Ileana Ros-Lehtinen: 1952—: U.S. Congressional Representative

The daughter of accountant Enrique Ros and his wife Amanda Adato Ros, Ileana Ros-Lehtinen was born in Havana, Cuba, on July 15, 1952. She was raised Catholic like most other Cubans, but her mother's father was Jewish. The family left Cuba in 1960, a year after Castro seized power, and supported the U.S.-backed Bay of Pigs invasion aimed at toppling the Castro government in 1961. After that effort failed, however, the Ros children were raised as Americans.

Ileana spoke no English at all when she arrived in Miami, but she adapted quickly to her new homeland. "She was such a normal person to grow up with," her childhood friend Maria St. George told the Globe. "When I first met her she was a very American Cuban, not very Latin."

That quick adaptation, however, masked much hard work. Growing up in the 1960s, Ros-Lehtinen did not have the benefit of bilingual education classes, and she would resist Republican-inspired English-only legislation when she became a political leader. "I was lost during the first year I was in the United States because we did not have those bilingual programs," she told Insight on the News. "In my second year it was better, and in my third year I was ready for my English classroom." Ros-Lehtinen's father stressed the importance of education, living away from his family for a time in order to improve his English and eventually earning an American college degree through night courses in Miami.

Ros-Lehtinen chose an educational career for herself, earning an associate's degree at Miami-Dade Community College in 1972 and going on for a bachelor's degree at Florida International University in 1975. In 1986 she earned a master's in educational leadership from the same school, and she began work on her doctorate in the 1990s. After teaching for several years in the mid-1970s, she opened a private elementary school of her own, the Eastern Academy, teaching and serving as its principal until 1985.