By Diana Nelson Jones,
Post-Gazette Staff Writer. Sunday,
June 03, 2001
Jim Jobe met Brielo Leon at the Kiski School in the late 1950s. It would be
the beginning of a beautiful friendship.
Over the years, they would prove to each other how much one can rely on a
friend and how one's will to help another can change both lives.
This weekend, the classmates of '59 attended a reunion at the school in
Saltsburg, Indiana County, and told their story after 42 years.
Jobe, using codes to cloak a clandestine escape plan, helped rescue Leon and
his family from the poverty and repression of Cuba. Leon was living on less than
$20 a month when his old friend helped set him free.
Jobe is a native of Turtle Creek. He moved in 1964 to Springfield, Mo.,
where he recently retired from Merrill Lynch as a vice president.
Leon was raised in Santiago, Cuba. It was a dangerous place for a teen-age
male to be, as Fidel Castro's forces waged war against the regime of Fulgencio
Batista. Many of Leon's friends were being killed by Batista's army. To get him
out of harm's way, his family sent him to the Kiski School, where a connection
had been established for Cuban boys before him. During school breaks, Leon
stayed with Jobe's family.
When Leon returned to Cuba in 1959, the revolution had been won, and he
began his life confident that the Cuba that suffered such outrage under Batista,
who he calls "a murderer, gangster and thief," would become a Cuba
that had "all the freedoms we needed."
"Castro had a lot of prestige," he says. "He had the support
of 99.9 percent of the people. Everyone had confidence." The peso was equal
to a U.S. dollar then. Today, it is worth a nickel.
In the early '80s, when the Cuban government began exporting boatloads of
people it considered undesirable, Leon's discontent began to stir. People who
wanted to get out had to register with the government, he says, and when they
did, police harassed them. Their electricity and water would go off suddenly and
at odd times. They would be followed. They were portrayed as criminals, he said
-- "as scum."
Leon, a mechanical engineer and a reserve officer in the army, loved the
sea, loved to fish, but was not allowed to own a boat. Long before his
allegiance had begun to wane, a pistol collection that he treasured was
confiscated.
"I had always supported the government. I was always a decent citizen,
and so I wondered, 'Why did they take my guns away? Did they fear me?' "
His growing angst led him to write a letter to his old school friend in
1993.
Jobe picks up the story, his voice becoming a little choked at times:
"He wrote, 'Things in my country have gotten so bad I have the need to
tell somebody on the outside.' But he never let on that he was hungry."
Leon had lost 50 pounds. His wife, Zoraida, was boiling orange peels to make tea
that they drank for sustenance, as one would soup. There was no gas, no eggs, no
meat.
"I wrote him back," Jobe says. "And in future letters, he
conveyed to me total frustration. We created a veil, a fiction" in order to
talk in code and plan for the Leon family to begin leaving Cuba.
In August 1994, Leon and a group of people he thought he could trust planned
an exit by boat. He had rebuilt an old motor to power it. But one member of the
group told authorities, and they were caught less than 200 meters offshore. For
this, Leon spent a few days in jail.
Early in 1998, Leon's daughter, Deborah, won a lottery visa to leave Cuba,
and Leon wrote to Jobe, asking if there was any way he could help her.
Jobe did, and in a big way. A man with two daughters of his own, he and his
wife unofficially adopted the girl and began sending her to school at Southwest
Missouri State University.
In recent days, the two men have gone over their letters and coded e-mails,
reminiscing about the circuitous steps they had to take to get first Deborah and
then Leon, his wife and daughter Annette to Springfield, Mo.
"In your letter back to me," Leon says, "You said, 'I feel
honored by your confidence in me.' "
Jobe smiles, and his eyes water. "Deborah, being away from her family,
she missed. . . ." He pauses to get his voice back to strength. "It
broke her heart. My friendship with Brielo was being reinforced by this
surrogate daughter. I became determined to do everything I could to get them
out."
Deborah eventually earned a full scholarship and graduated magna cum laude.
Annette was given permission by Cuba to go to England on a clinical fellowship
to reproduce original vaccination experiments for a European health consortium.
When the men wrote to each other, they cited Beowulf when they talked about
England and characters from "Lonesome Dove" when they began planning
for the Leon family's exit from Cuba to Texas through Mexico.
"We had this thing set up that there was going to be a family reunion
in Mexico and that two old aunts who lived in Bogota were having trouble getting
visas," Jobe says. The two "aunts" were Leon's daughters, and "Aunt
Bertha's house" was Mexico.
When Leon left Cuba in April, one family was being granted less than a pound
of chicken per month, 6 pounds of rice, 3 pounds of white sugar and one bun per
person, "smaller than a McDonald's bun," he says.
He was living on 375 pesos a month -- not quite $20. To make extra money, he
had set up a side business, a necessity for many Cubans, though illegal. In his
back yard, he forged piston rings for old cars that make up the majority of
personal vehicles in Cuba. He kept his own 1966 Chevy running that way.
The family, presumably on vacation from Cuba to Mexico, presented themselves
at the border in Brownsville, Texas, seeking asylum. They spent three days in a
detention camp, then were paroled into the United States provisionally, pending
immigration hearings and without work papers.
"Brielo is a mechanical engineer and we have many fabricating plants"
in and around Springfield, Jobe said. "But the first thing the INS told him
about was how to apply for welfare. We had a job lined up for him [in
Springfield] where his bilingual skills are needed."
That job has been cleared by several agencies, but the bureaucracy is moving
slowly. The Leons are living in a rental house, waiting for Brielo to receive
permission to work legally. They walked away from a house that Leon's wife had
lived in all her life. They left cats and a dog behind and all their other
possessions. Leon's wife is "traumatized," Jobe says.
Leon says he has not gotten used to being out of Cuba yet. He looks a little
shell-shocked.
"Self-censorship is instilled by the life. If you are young, it is born
with you. If you are old, it goes into you. I have been in the United States for
one month and a half and I still have the fear of being in Cuba."
Asked if he had lived in Havana, Leon says, "Yes, I live in Havana."
He stops and glances quickly to one side. "I mean, I used to live in
Havana. I live in Springfield."
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