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The
Pedro Pan Generation
They share a childhood trauma... and tremendous
professional success
By John Dorschner. jdorschner@herald.com.
Posted on Mon, Sep. 22, 2003.
At 13, Armando Codina found himself dumped in
a New Jersey orphanage with "a lot of troubled
kids.''
''It was a tough place, lots of fights,'' he
recalls. "I came out of there with an attitude
that I wouldn't ever let anyone take advantage
of me. I'd rather be hit with a two-by-four than
put up with anything. It was a character builder,
a very good experience and one I'll be forever
grateful for.''
Codina, now one of Florida's most prominent real
estate developers, was one of about 14,000 children
-- who have come to be called Pedro Pans -- sent
out of Cuba in 1961 and '62 by parents who feared
that, if they stayed, they would have been subjected
to communist indoctrination.
The Roman Catholic Church picked up most of these
unaccompanied minors in Miami and resettled them
in camps or foster homes here or in institutions
throughout the United States.
EXCEEDING EXPECTATIONS
Though they represent less than 2 percent of
Cuban refugees, Pedro Pans account for some of
their biggest success stories:
o Mel Martínez, the first Cuban American
appointed to a Cabinet-level job in Washington.
o Eduardo Aguirre, director of the Bureau of
Citizenship and Immigration Services.
o Leo Guzmán, the first Hispanic member
of the New York Stock Exchange.
o Carlos Saladrigas, founder of Vincam, the largest
Hispanic-owned business in the States until he
sold it in 1998.
o The de Céspedes brothers, Carlos and
Jorge, whose Miami-based pharmaceutical- and medical-supply
firm does over $600 million a year in business.
''There is something about this Pedro Pan generation
that is unique,'' Saladrigas believes.
TOUGH EARLY LESSONS
Indeed, many talk of having been forced to become
resourceful and independent, of having had to
learn at a tender age to overcome life's difficulties,
while their parents remained behind in Cuba.
''This was a dose of early opportunity,'' says
Martínez, secretary of Housing and Urban
Development.
''It was a wake-up call,'' agrees Willy Chirino,
the famed salsa singer. "We had to grow up
fast.''
''That which doesn't kill you makes you stronger,''
says Guzmán, a Las Villas province doctor's
only child who spent days with distant relatives
in Miami, then was given a one-way plane ticket
to New York and found his own way to the Don Bosco
boarding school in Ramsey, N.J.
It was October 1961. He was 15.
Like many other Pedro Pans, Guzmán threw
himself into his studies.
''I read the dictionary, starting with A,'' he
says. "I received a gold medal for math.
I was doing odd jobs at school. My senior year,
I was doing the school's accounting.''
He received a scholarship to Columbia University,
then went to Stanford University for his master's
degree. It wasn't until he was there -- 10 years
after he'd arrived in the United States -- that
his parents were able to join him.
He went on to work in investments and corporate
finance in Peru, New York and Kuwait. In 1985,
he moved to Miami and decided that he "did
not want to work for anyone else again.''
LOST CHILDHOODS
''We became adults very quickly. The child stayed
in Cuba,'' explains Lillian Mirabal Mendez, therapist
and chief operating officer of Psyche/Care, a
behavior managed-care firm.
''Most of us have been very successful in our
careers, very hard workers,'' Mendez says. "There
was absolutely no sense of entitlement: You have
to work for what you earn.''
No reliable studies, however, show how widespread
these success stories have been. Both Jaime Suchlicki,
head of the Cuban studies program at the University
of Miami, and Lisandro Pérez, director
of Cuban studies at Florida International University,
warn that serious research has yet to be done
on the Pedro Pans and that it's likely that more
than a few were so traumatized by the ordeal that
it ruined their lives.
'SURVIVORSHIP BIAS'
Even the successful ones acknowledge that.
''I know many who never recovered,'' Saladrigas
says.
''There's a survivorship bias,'' says Guzmán,
meaning that the successful ones get the public's
attention while the troubled ones may not talk
at all.
The truth is only 2,000 of the 14,000 have volunteered
contact information to the Pedro alum association.
So what qualities did the successful ones have
that pulled them through? What lessons can be
learned about how some have been able to overcome
such adversity?
José Manuel Goyos, himself a Pedro Pan,
found some answers in his doctoral dissertation,
Identifying Resiliency Factors in the Adult 'Pedro
Pan' Children.
He attribute it to "a combination of factors:
What kind of family did they come from? What kind
of experience did they have in Cuba before? Level
of intelligence. And in some ways, it helped if
someone took an interest in the child -- a parental
figure or a big-sister or big-brother type --
to help them through the emotional stuff.''
One astonishing factor is how varied the Pedro
Pan experiences was.
Chirino, for example, considers himself ''one
of the lucky ones,'' having been put in a group
home near Biscayne Boulevard, where Monsignor
Bryan Walsh lived. For high school, he went to
LaSalle, in Coconut Grove.
''Everyone spoke Spanish,'' he recalls. "It
wasn't a different culture, like many went through.''
But when his parents came a year later, Chirino's
relatively easy life changed.
''It wasn't a bilingual city back then, and it
was hard for them to get a decent job,'' he says.
"So I slept in two shifts: I woke up at 7,
went to high school, finished at 3. My father
picked me up, and I slept till around 7 or 7:30.
Then I went to work as a musician. I was a drummer,
but I soaked up everything, so if there was no
room for a drummer, I was a bass player or a piano
player.
"I had two different IDs saying I was 21,
so I could work in clubs. I worked till 3 or 4,
then went home to sleep until 7, when my day began
again.''
Then there's Eloy Cepero, co-owner of Peninsula
Mortgage Bankers. He and his two brothers ended
up in the Coral Gables home of the chairman of
Florida Power & Light -- "with a chauffeur,
maids, the whole bit.''
Eduardo Aguirre, who became a top Texas banker
before joining the Bush administration, spent
part of his teenage years in a New Orleans Catholic
institution that included "rough people and
sexual predators.''
''There are many good stories here,'' says Goyos,
who now works as a therapist. "And studying
them would be fascinating.''
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