Ruben had been just six years old when he had arrived in America alone. His family had tried to flee, hustled onto a plane in the middle of the night, carrying only what they could stash in their pockets. But they were stopped, yanked right out of their seats on the plane by armed men. Ruben remembered his mother screaming, his baby brother wailing, as they dragged away his father. It was the last time he would see his papi.
Ruben’s father had been one of six children raised in a poor village in eastern Cuba. He had moved to the capital at sixteen and worked his way up through Havana’s casinos. His papi started by sweeping floors on the overnight shift, then became a bartender, a blackjack dealer, a pit boss. When American investors opened the grand Hotel Habana Riviera, the same year that Ruben was born, his father was named head of casino security. Links to powerful gringos had been the reason his family had seats on a plane to Miami after the communist guerrillas closed in on the capital.
But those connections were also why they dragged his father away, leaving a single mother with young Ruben and his infant brother, Ernesto.
“There are three levels of document classification. ‘Confidential’ is the lowest level, where release of such information to the public would cause damage . . .”
Without his papi, Ruben’s mother was heartbroken and alone. Their family home was then seized by the government and turned into a headquarters for the local chapter of the communist Rebel Youth Association. So Ruben’s mother, through an inconspicuous friend at the Catholic church, made the most difficult choice for a parent: She sent her eldest son away to safety. Ruben, along with fourteen thousand other unaccompanied Cuban minors, was flown to America in a secret effort dubbed Operation Peter Pan. It was the last time Ruben would see his mother or his baby brother Ernesto.
Unlike the fictional Peter Pan, Ruben was forced to grow up immediately. He was sent to an orphanage in Buffalo, New York, and then on to a boarding school in Oklahoma. Once he turned sixteen, he quit school, like his father, and made his way to the big city. Ruben hitchhiked to Miami, where he took odd jobs running errands up and down Calle Ocho for the old men of Little Havana. At eighteen he worked as a hotel cabana boy, bringing clean towels and cold tropical drinks to middle-class tourists on Miami Beach.
As he ran along the pool deck in the sun, young Ruben remembered something valuable he had learned from his father: There was big money to be made in selling effortless leisure. The tourists in Havana’s casinos didn’t know that the bright lights and shiny hotels were a fa?ade for a crumbling system. And they didn’t care. They paid handsomely to escape their regular lives, to have fun, and to look fabulous. Pretending to have it all was good enough.
Miami in the 1980s was so similar to Havana of the 1950s.
The notion of effortless leisure was the inspiration for Ruben’s first Sunshine Yoga Studio & Juice Bar, opened in Coral Gables. The upscale neighborhood, known as “The City Beautiful” and home to the University of Miami, was the training ground for South Florida’s attractive elite. Within a few years, Ruben had Sunshine Yoga Studio & Juice Bar branches in Fort Lauderdale, Boca Raton, and Palm Beach. After a decade, he had a studio in every wealthy zip code in the state of Florida. Then he cashed out.
“SBU is a special designation which stands for ‘sensitive but unclassified.’ This is used for personnel records and other information that is not technically . . .”
Getting rich wasn’t enough for Ruben. He had learned that, too, from his father and the pain of his exile. Sure, he had grown to appreciate fine wine and Italian sports cars. He owned luxurious vacation homes in the Bahamas, the Florida Keys, and in Puerto Banús on the Spanish Costa del Sol. But Ruben also knew that to protect his fortune and his family, he needed to be politically connected. To get what he really wanted, he would use his wealth to buy power.
Ruben learned quickly that hosting fund-raisers for American politicians was easy. For a catered cocktail party and fifty grand in cash, passed through a network of straw donors, you could buy a congressman every other November. It was almost too easy.
“The distinction between Secret and Top Secret information is based on a determination of whether revelation of that information might cause extreme damage . . .”
Ruben was always thinking of a grander plan. If he could own a congressman for a pittance, then what about a President? Campaign donations paid his way into the inner circle of the White House. He had stayed with his wife in the Lincoln Bedroom and then with a girlfriend at Blair House, the President’s official guesthouse just off Lafayette Park normally reserved for visiting heads of state.
Why not bigger? What about an ambassadorship? It didn’t matter which one, really. Just a title and an entrée into the upper echelons of the American political game. Which he could leverage to expand his network and plot his ultimate goal.
“Top Secret information that is designed to be sensitive compartmented information is handled only in specially designated areas . . .”