Take Me With You

Take Me With You: A Secret Search for Family in Forbidden Cuba by Carlos Frias is a memoir about twelve days the author, an award-winning journalist, spent in Cuba, covering the illness of famed dictator Fidel Castro. As Frias covers Cuba, he is also inspired to retrace the steps of his parents, both Cuban exiles who spoke of their home country as a place of both wonder and pain. Frias explores his Cuban heritage through the examination of contemporary Cuban life as the child of immigrants who were forced to leave their country, and who have never been able to return.

The memoir begins with Frias's childhood. His parents were both Cuban exiles, and he grew up on the Dade-Broward county border in South Florida. Though South Florida is known for its large population of Cuban immigrants, Frias remembers living far from Little Havana in Miami. Instead, he was raised around “gringos,” depicting himself as “an American made from Cuban parts.”

Frias's separation from Cuba was, of course, more than just a lack of cultural heritage. Travel to and from Cuba has been forbidden in the United States for decades, and the embargo and concerns about their safety kept Frias' family from returning home for even a visit. For this reason, Cuba appeared in Frias's mind as a kind of hallucination or fairyland – not quite real, and its inhabitants similarly fictitious. Though Frias did receive phone calls from his relatives on the island, he had never met them or seen their faces in person. The stories his family told about Cuba were like fables, fairy tales from a long-ago place, a place that could not exist in the real world.



Frias grew up ignorant of Cuba and its complexities, at least in a physical sense, until his work as a journalist forced him to face the place from which he came. Fidel Castro, the Cuban leader who was responsible, in part, for the embargo that had kept Cuba closed off from the United States since the Cold War, was sick. Aware that Cuba was closing its door to all foreign-born journalists in a matter of months or weeks, Frias's newspaper sent him with a mission to get coverage on Cuba while it was still a possibility. Therefore, Frias found himself on a plane to Cuba, about to experience his “homeland” for the first time.

Though Frias was technically in Cuba for twelve days in order to cover Castro's illness and the fall-out from the decline of a long-standing leader on the Cuban populace, he quickly found himself drawn into another, more personal story. He visited family he had never met before, finally giving faces to names and voices on the telephone. He began to ask his family questions, and to create narratives of his history, physically retracing the steps of his mother and father in their courtship, and during their last days in the only home they'd ever known.

The result of that reporting was this memoir, which Frias wrote as an exploration of family history through physical space and landscape. He shares the stories of contemporary Cuba as well, interviewing people on the street and offering vivid details of Cuba in the modern age. Ultimately, what Frias offers is a story of immigration and exile, what it means to be cut off from the cultural and physical landscape of your family home. The memoir includes a number of publicly available photos, audio diaries, and more, to bring to life the stories of Cuba, and of the Frias family.



Cuban-American journalist, Carlos Frias is the author of the memoir Take Me With You. Bilingual, traveled to Cuba in 2006. From that twelve-day trip, he created a five-part series, also called “Take Me With You,” that became the basis for his memoir. This reporting won him the Best of Cox Newspapers Writer of the Year. Frias currently works for the Palm Beach Post and has received a number of awards for his journalism, including awards for sports reporting and three awards from the Society for Features Journalism. His story about a family dealing with an early-onset Alzheimer's diagnosis was republished nationally. He currently lives and works in South Florida, with his three children.