Jurist Retains Immigrant’s Perspective of U.S. Ideals

Francisco F. Firmat could sympathize as he watched the Cuban couple step off an airplane in Orange County, leaving their family behind for a new life earlier this month.

Firmat, an Orange County Superior Court judge, had been there himself.

In 1961, Firmat was spirited out of Cuba--alone and just 11 years old--through a program for parents who feared the new Communist government might send their children to the Soviet Union for schooling. The clandestine operation, dubbed “Pedro Pan,” sent Firmat first to Miami. But in days he was headed for the Denver orphanage that was to care for him until his parents could join him--if they were able to leave.

He wore a name tag with simple instructions: “My name is Francisco Firmat. I’m a Cuban refugee. I don’t speak English. I’m going to St. Vincent’s Home for Boys, a Catholic orphanage in Denver, Colo.”

His two sisters had gone separately to a girls’ orphanage in Denver. It would be months before their father, a former Havana judge, and mother made it to the United States. The family reunited in Colorado and later resettled in Alhambra.

Firmat’s experience as a vulnerable newcomer to the United States remains a defining moment for the 46-year-old judge. His courtroom sports an oversized print of the unveiling of the Statue of Liberty. On a bulletin board is tacked a one-page biography of poet Emma Lazarus, who penned the statue’s famed invitation to the world’s “huddled masses yearning to breathe free.”

For Firmat, who idolizes George Washington and can recite details of the Battle of Yorktown, the courtroom display is not just decor.

It is also his story--and a reminder to others.

“Immigration in this country has been the lifeblood,” Firmat said. “It has helped our economy, our ideals and our attitudes. Nobody appreciates America more than an immigrant does.”

A conservative Republican, Firmat acknowledges his pro-immigrant beliefs put him at odds with many in his party in Orange County, birthplace of the Proposition 187 voter initiative approved in 1994 to bar some government services to illegal immigrants.

“There’s a lot of anger out there,” Firmat said. “There’s a lot of people angry about the economy, the Orange County bankruptcy. It should be a time of great joy. The Berlin Wall fell. The Soviet Union collapsed. The danger of nuclear war is less. But there’s not a lot of joy.”

Firmat had tears in his eyes on greeting Luis and Miriam Abreu, who arrived March 6 after winning a lottery for visas to emigrate from Cuba. The judge was recruited as a Spanish interpreter by the Corona del Mar elementary school that sponsored the couple’s trip. Students first made contact with the couple by putting a message in a bottle and tossing it to sea.

Firmat called the Abreus weekly, giving updates on fund-raising and suggesting steps to help their two adult sons emigrate later. When chances for a possible home in Monrovia fell through, Firmat urged the couple to move to California anyway. A Santa Ana couple who emigrated from Cuba agreed to host the Abreus.

Firmat’s telephone calls to Cuba were “like a life raft to Luis, to know someone was checking in,” said Judy d’Albert, a Harbor Day School teacher whose students raised most of the Abreus’ travel expenses. “Without him, none of this would have evolved.”

Firmat downplays his role with a gentle smile. “It sounded like such a fairy tale that I said, sure, I’d like to get involved.”

Around the courthouse, Firmat is known as an amiable, if private, jurist with a strong bent for getting parties to settle civil lawsuits. Currently before him are major cases involving alleged fraud at Teachers Management & Investment Corp. and the case involving First Pension Corp., which collapsed in 1994 following a scam that left 8,000 investors with huge losses.

Firmat also presided last year over a pitched legal battle that polarized Cypress residents over the question of a proposed carpet warehouse and the 1991 case of Laura Small, an El Toro girl whose parents sued the county after she was mauled by a mountain lion in the Ronald W. Caspers Wilderness Park.

Firmat began his legal career as a personal-injury lawyer in Fullerton, catering mostly to a Spanish-speaking clientele, and was named to the Municipal Court bench in 1985. He was elevated to Superior Court in 1990. Firmat, who is unopposed this year, automatically gains a new six-year term on the bench.

He is at the hub of a network of about two dozen Cuban-American attorneys in Orange County. The group meets occasionally at a restaurant in Tustin, swapping news over lunches of ropa vieja, black beans and rice, fried bananas and Cuban espresso.

“He kind of serves as a father figure--the glue that holds the Cuban-American attorneys together here in Orange County,” said Santa Ana lawyer Jose Urcis, a member of the informal group.

Firmat also serves as chairman of a program for Spanish-speaking juvenile delinquents run by the Orange County Bar Foundation.

The judge lives in San Juan Capistrano with his wife, Laura, a homemaker, and their two children. He belongs to a group of Christian judges and lawyers and attends two churches--one Catholic, the other evangelical Protestant. Firmat, who teaches a contemplation class and reads Thomas Merton, calls his two faiths opposing branches of the same tree.

“I feel very strongly that this is my vocation--being on the bench. In a sense, it is where God wants me to be,” Firmat said.

The success has not dimmed memories of the helplessness Firmat felt as a young immigrant--one of about 15,000 “Pedro Pan children” shuttled out of Cuba.

“Most people don’t appreciate how wrenching it is for these families coming to the United States,” he said.

“If somebody goes away from their family, to go through that kind of pain, they must have a very good reason.”