A dime in his pocket, an improbable dream

On Dec. 7, 1961, 15-year-old Eduardo Aguirre took a Pan Am Constellation prop plane from Havana to Miami as an “unaccompanied minor.” 

He had a dime in his pocket. 

“It was our understanding that that would be what it would take to make a phone call in the United States,” Aguirre, now 78, said. “What a silly idea. Who the heck was I going to call? That dime disappeared somewhere along in my life. I wish I had kept it because I would have it framed somewhere.”

Aguirre had no close relatives in Miami. A few months earlier, after Aguirre’s father had gone to the police station in his Havana neighborhood  and announced his desire to leave Castro’s Cuba with his entire family, a police officer came the next day to the Aguirre house and took inventory of every fork, knife, spoon, glass, coffee cup and stick of furniture – just in case the family chose to leave and never return.

The display of Communist despotism culminated when the officer slapped the inventory note on the front door and bathed it with a can of glue so that it could not easily come off. 

“The glue dripped from the door to the floor, and that was very offensive to my mother, who was a meticulous housekeeper,” Aguirre recalled. “She went ahead and wiped the glue off the door and the floor. She was not shy about letting you know how she felt about anything, and Dad had to pull her back and say, ‘Settle down. It’s not going to get us anywhere to get antagonistic.”

The family had hoped to flee to the U.S. together, but that was almost impossible. Eduardo would go first, followed three months later by younger brother Luis and then months later by his parents, Eduardo and Altagracia.

“It was me who got the (first) telegram, and it said you had 72 hours to depart,” Aguirre said. “So, in 72 hours, you had to buy your airline ticket, get your papers in order, pack your bag, and if you missed the 72-hour window, you went to the back of the line.”

Aguirre made it onto the plane. When he landed in Miami, a representative of Operación Pedro Pan, a Catholic Charities program that covertly facilitated the exodus of more than 14,000 Cuban minors from 1960 to 1962 and took charge of their care, stood nearby. He was trained to observe which children were not being met by relatives and looked stranded. 

“He was Cuban and he spoke Spanish and he told me, ‘Sit down here, because there are other flights coming in,’” Aguirre recalled. 

By the end of the day, there were three other young boys who had flown in on the wings of Operación Pedro Pan, which later would magically drop him in New Orleans and Holy Cross School.

Aguirre’s journey to a new life in the United States – as a teenager with one thin dime in his pocket who decades later would be pulled in a gilded carriage by six chestnut horses to present to King Juan Carlos I his credentials as U.S. ambassador to Spain – is chronicled in his compelling autobiography, appropriately titled “From Immigrant to Ambassador: My American Journey.” 

“First of all, it’s exhilarating, but, if you keep yourself grounded, it’s also very humbling, because woe is the guy or gal who thinks they deserve it,” said Aguirre, who served as ambassador to Spain from 2005 to 2009 under President George W. Bush. “The position deserves it, and you happen to be occupying the position. For me it was always exhilarating, exciting, interesting, but I also realized it would all go away the moment I left the job.”

Early struggles in U.S.

Aguirre, who lost almost 20% of his body weight while he was in Miami for a few weeks after his 1961 arrival, does not sugarcoat his struggles as a wary, vulnerable immigrant. He and his brother Luis, who was two years younger, were sent first from Miami to Hope Haven in Marrero, which Aguirre said was a terrible experience.

Through conversations with Aguirre, Cuban-born labor lawyer Dr. Jorge Ramos heard of the plight of the Cuban students at Hope Haven and was able to work out an arrangement with Holy Cross in the Lower Ninth Ward to take them on as boarders.

“I saw Holy Cross, and it was like night and day,” Aguirre said. “The brothers were good, caring people. The school was outstanding. The food was excellent, not only in its quality but in its quantity.”

By that time, Aguirre’s parents had arrived in New Orleans and, with Ramos’ assistance, opened a foster home on Ursulines Street in Mid-City for the Pedro Pan students. 

One of those younger students, the same age as Luis Aguirre, was Pedro Nuñez, who became a priest of the Archdiocese of New Orleans and a global evangelist to Spanish-speaking Catholics. Luis (Louis) later worked for decades as the editor of The Bayou Catholic and director of communications for the Diocese of Houma-Thibodaux.

“To my knowledge, it was the first institutional foster home of this nature in the nation,” Aguirre said. “The archdiocese rented this big, beautiful, two-story house. They put in some industrial-size kitchen equipment so that it would allow for cooking and food preparation for eight kids. The idea was that these kids needed to retain their culture and their language. My parents would do so by providing Cuban-style food and Cuban-style nurturing, while we got a total immersion in English in school.”

Graded on the curve

Aguirre chuckles today about his lackadaisical approach to his studies as a teen.

“The good brothers at Holy Cross graduated me out of pity, not out of academic achievements,” Aguirre said. “I had no clue what was going on in class; I mean, zero.”

LSUNO at the time was an open-admissions school, but Aguirre continued to struggle and had to leave. It was only after meeting his future wife, Tere, another Pedro Pan Cuban expatriate who lived 100 steps away from his house, that he began to get serious.

“Tere was saying, ‘Hey, listen, you’ve got to get your degree before we get married,’” Aguirre said. “It took me a while to figure out she wasn’t kidding!”

A New Orleans mentor

During one of his academic siestas, Aguirre processed checks overnight at National American Bank. He met Jim Lazare, a mentor who saw something in him and urged him to continue his education.

“He told me, ‘Don’t be intimidated by money or by status. Be yourself, and you need to go back to school because you’re smart. If you don’t have an education, you’re not going to succeed,’” said Aguirre, who graduated a few years later from LSU in Baton Rouge. 

Over many years, Aguirre’s skills as a breezy, interpersonal communicator accelerated his movement into the top tier of banking circles, and later into international banking, where his multilingual ability was especially valuable. 

Still, he had insecurities. At an executive training session, each banker in the room was asked to list two personal questions for everyone else in the room to answer. Aguirre’s questions: Is my Cuban accent detracting me from being understood? Is my happy-go-lucky personality hurting my ability to be taken seriously?

When his colleagues unanimously answered no – they loved what he was doing and who he was – he felt the weight of self-doubt evaporate. 

“We all have self-doubts, right?” Aguirre said. “It’s the human condition. But when you don’t fit in – when you’re not locked in step with society – it enhances those self-doubts. I know I have an accent. My concern was I wanted to be taken seriously, and I like to joke, and I was concerned my levity would diminish the message I was trying to deliver. My peers said, ‘No, you’re fine. Continue to be yourself. Your accent is not a detriment.’”

Head of immigration

Aguirre eventually served as director of the Export-Import Bank of the United States, the export credit agency of the U.S., and as director of United States Citizenship and Immigration Services, where he whittled down a backlog of 5 million applications in part by having people sign up for appointments rather than wait overnight in lines.

 When Aguirre was named ambassador to Spain in 2005, with all its highfalutin pomp and circumstance, he reflected on his parents, Eduardo and Altagracia, who sacrificed their lives for their children’s freedom.

Parents’ self-giving love

Aguirre’s father worked as an elevator operator and night watchman at a Catholic Charities building on Camp Street. His mother was a seamstress in the fur department at Kreeger’s on Canal Street. There were no furs in Cuba, but she figured it out.

“I don’t ever remember hearing them complain,” Aguirre said. “Clearly, life dealt them a tough hand in the second half of their lives. Dad never whined, and Mom didn’t either. They were positive thinkers. They were ‘make do, do, do, do.’ Maybe some of that has rubbed off on me.”

Aguirre said he has no desire to return to the country of his youth, where he played and swam and sat in circles at picnics and family dinners, swapping stories with his aunts, uncles and cousins.

“I left Cuba, never to return,” he said.

He left with a dime.

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