Flight to Freedom

Ten years after Fidel Castro had been sworn in as Prime Minister of Cuba, Maria Zamora received her summons in the mail calling her to work on a Cuban farm or face arrest. Having just married her husband, the late Ramon Zamora, she began to devise a plan with him to not only escape manual labor, but also to flee the country. Ramon, a political dissenter, received an identical summons, but for a farm more than 2 hours away with no guaranteed form of transportation. The only way to get to their mandated labor farms was to hope for the goodwill of passerbys that had horses or cars, as Cuba had no centralized form of public transportation. The immense distance of Ramon’s farm meant that the couple would only see each other once every two weeks. Maria and Ramon considered themselves lucky, however, as they watched friends and family who opposed communism get arrested, jailed, and executed. It wasn’t unusual for Maria’s co-laborers to go missing from their positions during the day for her to discover later on that they had been detained.

“Life there was impossible. I know of people that said one wrong thing, and they were gone. Executed before their families.”

After the dust from the ending of the Cuban Revolution settled, somewhere around 1963 they began planning their exit 6 years before being forced into labor. They ventured out to an agency that provided citizens with necessary travel documents and attempted to apply to come to the U.S.  However, the process was long and grueling. Ramon had to be 28 years old before they would be considered eligible for departure, and he was 24 at that time. In a move that Zamora describes as something that "could have saved my life," they came to an agreement that having a baby would allow for her to be able to evade working and increase their chances of being allowed to leave the country. Ramon, having been arrested prior to marrying Maria but narrowly avoiding charges, was already known to the government as an opponent.

The process was risky for them, however, they were eventually granted permission to leave and were given a date for their departure on September 21st, 1970. Maria and Ramon became part of the largest airborne refugee operation in American history, the Cuban “Freedom Flights” or “Vuelos de la Libertad” which brought more than 300,000 refugees to the U.S.

“Before we left, we were afraid they would come to us and tell us no. My husband had already been known to be an opponent to communism and we used to hug and kiss really tight every time we said goodbye because we didn't know if it would be the last time.”

The couple’s luck was unprecedented and they considered themselves blessed. In March of 1968, more than one million people were on the waitlist to leave. The very last applications for the program were accepted in May of 1969, shortly before the couple’s daughter was born. The last Freedom Flight reached U.S. soil on April 6, 1973-- only 3 years after they had arrived. Maria’s sister and her husband, Angela and Carlos Torres, applied to “claim” their family members on the other side of the border in the U.S., and upon arriving in the country received the couple and provided them with housing and necessities until they were able to obtain jobs and afford a place of their own.

Ramon’s nephew, Armando Zamora, also faced difficulty in escaping Cuba. He was denied permission to depart on a Freedom Flight. Armando, desiring a better future for himself and his family, rented a boat and planned a journey across the Caribbean to reach American soil. Shortly upon venturing out, Armando and his group were intercepted by a U.S. Coast Guard and brought to Guantanamo Bay, whereupon they were held for more than 10 months before being allowed entry into the U.S. Originally planning to “claim” his wife and daughter and help them reach the U.S. as well, the political climate became much worse in Cuba and he was unable to do so. Armando’s now ex-wife and daughter remain in Cuba presently.