Family Sentence: The Search for My Cuban-Revolutionary, Prison-Yard, Mythic-Hero, Deadbeat Dad

To classmates and neighbors, Jeanine Cornillot was the daughter of a hard-working single white mom raising four kids in suburban Philadelphia. The household included her Irish grandmother, aunt, and three older brothers, along with assorted pets. She and her siblings attended Catholic school, played with neighborhood kids, skirted poverty—and kept their family secret. The man who gave the family its last name, Hector Cornillot was a Cuban revolutionary turned anti-Castro militant serving a 30-year sentence in a Miami prison for political bombings. While today this might be called terrorism, in the family mythology Hector was a hero. The tragedy is that father and daughter never got to be real to each other. In the end, Cornillot recounts how a child's mythology is replaced by adult reality in a final reckoning with her father when, she says, "Every time I showed him how he impacted my life, he showed me how I'd been erased from his."