Lost boys of Cuba? Hardly

EIGHT-year-old Jorge de Cespedes was scared, lonely and heartbroken, but he was making a killing in wholesale.

It was 1961, and the place was a sweltering, insect-plagued refugee camp on the edge of the Everglades. For Jorge and his 11-year-old brother, Carlos -- and 14,000 other Cuban children over the next 20 months -- the camp was their first stop in the United States after fleeing Cuba through a secret U.S. funded airlift dubbed Operation Pedro Pan.

Like other parents, Fernando and Esther de Cespedes feared that Fidel Castro’s revolutionaries might ship their sons off to Russia for communist indoctrination.

Most of the children didn’t stay at the camps for more than a couple of weeks before they were sent on to foster homes or orphanages. But the De Cespedes brothers wound up staying longer, and they, along with the other 900 children then at the Roman Catholic Church camps and group homes, got an allowance of $1.40 on Fridays -- four quarters and four dimes -- if they produced a letter to their grief-stricken parents.

“Boys that age, they hate to write, even when they’re homesick,” says Jorge de Cespedes, who still has a boy’s mischievous smile.

So he collected a quarter from each of the other boys, along with some details on their families, and hired older girl refugees to draft customized letters at 10 cents apiece.

“It was great. I haven’t had 60% margins since then,” jokes Jorge, now a 54-year-old Miami medical products magnate.

LIKE many “Pedro Pans” now in their 50s and 60s, the De Cespedes brothers left their comfortable home in Havana after Castro nationalized education by closing all private schools, including the Jesuit-run La Salle Academy the boys attended.

The brothers were told they’d be back in a couple of months -- as soon as the revolution fizzled.

They left the island with visas clandestinely issued by church officials using signed U.S. State Department documents with spaces left blank for names. The papers were smuggled in through diplomatic channels. The brothers flew out on the daily Pan Am flight to Miami on May 26, 1961, ostensibly to spend the summer studying English. It would be five years before they saw their mother and father again.

“Did we miss our parents? Of course. But as a kid it was different,” recalls Carlos de Cespedes, a 56-year-old who, despite a receding thatch of salt-and-pepper hair, looks boyish when he smiles. “Living at a camp with 900 kids! We played football, raised hell. It was an adventure.”

The boys’ first camp in this suburban gateway to the Everglades was an insect-ridden refurbished military barracks with sports fields and gravel parking lots traversed by snakes. After a year, when Carlos turned 12 and had to move to a camp for older boys, in Miami, the brothers lived for their Friday-night reunions at church-sponsored dances and other events.

Jorge, now a stouter, mustachioed version of his brother, says he was entrepreneurial even before leaving Cuba. He would fish and sell his catch to restaurants, even though he didn’t really need the money.

In Florida, their letter mill was the first of many enterprises the brothers undertook to pass the time waiting for their parents.

On the weekends, they hitched rides to stores miles away to fetch sodas, candy and transistor radios to sell at a markup. They took jobs cutting grass, cleaning the camp dining halls and emptying out the lockers of their Catholic school at semester’s end. Carlos rescued textbooks left behind by wealthy classmates and carefully erased doodles and other markings so he could sell them.

Their industriousness -- and their skill at hiding their savings for five years from larcenous campmates -- netted the brothers $1,500, which became the start-up cash for life in exile when their parents arrived with only the clothes on their backs.

The reunion was joyous, but reconnecting as a family took time. Jorge had begun to regard Carlos as his only authority figure.

The elder brother chafed under the reasserted parental guidance after they moved to an apartment rented with the boys’ savings.

“I was a 16-year-old punk, leaving the house at 9 p.m. My mother would ask me where I thought I was going at that hour and I’d think, ‘Who do you think you are?’ ”

Their father, a dentist in Havana, and their mother, a college professor, had to cope with diminished careers and social standing. Fernando worked illegally as a dentist, treating fellow exiles, and Esther got a job at a contact lens factory.

But the boys prospered. They attended private schools in Miami that the U.S. government, through the church, paid for. Both earned scholarships and college degrees, Carlos in chemistry at Emory University and Jorge in business administration at Florida International.

Over the last three decades, the brothers have built their Pharmed Group of healthcare businesses into one of the largest independent distributors of medical supplies in the country.

Jorge, a father of three, has warm memories of their family life in Miami, before his father’s death in 1986 and his mother’s eight years later. But he confesses to having suffered a long-delayed emotional trauma.

“I always swept it under the carpet,” he says of one nagging, unanswered question: How could his parents have risked sending their children to a foreign country alone?

One day shortly after his mother was widowed, she became petulant when he told her he would be away overnight on a business trip to Tampa, Fla.

“I was driving and this anger just came out of nowhere, like, ‘How can you have a problem with my leaving you for one day when you left me for five years?’ ” he recalls. The incident drove him to therapy and eventually to understanding.

Carlos says he has never questioned his parents’ decision. “I applaud what my parents did,” he says. “I have four kids. If I didn’t see them for five years I would die of sadness.

“Did they misjudge how long it would be before they would get here? Maybe. But they did the right thing,” he says.

Like the brothers, other Pedro Pan kids, toughened by institutional life and accorded free private education, learned to make their way in the business world. But there were emotional problems.

It took 25 years for the mother of one Miami woman to be reunited with her daughter. The mother now obsessively sews clothing for her daughter in a symbolic bid for forgiveness.

Another Miami woman whose parents never joined her said at first she was heartbroken, then confused and now bitter. She did not want to discuss her experience and “stir up all that buried anger.”

Even some of the operation’s most grateful beneficiaries concede there were emotional wounds and question whether the threat that ideological zealots posed to Cuba’s children was real or a rumor spread by CIA.

Although he says he arrived “as right-wing as you can find here,” Nelson P. Valdes, a University of New Mexico sociology professor who left Cuba at 15, said he later became convinced that the airlift was a Washington-concocted plot to drive wealth and knowledge from Cuba.

“One reason for the ‘success story’ of the Cuban Americans in comparison to Mexican Americans and other minorities is we were given financial breaks that others did not get,” Valdes said, recalling that the U.S. government paid host families $180 a month per child. Pedro Pans also could apply for government “loans” that they were never asked to pay back, Valdes said.

SOME Pedro Pans dispute that they were spirited away without Castro’s knowledge. He probably knew, they say, but declined to intervene and validate fears the regime was seeking to abrogate parental rights.

Castro might even have encouraged the panic, to eliminate political opponents, speculates Bernardo Benes, a retired banker who negotiated the release of thousands of prisoners in the late 1970s.

“We were a relief valve, a way to get rid of the opposition,” said Armando Codina, the son of a senator in Cuba who arrived penniless, dropped out of school when his mother arrived, and went on to build one of the most lucrative real estate empires in the Southeast.

Whatever its instigation, Operation Pedro Pan was undertaken by the late Msgr. Bryan O. Walsh, an Irish priest in Florida, after a State Department official asked him in December 1960 to prepare to care for about 200 Cuban children.

Walsh, who remained close to the De Cespedes brothers until his death six years ago, bequeathed the voluminous airlift records to Barry University in Miami Shores to be archived and made available for sociological research. The 14,048 individual case files are currently sealed for privacy reasons.

The Pedro Pans’ achievements remain anecdotal, but business leaders say the program fanned new life into South Florida.

“In many ways, Miami has been successful because of the Pedro Pans, who came out of that experience with such entrepreneurial spirit,” said Frank R. Nero, president of the Beacon Council, a public-private initiative promoting economic development in Miami-Dade County.

Nero points out that Cubans who came here alone as children have been successful not only in business but in the arts, sciences, law and politics.

Sen. Mel Martinez of Florida, GOP general chairman, was 15 when he came here through Operation Pedro Pan. Yale history and religion professor Carlos Eire wrote about his experience as a Pedro Pan in the National Book Award-winning memoir “Waiting for Snow in Havana,” and Yvonne Conde chronicled her experience in a broader look at the program in “Operation Pedro Pan.”

TIES among the former Pedro Pan children have been nurtured through the years, with a network of clubs reuniting those scattered from New England to California.

The De Cespedes brothers operate a favor network with other Pedro Pans. “We’re always calling each other to say, ‘This guy needs a job’ or ‘This guy needs drug rehab,’ ” Jorge says.

“The connection among us is so strong to this day, 45 years later,” says Ana-Maria Carnesoltas, a lawyer in St. Petersburg, Fla., who was one of 40 girls sent to a Catholic boarding school in San Antonio. “We’re on the Internet talking to each other constantly. We created a family here.”

With Castro now 80 and ailing, many of the Pedro Pans are optimistic they will have an opportunity to return to their homeland and share their know-how and good fortune.

“The interest is immense,” says Carlos. “I’m only 56 -- I still have time to contribute.” He predicts Cubans will demand more economic opportunity soon after Castro dies and businessmen like him will be well-suited to assist them. “I don’t know of any other exile community that after 45 years is still as fervent as the Cubans.”

The brothers describe the United States as the world’s most generous country and express deep gratitude for what the Pedro Pan experience gave them. But in their souls, they say, they remain Cuban.

“At 18, I would have said I was an American born in Cuba,” says Jorge. “But the older I get, the more Cuban I get.” He and Carlos dream of one day seeing a Pharmed branch, and perhaps even an NBA franchise, in

Havana.

carol.williams@latimes.com