All the “POPS!” and “BANGS!” from fireworks had my single (for the time) mother edgy. Firing-squads had been murdering thousands of Cubans ‘round the clock. Other thousands of Cubans waged a lonely and hopeless guerrilla war against the massively-armed forces of Soviet proxies Che Guevara and the Castro brothers. (All this 90 miles from U.S. shores.) All those bombs and gunshots were only months distant on July 4th 1962--the Fontova family’s first Fourth in the U.S. We landed in south Louisiana, deepest darkest Dixie. Castro’s propaganda constantly hammered that such areas of the U.S. were infested by "gun and religion-clinging...