Finding Ourselves – Inside the Cuban Heritage Collection

They find us.

I’ve come to believe that over a lifetime spent listening—to others, and eventually, to my own.

I arrived in the United States from Cuba as a child, part of a generation carried across uncertainty with little more than what our families could hold onto—memories, values, fragments of a life left behind. Like many who came in those years, we moved forward quickly. We built lives, careers, families. We adapted.

 

But something remained just beneath the surface. A quiet sense that our story—our collective history—was still unfolding, and in many ways, still unrecorded.

Years later, that realization would shape the course of my work.

Through the Immigrant Archive Project, I have had the privilege of sitting across from thousands of individuals whose lives were defined by movement, resilience, and reinvention. I came to understand that history does not live in textbooks. It lives in people—in their voices, in their memories, in the details they carry for decades, waiting to be heard.

That understanding led me to the University of Miami’s Cuban Heritage Collection.

To walk into the Collection is to encounter something more than an archive. It is a living repository of a nation’s memory—letters carried across oceans, photographs that outlived silence, documents and recordings that hold the weight of personal and collective history.

 

What distinguishes it is not only its scope, but its intimacy. These are not distant artifacts. They are deeply personal traces of lives once lived—yet still connected to who we are today. And yet, for all its richness, the Collection has remained largely unseen beyond academic circles.

That realization led to a simple idea:

What if we could bring people back to these stories—not as observers, but as participants? That idea became a Television documentary series titled Inside the Cuban Heritage Collection.

Each episode begins with an intimate conversation, where our guest reflects on the life experiences that shaped their identity and sense of legacy.

 

From there, we enter the Collection together—exploring a curated list of materials that echo and expand those memories. In these moments, something shifts. The past is no longer distant. It becomes immediate. Personal.

In the final act, each guest contributes a meaningful artifact of their own—transforming memory into record, and personal history into something preserved for the future. An act of legacy.

We begin filming on May 15th, marking the first step in what we hope will become an enduring body of work. Each episode will be produced in both English and Spanish, reflecting the dual identity of a community that has always lived between languages and cultures.

The Spanish-language episodes will air on MegaTV in Miami and across its streaming platforms, bringing these stories to audiences in ways that extend far beyond the walls of the Collection.

Our guests will be individuals whose lives have helped shape the Cuban-American experience in meaningful ways.

I am honored to share that Andy Garcia has confirmed his participation. His body of work, and his enduring connection to his heritage, reflect the very themes this series seeks to explore.

In many ways, his involvement affirms something I have come to understand:

These stories are ready to be told.

For years, this collection has safeguarded the fragments of a nation’s story with extraordinary care. Now, for the first time, we open the door.

Not just to scholars, but to a much broader audience—to anyone willing to step inside and discover that these stories are not distant at all.

They are ours.

We hope you’ll join us on Inside the Cuban Heritage Collection.