Battling Baker : From Revolutionary Cuba to Drug-Plagued Lennox Neighborhood, He Fights for a Cause

The battles of Daniel Fajardo, the baker-warrior of Lennox Boulevard, span four decades.

He fought in Fidel Castro’s guerrilla army during the Cuban revolution of the late 1950s, then found himself in Castro’s prisons.

As a penniless refugee in the United States, he fought to build up his bakery business in Lennox, where he now owns a small commercial strip that serves a melange of Latin cultures.

Anti-Drug Message

And he has fought drugs, defying death threats and working with police and other merchants against street drug dealers.

“I wish there were a thousand more like him,” said Capt. Walter Lanier of the Los Angeles County sheriff’s station that patrols unincorporated Lennox.

Products from Fajardo’s bakery and a gelatin company he co-owns carry the anti-drug message of the Sheriff’s Department’s Substance Abuse Narcotics Education (SANE) program. He and his partner in Lulu’s Desserts Co., Agustin Acevedo, were honored for that effort last year by County Supervisor Kenneth Hahn and Sheriff Sherman Block. Sheriff’s officials said they do not know of any other merchants whose products currently carry the SANE message.

“If drugs destroy youth, the country will be destroyed,” said Fajardo, 56, speaking a rapid-fire Spanish that softens consonants in the Cuban manner. “I love this country more than my homeland. I don’t want it to go down. People ask me why I don’t travel, go on trips to Europe. I tell them, I make my money here, I spend my money here.”

He is a simple man, friends and associates say. A man who divides the world into heroes (Ronald Reagan, Oliver North, Kenneth Hahn) and villains (drug dealers and communists). A workaholic and fierce Republican partisan, he plans to obtain U.S. citizenship when he has time to learn English.

Said Hector Carrio, a Lennox school board member, fellow Cuban immigrant and longtime friend: “He’s the kind of person who, if you ask him to give you something, will say, ‘Why don’t you ask me how you can earn something from me?’ ”

But last Christmas, every one of the 730 students at Felton Elementary School in Lennox received unsolicited toys at Fajardo’s expense.

School Benefactor

Fajardo has subsequently become the school’s godfather, showering students with baked goods and sponsoring a “citizen of the month” program that recognizes well-behaved students, Principal Ray Tolcacher said.

But Fajardo was reluctant to be honored by parents for those efforts, according to Carrio. “He’s most comfortable in his bakery, working like a beast, as he has for all these years,” Carrio said.

Cubans are a small but visible part of the Lennox community’s 80% Latino population. The predominantly Mexican mix also includes Guatemalans, Salvadorans, Nicaraguans and South Americans.

Fajardo’s La Gran Via Bakery provides bread and pastries for their varied tastes, as well as birthday and wedding cakes, strong Cuban coffee and donas (doughnuts). (La Gran Via means “the Big Avenue.” The first owner named the bakery after a Havana street of that name.)

Standing between long tables in a back room of the bakery, the chunky, animated Fajardo talked as workers kneaded dough and served customers at a counter adorned with photos of President Reagan and retired Marine Lt. Col. North, the darling of many anti-communist Cuban-Americans.

“I started working as a baker when I was 9,” said Fajardo, who grew up in the port city of Santiago de Cuba. As a young man, he belonged to a bakers union and supported the ortodoxia, a key working-class party of the revolution.

“We were against (President Fulgencio) Batista,” Fajardo said. “We had to fight, because the soldiers would have killed us.”

In 1956, leaders like Castro, Che Guevara and Huber Matos, a popular commandante from Santiago, were reaching mythical status in the struggle against Batista. Fajardo joined the guerrilla movement in the Sierra Maestra and earned the rank of sergeant. He describes it as a young man’s adventure of tolerable hardships.

“Sure, we had to bathe in rivers, it was cold, we were hungry,” he said. “But the peasants were on our side. It wasn’t that bad. We would be playing baseball in a field and the peasants would say, ‘Hey, there’s a convoy of guardia (soldiers) coming.’ So we would prepare an ambush, shoot at them, and then go back to playing when it was over.”

When Batista fell in January, 1959, Fajardo says he took part in the rebels’ triumphant entry into Santiago. The name “Fidel” was on every Cuban’s lips; Fajardo says he saw Castro once and was duly impressed by the young leader’s magnetism. He also remembers Raul Castro, Fidel’s brother and current defense minister, a hard-line Communist whose political maneuvers sped the disintegration of the broad-based revolutionary coalition.

“I was on guard at a prison in Santiago early one morning. Raul Castro brought in a truckload of 81 prisoners and had them shot. We thought it was too much. But, at least in the beginning, these were circumstances of war.”

When the fiery leader Matos broke with Fidel Castro because of Castro’s drift to the left, Fajardo and his friends followed suit. Matos was imprisoned for 20 years and now lives in Miami, a hero of the Cuban exile community.

After several uneasy years of civilian life, Fajardo said he also found himself a political victim. He was accused of smuggling a boatload of refugees to Florida, a charge he denies. He was imprisoned.

“You could hear the firing squads every night. The guards would come to us and say, ‘Tonight you’re going to be shot.’ And your turn wouldn’t come.”

Fajardo was released after about two years under conditional liberty that required him to check in periodically with the authorities. But he went to Havana and managed to obtain a 30-day travel visa to Spain. Upon arriving in May, 1967, he went to the U.S. Embassy in Madrid and was granted asylum.

Six months later, Fajardo was in Torrance, where he had a cousin. He worked 18 hours a day in three bakeries while arranging to have his wife, Ophelia, and other family members come to the United States via Spain, and saving money for his own business.

By 1971, he had the $1,000 down payment needed to buy the Gran Via Bakery. The previous owner had decided after three months that the bakery would not make money. Fajardo made part of the monthly payments with bread to the previous owner, who also owned a market in the San Fernando Valley.

“I slept here, on the floor,” Fajardo said. “At 8 o’clock we would close and I would go to the night school across the street to sell coffee and sweets to people taking English classes.”

The growth of the business paralleled the growth of the Latino population. Between 1970 and 1980 the Latino population in Lennox more than doubled, according to school district and county officials. Today, school officials estimate the district’s student population is 87% Latino, and the community population is at least 65% Latino.

Fajardo purchased surrounding property and rented it to other businesses. But a new challenge soon emerged: a wave of drug activity by brazen dealers.

“It was so bad in 1980 you would not believe it. They sold drugs right there on the corner, day and night,” Fajardo said.

Fajardo and several other businessmen decided to unite and help the Sheriff’s Department combat the dealers. His defiance earned him death threats. A nighttime attack by vandals on the bakery in 1981 forced police to evacuate the street while they checked out a bomb threat.

Fajardo “is a man without fear,” Carrio said. “He kept working. He would go out on the street and confront them.”

Community and police pressure has reduced drug activity near the bakery, though it has not been eliminated, Lanier said.

“It’s not as open and blatant,” Lanier said. “You really have to have community support. Mr. Fajardo was more than willing to bear whatever danger he might have faced.”

Fajardo said he remains ready to protect himself. For emphasis, he pulled open a drawer to display several loaded pistols.

“This area has been cleaned up,” he said. “The battle against drugs is being won.”

Fajardo does not appear to have slowed down. He still works from 5 a.m. to 8 p.m, breaking for a quick siesta. He remains staunchly right-wing and anti-Castro.

“I’m still bitter,” he said. “I was betrayed by my own people. I don’t miss Cuba. I’ll start talking with another Cuban and we’ll say do you remember this street, do you remember that. But I wouldn’t go back. It would be like a desert for me now.”

There is one chink in the conservative armor. Fajardo said the recent immigration reform law has caused hardship in communities such as Lennox. He suggests that undocumented immigrants, at least those who work, be given another opportunity to become residents.

“Most people in Lennox are hard-working,” he said. “They work in hotels, restaurants. Nobody lives off the government here. They will make progress if they get a chance.”