4
Miami, Florida
Late 1962
My parents made it to Florida just before the whole world nearly exploded in October 1962. It was a near-run escape, at the height of the Cuban Missile Crisis, their movement greased with the last of the family’s resources to ensure they’d have a ticket to freedom.
They reached Miami with nothing but a few changes of clothes. With lots of help and guidance from Humberto, my mom’s cousin, they obtained our first living quarters in a ramshackle apartment complex just off of Biscayne Boulevard and Twenty-second Street. My dad’s days of respected middle-class entrepreneurship were left back on Cuban shores. He had nothing to start with but his street smarts and his hands. A new nation, new language to learn, new customs in an unfamiliar city—that was their reality in those early weeks in America. To some, it may have felt overwhelming. But my folks rose to the challenge with courage and energy.
I saw our new reality that fall after my folks retrieved me from the orphanage. A church van dropped me off in front of the place, which virtually was a ghetto back then (it has been gentrified in recent years). Inside, the three Prados plus Tia Tere and my two cousins, Manny and Margarita, existed in a tiny one-bedroom space designed for two people. Closet-size kitchen, bare-bones furniture. I remember a Formica-topped aluminum table wedged into the kitchen, a couple of ancient chairs tucked underneath. Stained sink beside a Depression-era stove. A shower/toilet area smaller than most present-day closets lay beyond the kitchen. We gusanos (“worms,” as Castro named those who deserted the revolution) knew what starting over felt like. And we knew we were blessed to be in America.
My folks slept in the nook that passed for a living room. Every night, they took the couch cushions and laid them out on the floor, then fell asleep together under threadbare sheets. Being the tropics and Florida, cockroaches were a constant problem. We could hear them scuttling around us at night.
My dad never took a welfare check. Instead, he found any work he could get. He mowed lawns, unloaded trucks while I sold newspapers for a few extra pennies. It was not enough. My mother soon went to work at a sweatshop making shirts. Day in, day out, she labored in a sweltering warehouse sewing buttons on clothing my family could not afford.
Nobody complained. My uncle was an electrical engineer at the power plant in Santa Clara. Though his children and wife had left for the States, the regime deemed his skills too critical to lose. They would not let him emigrate. Desperate to be reunited with his family, he tried to escape by boat. He spent six days at sea before grounding on a reef and being rescued by the U.S. Coast Guard.
In retrospect, the best thing that happened to me personally was the Cuban Revolution. I became an American and had the opportunity to make the most out of my life. But in those first years in our adopted country, my parents paid the price.
Yet I never saw them quarrel. Their loyalty and love for each other held the family together. They sustained us in a way that sometimes made others envious. In later years, I used to say that anyone who tried to judge their own marriage by my folks would fall way short—even my own wonderful marriage of thirty-nine years as of this writing. I never saw anyone match the connection they shared.
There were many despairing moments along the way. Large and small, each was a test of my parents’ resolve. Most of the time, we adapted. We made do without. We survived. But occasionally, there would be a moment that served as a reminder of all that we had lost thanks to the communists back home.
I remember playing with my cousin Manny (who became the closest thing I have to a blood brother) in the street outside our apartment one evening, waiting for my dad to come home from work. Just as he wearily arrived, an ice cream truck puttered down NE Twenty-second Street. My cousin Manny and I asked my dad if we could get an ice cream.
He said nothing for a long moment as he looked at the two of us. Then he quietly began to cry.
The prosperous business owner from Manicaragua had been reduced to such poverty that he did not even have a dime to give to his son and nephew for a treat.
When my uncle came a few months later, we scraped together enough money to move the family across town to a rough-and-tumble lower-middle-class neighborhood in northwest Miami near what is now Liberty City. Another ghetto, but an improvement for us. Our new, slightly larger apartment was still a shoebox, but after Biscayne Boulevard, it felt like the Hamptons to us.
Life settled down a bit for us there. We found a church, Corpus Christi, where I sang in the choir on Sundays. A priest who noticed my attendance pulled my parents aside and offered me a free education and uniforms at the adjacent Catholic school. I was attending there when John F. Kennedy was assassinated.
After a couple of more local moves in the racially mixed Miami area, my father scraped up just enough money to buy a small house in Hialeah, a new suburb of Miami, Dade County, which most considered the hinterlands. It was a whopping $12,000 home.
I started school at Palm Springs Junior High, where the distinction of being Cuban and a new kid sometimes led to conflict with the native white kids. As my parents battled their way up the economic ladder, they encountered that racism, too. In the early days, some places would not rent to us because we were Cuban.
My family took that in stride. It was almost like paying dues. You take the heat; you keep pushing on. My dad never lost sight of his objective: a better life for his family. And as he secured better employment, his sheer industriousness opened doors that guaranteed we would get where he wanted us to be.
He got a job on a small boatyard on the Miami River. With his first paycheck, he bought a hammer, saw, hand drill, and some screwdrivers. Those tools became his prized possessions. He used them constantly, working jobs at night building things for other people. If he didn’t have a job after his shift at the yard, he’d store his tools there. One night, a fire broke out and burned the storage area to the ground. The next morning, my dad discovered that he’d miraculously forgotten to put his tools away. He’d left them in the boat he’d been building. That boat burned to the waterline, but his prized tools were intact.
Those little lucky moments became our family’s saving grace.
Subsequently, his work ethic landed him a job at the prestigious Chris-Craft Corporation, making luxurious boats. He was an exceptional carpenter, and back then, most of the boats were still made of wood. We were starting to live the American dream: you work hard, you get to enjoy the fruit of your labor.
In time, he bought a van to carry his tools from site to site. Inside, he meticulously organized his equipment. Everything had an exact place, and when I began going with him to help on projects, I had to learn where every tool belonged in that van. That level of organization stuck with me and would play an important role later in my life when I was helping my beloved Contras fight in the jungles of Central America, or with my CTC colleagues planning the demise of an international terrorist. Through those tools and that van, I learned to be organized and meticulous.
In two and a half years, my father went from a penniless immigrant living in a dump to a modest homeowner in his new country. The down payment for that $12,000 house stretched us to the limit, but every spare moment he devoted to improving it. He built a two-car garage, added an extra bedroom, bath, and even a sunroom off the back of the house.
For several years, my father and I worked on weekends together, doing odd carpentry jobs for people, painting, and cabinetry. Once, while I was painting a pair of louvered closet doors in an empty apartment, I came across a beautiful Gurkha knife sitting on one of the closet shelves. I showed my father, asking if we could keep it. It had clearly been abandoned by the previous tenant. But my dad said no. He was a man of honor, and his code forbade him from taking another’s possession, even if it had been left behind and forgotten.
My mother and father loved America and all its promise. They earned legal resident status, then received their citizenship in record time. They became ardent patriots who never missed voting in an election. Here, we could work as we wished, worship as we wished, and be left alone to do it. Nobody threatened us. Nobody tried to seize our property or steal my father’s livelihood. He didn’t fear his only son might be kidnapped and held for ransom. Air strikes and raging battles that put tank rounds through our family’s furniture were a thing of the past.
He made the most of this second chance.
My mother did, too, though she probably suffered more than any of us. Long hours in the sweatshop never dimmed her spirit. She learned to do without. She learned to stretch the family’s food budget.
In the sweatshop, she was surrounded by heavy machinery and huge fans that did little more than push the hot air around. It was a piecework job, meaning the more she produced, the more she made. A finished shirt netted her five cents. She could work all day as fast as humanly possible and make only a few dollars. Yet every nickel counted, so day after day, she returned to that factory even as it robbed her of her health. She developed hip and leg problems as a result of the repetitive motions required to do her job. Much later, they allowed her to work at home, dropping off work in the morning and picking it up at close of business. She did detail work then—embroidery, making buttonholes, and so on.
Despite the physical demands her new job placed on her, she always brought a softness to the harder edges of the family—the yin to my father’s yang. She never left the house without being meticulously coiffed and dressed. From her, I learned the value of clothing and style, and that part of her remains with me to this day. Her spirit was irrepressible. In the worst moments of our leanest times, I never once saw her despair.
Even at our poorest, my mom made sure we had books in our house. She was a voracious reader, consuming every Spanish newspaper we could get in Miami. I picked up her reading habit, too. In those darkest moments of my family’s struggle to get established in America, I escaped into dime novels. They fed my suppressed thirst for adventure, and I found kindred spirits in the likes of Ian Fleming’s 007 spy series, Edgar Rice Burrough’s Tarzan, but especially World War II spy novels about the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) and the exploits of its agents. It was through those latter books I learned about the legendary real-life spy, William “Wild Bill” Donovan—the head of the wartime OSS. He was a larger-than-life figure, a man of action imbued with courage and the conviction of a dedicated patriot whose lifetime of service to the United States ran the gamut from infantry officer in World War I to antitrust lawyer, diplomat, and spy. He was the founding father of the U.S. intelligence and special operations communities.
I spent many late nights in our humble homes, poring over those books. They were a window to a different world. Without them, I may have never seen beyond the one I knew in Miami—the rugged streets, school, and the weekends spent working with my father.
Three years after arriving with nothing, my folks had carved out a successful life for themselves. We were established, chasing our own American dream. But just as things were going well for my parents, I started to cause them heartache.
As we clawed our way out of poverty, I learned some hard lessons on the streets of Hialeah. If you didn’t have a close group of friends around you who had your back, you became a target. White kids and Black kids coalesced into their own tribes. We Cubans did the same. We looked out for each other. If one of our own was caught and pummeled by the other street kids, we’d make sure to exact a price from those responsible. It was a bare-knuckle path to high school that made us hard and taught us the value of loyalty.
The summer before my freshman year in high school, my dad landed a second job working for an eccentric millionaire named Edgar Gabor. He owned a company called Cadillac Steel Works, but it was his side project for which he hired my father. Edgar had gone into the navy during World War II, serving on PT boats. Somehow, he’d found a war-surplus PT boat and wanted to turn it into a private yacht. Those little torpedo boats were made almost entirely from wood, so the reconstruction was tailor-made for my dad’s skills.
He took me to work on the evenings and weekends that summer, and it was on that job I met Edgar’s personal pilot, Jay, an air force veteran who was into martial arts. He showed me some basic judo moves, then gave me a little red illustrated book on the subject. I studied it constantly, practicing kicks and sweeps with my neighborhood friends. I filled a duffel bag full of sawdust, hung it in the garage my dad built, and spent hours working out, beating the bag with the moves Jay taught me. It was the first time I’d been introduced to a disciplined method of self-defense. I was hooked.
My freshman year in high school, I discovered girls and SCUBA diving. My grades tanked. My parents watched with alarm as I started sliding off the path, spending more and more time chasing girls and cutting school to go dive, all while getting in a scrap or two.
Karate became my saving grace. With the pennies I saved, I joined a karate school owned by a World War II Marine named Leo Thalassites and his junior partner, a Vietnam War Marine Raider named Jim Alfano. Jim saw potential in me and developed into a mentor through my first year of high school. He kept me from going totally to the street, where many of my junior high friends were already headed.
I thrived in Jim’s world of hard work, mindfulness, and pride. He developed us as full individuals, teaching us a philosophy of constant self-improvement. At the heart of our dojo was a style of karate called Kyokushin that focused on supreme aggression—one kick, one punch to defeat a foe.
Our class would sometimes do demonstrations of this discipline of karate. Once, we were invited to do one for a local army reserve Special Forces unit. At the end of it, I broke a brick with my bare knuckles, a feat that impressed the Green Berets.
Not long after, Jim told me he’d lined up a demonstration at my high school. The news excited me. My parents never approved of organized sports, so this would be my chance to show my peers some of the skills I’d learned. But the night before the demonstration, my father came home from work and asked me to stay home from school the following day. He had acquired a free load of cement from a work colleague, and he needed me home to help his friend pour our new patio floor. I had no choice. I obeyed my father.
When I failed to show up for the karate demonstration the next day, Jim was furious. To him, my no-show was a breach of discipline, of loyalty. In reality, it was anything but. I’d sacrificed my chance to earn some social standing at the high school to obey my father’s request. It didn’t matter. Without asking me for an explanation, Jim ostracized me from his inner circle and barely acknowledged me again. I was as brokenhearted as a fifteen-year-old could be by that treatment.
I’d thrived in the program, and Jim’s mentorship had meant a great deal to me. With his guidance, my trajectory was heading in the right direction. I probably would have ended up in the marines, or maybe the Miami PD.
All that changed with that one no-show. The rejection devastated me and left me embittered. In retrospect, I suppose I could have gone to Jim and explained what had happened, but I had too much pride to do that. I suffered in silence, then finally left the program.
Thus began my tailspin into Miami’s mean streets.