José Azel

“We have to face serious challenges at an early age. We were all between ten and sixteen years old, the eldest were seventeen years old. We were thrown into life. Some of us, me in fact, have had the luck to end up in south Florida, but many went to all kind of places in the States with very cold weather and snow, the conditions we have never experienced. Kids lived in families they didn´t know until they could be handed over to their parents. Unfortunately, I never met my father again. Such was the story of our exodus. And it is interesting – and I am saying it with pride – that according to studies conducted it has transpired that this group of 14.000 children became economically the most successful group of political refugees ever studied. Many of us made successful careers. Senator Mel Marínez, for example, and many others. But on the other hand many had severe personal issues, their marriages were being broken and such, as we grew up lonely, often without family to turn to.”

“One of the reasons we ceased our actions against the Fidel Castro government was that we just needed to start to live a normal live, go to work, to survive, to begin from nothing. After all the blunders like what happened in the Bay of Pigs, the Cuban Crisis and so one, we felt exhausted and disappointed, as far as the fight was being fought. One still identified himself with the struggle but was less and less active. I started a family, raised three kids. And ten or twelve years later I went back to the university at Miami and joined the new generation of activists. Not as a young man striving for a quick change but as a professor who could advise on many matters. A 13 years old boy who joined the resistance and participated in acts of sabotage turned into an older man who tries to benefit the new generations by his texts, publications and intellectual activity.”