business, two people survived something meant to erase them — and a third carried what they built all the way here.

By Sarah Hope. 5 min read. Family & Heritage

My grandfather never talked about the war. My father never talked about leaving. For most of my life I thought that silence was distance — until I understood that it was the whole story, held quietly by two men who each carried something too heavy to say out loud. This is the version I finally have the words for.

It started with a crossing, not a choice. In the mid-1800s, southern China — Guangdong especially — was collapsing under famine, war, and the ruin of the Taiping Rebellion. Millions were displaced or starving. At the same time, Cuba's sugar economy was reeling after Spain was pressured to end the African slave trade, and plantation owners desperately needed cheap labor. China became the answer. Between 1847 and 1874, more than 125,000 young men were shipped from Guangdong to Cuba — recruited, tricked, kidnapped, or sold into contracts they couldn't read, promised wages and a passage home that almost never came. Beatings were routine, pay was withheld, suicide rates were staggering. Historians call it “coolie slavery.” One of those men was my ancestor. That single, brutal crossing is the first chapter of how I got here.

My grandfather was born into the world those men and their children built — rural western Cuba, San Diego de los Baños in Pinar del Río, a farming and sugar town shaped by labor and poverty. Chinese-Cuban, in a family that had already made the long crossing. He carried the marks of that life his whole time on earth: the hardened body of a man who'd worked the land since boyhood, and scars that were never explained away. He didn't need to narrate what he'd survived — you could see it in him. But the worst of it hadn't happened to him yet.

When the Cuban War of Independence broke out in 1895, it wasn't fought cleanly between armies. Spain couldn't beat the rebels in the countryside, so it turned on the people who fed them. In 1896, General Valeriano Weyler imposed reconcentración: every rural family was ordered into guarded towns within days. Homes were burned. Crops and livestock destroyed. Anyone caught outside the lines was shot on sight. These weren't refugee camps — they were containment zones built to starve a population into submission. Historians estimate 200,000 to 400,000 civilians died, and children died first. My grandfather lost his entire family inside those camps. A brother of his, still just a boy, was shot by soldiers. That wasn't an accident of war — it was policy.

He was captured, badly wounded, and left for dead by a river. He didn't die. By the time he was strong enough to walk home, there was no home left to walk to.

My grandmother's story is the other half of the same catastrophe. She lost her entire family to the camps when she was still a child — orphaned by a system designed to erase people like her. Too young to survive on her own, she was passed from household to household, taken in wherever someone could spare a little food or shelter, during a time when almost no family had enough for itself. Her childhood wasn't safety or schooling. It was movement, dependence, and the stubborn refusal to die.

When the war ended in 1898, Cuba wasn't healed — it was emptied. Villages were gone, records were lost, children had no parents, and survivors carried scars no one had written down. My grandparents found each other in that wreckage. Their union wasn't born of ease or romance; it was born of necessity and a shared understanding that survival meant rebuilding. Both had lost everyone. Both had lived through something meant to end them. Together they did the bravest thing survivors can do: they made a family where none existed before. Seven children — a line that war had nearly erased, restored by two people who refused to let it die with them.

My father was one of the younger of those seven. Born into a family rebuilt from nothing but loss and willpower, raised on the memory of everything his parents had survived. In 1969 he made the crossing the generations before him had fought to make possible: he came to the United States on the Cuba Freedom Flights, the historic airlift that between 1965 and 1973 carried hundreds of thousands of Cubans to a new life in America. He settled in New Jersey, where he met my mother. I was born in 1972 — his only child. His brothers and sisters had large families of their own, so I grew up blessed with dozens of cousins and an extended family that is enormous, loud, and deeply loved. Every door I have walked through since was opened by decisions he made and risks he absorbed so that a girl from New Jersey could have a life he could only imagine.

Here's the part people find hardest to believe: by the time later generations were born, the Chinese ancestry that started our story had faded from DNA tests — diluted across generations of marriage into Afro-Cuban, Indigenous, and Spanish families until it no longer shows up on a report. But absence in DNA is not absence in truth. What survived wasn't paperwork or precise records. What survived were names, scars, places, and stories told quietly — and a sense of endurance you can feel before anyone explains it. The record disappears. The memory doesn't.

I'm proud of what my grandfather endured and rebuilt. I'm proud of what my father carried and risked to bring our family here. I'm proud to be his only child, and proud of the enormous family his brothers and sisters built. I don't build businesses to chase a number — I build because moving forward is literally in my blood. Two people who survived a system built to erase them decided the answer was to make more life, not less. They did, and it became a family that fills rooms. So I refuse to be erased, and I refuse to waste what they fought to give me.