MIAMI — The last time the Yankees visited the Marlins, Nestor Cortes found himself filling an unusual role in a familiar setting.

A resident of nearby Hialeah, Florida, Cortes had to pinch-run late in the game with the Yankees’ bench depleted. A left-handed pitcher, Cortes is known for his arm, not his legs. But he gladly made his first major league appearance in his hometown ballpark — even if it left him desiring more.

“That was pretty cool,” Cortes told the Daily News of his awkward stumble around the bases in 2021, but he added that it would also be “cool to go back and actually pitch a game there.”

Cortes will get his wish on Saturday when he starts against the Marlins, the team he grew up rooting for, at LoanDepot Park. He will also see friends and family at the stadium during the Yankees’ three-game series, and he will stay at his parents’ house, where he still lives in the offseason.

The homecoming start will check off a major item on Cortes’ baseball bucket list. The day would have never been possible had Nestor Cortes Sr. not been arrested in 1990.

Back then, the Cuban native was contemplating defection. Cortes Sr. and some family members had discussed ways to leave the isolated island they called home. Those thoughts, which made their way to the wrong people, were enough for Fidel Castro’s government to come pounding on Nestor Sr.’s door.

“There was just word on the street,” said the younger Cortes, who was born in Surgidero de Batabanó and boasts a Cuban flag on his right arm. “They never actually got to the water and got to the raft. Just for that, they got penalized.

“He wasn’t caught in the act. They just knocked on his door and were like, ‘Hey, we heard you were trying to leave, so you’re coming with us.’”

For that, Nestor Sr. served a one-year prison sentence. He worked two jobs while incarcerated, first cleaning and feeding pigs and then building charcoal ovens.

Good behavior earned him the ability to go home on weekends after about seven months, but he bided his time alongside inmates who were far more dangerous.

“He was in jail with people that killed people,” Cortes said. “They were all in there together.”

While scary at times, Nestor Sr.’s time in prison proved to be life-changing.

Shortly after his sentence ended, he met his future wife, Yuslaidy. The couple wed in February 1994 and gave birth to their only child, Cortes, that December.

During the months in between, one of Nestor Sr.’s relatives signed him up for a new visa lottery program that granted legal entry to the United States for those selected. Despite long odds, the family of three won.

After raising and borrowing somewhere between $9,000 and $12,000 for flights and travel documents, the trio, including a 7-month-old Cortes, arrived in the United States in the summer of 1995.

“If [my dad] came in 1990, obviously, my mom wouldn’t be my mom,” Cortes said. “Who knows what I would have been. And then even if we didn’t win the lottery in Cuba in 1994 and we just stayed in Cuba, I probably would not have been a baseball player. Or I might have had to defect when I was older. Like there’s so many scenarios that could have gone either right or wrong, I guess.”

Cortes and his parents had some help when they first arrived, as Nestor Sr.’s sister left Cuba as a Mariel Boatlift refugee in 1980. She took the three in while Nestor Sr. found work as a forklift driver for a sheetrock company.

Cortes assumed his dad made minimum wage — about $4.75 back then — but Nestor Sr. put everything he had into his company’s 401K plan and moved his family into their own apartment after a year or two. In 2001, they bought the house that Cortes still calls home.

The Spanish-speaking family didn’t feel out of sorts in South Florida, where there is a bustling Cuban population.

“In Hialeah, growing up, you didn’t even need English to survive there,” Cortes explained. “Your local supermarket or local grocery stores, gas stations, Walgreens, CVS, everybody’s speaking Spanish. If you’re only an English speaker and you go in there, you might get lost.”

Still, Cortes made an effort to learn English as a child. He showed less curiosity, however, when it came to Cuba’s history, the struggles his parents endured, and the issues he often heard his family complaining about.

“When you’re a kid, you’re so naive to all these things,” Cortes said, but he began expressing more interest in his roots during his teenage years.

As visa lottery winners, Cortes and his family were allowed to return to Cuba. Cortes has been back six times, most recently at age 13. In his younger years, he felt free to run around and play outside there, where there was less traffic than Hialeah.

But as he got older, the trips proved startling.

Cortes remembers visiting Cuba around age 10 and seeing a truck that crashed through a barricade on a bridge. The vehicle had been left dangling over the edge. When Cortes returned three years later, he found the truck in the same exact spot. No individual nor company nor government agency had bothered to remove it or fix the barricade.

“For somebody who hasn’t gone, you picture it as something, and it’s probably 10 times worse, to be honest,” Cortes said of Cuba’s problems, which he noticed includes a lack of paved roads and quality drainage systems. “The food supply is not great,” continued Cortes, whose parents told him of state-issued ration books that households require to get groceries.

“There’s things you see there that are not like home, obviously,” added Carlos Rodón, another Cuban Yankees pitcher whose father took a Freedom Flight to the States at age 5. “We’re pretty blessed to live in this amazing country we live in. So it is very eye-opening when you go to a third-world country, especially Cuba, a communist country, and get an idea of what life is truly like. They only want you to see certain things.”

Rodón, who was also lined up to pitch against the Marlins before succumbing to a hamstring injury, was born in Miami but moved to North Carolina with his family when he was 8. He visited and pitched in Havana with the USA Collegiate National Team in 2012.

Cortes would love to play in or for his baseball-obsessed homeland one day. He said that pitching in the Cuban Winter League is a “dream” of his, and he’s shared a desire to represent Cuba in the World Baseball Classic.

Earlier this year, Cuba allowed some major leaguers who defected from the country to play for its WBC team for the first time. Cortes, however, had already accepted an invitation from Team USA.

A hamstring injury ultimately kept Cortes from participating in the tournament altogether, but he said that he would have accepted an invite from Cuba had the country reached out first. He knows that such a decision would have provoked mixed reviews in the Miami area, where Cuban exiles harbor resentment toward the country and Castro’s abuses of power.

Nestor Sr. experienced those abuses first-hand, but Cortes is still proud of where he comes from — even if he’s not always proud of Cuba’s history.

“You don’t choose where you’re born,” Cortes said. “You learn to accept it and learn to live with it and learn to love your country, right?

“I wasn’t there long enough, but I knew how my parents felt about their childhood and growing up, just how free they felt with the little they had. Even though they didn’t have much, they were able to navigate through the difficulties they had going on there.”

With that said, putting on the stars and stripes would have also meant a great deal to the southpaw, just like pitching in Miami will. He is thankful for his life in Hialeah — and for all the twists of fate that worked out for him on his path to becoming a major leaguer.

“This country,” Cortes said, “has given me and my parents and my family the opportunity of the world to live the American dream.”

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