A ‘Pedro Pan' uses memoir and Smithsonian donations to capture youth exodus from Cuba

Yahoo

04-05-2025

It was a lot to ask of an 11-year-old boy. But José Linares survived, and so did the little crucifix affixed to sea shells and coral an old woman gave him when he knocked on her door in Miami, collecting scrap paper to help feed for his family.
Today, both are telling one immigrant's story.
Linares, a retired computer programmer and project manager who lives in the Feeding Hills section of Agawam, is completing a memoir of the crisis his family faced in Havana in 1961, as they and others alienated by Cuba's 1959 socialist revolution looked for ways out.
That little crucifix? Linares delivered it personally to the National Museum of the American Latino in Washington, D.C., where it will help visitors picture the lives of Linares, his brother Raúl and the more than 14,000 Cuban children whose parents sent them from the island in what became known as the 'Pedro Pan' migration.
'It used to glow in the dark,' Linares, now 74, said of the crucifix. 'It doesn't any more. It's been a long time.'
Amid the revolutionary fervor, families became convinced – wrongly, it turned out – that in the interests of his emerging socialist government, Fidel Castro planned to terminate parental authority ('patria potestad') and send young men to live with the country's new allies in the Eastern Bloc.
'Word spread like crazy,' Linares said of the feared exodus. 'The rumors were crazy. Everyone believed it was imminent. It scared a lot of people, including my parents. It became a flood. Time was not on our side. It never did come to fruition.'
But in the fall of 1961, his parents, Manuel V. Linares and Onelia J. Ortiz, paid a fellow Cuban living in Miami $4,000 to help care for their two sons ($42,780 in today's dollars).
Tey Marianna Nunn, associate director of content and interpretation at the new museum, said she's grateful to Linares for sharing his story with the public.
'We all play a role in history, so there are no small stories,' Nunn said. 'Local, regional, and national experiences combine to convey a greater shared history.'
The crucifix and other objects donated by Cuban children who were part of the Pedro Pan movement will be used for rotating displays, according to Ranald Woodaman, the museum's assistant director of exhibition development.
Woodaman says the Pedro Pan story is an important part of both U.S. immigration history and the Cuban American experience.
'It allows us to explore the refugee experience from the perspective of children, he said.
José Linares isn't thinking only of the past. 'People need to know what happens to immigrants when they get here,' he said. 'The majority of us are just looking for freedom, for a better place to live.'
Linares describes the fear of family separation this way in the memoir he is now completing: 'The horrific possibility that [parental authority] was about to be abolished proliferated like a wildfire powered by a windstorm of lies over a land devoid of truth. Fear of losing one's children, of seeing them shipped to a communist bloc country, was on everyone's mind. My parents were beside themselves. The atmosphere became one of desperation.'
José and Raúl became two of the estimated 14,048 young Cubans whisked away on commercial flights to Miami. Their parents, who initially supported the overthrow of Cuba's longtime dictator, Fulgencio Batista, thought Castro's revolution would falter and the family would reunite in Cuba.
A small exhibit about the Pedro Pan children is already part of the new American Latino museum, temporarily housed in a gallery within the Museum of American History as part of the Smithsonian Institution.
'It needs to be told. This is an immigrant story akin to the Kindertransport,' José Linares said, referring to the rescue of about 10,000 children, most of the Jewish, from Nazi Germany from 1938 to 1940. 'I can identify because this is my story.'
Raúl Linares, now 79, gave the museum the duffel bag he carried when he flew to Miami on Oct. 25, 1961. That type of satchel was known as a 'gusano,' the Spanish word for worm, because of its shiny surface; the term is also the pejorative used against Cubans who did not support the revolution.
'That duffel bag? It's a small way that my brother and I can pass a message on to people about what happened and the trials we went through for no reason,' he said in a phone interview from Lawrenceville, Georgia, where he lives after retiring from building and repairing medical equipment. 'It is as real as the history behind it and all the emotions attached to it. It's important that America understand what happens when certain philosophies and agendas get ahold of a country.'
The D.C. museum's collection now includes the passport (No. 64603) that José Linares carried with him to Miami. He stood 4-feet, 3-inches tall with brown eyes.
As he researched his memoir, Linares obtained copies of the visa waiver that he and other Pedro Pan children obtained through the U.S.-based Catholic Welfare Bureau, an essentially one-man effort led by a priest, the Rev. Bryan O. Walsh.
He found the manifest for KLM Flight 977 (48 passengers, only nine of them U.S. citizens) and his customs entry form, stamped 'STUDENT.'
When Castro arrived victorious in Havana on Jan. 1, 1959, the Linares family was running a gumball vending machine business. But as Cuba's trade relations with the U.S. frayed, the family could no longer get gum, toy charms or parts for the machines.
The Linares switched to stocking their machines with candied peanuts, but those fused in the Cuban heat.
José recalls being puzzled by the shutdown in trade, imposed by the U.S. ''Mima,'' he said he asked his mom. ''Why are the Americans our enemies now?''
To celebrate the revolution, the family's vending machines had for a time dispensed little pictures of Fidel and Ché Guevara. A sign on the family's home, reading 'Esta es tu casa, Fidel,' told the new Cuban leader he was welcome to visit. Onelia believed for a time that Castro would fix Cuba's problems, her son says, after the long Batista dictatorship and an ever longer tradition of outside business interests extracting value from the island without benefiting the Cuban people.
The family's view of the revolution changed as their business struggled. Fearing counter-revolution after the failed CIA-guided Bay of Pigs attack in April 1961, the Castro government set up neighborhood watch units.
In his memoir, Linares captures the routine of sharing a family business – counting and wrapping pennies from those gumball machines, his father's love of chess and trips into the interior to visit relatives, where he remembers anole lizards feasting on ants in areca trees.
Then the moment came when his parents decided to act.
'My brother and I, on a trip, just the two of us! It would be our adventure, I thought,' he writes. 'How innocent we were! … Our departure date, October 25th, was now like those sugar cane trains in [the rural town of] Vegas, fast approaching, roaring, unstoppable and laden with sadness. The drive to the airport was gut-wrenching, and the dread of separation filled my very being. The air felt thick. Decades later, I still have just glimpses of that part of our trip as if I am outside of the car looking in and watching our final moments together.'
Because Christmas was coming, his mother had snuck a Zorro hat and mask into his luggage.
The brothers had been told the separation was temporary. Today, José Linares has 62 years of perspective.
'You're leaving your country, your language, your innocence behind,' he said at his kitchen table in Feeding Hills. 'Terrifying was a mild word.'
Raúl Linares, who was 16, says his mother had asked him to look after his little brother.
But after landing in Miami on the KLM DC-6 propellor plane, the brothers were separated and taken to different transit camps.
'When we left customs, we went to a covered parking lot and my brother went with a group of children his age. I had thought that we were going to stay together,' Raúl Linares said. 'We had landed in a strange country and it was all a big shock. I had no idea where he was going.'
José was driven to what he later learned was a former dormitory for Black children called Camp Kendall. Raúl was taken with older teens to Camp Matecumbe in southwest Dade County, still wondering what had become of his brother.
Camp Matecumbe was a former summer youth camp run by the local Catholic diocese. It offered high school classes to the arriving Cubans, but Raúl says he was too preoccupied with finding his brother to attend. He remembers spending days up in a tree, thinking, and missing his girlfriend in Cuba.
On his first Sunday in the camp, Raúl and others were driven to Bayfront Park in Miami to spend the day. The next Sunday, instead of returning from the park to Matecumbe, he used a few dollars his mother had given him to take a cab to the address of the man who was supposed to be helping the brothers. Raúl had heard that the younger Cuban children might be put up for adoption. He managed to make a phone call to his mother in Havana. He explained he wasn't with José. 'It was devastating for everyone, especially my mom, who was very protective,' Raúl said. 'I had to do something quickly.'
With the man's help, Raúl found his way to Camp Kendall. After 12 days apart, José and Raúl were reunited.
'I don't forgive them for separating us, but I know why now,' José said. 'They were overwhelmed with so many kids.'
Freed from transit camp life, the boys stayed for a time with the man and his family.
In his memoir, José Linares identifies that person only as the Ogre. In conversation, he calls him the swindler and believes he exploited his parents' fears, charging them for a visa waiver that was free from Walsh's Catholic welfare group and the Department of State. Raúl refers to the man as 'that drunken, parasitic person.'
The boys' parents arrived in Miami later that year with their sister Marta, 20.
'They didn't know if they would see us again,' José said of his parents. 'I got lucky. We got lucky.'
The family lived in Miami into 1963, making money any way they could. Raúl and his father picked beans with migrant workers in Homestead.
Both boys canvassed neighborhoods, knocking on doors to ask people to give away old paper. The Linareses sold them for 50 cents for every hundred pounds collected.
Their English was coming along, slowly. Asked if he remembered his pitch when he knocked on doors, José says it was something like this: 'Do you have newspapers and magazines, old?'
'We had found this old Flyer wagon. We fixed it up. My father called it the 'Cuatro Vientos,' the Four Winds. My dad christened it,' José said. Raúl remembers that they pulled it with a rope.
It was on those rounds that José, on a hot summer day in 1962, came to the door of the woman who gave him the crucifix. She didn't have any old paper, but asked him to wait while she fetched a container of lemonade and the homemade crucifix display – five shells and five small pieces of coral – that now lives at the Smithsonian museum.
In 1963, the family moved to Frederick, Maryland, through a sponsorship program. 'That's where the doors of opportunity opened up,' José said. 'That's when we got back on our feet again.'
His brother and father took jobs in construction, though José thinks his dad was too old for that. 'It was rougher for him because he was past 50,' Raúl said. Manuel Linares later found work as a night janitor. Mother Onelia and sister Marta worked in restaurants.
Both parents died decades ago.
José says his mother was bitter the family had to leave Cuba and wanted for years to return, at least until an American grandchild came along. His father didn't share the dream of going back. José says he once asked his father how he coped with losing his business and his life in Cuba. 'He said, 'I decided never to look back, because you would go insane.''
Raúl said the promise of the early revolution failed people like his family. 'It was the devil in sheep's clothing. We do know now.'
José hasn't been back to Cuba and pledges he never will. 'I will not drop any money in the country that kicked us out and destroyed our lives.'
Read the original article on MassLive.
Read the original article on MassLive.
Read the original article on MassLive.
Read the original article on MassLive.
Read the original article on MassLive.
Read the original article on MassLive.
Read the original article on MassLive.
Read the original article on MassLive.