Cuba
1959–1962
A few days after I returned home, revolutionary forces led by Che Guevara launched a three-pronged assault on Santa Clara. The fighting engulfed my godmother’s city, and on New Year’s Eve 1958, Batista’s troops broke and ran. That was the final nail for the Batista regime, and the dictator fled the country for the Dominican Republic a few hours later on January 1, 1959.
The revolution, dubbed the 26th of July Movement, swept Castro into power, and overnight, life changed for my family. In Santa Clara, the effects of the recent battle were evident everywhere, including in my godmother’s small duplex. During the fighting, one of Batista’s World War II–era American-made M3 Stuart light tanks put a 37mm armor-piercing round right through their living room and demolished their couch.
Fortunately, nobody was hurt. I remember my cousin showing me the solid, unexploded round, which he’d found in the living room and kept as a souvenir. It was bigger than my hand.
If the aftermath of the revolution was evident in the streets, the new way of life for us kids began at school. We were ordered to join the Cuban Revolutionary Youth, dubbed the “Castro Youth.” It was loosely based on the organization of the Boy Scouts, but instead of learning to camp, the Castro Youth tried to mold us into compliant Marxist ideologues. We wore our uniforms every day—shorts and white shirts with a neckerchief whose color denoted what level you were in the organization. We were sent out into the countryside to be foot soldiers in Castro’s new literacy program. At age eight, I was expected to teach hardscrabble peasant farmers how to read. That was my first direct contact with the absurdity of the new Marxist regime.
In school, our teachers told us to watch each other and our families. If we heard anyone saying anything against Castro, we were to report it at once. The new regime weaponized us against our own families in perfect 1984-esque fashion. Around town, every block had a designated official who recorded his neighbors’ movements. Ears were always open, listening to the slightest critique of Castro, his revolution, or of Marxism in general. Once reported, those people vanished, taken in the night by the storm troopers of the 26th of July Movement.
As Marxist indoctrination soon dominated every aspect of our lives in school, life back home in Manicaragua became a growing nightmare for the middle class. A lot of people in town had always been jealous of my family’s success. We’d endured threats before, but this seemed different. Various revolutionary committees were formed, led by some of the true dregs in our city. Now that they had achieved a level of power they hadn’t had under a capitalist system, they took revenge on those more successful.
It didn’t take long for some of the local guerrillas who had fought loyally with Castro to see this would soon spin out of control. They broke with the revolution and headed back up into the Escambray Mountains to carry on a new struggle against their former leader. Castro’s loyalists showed no mercy to these “traitors,” who were hunted down and killed over the next four years.
While new skirmishes raged outside of town, my father found it increasingly difficult to run his business under the new regime. In June of 1959, one of the newly appointed committees showed up at our family’s business and declared it “confiscated in the name of the people.” My mother tried to go back in and get her sweater, which was draped over her office chair, but the committee stopped her, declaring that even the sweater was now property of the state.
Across the street, they came for my grandfather’s cigar-rolling business and his gas station. Overnight, we went from prosperous and hardworking to a family officially robbed by the new regime. The committee “generously” asked my father to manage the people’s coffee roasting concern, but he refused. Though he was apolitical and had never expressed his views on Castro, after his livelihood had been stolen, he was far too proud a man to run it for these thieves.
About the same time, my godmother’s husband sat my father down to give him a warning. Though he was a professor and lifelong Marxist himself, he could see the devastation the revolution was having on us and wanted to help. The news he conveyed was not good. My school in Santa Clara had been tasked with selecting several of its most promising students to be sent to the Soviet Union for further education. My name was on that list. This would not be optional; the government would simply put me on a plane to the Soviet Union, whether my parents agreed or not.
I was about to be torn from my parents to be brainwashed in a foreign land so I could someday become part of the revolutionary vanguard itself.
In the years since, I’ve often wondered what would have happened to me if we had not received that tip. Would I have ended up a Marxist, too? Would I have joined an intelligence service like Cuba’s version of the KGB, the 02? I’d like to think not, but the indoctrination those children were subjected to in the Soviet Union transformed most of them into apostles of the revolutionary Marxism who later held positions of importance in the regime.
Losing his business was bad enough. My father was not about to lose his only son to the state as well. He pulled me out of school at once and returned me home to Manicaragua, where the tension ran high. At night, my parents would whisper to each other, planning and working through what to do. Already, the coffee business was being run into the ground by the revolutionary committee. They asked my father to come back and manage it again. He refused. It went out of business not long after.
The family limped through the next year in our home, watching conditions deteriorate. In April 1961, CIA-backed counterrevolutionaries landed on the Bay of Pigs, adjacent to La Planchita, one of the beaches my family used to vacation at in better times. I remember it being a place of great memories for my family, where the seafloor was carpeted with blue crabs and my dad would take me shrimping. Now, as the anti-Castro forces landed and tried to push ashore, revolutionary troops throughout the island mobilized to fight them. “The gringos are coming!” were the words on everyone’s lips in those days.
The CIA-organized Bay of Pigs Invasion lasted three days and ended in a complete fiasco due to the betrayal and broken promises of the Kennedy administration. That costly failure both solidified Castro’s status as a national hero and humiliated the United States. There would be no breaking Castro’s stranglehold on power now.
My father and mother saw the writing on the wall. Our position had grown more acutely vulnerable every day and our family’s options grew limited. It was time to leave town and try to get out of Cuba.
The new regime did not ban emigration, but anyone wanting to leave Cuba was required to leave all their possessions and resources behind. In the days before we departed for Havana, the local committee reappeared at our house, inventorying every possession inside. In front of us, they argued over who would get what item. It was revolting—legalized theft.
We packed a few clothes and decamped to Havana’s Bristol Hotel, where we joined many families in similar straits. My father soon discovered that while it was possible to get out of Cuba, getting the exit permits needed to do so was an exceptionally difficult and corrupt process. He spent months cultivating contacts, trying to cut loose the necessary documentation. Meanwhile, we lived a life of waiting in the hotel.
It became clear we could not get the entire family out at once. My parents looked for options, growing ever-more concerned about the excesses of the Castro regime, fearing more violence and crackdowns aimed at people like us.
They had cause for such worry. When we first arrived in Havana, we turned onto one street to discover bodies hanging from the light poles. My mother gasped and screamed, “Don’t look!” as she twisted around and dived over the front seat to try to hide the scene from me. Too late, I saw it. Buffered by a child’s innocence, I was surprisingly not disgusted. It would be years before I understood that horror.
Those bodies hung there as reminders of what happened to enemies of the revolution. If we had not already started to hate Castro, this was the turning point for us.
In the hotel, my parents impressed on me the need for caution. I learned not to talk to other kids about any of our family’s plans. They frequently repeated things to their parents or the regime’s watchers. This new Cuba was fraught with new dangers.
We would have no freedom here. All the talk about agrarian reform, health care for all, literacy—it meant nothing in a country that no longer let you keep the fruits of your own labor, confiscated your possessions, and made everyone paranoid to even say one critical word about the regime.
There was only one place to go: America. We didn’t know much about it. My parents had never been outside of Cuba, nor had anyone else in the family. But in the context of the Cold War, there was only one place of hope for people in our situation: the United States. Despite the Bay of Pigs and the fear of an American invasion it triggered, the truth is most Cubans had a generally favorable view of the U.S. and its people.
When it became impossible to get all three of us out at once, my father discovered the Peter Pan Program. Founded by a Catholic priest named Father Bryan Walsh in 1960, Operation Peter Pan was originally an effort to get the children of Batista loyalists out of the country so their parents could continue the fight against Castro while knowing their kids were safe. However, after the failed invasion, it quickly evolved into a U.S.-funded evacuation of whoever could or wanted to get their children out.
The exit visa process was managed by corrupt Castro bureaucrats in Havana. The necessary paperwork could be handled—for a price. My father developed the right contacts and got me an exit permit and a twenty-five-dollar plane ticket to America.
The family talked it through over many nights. My parents were sending me to a different country, unsure if they would be able to follow. Given the situation in Cuba, my father deemed it the only chance for me to live a life free from oppression and violence. He wanted so much for me to live in freedom that he was willing to risk never seeing me again to ensure I got that chance.
My mother was heartbroken and terrified by the prospect of losing her little boy. My father comforted her as best he could. On our last night together in Havana, we went to dinner with our extended family to the Tropicana, dressed in our most formal remaining clothes. Somebody snapped a photo of us at the table. Our last family supper. I was the only one holding a smile. My parents and other family members all looked grim and tense.
No wonder. My parents had lost everything. The television, the Pontiac—those were just material items easily replaced. But the family heirlooms that were signposts of who we were and what we became, those were unique. They were precious to us, meaningless to the committee that simply assigned a monetary value to everything back in our once-tranquil town.
On the wall in our home hung a beautiful set of silver spurs. They belonged to my father in his youth, and they were among his most prized possessions. He rode with them, he worked with them, and he brawled with them. They symbolized his unbridled spirit, wild and ready for any adventure or challenge. Even after my mom tempered him in marriage, he burned with the need to achieve, learn new skills, try different things, and see distant places. That sense of adventure further connected the two of us. It was part of my DNA, too.
Someday, when I was old enough to recognize what they meant, my father intended to pass those silver spurs to me. I was to do the same someday when I had my own family, my own son. A shared legacy across three generations of Prados.
Now such things would never be shared.
The tangible items of our life here in Cuba had been erased. The committee robbed us of our heritage. That was a generational wound that never healed, and among most Cubans who escaped Castro, that deep sense of loss is shared to this day.
The morning after our night at the Tropicana, they helped me pack one small duffel bag—all that we were allowed. My father dressed me in a fine charcoal-gray suit, and we departed the hotel as a family for the last time.
In the street in front of the airport terminal, soldiers of the revolution patrolled with rifles. They were everywhere—a reminder of the new realities of the Marxist police state our country had become in less than three short years of Castro’s rule. I doubt my parents even noticed them, though. They were too busy struggling to control their emotions.
At the front entrance to the terminal, we said our goodbyes. My father said to me, “We will follow as soon as we can. You’re a man.”
I was ten years old.
My mother crushed me in one final hug, her face revealing her heartbreak. “If you cry,” I said to her, “I’m not going.”
She hugged me tighter. Then I felt her arms release me. Numb, walking like a robot, I carried my duffel bag into the terminal.
After three long years that saw them lose their livelihood, their house, and their possessions, they were now losing their only child.
When I turned around for one last look of my parents, through the glass “fishbowl,” I saw my mother sobbing uncontrollably. Beside her, my father was biting his lips, tears in his own eyes.
I’d never seen him cry before. Somehow, I did not cry myself. I headed for the gate and the plane for America waiting there.