By LIZ BALMASEDA Cox News Service
Sun. Aug 31 - 4:46 AM
WEST PALM BEACH, Fla. — The religious scapular swung around his neck as
the lanky, daring, 14-year-old Cuban boy ran across the basketball
court. He wore the Catholic medal to his school games in defiance of the
atheist regime that had seized control of his homeland. For this he drew
stares and threats from a pack of Communist militiamen.
They taunted him and, to the horror of the teen's parents, they shouted:
"Kill him! Kill him!"
Their words rang against a backdrop of increased hostility and
uncertainty, all of which placed a healthy, athletic, inquisitive, and
quite typical Cuban teenager named Melquiades Rafael Martinez on a
painful, meandering, often amazing path to the chamber of the United
States Senate.
Now, U.S. Senator Mel Martinez (R-Fla.) tells the story of his solo
flight from Cuba at age 15, his years in an American foster home, in
Orlando, and the refugee life that molded his character in a memoir
published this month, A Sense of Belonging: From Castro's Cuba to the
U.S. Senate, One Man's Pursuit of the American Dream (Crown Forum/ $26.95).
For all the successes in his 25-year career as a lawyer and his rise to
political prominence, Martinez's most life-altering moments are those he
lived as a child in the city of Sagua La Grande, North Central Cuba, and
later in Miami and Orlando as a refugee boy away from his parents.
Martinez was one of 14,000 Cuban children spirited to the United States
between 1960 and 1962 as part of a clandestine Catholic Church program
dubbed Operation Pedro Pan. It was the largest migration of
unaccompanied minors in the Western Hemisphere.
"I'll see you in three months," his father told him as they said goodbye
beneath the balcony of his grandmother Graciela's house, in the same
spot where the school bus had picked him up for the first day of school
10 years earlier.
But it wouldn't be three months. It would be four years before his
parents and young sister would be allowed to leave Cuba. When the
Martinez family finally reunited, a 19-year-old Mel stood inches taller
than his father.
As painful as it was to be apart from them, Martinez says he is grateful
that they took the risk and sent him away from Cuba.
"I was very lucky. I had stayed in Cuba long enough to have childhood
memories, but I left before I could be drafted into Castro's obligatory
military service. And I came to this country at an age when I could
adapt to American life," Martinez said last week, taking a breather from
a high-profile book tour. "My parents were not only wise, but very brave."
The Americanization of Melquiades Martinez came gradually, as the teen
grappled with a new language. He learned English in the "sink or swim"
manner of the early exiles, by watching '60s sitcoms, listening to The
Beatles, and soaking in the banter of los americanos. For Martinez, it
meant plunging into conversation, however halting and confusing, with
his Orlando foster parents, Eileen and Walter Young, and their two sons.
"It would be a couple of years before I felt like I fit in and I wasn't
a complete outcast at school. By my senior year I felt like I belonged,"
said Martinez, who grew up to be the mayor of Orange County, Fla., the
U.S. secretary of Housing and Urban Development, the head of the
Republican National Committee and the first Cuban-American member of the
U.S. Senate.
But no matter how well he adapted to his new country, Martinez says he
could not help but to keep looking back to Cuba, where his parents were
stranded.
It wasn't until his parents arrived in the U.S. that he began to
consider himself "an immigrant."
"At that point, it was all hands on deck to make it in America," he
says. That endeavour brought its share of surprises.
Martinez, like many of the children of those early exiles, came to
realize he would have to serve as his parents' interpreter.
"Because my parents had lost their country, their heritage and their
language, I, from age 19, would parent them in America," he writes in A
Sense of Belonging. "In this strange and wonderful new country I knew
the ropes and they didn't."
It was poignant to watch his father, a take-charge businessman and
veterinarian, turn "timid and shy" just before his first American job
interview.
It was the younger Martinez's role to play life coach — "Come on, Pop,
suck it up; you can do it" — as he accompanied his father to the
interview. And it was a privilege, Martinez says.
What those years did for Martinez can be glimpsed in his political career.
He has been a vocal advocate for immigration reform, taking a
compassionate view that has earned him the rebuke of hard-liners and
more than a few epithets.
"Amnesty Mel," his critics have called him, urging that he be deported —
to Cuba, or, in the very least, to the Democratic Party. At one point,
critics began sending boxes of red bricks to his Capitol Hill office.
The message:
"Build a wall. Secure the border."
None of it fazes Martinez, who endured far more volatile political
outbursts during his Cuban childhood — outbursts that included bullets
ringing outside his family home as his family hid between the beds
during the revolution.
It doesn't faze him, but it does surprise him. He had believed a man of
his background wouldn't have to explain his compassion for fellow
refugees and immigrants, especially to those in his own party.
But he has, and, he says, he will continue to do so.
"If there's something I've tried to follow in my public life it's that
you have to be true to who you are," says the most distinguished alum of
Operation Pedro Pan.
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