Private schools on the island, shut down by Fidel Castro in 1961 (coincidentally, the same year Ernest Hemingway left the island he called home for many years and killed himself back in his hometown, Oak Park) were reborn in Miami, down to the school songs in Spanish and the school shields. It is an intensely nostalgic song, and one that replicates Miami’s fifty-year transformation into a kind of Alt-Cuba, or Cuba North, as I like to say. Chirino even sings about relocating an entire city-Pinár del Rio-from Cuba to Miami. In his luggage he also brings a palm grove, and a bohío, a kind of thatch-roof house found in the Cuban countryside. In Chirino’s suitcase is also “a dream and a danzón,” a traditional Cuban dance.Īs the song progresses, the contents of the suitcase go from the specific to the hazy and abstract or the downright impossible. Secretary of State John Hay called it a “splendid little war.”). I had to sail ninety miles to begin my life as a foreigner.” Later, Chirino tells us what’s in his suitcase, including coloring books and a book about José Martí, the famous poet-patriot of the nineteenth-century Cuban War of Independence (I cannot bear to call it the Spanish-American War, which lasted only four months compared to nearly two decades of the Cuban struggle against Spain. “Just a boy,” he sings, “my father dressed me in a sailor suit. The lyrics tell of Chirino’s Pedro Pan experience. I’d wager money that most Cubans have likely shed a tear at least once while listening to the song. His hit “Nuestro Dia (Ya Viene Llegando),” or “Our Day (It’s Coming),” is an anthem for Cubans in this country. In the United States, he’s become a household name in many Hispanic homes, but especially among Cubans and Cuban-Americans. Born in Consolación del Sur in Cuba, Chirino earned his Lost Boy badge at the age of fourteen. One wonders what the story of the Central American child refugees will be.Īll of this brings me to one very famous Pedro Pan child-the salsa singer Willy Chirino. They include senators and musicians, CEOs and doctors.

The Pedro Pan kids are some of the most successful Cuban-Americans. Their number was dwarfed by more than twenty thousand with the flood of children who came alone to the United States in 2014, fleeing Central America. And to think that there were so many Pedro Pan children! Until last summer, Operation Pedro Pan represented the single biggest exodus of unaccompanied minors. I think of her often as a little girl in a strange world, an unknown language in her ear, through that first winter which must have seemed so terrifying and so beautiful. Her own parents joined her years later, leaving Cuba via Madrid. Because she had family in Union City, New Jersey, she skipped the foster parent part of the experience. My mother-in-law, a feisty and loving woman, was a Pedro Pan child.

Cuba nostalgia