Boxing for Cuba: An Immigrant’s Story of Despair, Endurance & Redemption
by Guillermo Vicente Vidal
ISBN: 0979945603 $19.95

Book Description: The whims of politics are at the fore of Guillermo Vicente Vidal’s memoir, in which young boys become men in the shadow of revolution and personal turmoil. Vidal writes about his family’s participation in events that forever altered U.S.–Cuban relations after an effort to free children from the threat of Communist rule sparked Operation Peter Pan. From chance encounters with Fidel Castro and Robert F. Kennedy to life in a dismal Catholic orphanage in Colorado, Vidal perseveres to embrace life as a proud and successful Cuban American. His account is a poignant story of struggle, forgiveness, and the joy of returning home.

Blurbs: “This is the best book I have read in ages. Guillermo Vidal’s is a remarkable life. I was heartbroken at the finish, not from the story, but because I had no more to read. A lyrical and magical book.” —John Hickenlooper, Mayor, Denver, Colorado

“This is an inspiring story about Guillermo Vidal and the heart wrenching challenges of a son of Cuba displaced from his homeland and family. Even though the emotional toll on his family is immense, Vidal realizes that the sacrifice that his parents endured to give their sons a better life proved to be the ultimate act of love. Vidal is an American success story through his exemplary leadership and service.” —Ken Salazar, U.S. Senator

“This is a haunting coming of age story that reads like a Dickensian novel, though it is all true. A Cuban boy loses both his family and his country, survives several years in an American orphanage, and emerges to become a civic leader in Colorado. At the same time, he offers us a unique and enlightening vantage point on the explosive relationship between the U.S. and Cuba. Both narratives are so seamlessly intertwined that it reads as if they are one.” —Helen Thorpe, journalist

“The painful narrative of Boxing for Cuba is made bearable because the narrator’s voice is the voice of a natural storyteller. Guillermo Vidal is a witness, and now recounts those years with the attention to detail that makes history and the turbulence of those months come alive. Not an easy book for Cuban exiles to read, but perhaps a necessary one.” —Olga Karman, author of Scatter My Ashes Over Havana

“Guillermo Vidal’s poignant story is a worthwhile read for anyone who wants to understand the immigration experience. From his Cuban childhood to his career as a public servant in Colorado, Boxing for Cuba reveals the enormous struggle, both emotional and economic, which Vidal and his family were able to overcome.” —Roy Romer, former Governor, Colorado

Bill Vidal’s take on the first 90 days of Boxing for Cuba since publication, posted 2/21/2008

Profiles and Reviews:

CBS4 Breakfast with Brooke air date February 15, 2008; web extra video available

La Voz Colorado Review: Posted January 2, 2008

Blog review posted January 8, 2008 carp(e) libris

Rocky Mountain News review, 11/16/2007, B+. Excerpt of review: “Vidal writes a wonderful firsthand story about family, not politics, pulling no punches about the mistakes, bitterness and harsh shortcomings of his own.”

Denver Post profile of Guillermo (Bill) Vidal, deputy mayor, about the upcoming release of Vidal’s memoir, Boxing for Cuba, 10/3/2007

thedenverchannel.com, profile, posted 11/11/2007

Enfuse Magazine review posted November 2007

Book Excerpt: Chapter Five

Cinco
Lost Boys

J.M. Barrie’s Peter Pan, which premiered onstage in London in 1902, is the story of a boy in magical place called Never-Neverland, who refused to grow up. It was a story my brothers and I did not know when we left Cuba in 1961, and as we became aware of it in the succeeding years, it always seemed odd to us that Father Walsh had chosen to name his child-refugee program after Barrie’s fictional character. The first child Father Walsh helped reach safety in the U.S. was a fifteen- year-old named Pedro-Peter-and the flights that ultimately carried more than 14,000 Cuban children out of the country almost always were Pan American, so the name was logical enough, and no doubt Walsh hoped “Operation Peter Pan” would carry with it for many of the children it served a sense that their flights out of Cuba were magical journeys themselves, the sort that never would engender foreboding, fear, or a terror so deep you believed you were going to die.

Yet for my brothers and me, Operation Peter Pan demanded, in point of fact, that we grow up in a single day. We simply were offered no other choice, and I know I never called them Kiko and Toto again once we had banked away from Havana en route to the United States. From that day forward, we were solely and exclusively Rojugui-Roberto, Juan, and Guillermo-three brothers bound into a single destiny, and our childhoods suddenly slipped away from us in the way that sand would fall from our hands on the beach at Santa Lucia.

Father Walsh, based in Miami, first became involved in the exodus of children from Castro’s Cuba when the boy named Pedro was brought to the Catholic Welfare Bureau in hopes he could help place the young immigrant in a foster home since his U.S. relatives were too poor to care for him. Walsh succeeded in finding a home for Pedro, then assisted a Cuban mother in placing her two children in what she hoped was temporary foster care before she returned to Cuba, where she and her husband were involved in dangerous clandestine anti-Castro activities. Those three placements quickly convinced the priest that many thousands more would be needed in the coming months-a mass exodus of children from the island was brewing, he came to believe-and by December 1960, Walsh had obtained a million dollars from the Eisenhower administration to partially fund his child-refugee program.

Father Walsh began to work closely with James Baker, headmaster of the prestigious Ruston Academy in Havana, which, prior to the revolution and Fidel’s closing of private schools, had served the children of U.S. residents and Cuba’s affluent class. Many Cuban parents already had begun pleading with Baker for help in getting their children safely to the United States, and Baker had begun to look into the possibility of establishing a large boarding school in Miami for Cuban children. Father Walsh ultimately was able to convince him however that because so many of the arriving children would be quite young, families in foster homes could care far better for them than could a school, and the two subsequently became an effective team-Baker overseeing arrangements for hundreds, then thousands of children’s departure from Havana, and Walsh accepting responsibility for them once they reached Miami, ultimately finding them homes with relatives, family friends, and empathetic Floridians.
It was a dangerous mission, particularly for Baker, but Castro’s government appeared to be paying no attention to the operation, and by the end of 1960, he and Walsh successfully had coordinated the relocation of 125 children. When Fidel summarily forbade using Cuban currency to purchase airline tickets to the U.S. early in the new year, it was Baker, Walsh, and the Catholic Welfare Bureau that devised the system of purchasing them via family members already in Florida and routing the tickets through Miami’s W. Henry Smith Travel Agency, which maintained an office in Havana. And, of course, it was Walsh who successfully persuaded the Eisenhower administration to waive visa requirements for the children seeking asylum. By the early spring of 1961, many hundreds of children had reached the United States, and the program’s biggest hurdle became finding homes for each of the hundreds of children who now arrived every week.

First Walsh converted buildings at Camp Kendall, an abandoned army base, into temporary housing; then he found a large house in Miami proper; next he employed a group-home operated by nuns, a summer youth camp, and the homes of hundreds of Miami Cubans, but still more children arrived, some of whom were utterly unexpected and who Walsh and his assistants would find wandering alone-and often terrified-in the Miami airport. Soon Walsh was forced to place children far from Miami, and before the program ended youngsters in the care of the Catholic Welfare Bureau were assigned to homes-and orphanages-in thirty-five U.S. states.

Was Fidel aware of Operation Peter Pan? It’s hard to imagine how he could not have been. Could he have staunched the flow of children out of Cuba at any time? He unquestionably had the power to do so, yet my father and many others believed that Castro did not see any value in those who opposed him and his policies continuing to live in Cuba when, in fact, they were eager to leave. My family and the thousands more like us were simply gusanos, worms, the revolutionary government loudly and everywhere proclaimed, and if many hundreds of children were allowed to leave the island, then surely their anti-revolutionary parents soon would follow.