Sketches from A Life is a memoir by Lincoln Díaz-Balart (Havana, Cuba, 1954). It is the story of how he arrived in the United States from Cuba as a four-year-old refugee with his family, and the paths he took before being elected to the U.S. House of Representatives in 1992. Once in Congress, Lincoln Díaz-Balart was the author in 1996 of the codification of U.S. sanctions against the Cuban dictatorship, making the lifting of sanctions, by law, contingent upon the liberation of all political prisoners and the scheduling of multiparty elections in Cuba. Lincoln Díaz-Balart authored the most impactful immigration reform passed by the U.S. Congress since the 1986 Immigration Act — the Nicaraguan Adjustment and Central American Relief Act of 1997 (“NACARA”) — which granted legal residency to hundreds of thousands of immigrants facing deportation in the United States. In Sketches from A Life , Lincoln Díaz-Balart explains how these and other legislative milestones were accomplished. Lincoln Díaz-Balart retired from the U.S. Congress in 2011. Subsequently, he practiced law in Miami, Florida, chaired the Congressional Hispanic Leadership Institute ( CHLI ), in Washington, DC, which he founded in 2003, and established The White Rose Institute , which promotes the ideas of The White Rose for the reconstruction of the democratic Cuba of the future. Those ideas are the product of decades of study by his father, Rafael L. Díaz-Balart, who founded The White Rose , the first organization created to fight the Castro dictatorship, in New York, on January 28, 1959.