Recalling Casa de Sales
Plucked out of post-revolution Cuba, a group of young immigrants learned to succeed—and lead—in Delaware. Would they ever go home?
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Joe Miro was only 15 and leaving Cuba, the country of his birth, for the first time in his life—and probably for good.
He wasn’t worried or afraid. Young Miro was comforted by the fact that his mother would soon join him in the United States. She was scheduled to leave on October 23, 1962, to be reunited with him in Wilmington.
On October 22, 1962, however, President John F. Kennedy announced a quarantine on all shipping into Cuba in response to the discovery of Soviet offensive missiles on the island. The Cuban Missile Crisis had begun, and Miro’s adolescence had been irreversibly altered.
Miro was not the only one. Through Operation Pedro Pan, an effort of the Catholic Welfare Bureau in the United States and the U.S. State Department, thousands of Cuban boys and girls between the ages of 12 and 18 were being moved to the United States to prevent Fidel Castro from sending them to Communist indoctrination camps in Eastern Europe.
In all, some 14,000 Cuban youths were moved to the United States, either to be reunited with family or to become wards of Catholic-sponsored foster homes, group care homes or temporary orphanages established for the specific purpose.
One such orphanage was Casa de Sales at 13th and Broom streets in Wilmington, which was operated by Salesianum School. According to Miro, 21 young Cuban boys eventually went to live there.
One of those youngsters was Pedro Ferreira, then 15, whose parents feared he and his brother, then 13, could be sent to Eastern Europe.
“I came under the Pedro Pan program, but I didn’t know it was even called that until I was in my 40s,” says Ferreira, a psychologist in Wilmington. “I only found out the name when I attended a psychology seminar and the subject had come up.”
Ferreira was not alone in his ignorance. According to www.pedropan.org, Operation Pedro Pan intentionally avoided publicity, fearing it could be used for propaganda purposes.
The first published reference to Pedro Pan occurred in a 1962 issue of Reader’s Digest. The next occurred in 1988. So many of the 14,000 who came here under the program merely thought they were arriving under the same student exchange programs that had operated between Cuban Catholic schools and the United States in pre-Castro times. (Castro closed all parochial schools, such as Ferreira’s Collegio St. Augustine, following the Bay of Pigs fiasco in 1961.)
“I thought I was coming here to attend school for maybe six months or so,” recalls Armando Hidalgo, another Casa de Sales alum who, at 64, still operates a successful refrigeration and air conditioning business in Miami. “But my father knew exactly what Castro was all about, and one year following the Bay of Pigs, he said, ‘Cuba is lost forever. I’m sending you to the United States.’”
Pedro Pan also transported young girls to the United States. One presides today as a Delaware Family Court judge. Another, Yrene Waldron, only 10 in 1962, was supposed to leave Cuba with her parents and younger brother. But when Waldron’s father was discovered to be engaged in counter-revolutionary activities, his visa was revoked. His family’s was frozen. Fearing his children might be relocated to the USSR, he pleaded to Pedro Pan.
“He bravely gave us up so that we could live in a democracy,” says Waldron, a licensed nursing home administrator from Wilmington and executive director of the Delaware Healthcare Facilities Association.
Waldron grew up fast. After arriving in Florida City, she learned that she and her brother were to be placed in separate foster homes.
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