Florida, USA
1962
Darkness. I lay on my cot in almost a state of shock. Around me, a dozen Cuban boys snored and sneezed through this first night in America. From time to time, I could hear the sniffles of someone overcome by homesickness. Dazed or not, I was not going to cry. My father told me I was a man. I would behave as one.
Before I left, my mother gave me a ring. I wore it on my right pinkie as a reminder of her love and guidance. Through the night, I nervously played with it. I’d never worn jewelry before. It felt both awkward and comforting on my finger.
My first plane flight was a blur. I have no memory of what followed, just a jumbled bunch of fragments like a puzzle with half the pieces missing. We reached Miami to find a priest waiting for the five of us Peter Pan refugees on board the plane. I remember a white van, going to a fast-food joint, and sitting inside for my first American meal: a burger with fries.
I paid for it that first night in Florida City. My stomach convulsed, unused to anything but my mom’s and godmother’s cooking. The sounds around me were all different, all new. I missed my parents. Missed my home. Even the hotel in Havana. The future looked uncertain, and it began to dawn on me how on my own I really was now.
This was my introduction to America. The stories of immigrant families going to New York, entranced by the sight of the Statue of Liberty—that was not our tale. Mine was of a terrified boy, numb with shock, moving like an automaton to the directions of a kindly priest.
Because of the large number of children being rescued from the clutches of communism, there were three sizable and permanent camps where the new orphans could be housed: Florida City, Matecumbe, and Opa-locka. These were made up mostly of quickly erected townhomes, supplemented with a few tents for dining areas and makeshift classrooms. Florida City is where I was taken. Although initially created to be a more temporary camp, eventually it also became a long-term fixture. Some of the kids would find foster homes; others would be blessed with their parents’ quick arrival.
Others would be there for the duration. A select few, like myself, would be sent to an orphanage. But what was for me supposed to be a few days in Florida City turned into nightmarish weeks as a measles outbreak swept through us boys.
I caught the virus early, so my first week in America was spent in quarantine. My body ached with fever; my back grew covered with sores. I was taken to the base infirmary and lay on another cot, where once a day a nurse scraped the scabs off my back and cleaned the open wounds with alcohol. We were a miserable, scared, and homesick lot of kids.
I stayed strong by remembering the strength of my father and grandfather. They had led by example all their lives. I watched and learned. They embodied the toughness I knew I needed to survive this, and my memories of them sustained me through the worst moments in the camp.
In my dad’s wild days, he and his older brother, my godfather, settled into a village bar one night. They were the rough-and-tumble cowboys whose aura of adventure attracted the small-town ladies. The “campesino” men didn’t take kindly to that, and a fight soon broke out. My dad never shied from using his fists, but one of the small-town boys took the brawl to a new level when he pulled a knife and drove it into my dad’s arm. Undeterred, my dad grabbed a chair and slammed it over his head. That ended the fight.
Those old Prados did not lose. They did not break. They took no shit from anyone.
I guess a little of that must have rubbed off on me.
As a young kid of perhaps six, I remember getting into a scrap with a neighbor boy who had called me names. It was as much of a fight as two six-year-olds could muster, until his father came out and chased me around the block, trying to hit me with a switch. When I dashed up to the house, I found my maternal grandfather, Emilin, watching me from the porch. The other kid’s dad saw him and abandoned his pursuit.
“What happened?” my grandfather asked.
I told him the neighbor boy called me a son of a bitch. So I belted him.
My grandfather smiled, tousled my hair, and gave me a peso.
Lesson learned. Don’t take crap. True pride requires the courage and honor to defend yourself.
That Christmas, my father got me a Daisy Red Ryder spring-powered BB gun. After a distant cousin kept calling me names, I decided on an ambush. I lay in wait for him around the neighborhood and sniped him with the Red Ryder. He’d take the hit and look around for me, but I had already melted away like a six-year-old paramilitary warrior in the making.
It did not take me long to realize those lessons from home applied in my new life on my own in America.
When the measles outbreak ended and we returned to full health, the church began sending us to more permanent placements. Some of the kids went to foster homes. Some stayed there in the camp. Just a few were farmed out to orphanages around the country.
I was one of those kids. With the measle scars still fresh on my back, I packed my meager duffel bag and took another ride in the white van to the Miami airport. I spoke no English, the people at the airport spoke no Spanish. I just knew they were sending me to some place called Denver.
I’d never heard of Denver.
Aboard the plane—a bigger, fancier jet than the one I remembered boarding in Cuba—I fiddled nervously with my ring. After we took off, it slipped off my finger and fell into an air conditioner vent. I tried to retrieve it, but my fingers were too big to fit through the grate. I tried to explain to the flight attendant what had happened, but she didn’t speak Spanish.
I had to leave the ring on board that airplane stuck somewhere in its ventilation system.
Denver’s tall, snowcapped mountains proved the first of many culture shocks for me in Colorado. Another priest waited for me as I deplaned, and another van ride took me through the Rockies. I stared out at the passing countryside in a mix of fear and awe.
Rugged, towering mountains simply did not exist in Cuba. Neither did snow. The very scale and vastness of Colorado after life on an island was like watching a Disney movie. I was enthralled, and to this day, I love visiting those sites.
This new priest drove me into Pueblo and parked the van in front of a redbrick, four-story building. The sign out front read Sacred Heart Orphanage. With its bell tower and sweeping arch over the front steps, it was a dramatic-looking place, designed and built in the Romanesque Revival style that became popular throughout the West at the turn of the century.
I was led up those front stairs into the first floor, where the chapel and offices were located. Given bedding and some basic supplies in this shelter of God, I was shown to my new home on the second floor by a nun. I followed her up a narrow, winding staircase past stained glass windows until we came to the second-floor landing. Through a doorway, I found a broad, open bay furnished with World War II–era metal beds spaced a few feet apart—a room crammed with boys of varying ages.
The nuns who ran the orphanage lived on the floor above. Top floor was the girls’ dormitory. There was also a pool, and beside the orphanage’s outer wall on one side stretched a cemetery. Out back, the church had placed a series of temporary structures that served as classrooms.
What followed was a rigid routine carefully orchestrated by the nuns. We started mornings with Mass after breakfast, school during the day. At night, we had a television in each dormitory we could watch. Of course, the shows were in English, and I understood little, at first. Most were westerns that excited me with their action—Bonanza, Gunsmoke, Rawhide. And of course, the Three Stooges made us all laugh. If we got out of line, the nuns had no issues smacking us. We found them to be tough on us, but in a caring, not capricious way.
There were only a few Cubans at the orphanage. A couple of Mexican kids who also spoke Spanish were the only people we could communicate with at first. But the nuns set about teaching us English right from the first day we arrived. See Spot Run books were the source of my first words of English.
Early on, I befriended an older kid named Christopher. He was proud of his Mexican heritage. He was tougher and bigger than most of the other kids, and he spoke Spanish. Sometimes at night, we would grab some of the other kids and sneak out via the fire escape to go play hide-and-seek in the cemetery. If the nuns or our priest knew about it, they never said anything. It was one of the few ways to feel adventurous while institutionalized. I guess it fed that part of me I inherited from my father; a little mischief can be exhilarating.
One night, I was alone in the shower when three white kids came in, fanned out around me, and asked, “Do you like Mexicans?”
I was not quite sure why they asked, but the Mexican kids were my friends, so I shrugged and said, “Yeah.”
Wrong answer for them. The three started shoving me around. I tried to stand my ground and got a few licks in, but it wasn’t a fair fight. It was an ugly moment, even if eleven-year-old kids can’t really do much damage to each other in such a brawl. Still, it taught me a valuable lesson: if you don’t fight back against bullies, they will only continue to target you.
The next morning, I told Christopher what happened. He gathered the Spanish-speaking kids together, and we discussed the situation. That night, a select three, including me, entered the showers. All three of the white kids were there. I picked them out, and we paid them back and then some. Of course, Christopher did most of the damage. By the time the fight was over, it was clear nobody would mess with us again.
Nobody did. Therein lay the lesson. My father and grandfather showed me the importance of pride. Of honor and courage. Those were integral parts of being a man and a Cuban. But there was a practical side to this I don’t think I recognized until those two fights at the orphanage. Bullies will take your self-respect, your pride, and your dignity while they work you over day after day. What is the answer? Maintain your pride and honor by fighting back. If they have numbers, find allies. If they are stronger, you fight smarter. You make them pay for messing with you, and they will never mess with you again.
That was the true reason my grandfather gave me that peso. I never teased or bullied anyone, but I was damned sure never going to take a pounding without doing something about it. I think the principle applies to nations just as it does with schoolyard politics. In the years ahead, as I began my journey into the shadow world of paramilitary and counterterrorism operations, I saw the same lesson many times. They will leave you alone if you prove too dangerous to mess with.
Months passed. At times, I felt like I was sleepwalking through my new routine. We were encouraged to go to confession every other day, but what ten-year-old has so many sins to atone for? The steady diet of religious indoctrination kept me from feeling truly spiritual. I always liked going to church back in Cuba, taking Sundays to go with my family to the little church in Manicaragua that formed the center of our town square.
There was comfort there, a sense of belonging and family. To this day, I enjoy going to church, only these days I prefer to go alone. Spirituality is a personal aspect of my life, shared only between God and me. Over the years, I found that priests and parishioners only interfere with that connection.
Often at night across the dormitory, sadness was palpable. Every boy there had a tragic tale. Some had been abandoned. Some had lost their parents. Others were given to the orphanage at birth and never knew anything but life according to the church.
Whatever path they had followed to this place, they all felt a void. There was nobody waiting for them, eager to get them out of this place. No family. They were castaways and they knew it. With this realization in their minds, you could feel their mood turn like the autumn chill that crept through the old, wooden windows. Boys who posed as solid, tough, and resourceful in daylight would often be reduced to tears in the darkness.
Those were the hardest moments for me, lying on my army surplus hospital bed. But again, I was different. I knew my mom and pops would come for me. That faith was never threatened, even as the days dragged into weeks, and the weeks into months. My father would find a way to get to America and reunite with his only son. The others around me? I knew I was the fortunate one, a point driven home through the toughest nights when I heard even Christopher trying to stifle his own tears a few beds over from mine.
Thoughts of home would always dominate my mind in those moments. The horse my parents gave me. We named him Candela, “the Flame,” and my father taught me to ride with him. I missed the little community we had set within our town. My grandfather’s place across the street, my great-grandmother’s not much farther away.
Family ties meant everything to us. Feeling severed from those roots left me pining for home.
I missed the smells of home. In the mornings, as my father opened for business, the rich aroma of coffee always filled the house. To this day, the smell of freshly roasted coffee and leather can take me right back to my childhood home. If I walked down the street, a saddle shop and tannery stood at the corner. The smell of leather always made me stop. To me, it was the scent of adventure and the many explorations I made while riding the Flame.
In the mornings, the sadness was packed away and the daily grind of learning English began anew. The See Spot Run books were a valuable gift the nuns gave to me. Learning the language of our adopted country would be our ticket to a better life. To this day, many friends wonder at the fact that I have little to no accent in my English.
Far beyond my horizon, the relationship between Castro’s Cuba and Kennedy’s America steadily declined. Tension grew, and Castro began importing Soviet military equipment and advisors. The threat this posed to the United States would become clear later that year with the Cuban Missile Crisis and the world’s whisker-close brush with World War III and Armageddon that nearly followed President Kennedy’s decision to impose a blockade. But through the summer, the deteriorating relationship between the two countries prevented many families from getting out of Cuba. Some of the Peter Pan kids were never reunited with their families. For others, it took years and the establishment of the Freedom Flights, which pulled some three hundred thousand Cubans out of the country and brought them to the United States.
Even then, about 10 percent of the Peter Pans languished in orphanages or camps like Matecumbe and Florida City. Others went to foster homes. Some, I am sure, endured abuse or emotional neglect. Ultimately, about fourteen hundred Peter Pans never saw their families again.
One early evening during the late fall of 1962, we’d had our supper and were given a little free time in the yard to play team sports. I was on one of the basketball courts when a nun came to escort me to the rectory.
I walked over there with her, and upon entering found our priest waiting, the coal-black office phone off its cradle, handset lying on his desk. The nun handed it to me.
“Hello?” I said tentatively in Spanish.
“Son,” my father’s reassuring voice said, “we’re in Miami. We’ll be getting you home soon.”
I never doubted he would.