Rene Ramos (00:02):
I know your name, but for the record, if you could tell us your name and where you live and what you do for a living.

Miguel Pérez (00:11):
My name is Miguel Pérez and 'm a retired joumalism and history professor, although I still teach a history class, part-time, one class per semester online, and it's all about the history of Hispanics in what is now the United States territory. It's a very specific course that is really not taught anywhere else in the country because Hispanic history is excluded from American history books and there's like a hundred years before the pilgrims arrived that Americans are not told about. And that's what I'm about.

(00:50):
I have a website called hiddenhispanicheritage.com, and that's the textbook that my students use. I have been all over the country because again, before I was a history professor, I was a joumalist for 40 years and a newspaper columnist. I was a columnist for the New York Daily News, and so I wanted to tell history from a joumalist perspective. What I do and what I have been doing now for 15 years is going to all these historic sites all over the country. That's why I'm in Miami now, visiting historic sites all over the country and writing about each one of them and compiling them. There's probably about 200 of them already on the website, and eventually, that will become two books that I'm working on at the same time. I hope that was enough.

Rene Ramos (01:43):
That was great. There are two words that I want to talk about that are often used in conjunction with the Cuban community at large, but mainly in South Florida. The words are exile and refugee. Could you tell me what those words mean to you?

Miguel Pérez (0214):
Nothing to be ashamed of. That's what the bottom line is. I tell people, excuse me, these are people that you're talking about now as if they were aliens or whatever, and you're calling them refugees, I was a refugee and I'm proud of it. It's a source of pride for me, but I understand that those words have been distorted somewhat and it's terrible.

Rene Ramos (02:42):
If you were to explain it to somebody who had never heard the word before, what would you tell them an exile is?
​
Miguel Pérez (02:48):
An exile is someone who needed freedom, needed a place to live in freedom and needed to move from his homeland and seek freedom elsewhere.

Rene Ramos (03:02):
Let's do the same exercise with the word refugee. What would you tell someone who had never heard that word before what it means?

Miguel Pérez (03:09):
Someone who needed refuge. Someone who came to this country hoping to find open arms, help. Just like Jesus would've done in spite of the so-called evangelical movement nowadays that want to tum its back on immigrants.

Rene Ramos (0329):
​I want to travel back in time. I guess we could do it a couple of different ways. But first, let's talk about what you can remember of your family life in Cuba before coming to the United States. Could you tell us, could you set the scene for us and what things were like and what led to your family deciding to come to the United States?

Miguel Pérez (03:58):
I lived in a very small country town called Santo Cristo de la Salud in Havana province, better known as La Salud. I lived in a farm. I had the greatest childhood one can ever imagine. My mother was a teacher. My father was the secretary of elections for the whole district. My grandfather was a guy who registered people and the notary that notarized people when they were baptized. He used to work for the government. I forget the title. He was the guy who you came in, you had a baby and you gave him 15 names. Maria Teresita Rodriguez Perez. My grandfather hated that so much that everyone in my family doesn't have a middle name. I'm just Miguel Pérez. No middle name, no one, and it was because it came from my grandfather, but he was a genius in my opinion. He was an agricultural person. He ended up owning several farms, ended up very, very rich toward the end of our time in Cuba. He was was a genius in the sense that, l'll tell you one quick little anecdote about my grandfather. He also lived with us here in Miami. He died in Miami.

(05:22):
Can you imagine in the 1950s, someone going from Cuba, this is how well off my grandfather was at that time, on vacation to Hawaii? He goes to Hawaii with my grandmother and my aunt, and he realizes that they have this very sweet littie papayas that they don't have in Cuba and they're Hawaiian of origin, the little papayas that we see everywhere now. He basically ate a couple of boxes of papaya there, took the seeds back to Cuba, and in a few years, he was competing with Hawaii in importing little papayas to the United States. He had the market on papayas in Cuba because it turned out that the soil in Cuba was very good for them. Basically, he stole the Hawaiian papayas on a vacation trip and came back and became very, very rich because of that. He was already rich, but the papaya venture was amazing. That was toward the end of the 1950s that this was happening. I was already a boy.

(06:25):
In fact, when I was a kid, I was used in commercials to promote the papaya thing. I remember myself standing on a box, them taking pictures of me holding a little papayita. But anyway, that was my childhood. I roamed around. I had horses. Over the years, right next to the family farm, my grandmother had grown every conceivable fruit tree that you can imagine. Anon, mamey, guayaba, it was like paradise. You would just walk out there and grab them. The mameys would fall off the trees because there was too many of them. That's where I lived. I lived in paradise.

The change was dramatic. I didn't speak a word of English when I came. My parents sat me down one day and said, "Hey, guess what? We're going to the United States." They had already made up their mind and I was 11 years old and there was nothing I was going to do about it. And the plan, what my family had to go through to get here. My brother Beny, who was seven years older than I and died 10 years ago here in Miami, had to lead the way. And so what they did in those days, in order to get to the United States, you had to have somebody claim you from the United States, and we had no one to claim us. My brother, who was 17 at the time, was sent to Jamaica and then spent six months or so in Jamaica until he got a visa at the American embassy in Jamaica to come as an exile.

(08:24):
Once he got to Miami, then he was able to claim me and my parents, and then my parents, a year later, were able to claim their parents, my grandparents, and so forth, It was a process of several years to get the whole family over here. But it was this initial sacrifice of my brother at
17. Unlike me, I had the privilege really of getting here at only 11, so I was able to go to school. I didn't have to drop out. My brother had to drop out. My brother was a genius also. He was a very bright man and he would've done well if he could have gone to college, but he had to sacrifice that for the family.

Rene Ramos (0910):
I want to explore a little bit about what your impressions were, because it's a real good opportunity for us with someone who was really kind of a conscious individual at the time this is all happening. With some folks, we're just talking memory or second hand memories, but with you, we have direct memories. What was it like coming here? You said your family essentially, you felt that you were in paradise. What were your first impressions when you came to the United States? What were the things that made impressions on you at that age?

Miguel Pérez (09:49):
​Well, before I got on the plane, I tell everybody about the gusanos. You know what the gusanos were, right? People don't realize that there were duffel bags that we were required to use when leaving Cuba. It was the only kind of luggage they allowed, three changes of everything and duffel bags. They used to call us gusanos and that's how we ended up with the term gusanos. When I hear the term gusano, I'm not offended. The anti-Cuban, whatever the site they may be coming from, they use gusanos as a derogatory term. Thank you very much. I am proud to be a gusano. Thank you. Back to your question. I'm sorry.

Rene Ramos (10:30):
That's okay. When you came with your gusano ...

Miguel Pérez (10:35):
Yeah.

Miguel Pérez (10:36):
My impression of Miami.

Rene Ramos (10:38):
​Yeah.
​
Miguel Pérez (10:40):
My uncle had come with my brother. When my brother went to Jamaica, he came with one of my uncles, so the two of them were in Jamaica and then waiting for the rest of the family when we arrived here. That first day, my brother took my parents. He had already set up an apartment for us on Southwest 4th Street, right there, in the heart of Little Havana. My brother went and picked up my parents. I don't remember. I think it was Opa-locka that we were arriving at at that time, but we were picked up by my brother and my uncle. My uncle took me and my parents went with my brother back to the apartment and all that. My uncle said, "No," (they used to called me Chiche). "I'm taking Chiche with me," so I went and my uncle took me to the farmers' market in Miami, because he wanted to impress me. It's a form of torture that they do to Cubans, but a lot of people do that. They take you to the produce department when you arrive, so you can see all the abundance. That's what he did.
​
(M:56):
But he actually lived in Northeast Miami near, I don't even know if the farmers' market is still there. It's been so many years. But he took me to the farmers' market back then. It was like, I couldn't believe it because I came from a farm and now everything was beginning to run out. Now I see this and I began to cry. I was 11 years old. The first impression, day one, April 7, 1962, I'm at La Plaza here at Northeast Miami and I'm crying watching this, so it had a shocking, shocking impression on me.

​But the rest; I grew up in Little Havana, went to Ada Merritt Junior High School, which was supposed to be, at the time, the toughest place to go. Before that, I went to Riverside Elementary. Talk about busing, right? Everybody's, for years now, has been talking about the controversy about busing kids. I would walk to Riverside. They would put me on a bus and drive me to Snapper Creek Elementary, which is way out there. It's still far. Okay? They would drive me to Snapper Creek Elementary every day and then bring me back to Riverside, and then I would walk home from Riverside. This was the routine.

(13:12):
I did that fourth grade in Snapper Creek, fifth grade in Silver Bluff Elementary and sixth grade, I had already moved down to where the Brickell area is now, and it's still there: Southside Elementary, and if you look for Southside Elementary, you can't even find it, it's there, but it's surrounded by high-rises. It's an incredible site because that's where I grew up. I used to deliver the Miami News in the afternoons with a basket in the front of the bicycle in that whole Brickell area, which is totally different now. It's amazingly different. My house that was there and all that, it's all buildings now.

Rene Ramos (13:54):
The Miami News was first published out of the building that we call the Freedom Tower.

Miguel Pérez (14:00):
Yes, sir.

Rene Ramos
As you know.
​
Miguel Pérez (14:01):
Yes, sir.

Rene Ramos (14:03):
​I want to use the article that you wrote and the experience that you had as kind of a touchstone for exploring your family's experience of the Freedom Tower and the services that were provided there. Could you tell us a little bit about the experience that you had? Let's go backwards. Let's start with the experience you had when you went to the original exhibits that we had there, and you encountered the photograph that you mentioned in the article and then, let's dig into what is being represented in that photograph and what the experience was of your family in contact with the Freedom Tower.

Miguel Pérez (14:47):
Well, I went there after so many years, probably about 50 years since I had not been in the building. Because again, I am a historian visiting Hispanic heritage sites, and I told myself, this is a very personal, moving story. I can write about this building because I went through this experience. I can tell my own family story by going to this building, and I knew that already the exhibit existed in the building, but I had no idea. I knew that there was an exhibit about what had happened there in the 1960s, and I also think I knew that the photos were from the Miami Herald or some of the photos were from the Miami Herald. That's what I knew. I said, "This is perfect. I'm going to go there. I'm going to write an article about what it means to me."

(15:37):
The moment I got there, | started looking at it. I'm going, "Jesus Christ, I went through this," and I actually remember. I mean, there's a gigantic waiting room that they had where people waited for everything. You would go here for the dentist, there for the doctor, there for the nurse, and then over there that way for the people who were being relocated to other parts of the country. Everything was happening there, and you were stuck in the middle and people were being called up for different things. But I was 11 years old. This is a new world to me. Again, I came from a farm. That whole experience, I'll never forget. I still visualize it. But when I saw the photos again, I was able to visualize it even better, and it took me a long time just to contemplate every photo because it took me there. The exhibit takes you there, especially if you had gone through it.

(16:38):
​When I found, all of a sudden, here I am, I look up and there's this gigantic picture of the people on the food line where refugees would receive a box with food. I remember the big chunk of American cheese that they would give us. But anyway, this little box, you would stand in line and all of a sudden, I see this humongous photo where my father is one of the most prominent people in the line, standing in the line, waiting for the box of food. I didn't know where to put myself. I broke down crying. I was shaking. I thought I was going to faint. I wanted to sit on the floor, but I resisted the temptation to sit on the floor. I'm pretty sure my nephew was with me, and he had to hold me up. Yeah, it was my nephew, Daniel, who was with me, and he had to hold me up. "Tio, tio hold on." But he started crying too when he saw it.

(17:44):
But it was an experience I will never, ever, ever forget I am grateful to the museum for creating this incredible moment for me. That's why I'm here. It's a pleasure to be talking to you guys because I think it's very valuable work that you guys are doing, and especially with this exhibit. I think this exhibit should be there permanently. I'm pretty sure it is. But if it isn't, you should make it a permanent exhibit.

Rene Ramos (18:15):Let's go into that photograph. If we were able to actually travel in there and be there in that moment in which your father was photographed in that line, can you set the scene in terms of what your father's experience was doing business there or doing what he needed to do there for the family?

​Miguel Pérez (18:40):
Well, my father would go, I don't think I know, it was once a month that he would go. I didn't always go with him. I was in school or whatever, but he would go in the daytime and pick up this box, and my mother would find a way to use every single thing in the box, because at that time, we were poor. We were very poor. We were just starting out, and my brother was basically feeding the entire family. My father eventually created his own business. Since we're talking about my father, I wrote an article about that moment, and I actually found a photo that is now on my website with that article. That photo is there, but there's another photo of him wearing the same shirt with me and my mom the day that we arrived from Cuba, so you see him. Because again, we had three shirts back then, so he's wearing that same shirt a few days later apparenty when he went to the refugee center. We had already taken a photo when we first arrived from Cuba standing in front of this apartment building where we first lived.
​
(19:53):
That whole experience with my father, that shirt brings me back. That whole expenence of him bringing home the food. It was he who brought the food and the food was from the refugee center, and I mean, we appreciated it so much. We had other people, I remember, that helped. Aside from the refugee center, we had people who helped my family considerably because in my hometown in Cuba, there was an evangelical preacher who lived right next door to me, an American evangelical preacher. He was the only American in the town. His name was Jorge El Americano. Nobody knew him by any other name. His name was actually George Walker, but George Walker was an angel. He was a terrific man, who really was great to the kids in the town and all that and "Yo aprendí a hablar el Español de esta manera porque yo de niño sabía imitar a Jorge, el Americano. Ellos hablan así con este acento" (Translation: I learned to speak Spanish this way because as a child I knew how to imitate Jorge, the American. They speak like this. with this accent).

(2104):
Then Jorge El Americano, again, he ran a church right next to me in my little town. He ran an evangelical church, which my parents never allowed me to go to because we were Catholic. But he ran an evangelical church, and during the daytime, we could play with him and he taught us many things. But when we got to Miami, he had already established a church in Miami helping Cuban refugees. And imagine: He was my neighbor in Cuba! He showed up with everything we needed for the apariment. A bucket of water, a broom or the essentials, he brought it all in first day. We had that support too from an American family that not all Cubans had like day one, but we did, because again, I was the only Cuban that can tell you, l've always had an American neighbor because it happened in my hometown in Cuba.

Rene Ramos (22:01):
There were the official channels of help, but there was also a lot of informal . . .

Miguel Pérez (22:07):
Churches.

Rene Ramos (22:09):
But also networking neighbor to neighbor and people who knew each other.

Miguel Pérez (2213):
Yeah.

Rene Ramos (2213):
Were there family or people that you knew from Cuba that were here that you networked with and that you associated with?
​
Miguel Pérez (2219):
Absolutely. People from the hometown as opposed to now where so many years later, it's hard to keep up with people. Many people have died and so forth. But after I leave here, I'm going to go see two brothers who I haven't seen in a while, a few years, who are from my hometown. They have a Rouco and Sons landscaping company. I haven't seen them in many, many years. They are from my hometown, and I am leaving here because they're close to here to try to catch up with what I have lost, the memories that I have lost, because after my brother died 10 years ago, he was my only connection really to my old days in Cuba and all that. When I couldn't remember something or when my brother couldn't remember something, we would call each other. I don't have that anymore. Now I have these two brothers here that i'm going to go pick their brains today because I havent seen them in a long time, so I'm really looking forward to seeing these guys.

(23:30):
But to the point that I was about to make when I changed the conversation here. Day one, they arved maybe two weeks after we did, the whole Rouco family, which was a whole bunch of people. We lived in a one bedroom apartment efficiency in Little Havana. Me and my parents. Vy brother didn t live with us. Me and my parents. The whole Rouco family moved in with us because they were from our hometown and they had no place to sleep. It was obvious. It was unquestionable. People were sleeping on the floor. It didn't matter until they could get their own place. That's the kind of support that we had.

Rene Ramos (24:14):
Can we go back to the Freedom Tower and any memories that you have personally of going there? I know you said that your dad was the one that mostly went there, but you did go there occasionally. What were the kinds of things that you did there and what can you remember about maybe anybody that worked there or anything like that?

Miguel Perez (24:37):
I don't think I can picture a person specifically, but I do remember one. In fact, I was thinking maybe if I had known that we were going to do this before I leit New Jersey, I would look for a pair of glasses that I think they gave me there when I was 12 or whatever. Nerdy, very nerdy, cheap-looking glasses, but I think I still have them. That's the most memorable thing. But again, I remember that I used to go there for the dentist, for the eye doctor, for the doctor, for everything, All my medical care was there, and my mother would take me there often. My mother was one of these people that believed wholeheartedly in doctors. I was vaccinated for everything that you can think of since I was a little kid, so my mother would go there a lot with me and the doctors there.

Rene Ramos (25:32):
When I was reading your article, you mentioned there was a point where the family had the opportunity to relocate.

Miguel Pérez (25:40):
Yeah.

Rene Ramos (25:42):
What happened with that?
​
Miguel Pérez (25:44):
My father was given the opportunity. I forget the states now, but I think he was given two different states that he could go to, Nebraska or something like that. My God, can you imagine? No, he turned them down and at that time, he had already began to formulate an idea about what he could do to make money in Miami, and he did, and that was he rented an old Chevy and he would go to La Plaza, the farmers' market, and he would buy potatoes, lettuce, the essentials, and he'd resell it to the little bodegas, the little Cuban grocery store. This is the eary 60s, there were no major supermarkets and distributors and so forth. My father created his own little business as the middleman between the farmers market and the Cuban grocery stores. He would supply the entire produce department for a lot of, I remember one on there was one particular Cuban grocery store, Southwest 8th Street and 1ith Avenue. That was like a very popular place. My father brought him everything that they had in the produce department.
​
​(26:56):
Every Saturday I had to get up at four in the morning and go work with him for years. That was my Saturday duty to the family. I would go and spend the whole day. I was exhausted at the end of the day, and then learning to appreciate how much my father would go through the rest of the week. I would be carrying heavy sacks of potato and cebolla (Translation: Onion) and boxes of lettuce in and out of this. I remember he started with a Chevrolet that had only two doors, so you had to swing the door open, throw the stuff in there. But later, of course, he ended up with a van and then he ended up with two vans, and then he hired people to work with him too, so the business grew until the point where he got sick and he got cancer, and eventually he had to retire. But his business grew and I could have gone personally in that direction, and I could have inherited his business. Who knows? I could have expanded that into some major food distributor now or whatever, but it wasn't in me. That was not what I wanted to do with my life and neither did my brother. My brother had other ambitions. I wanted to go to college and I did.

Rene Ramos (28:16):
You took a driferent trajectory in your life from your father, but is there anything that you could point to in these early experiences that stayec With you and that shaped you and your way of looking at things and what you decided to do with your life?

Miguel Pérez (28:32):
My father was the most honest person I have ever met. By far. That's transferred. I admired that so much in him, and so I tried to live by those standards, and it's hard because he was exceptional in that sense. But that was the main thing about my father. I respected how he was an integral person. He had been a police officer in his youth in Cuba, and his father, my grandfather, had been a Cuban army general in the heydays. He had that sort of like a military background, although he wasn't strict in that sense. Basically, my father was the kind of erson who would say to my mother, "Look at what your son is doing. if I was misbehaving, he wouldn't bother with it. He would have my mother take care of it, but he was very loose with me.

29.33):
​But you see, I have to throw this in that l'm about to tell you because the reason why I didn't really follow the produce department, it was because I had also a very, very, very influential uncle who was on my mother's side. He was married to my aunt, but he was my godfather. My mother's sister is married to this guy, and they were my godparents. His name as Benito Alonso y Artigas. He was a very well-known joumalist in Havana. He wrote for El País, and so did his father with exactly the same name, Alonso y Artigas. But they were very well-known jouralists. I wanted to be like him. When I was a kid, he had the best Christmas presents, he had the best birthday presents. He knew exactly what I wanted, and to me, he was the image of success, you see?
​
(30:34):
Then Superman comic books, believe it or not, Clark Kent turned me into reporting. Between my uncle being and Clark Kent, and I'm going, "Oh, this is what he does. I'd like to do that." That's how I became, and I still tell my students. One of the greatest advantages that I've ever had was the fact that I had no hesitation whatsoever about what I wanted to do with my life. it was day one, journalism. From now on, I worry about nothing else. Everything I did from that point on, I was studying to be a journalist. Even when I read the newspaper, I was reading it to see how the story was written. Not just for the news in it, but oh, look where they put the information on the top and this one, they buried the lead. I'm getting into this thing even before I was studying journalism, but it was because again, my uncle was amazing person and he was very, very influential. He's the one that came with my brother to Jamaica and took me to the farmers' market. Okay? Same person. So I still miss him. I miss them all.

(31:46):
One of the things I have to do now, I mean | just arrived in Miami a few days ago, is I have to visit my whole family. They're on a couple of cemeteries here on 8th Street From here, because you guys happen to be very close to this place where go almost every year, every two years when I visit Miami, one of the first places I stop is this place called Chan's Flowers. Have you ever heard of it? It's near here. 72nd Avenue. They sell the kind of flowers that you can put in the cemetery and they'll last for a long time. I'm going there now, pick up some flowers because I haven't been to the cemetery yet, Woodlawn Cemetery. This is hometown. I've got two hometowns. I've got the one in Cuba, and I've got this place here. But again, I don't know if I could adjust myself to Miami anymore.
​
Rene Ramos (32:44):
I'm so glad you brought-

Miguel Pérez (32:45):
​Too many things have changed.

Rene Ramos (32:46):
I'm so glad you brought that up because there was a question that! had earlier in this set that I kind of skipped over because we started talking, but that's the other word that I want to explore. The word home. What does that word mean to you? You started to talk about it a little bit, what is home? But if you could tell me in the abstract sense and then personally.

​Miguel Pérez (33:11):
Well, as I said, it's hard for me because I guess, it's hard for all of us who've lived different places in our lives. But I have three homes. I have La Salud in Cuba. I have Miami, which is where I grew up from 12 to about the time when I went to college from 11, and then I lived in New York and New Jersey for 40 years. If you ask me what's home now, it's Union City, New Jersey, and I teach in New York, so I live in New Jersey and I teach in the Bronx, so you can imagine I'm all over the place.

(33:51):
But home to me, to me, it's still La Salud, and I've never gone back. I'm one of those people who made the promise to his parents, I'm not going back until Cuba is free and 'm not doing it I've had 20 opportunities to do so, free of charge, all expenses paid by the newspaper that wanted to send me and I'm the one who would say, "Excuse me. Before I was a journalist, I was already Cuban. No. Stop it. I'm not going." Even when the Pope went, remember when the Pope went? My editors kept saying, "It's so safe. You're going to be there with the Pope. What are they going to do to you?" I would say, "It's not what they did to me. It's what they were going to do to me. It's what they already did to me." There's a big difference.

(34:43):
But also because, frankly, I've interviewed Cuban dignitaries at the United Nations, at the Cuban Mission in New York. Again, I was with the New York Daily News for many years, and I was an opinion columnist for the Daily News, and I blasted the Cuban government every single time I had a chance. The guys there at the Mission who had became friendly with told me, "Don't you dare go. Don't go until you're absolutely sure." Because they actually, at that time, I don't know now because it's been years, they kept a file on every article l ever wrote and they said, "It's this big, and you're going to have to respond for everything when you get there," so they advised me never to go back.

(35:35):
Believe me, there's nothing I would like more than to go back and walk that town again. Nothing I would like more. Here I am, a person who, again, right now l am on one of the longest road trips you can imagine and this is like my fifth across the country. I started from New Jersey coming to Miami, but I went to Arkansas first. I took the long route to get here, so l've been on the road for like two weeks now to get to Miami.

Rene Ramos (36:10):
I want to wrap up with two questions. The first one is about the present, and then the second one is about the future.

Miguel Pérez (36:17:
Okay.

Rene Ramos (36:19):
The one about the present has to do with, well, it's kind of the past as well. What does your experience, your feeling about the exile experience as it played out for the people who came the way that you did and experienced, had their first encounters with the United States in the way that you did, what does that have to tell us about today and just the whole area of immigration and people who are coming to this country now?

Miguel Pérez (37:02):
Well, apparently what has happened, I can think of.. Let me... Spam. l can't think of no other explanation than the fact that people are forgetting what really happened or never knew or Cubans who came much later than me under totally different circumstances that I don't relate to anymore, so it's hard for me to understand how.... T get a little political here, if you don't mind. It's hard for me to understand how Cubans can be supporting the Russians.

(37:39):
I mean, since I was a little kid, I learned how to hate the Russians and the guy who's in charge of Russia right now is a KGB agent. How could anybody want to be on the side of a KGB agent? They're still the same people. They still want to establish the old Soviet Union. I started telling you earlier, I don't know if I could live in Miami because of the mentality of a lot of the Cuban Americans here. We fled from a dictatorship, and it appears that people have forgotten what a dictatorship is. I don't give a damn whether dictatorship of the right or of the left It's a dictatorship. Okay?
​
(38:19):
But they're using communism now and Democrats. It's like, if you dislike Trump, you must be a communist. Hello? But I came here for freedom of expression, freedom of thought. You have all these people who came here not looking f.r...I fell for the whole thing, hook, line and sinker. I came for democracy. I came for the First Amendment. I came for freedom of expression. A lot of people now who I thought came for the same reason, didn't come for that. They came for looking for a right-wing dictator. They left a left-wing dictator. They didn't like that. What they were looking for was a right-wing dictator. That's terrible.

(39:12):
To me, Fidel and Trump are the same shit, frankly. For people do not see that, not see that. And especially the ties with the Soviet Union. I have voted Republican, Emmanuel. I'm an independent I've always been independent because I'm a joumalist, so I've always kept.. I'm an equal opportunity critic. I voted for Ronald Reagan. I ask myself nowadays, what would Ronald Reagan do about Ukraine? Would he be dragging his feet about helping Ukraine? It's absurd what's happening in this country. And it's all politics. It's all trying to help Trump. It's all the mentality of Trump can do no wrong.
​
(40:03):
I love my Miami with my heart I grew up here, and all my friends are here. What's today, Friday? The main reason why I'm here is because one of my very best friends is getting married in Miami Beach tomorrow, and I'm going to see all my high school and junior high school friends there. I would like nothing more than to live here. You know what I do when we meet? No politics, please because half the room is on one side and half the room is on the other, and I don't want to lose my friends. But people are losing a lot of friends because of this, and it's terrible. Some of them who agree with me on the politics side tell me, "Hey, no, no. Hey, you better look out for so-and-so. He thinks you're crazy." Why? Because I don't like Trump I'm crazy? But that's the mentality here, and that's something that would be very hard for me to deal with.

Rene Ramos (40:59):
Okay. That's a good picture of the present.

Miguel Pérez (41:01);
Yeah.

Rene Ramos (41:03):
​Let's talk about the future.
​
Miguel Pérez (41:04):
Okay.
​
Rene Ramos (41:06):
The building, and you mentioned it in your article as well, through I would say a great stroke of luck, the building will exist going forward, and we're working to capture testimony from people like you who have direct experience, but also just in general recollections about that era. What do you think? Let me say it a little differently. What would you hope people in the future when we're not around, to tell them directly about these experiences? What would you hope for people who encounter the museum, encounter these exhibits and this testimony, what would you hope for them to take away and to understand?

Miguel Pérez (4202):
History. History is history. You can't deny it You can't hide it Some people are trying to hide history all over the place now, whether it's Hispanic history, African American history or whatever for political reasons, but it's about history. It's about documenting what happened and making people aware of it and opening people's eyes. That's what you guys do in a great way especially with this exhibit. Believe me, I've visited almost every Hispanic heritage museum there is in the country, and that's why I said make it a permanent exhibit. I'm not crazy about traveling exhibits because they're usually local artists and whatever. I'm into history. I'm into teaching people who we are and what we're about, and the history that you guys can teach in this museum through a permanent historical exhibit like this one is priceless. It's really very, very important to do. So yeah, for the future, the tower should stay there. The museum should definitely prevail, and so should the exhibit, and many more like it. I'm not just talking about this one. Videos, documentaries, all kinds of stuff that should be done to keep that history alive. That's what it's all about.

​(43:23):
I'm going to Sevilla soon. And it's the Tower of Seville, right? That was modeled. So I'm anxious to take a picture of that so I can put the two side by side on my website. That's how much I'm into the building, so you understand. By the way, another anecdote. The conquistadors discovered the Grand Canyon, and when they did, they wrote back to Spain and they said, "It's deeper than the Tower of Seville," to illustrate how deep in this thing was. That's the first reference that I've seen of the Tower of Seville was the conquistadors who discovered the Grand Canyon.

Rene Ramos (44:11):
Well, I want to thank you personally for sharing your story, and I've just gotten so much out of talking with you. I also want to thank you on behalf of the project and of the college.

Miguel Pérez (44:22):
My pleasure.

Rene Ramos (44:23):
This was wonderful, and I hope you can come back.

Miguel Pérez (44:29):
Anything I can do in the future, just let me know. I'm around.

Rene Ramos (44:32):
We'll be opening the museum in a year, so hope to see you there.

Miguel Pérez (44:35):
Oh, that'd be good. Send me an invitation for the opening, please. I'll come. I'll come.

Rene Ramos (44:38):
Absolutely.
​
Miguel Pérez (44:39):
I'll come. That'l be wonderful.