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Carlos Ochoa and Renaldo Alfonso haven’t seen each other for several years, but when they greet in the lobby of the Fort Wayne Marriott on a recent Saturday afternoon, it’s with a hearty handshake and Ochoa’s cheery call, “Hey, Camaquey!”
Not many would know to call the 65-year-old Miami resident by his childhood nickname, which is also the name of the region of Cuba where he grew up.
“Camaquey – it’s the Texas of Cuba,” Alfonso says with a grin.
Then again, not many share the history these two men do.
Ochoa and Alfonso, reunited last month for the 45th anniversary of their graduation from Fort Wayne’s Central Catholic High School, are members of one of the city’s lesser known refugee groups – those who fled Fidel Castro’s Cuba in the early 1960s.
But unlike many Cubans, who left the island as adults to make new lives in the United States, these two left, without their parents, as teenagers – part of a movement aided by the Catholic Church that spirited an estimated 14,000 children out of the rapidly communizing country between 1960 and 1962.
Known as Operacion Pedro Pan in Spanish (or Bread of St. Peter), the movement brought more than 40 teen boys to Fort Wayne, one of about 100 cities in 35 states where the church resettled the Cuban children.
In Fort Wayne, the boys lived in a dormitory overseen by priests and religious sisters on the grounds of the former St. Vincent’s Villa (now Imagine MASTer Academy, a charter school ) on North Wells Street or found homes with foster parents. Over the years, they came to call each other “the Peter Pans,” as the name of their resettling group became anglicized.
Far from their families, without knowing English, without financial resources and missing home, it would have been easy enough for the Peter Pans to have become “lost boys,” as in the “Peter Pan” children’s story.
But Fort Wayne’s Peter Pans have gone on to become American successes while joining communities of Cuban expatriates around the nation and contributing to a tiny one in Fort Wayne. The 2000 U.S. Census, the latest available, counted 182 people in Allen County who listed Cuba as their country of origin.
Alfonso, for example, is now a businessman in Miami after managing agricultural operations in Costa Rica for Eckrich Meats for many years – a job he knew about from his early days in the ranching area of Camaquey.
A fellow Peter Pan, Winston Deferia, 64, is now a real estate investor in San Juan, Puerto Rico.
Among those who stayed on in Fort Wayne, Pedro Ledo, 62, coordinator of the local reunion, is manager of national and international sales for Fort Wayne-based Piremag Corp. Cesar LaGuardia has retired from teaching Spanish at Snider High School; Julio Garcia, who arrived at 13, is a teacher and coach at North Side High School. The late Gabriel Aldin was in management at North American Van Lines.
Two Peter Pans became Catholic priests – the late Rev. Carlos Rozas, who served Fort Wayne’s Hispanic population at St. Paul’s Catholic Church for many years, and the Rev. Filipe de Jesus Estevez, now Auxiliary Bishop of the Archdiocese of Miami.
Making his first return to a reunion since moving to Miami, Estevez, during the June 27 reunion, celebrated Mass at the Cathedral of the Immaculate Conception, where he was ordained in 1970.
“To you, he is a bishop, but to us, he is Filipe, our little brother who bothered us and we had to put up with all the time. We know his secrets,” Alfonso says jokingly.
Ochoa laughs with him. “We saved him from the evils of the world,” says the 63-year-old retired Fort Wayne factory worker.
Adds Ledo, who arrived in Fort Wayne when he was 14: “We were all like family. … They (the Pedro Pan boys) were the only family I had for four years.”
Indeed, for many years, Operacion Pedro Pan was somewhat of a secret itself.
The group’s official Web site at www.pedropan.org, states that the name appeared in print only once, in 1962, before a Reader’s Digest article in 1988.
“Every effort was made during the entire Operacion Pedro Pan to avoid publicity and to avoid any effort to use it for political propaganda,” wrote the late Msgr. Bryan O. Walsh in the Web site’s history. Walsh is known as the father of the movement in the United States.
There was good reason to keep things quiet. Times were dire as Cuba’s former leader, Gen. Fulgencio Batista, fell from power and fled Cuba to Miami and the Cuban Revolution unfolded, says Alfonso.
“My father was in the (Cuban) Army (of Battista) as a major … and he was to die in a firing squad,” he says. “But the sentence was changed to prison for 50 years.”
Cubans were between a rock and a hard place. Battista had been brutal, but so were the revolutionaries. Catholic churches, as well as others, were being shut down, and any inkling that the church was helping people leave would have made things even harder.
Alfonso says his parents knew that if he remained in Cuba until he was 18, he would be forced into the revolutionaries’ army. Through connections and an underground network of Catholics, they found out about Pedro Pan’s unaccompanied minors program.
The effort was set up after Walsh, who directed the precursor to Catholic Charities in Miami, learned of the plight of Cuban children when a 15-year-old Cuban boy named Pedro was brought to him by relatives seeking assistance. The boy had been sent on his own by his parents to live with U.S. relatives, but they were not financially able to care for him.
Walsh realized Cuban children were being sent informally as toeholds in the United States – by parents unwilling to allow their children to grow up or be educated under communism. Many of the parents were hoping to arrive later.
Walsh met with a federal official who assured him money would be provided by President Dwight D. Eisenhower for the care of unaccompanied minors. He then began cooperating with James Baker, headmaster of Ruston Academy, an American school in Havana, who was organizing a network of expatriate and would-be expatriate families in Cuba to send children.
Word of the effort spread quickly throughout the island by churches and by word of mouth, Alfonso says. Most of the children sent were from middle-class or working families; the rich were able to emigrate together. Not all the children were Catholic.
Alfonso says he got on a plane by himself, alone and scared, in June 1961.
“We didn’t have family here, so we would go to a (refugee) camp. There were four of them sponsored by the Catholic Church,” he says. “I was going to come to the U.S., and come back (to Cuba), but then the Bay of Pigs happened (in August 1961), and you remember what happened after that.”
The Bay of Pigs, the ill-fated U.S. plan to have Cuban expatriates invade Cuba, and the subsequent Cuban missile crisis changed the political landscape, and return became impossible.
Alfonso remembers the day he was given three choices about where he would go to be resettled in the United States.
“The first one was Montana – Butte, I think – and the only thing I knew about Montana was it was way north, and it would be too cold, so I said, ‘No.’ The second choice was Indiana, Fort Wayne,” he relates. “I didn’t want to wait for the third choice, so I said, ‘Indiana.’ ”
Although far from ideal, Fort Wayne proved to be a warm place, at least in terms of welcome, says Deferia, who recalls sleeping in a 24-bed room with other boys at St. Vincent’s.
Later, a house on West Wayne Street was purchased for living quarters for 16 boys. As boys graduated from school and left the program, more were sent from Miami to fill spots, he recalls.
Instrumental in running the local effort was Msgr. J. William Lester, then superintendent of Catholic schools and chaplain for the villa. He got the boys situated in high school and made sure they had classes to learn English, the chance to play sports and after-school jobs, and he disciplined them when necessary.
When their families arrived later under a family reunification program, Lester and others in local churches helped them get situated.
“The nuns and the people (at St. Vincent’s) did the best they could to deal with young people – boys, 15 through 18 or 19, all boys, and that’s an age, impossible age,” Deferia says.
“We didn’t know English. They didn’t know Spanish. The food was completely different – no Cuban sandwiches, no rice and beans. They did the best to please us, but to please young guys like that – that’s Mission Impossible.”
Deferia is a native of Santiago, the city where Fidel Castro seized a Cuban Army base and 5,000 soldiers without firing a shot in 1959. His father, an elected politician in the Batista government, had recently died when Deferia was sent to the United States in 1961.
Ironically, he recalls, one of the first Cubans to assist the new arrivals was a family named Castro whose patriarch was a barber in Fort Wayne.
“They came (to St. Vincent’s) Thursday night and made us sloppy Joes, and his wife was not Cuban, but she had learned to make Cuban chicken and rice, which was a favorite,” he recalls.
But Deferia, who says his last time in Fort Wayne was 45 years ago, recalls a well-known Fort Wayne family, Mr. and Mrs. Edward Dahm, with whom he lived as a foster child for about six months. Dahm is the co-founder, with his brother Bill, of Mike’s Express Carwash.
“Yesterday I sat down with Mr. and Mrs. Dahm,” he says as tears come to his eyes. “They became my foster parents. They had five kids already, and they took another one in, and that was me. That was how I learned how Americans lived.
“Mr. Dahm taught me everything. He taught me how to drive. … From him I learned the American way, of decency, honesty, integrity. … (And) because I lived with Mr. and Mrs. Dahm, I had the opportunity to help a lot of people with parents and (other relatives) coming out of Cuba. I was able to help people get shelter, get clothing, get furniture.”
He smiles. “The Salvation Army was instrumental to us. We would make what we called raids. We would raid there all the time to get chairs and tables.”
Deferia’s mother, who was born in Canada, eventually came to New York City, as did other family members. Deferia planned to go to college, but, he jokes, “I was joined by the Air Force.” He served for several years, went into business in New York, and now lives with his wife of 38 years, Tita, in San Juan.
“Fort Wayne was a small town, with hardly any Cubans, but they accepted us with so much grace and compassion,” he says.
Alonso agrees.
“I’ve traveled all over, but I still say Fort Wayne is my home,” he says.
“I want you to put down that I am very grateful to the people from the area who received us and helped us in 1961. … Fort Wayne is a great place, and it has great people.”
