It was Christmas Eve 1958, in the days of the rural occupations that led to Fulgencio Batista's flight out of Cuba. About 90 rebels arrived in the night, cutting across the poor fisherman's barrio where my grandfather grew up. They took the crooked dirt road into town and began firing as they pressed into the heart of Puerto Padre.

I was safe and snug, protected from the tumult of Fidel Castro's revolution -- for the time being at least. I was still in my mother's womb as she took refuge in a candlelit corner of my aunt's house.

Eight months pregnant, she made her way to the bathroom. My father helped her into the pink square tub and covered her with pillows. And that's how they spent El Triunfo, huddled in the dark.

I've heard this story so many times I can write it now without even having to ask her about it.

I know my grandfather came to door in the quiet of dawn holding empty cartridges in his hands, his jubilant words foretelling the town's celebration: ``The saints have come down from the mountains!''

I was born days later, on Jan. 17, in the town's tiny clinic. And 10 months after that, my parents brought me to live here. I have no memory of Puerto Padre, only a strange glimpse caught in 1983, when I returned to report on the 25th anniversary of Castro's rise to power.

Ever-present

Still, something more indelible than memory runs through my veins. For all my life outside of Cuba, away from its landscape and its torpid evolution, I have had Cuba. It has always been there, in the industrial churn of Hialeah, in the order of ingredients for all the recipes of my childhood, in that quirky, little jug always kept by the tub for quick, island-style baths, in the violet scent of Cuban babies.

La Patria  is the pocket item on every Cuban's agenda. Put two of us together and eventually we'll get to The Topic.

It is involuntary, the yearning I feel each New Year's Eve at midnight, the rush of emotion I feel each time I see Cuban relatives reuniting at Miami International Airport. It has marked my life. No matter how far I travel into other cultures and other worlds, I am never far from Cuba. It is always just beneath the surface.

And it has been that way for 40 years.

Forty.

It is a milestone in a richly textured, experience-packed life, many lives in one. I have been a witness of truly amazing things, the transformation of cities, the fall of empires, the dizzying progress of technology, the births of babies. My generation has evolved. I have evolved. Everything has evolved. Everything, it seems, except Cuba.

Pain and wonderment

It is a stupefying thing to behold the tired admonishments of Fidel Castro, still bearded, still in fatigues, still poking northward, on the 40th anniversary of his rule. Here I am, smoothing moisturizer under my eyes, writing this column through my first pair of reading glasses, anticipating my fifth decade of life with a mix of gratitude and horror. And there, on CNN, it's the same old same old out of Cuba. The same old heartache.

Granted, I have thrived in the Havana-Miami disconnect. But I wonder what my life would have been like had Cuba been more than a yearning. I search for clues in newly arrived compatriots, studying their most mundane details, the open cadences of their speech, the way they grind their hips when they dance.

I'll never know. My language and moves are different, Hialeah homogenized. The course of my life was dictated 40 years ago, on a fiery night in Puerto Padre, a night I can't remember, a night I can't forget.