Vince Castro’s first memory of America is almost too Cuban to be fiction. He was five years old, walking off a boat onto the pier in Key West, when someone handed him a little styrofoam cup with Coca-Cola inside. He had never seen a styrofoam cup. He drank the Coke — then tried to bite into the cup.

That was 1980. His family had just arrived on the Mariel Boatlift — one suitcase for the four of them. His grandmother had spent five years in a Cuban prison for opposing the Castro regime. His father, a chemical engineer and would-be professor at one of Cuba’s top engineering schools, had slipped out before the government realized what they were losing. They landed in Key West and their new life began.

The early years were humble. The family moved from apartment to apartment, eventually settling in a two-bedroom, one-bath home in Homestead — five people, one bathroom, no complaints. “We didn’t know we were poor,” Vince says. “We just had great parents.” His parents worked without pause. They pushed their children toward education. They moved forward without excuses, and without looking back.

Being part of the Mariel generation had its complications. Growing up in West Kendall, surrounded mostly by Cuban American kids born here, Vince often had to explain what it meant to have arrived on a boat, to have lived in the Orange Bowl, to have a grandmother who had been imprisoned. “If you’re not born in a communist country, you can’t understand it as a kid,” he says. He spent years explaining. It made him sharper. It made him proud.

Today, Vince Castro is Partner and Regional President of Hotaling Insurance Services, one of the most respected insurance firms in South Florida. His 30-year career spans commercial property and casualty, employee benefits, private client insurance, life insurance, and estate planning, with a particular focus on high-net-worth individuals and families. “I love the insurance business because it is about protecting families,” he says. “Protecting businesses. Protecting what people have built. And passing it to the next generation.” He knows too well what it looks like when everything gets taken away.

In 2023, Miami Dade College — where he earned his Business Administration degree — inducted him into its Alumni Hall of Fame, recognizing his exceptional achievements as a business leader and community advocate. He chairs the Board of Directors of Voices for Children, which supports abused, abandoned, and neglected children in Miami-Dade County. He sits on the Board of the Baptist Health Foundation. And he serves on the FACE Board of Directors, giving back to the organization whose mission is built from the same story as his own.

He is raising four children in the same city where that five-year-old boy stepped off a boat with nothing but a styrofoam cup. He tells them what his parents taught him, though his parents said it without words: you are here because someone bled for this. You have every opportunity they never had. You have every opportunity they never had, now go Make It Happen (MIH)!