What began as a handwritten, 13-page document in all caps telling the story of a Cuban immigrant fleeing the country with his little brother, landing in a Nebraska orphanage, then working to bring his parents over, is now a fully fleshed-out book, written by the man's son.
In 2020, Lincoln native Tony Ojeda, 51, decided to write a biography documenting his father Rene's faith-based journey from Cuba to Nebraska: "My First Hero: A Story of Overcoming and Success."
"It wasn't meant to necessarily be a published book," Tony said. "Really, it was meant to be something I would share with my brother and sister, their kids, my kids."
But when people who knew his dad discovered Tony was helping write his father's biography, they'd ask when it was going to be published.
The first time Tony read the original story written by his father he was amazed.
"As you’re growing up with your parents, they’re just who they are, they’re just your parents, but you don’t understand them," he said. "I understood, when I read that story for the first time, why he is the way he is in a lot of different ways."
When he read the story a second time, Tony said he was disappointed, because there seemed to be so much more that his father wasn’t saying.
In an attempt to tell his father's full story, Tony and his eldest daughter, Rachel, conducted weekly 90-minute interviews with the now-74-year-oldRene and wifeCandy. The interviews, which ended in March, also involved Rene's late brotherJose, who died in August.
Rene said reliving some of his past wasdifficult.
"I am not the type to shed tears, but I know I shed a few tears while we went through that," Rene said. "Remembering what my parents went through was probably the most difficult part of sharing that information.”
The group started with examining Fidel Castro's rise to power in 1959, when Rene was 11, and worked its way forward to the present day. According to Rene, his parents pulled him from school amid a chaotic mix of closed parochial schools and an overtaken public school system.
As the fear that Castro and the Communist Partywere planning to place children in communist indoctrination centers grew in 1960, a program known as Operation Peter Pan executed a secret exodus of more than 14,000 unaccompanied minors over a two-year period, including Rene and his brother.
"The last thing his mom said to him when he left Cuba was 'Take care of your little brother,'" Tony said. "And within 30 minutes of them arriving at the Miami airport ... the two were separated."
According to Rene, there was a period of almost two months where he didn't know where Jose was. The two were sent to different camps in Florida, with Rene sent to an Everglades base and Jose to a Florida City location.
Once the two found out where the other was, the camps set up a process where, twice a month, Rene would commute from his camp to Florida City to reunite with his brother for a few hours. A year later, Rene was transferred to Lincoln, leaving his brother behind once again.
But a month after Rene arrived in Lincoln, his brother followed. They were both placed in an orphanage, where they stayed for about four years.
During his time at the orphanage, Rene attended school and worked two jobs to fund his parents' immigration to the United States. However, the first time he sent money, it was somehow lost and never reached Cuba, he said. The money, raised twice, was equivalent to $30,000 today.
According to Rene, when their parents were allowed to leave in the late 1960s, they came to the country with nothing. Using the income from his jobs, 18-year-old Rene bought the family a small house and furnished it with used furniture.
"My dad, my mom, neither one of them had a job," he said. "So I had to support them, support my brother. That was difficult."
Within the year, his mother was hired to clean toilets at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, with one catch: Rene had to be there to translate. Later, his father was hired at a tech factory with the same caveat.
"What I admire most about my father is he had to do something to make all this happen," Tony said. "He came to this country and he was responsible for his brother and responsible for bringing his parents over and then he was responsible for basically financially supporting them."
As a senior in high school, Rene balanced classes, athletics and working alongside his parents as both an employee and a translator.
"I have a lot of faith in God," Rene said. "(My dad) taught me that if you pray to God, he’ll help you. Believe me, I needed a lot of help in my lifetime. ... If you don’t have faith in God, you can’t survive. Without faith, there’s no way I could have survived what I went through."
Gloria Deo Books, a Catholic bookstore in Lincoln, is carrying the book. A deal with Barnes and Noble fell through because Tony said he didn't want to participate in the required in-store book signings.
"The story’s about my dad," he said. "It’s not mine. I want it to be reflective of him, not so much about me.”
Moving through several different career fields, Rene ended up in the insurance field, working for John Hancock Financial, Lincoln First Federal and Ameritas, from which he eventually retired.
"Not all that happened by accident," he said. "God was behind all that. What I went through, if that never had happened, I never would’ve ended up where I am today."
Years ago, Rene Ojeda (right) first wrote down his experiences growing up in Cuba and fleeing to America as an unaccompanied minor. His son, Tony Ojeda (left), recently expanded those writings into a book that tells his father's life history, including moving to Lincoln.