I found out my father was in prison three days after it happened and honestly I did not even know at first because it felt normal that he was not around. My parents got divorced more than ten years before that so him not being there was just regular life for me. I kept trying to call him and the phone just said the line was off every single time. I asked my mom and she started crying and that is when I knew something was wrong. After a few days the rumors started getting to me. People were saying he was going to get 25 years or even more. They were calling him corrupt and saying he was one of them. But when I learned the full story I understood what actually happened. My father worked in food production and he threw away waste products from meat because they were not good for people to eat. He did the right thing. But the people running the system did not want him to do the right thing and so they turned it around and made him look like the criminal instead of them. That really changed the way I see things. I grew up thinking the system was supposed to protect people but what I learned from my dads situation is that sometimes the system is exactly what you need protection from. That is a hard thing to understand when you are young but once you see it you cannot unsee it. It is also one of the biggest reasons my family ended up leaving Cuba and coming to the United States in 2022. We came here with nothing. No money no language no connections nothing. I was 12 years old starting completely over in a country I did not know. But something good came out of all of it. I started taking school more seriously than I ever had before because I understood that knowledge is the one thing nobody can take away from you. Right now I am in the top ten percent of my class at Manvel High School and I am on track to graduate with an associate degree before I even start university which is something I am really proud of. I want to study finance at the University of Houston because I believe that understanding money and financial systems is one of the most useful things a person can do for themselves and for their family. My father taught me without meaning to that systems have power over people who do not understand how they work. I do not want to be that person. I want to be someone who understands the system and can use that understanding to help other people who are starting from the same place I was. My father did not let prison define him and I am not going to let where I started define me either.

Money does not care where you come from. I was born in 2009 in a small neighborhood in Cuba with its own economy. Neighbors traded favors the way the oxpecker trades cleaning for safety, everyone had something someone else needed, and survival depended on figuring out what that was. Doctors drove taxis after shifts just to have enough money to eat. Every day started with the same question: what can I do today to get ahead. That was my first financial education, without it being in a classroom.` Cuba is a beautiful country. Its system is not. Corruption takes what hard work builds, and what is left teaches you something school never could. The best way to learn how to get something is to grow up without it. A traditional home is where most kids get their first financial education before they even know what that word means. In my culture, mom stays home and dad goes to work. Mom cleans, organizes, and takes care of the kids. Dad provides. Simple. What I did not realize until later is that this was not just a family structure. It was a transaction. Mom offers care and dad offers resources, and both get what they need. That is trade. That is economy. That is the most honest financial lesson anyone ever gave me, and nobody sat me down to teach it. When my family arrived in the United States in 2022, that same model collapsed overnight. There was no stable income because my parents were learning a new country from scratch. Suddenly both of them had to do everything at once, work, care, survive, and figure out a system none of us understood. I was 12 and I became the translator, not just for the language but for the concepts. What is a credit score. What is a lease. What is interest. I was learning these things the same moment I was explaining them to my parents. That was my real financial education. One of the first books I got the chance to read was The Richest Man in Babylon. I read it once and did not understand it. Read it again, even worse. By today I have read it more than five times and every time I find something new. The lesson that stayed with me the most was simple. A part of what you earn is yours to keep. Not the rent, not the food, not the government. Yours. Coming to the United States I saw the opposite possibility. The ones who get ahead are not always the smartest or the luckiest. They are the ones who understood the rules early and decided to play differently. That is what I am working toward. A financial education does not have to come from Harvard or Stanford. Mine came from the streets of Cuba and a small house where survival was the curriculum. From watching my family work with nothing, to reading the books, every lesson has pointed in the same direction. I plan to study finance at the University of Houston Bauer College of Business and use that knowledge to build something real, not just for myself but for others who arrived here the same way I did. I am still learning. I am still improving. And I plan to use every opportunity I gain to build a future that makes all of it worth it.