I interviewed the Catholic priest who ran the camp in Miami where the children first arrived, Monsignor Bryan Walsh, and he led me to many of the ”kids,” now grown. Some lived with relatives already in the U.S., but many grew up in foster homes and orphanages for years while negotiators tried to win their parents the right to leave the island. I learned that more than 14,000 children-ages 6 to 17-had been smuggled out of Cuba in that way during the early 1960s, before the Cuban government cracked down. Because they were minors flying by themselves, they became known, secretly, as the Peter Pan kids. With the help of the Catholic Church and foreign diplomats, children were provided with false travel visas and placed on planes leaving Cuba to the U.S. They were afraid that Castro, who was forming close relations with the Soviet Union, would start sending their kids to schools in Moscow or otherwise indoctrinate them in communist ideology. I was reporting one story or another months later when I first heard mention of an episode in Cuban exile history called “ Los Niños Pedro Pan ”-in English, “the Peter Pan kids.” I did research in the newspaper’s library and found that soon after Fidel Castro and his followers took power in Cuba in 1959, some families started smuggling their children out of the country. The city editor at the Herald assigned me cover the Cuban community full time, including its culture and rowdy politics. Of course, I was absorbing a certain amount of “ Cubanía”- Cubanness-just by living in Miami, but that had not yet provided me with an idea for a book. But what to write? Neither my upbringing nor my previous journalistic experience had taught me much of anything about Cuba, certainly not what I would need to know to write a novel. I decided that the first book should be about the Cuban exile population, the largest of the immigrant communities in the region and the most politically and economically dominant. My protagonist would be a Cuban American former police detective turned private investigator. I forged a plan to learn enough about Miami and South Florida-especially its various Latin American and Caribbean populations-to write a series of detective novels set in those communities. Along the way, I published three stand-alone crime novels but wanted to embark on a series. At that point, I had lived for years in Mexico and in Central America-where I was a foreign correspondent-and had relearned Spanish. I became a newspaper journalist, and in the early 1990s I moved to Florida to work as a reporter for The Miami Herald. I was raised mostly among Irish and Italians and spoke only English. That was in the early 1950s, and, as far as I know, we were the only Latin family for miles around. We lived in a Spanish–speaking neighborhood, but just before I turned four, we moved to a small town in New Jersey. to a Cuban father and a Puerto Rican mother.
0 kommentar(er)
