Having fled Castro’s Cuba at age five, Jorge Malagón Márquez honors the landmark reopening in September
J
orge Malagón Márquez’s first sighting of Miami’s iconic Freedom Tower, the so-called Ellis Island of the south for its role in processing more than half a million Cubans fleeing Fidel Castro’s communist revolution, was through a flood of tears.
It was May 1967, and his family had just arrived from Havana on one of the first so-called Freedom flights ferrying refugees allowed to escape the dictator’s tightening grip on the island.
His parents, Eduardo and Irma, held in their hands two small suitcases and his seven-year-old brother Ed. The bewildered Jorge, aged five, clutched the shredded remains of what just two hours previously had been his beloved teddy bear.
