Jorge Labarga: Chief Justice of the Florida Supreme Court.

• Author: Pudlow, Jan
• Position: Profile

After helping tie a Cuban flag to the antenna, seven-year-old Jorge Labarga jumped in his father's canary yellow '56 Chevy Bel Air, and they cruised around town honking the horn and cheering in celebration of the revolution.

It was 1959, dictator Fulgencio Batista had fled the island with Ms fortune, and Fidel Castro came down from the mountains bringing grand promises of an American-style democracy for Cuba.

But that democratic dream soon turned into what Labarga calls a "Marxist nightmare."

Labarga may have been a young boy, but he was old enough to understand while listening to his father and his friends gathered in the living room. The men talked about being harassed by the military and strategized about big changes to come.

"My father had been arrested a number of times by the prior dictatorship that had been in place because he was suspected, rightfully so, of supporting the Castro revolution," Labarga said, adding that because his dad knew the Mason's secret handshake to exchange with a member of Batista's secret police, he was never locked up long.

Once the revolution turned darkly oppressive, those living-room conversations buzzed with plans to escape from Cuba before they were killed by the Castro regime.

"Castro was executing and arresting anyone who didn't agree with Ms neo-Marxist thing," Labarga said, explaining that the new dictator was keeping track of everyone in the underground who had supported him.

"So Castro now knows we can be just as effective to oust him, so he is getting rid of anyone he knows to be effective," Labarga said.

Fearing for his life, his father, Jorge Labarga, Sr., hopped a Pan Am flight to Miami, leaving his parents, wife, and three sons behind, with hopes they would join Mm soon.

But delays caused by the Cuban Missile Crisis from October 14 to 28,1962, and the ensuing embargo required a six-month detour to Mexico. Finally, in 1963, the Labarga family--husband and wife and three boys, with the grandparents sadly left behind in Cuba--was reunited in America, in the sugar mill town of Pahokee in Palm Beach County.

Vivid memories of communist soldiers bursting through the door with guns drawn and the horror of many executions were seared into the mind of Jorge Labarga, Jr., who knew at an early age exactly what he wanted to be when he grew up.

"I always thought that the best way to defend, protect, and uphold democracy in this nation, so the same thing doesn't happen here that happened in my mother nation, is to be a lawyer," 61-year-old Labarga said, standing in the Florida Supreme Courtroom, where centered on the polished wood bench is a name plaque bearing his new title: chief justice.

"The integrity of our system is in the hands of someone who felt the destructive intent of a system void of integrity. And a nation and state built upon self-reliance and self-determination has found its judicial embodiment in an individual who literally relied on those values to chart and pursue a celebrated career," Florida Chief Financial Officer Jeff Atwater, a longtime friend from Palm Beach Comity, said at the June 30 Passing of the Gavel Ceremony, where an overflow crowd honored the first Cuban-American to become chief justice of the Florida Supreme Court.

"Asking at the outset for nothing more than opportunity and offered at the outset nothing more than a fair chance, Justice Labarga now ascends to one of the most revered positions in our state."

From Mexico City Mansion to Pahokee Sugarcane Fields

Before arriving in small-town Pahokee on the shores of Lake Okeechobee, 10-year-old Jorge Labarga was dazzled by opulent accommodations in cosmopolitan Mexico City, where a Cuban childhood friend of Labarga's grandfather had lived for many years.

"He became like the Donald Trump of Mexico City," Labarga described. "My grandfather wrote to him and said, 'I need to get my daughter-in-law and three grandsons out of here. Will you take them in?"'

"Of course," was the welcoming reply. And that's how, in June 1963, Labarga came to live in a mansion in the equivalent of Mexico City's Beverly Hills, with more than a dozen live-in maids and a chauffeur who drove him wherever he wanted to go.

Within six months, the Labargas' applications to immigrate to the United States were approved, and the family was reunited in Pahokee, where Jorge Labarga, Sr., was working as a blue-collar sugar mill employee for the same folks who had hired him in Cuba: the Fanjul family, who began sugarcane farming in Cuba in the 1850s and re-established the business in Palm Beach County in the 1960s.

"Growing up in a little town was very strange at first," Labarga recalled of that period in the South before the passage of the Civil Rights Act,

When one of his brothers got sick, Labarga walked with him and his mother, Miriam, to the doctor's office, where they were confronted with confusing signs in the lobby.

One said, "Colored." The other said, "White."

'We didn't know where to go," Labarga recalled. "We just did not understand this division that existed in the United States. My grandmother would tell us about the United States and how grand the American people were. Then we came here and the African-American community lived in one side of the town, which is not a very good side of town, and the whites lived in another. You had a white movie theater. You had a black movie theater. Everything was divided."

By contrast, he said, in Cuba, the country-club set was segregated from the rest, but working-class folks, regardless of skin color, lived next door to each other.

When the Labargas were starting over as refugees in Pahokee, it was the height of the Cold War.

'We had just come out of the Cuban Missile Crisis, and but for President Kenned/s wisdom, we might not be here today. People were building bomb shelters in their backyards," Labarga said.

"The Berlin Wall had just gone up. We saw people on television jumping over barbed wire to escape. We were seen as people who had escaped from that same type of tyranny, so we were welcomed."

Labarga could not speak a word of English when he started the fourth grade in Pahokee, and there were no...