KEN THOMAS
Associated Press

MIAMI - Mel Martinez was dominating the basketball game, and with each basket, people in the crowd started to notice the Catholic necklace bouncing out of the lanky teen's jersey.

It was 1961 in Cuba and Fidel Castro ruled the island nation. Seated in the stands, his parents heard some of the gun-toting fans yell "Kill the Catholic," reacting to the scapular their son wore. A priest expelled by Castro had given Martinez the religious symbol. Spectators continued to heckle and his parents grew more concerned.

"There was 'Kill the Catholic,' 'He's Catholic,'" Martinez recalled. "Those kind of things were very frightening to them."

The basketball game was the culminating event in their decision to send their son to America in February 1962, part of an exodus later dubbed "Operation Pedro Pan" that helped about 14,000 Cuban children flee Castro's government.

Alone in a new country, the 15-year-old Martinez lived in youth camps and foster homes, where he learned English and tried to understand the American culture while grappling with the loss of his old life in Cuba. Four years later, when he was reunited with his parents in Orlando, Martinez played the role of adult, lining up a job for his father and tapping his savings to buy his family a used car.

Martinez, who served as U.S. Housing Secretary under President Bush, will likely turn to his story as he campaigns for the Republican nomination for U.S. Senate. His story could resonate with South Florida's Cuban-American community and an increasing number of Hispanic voters in central Florida. But for Martinez, now 57, his Pedro Pan experience has shaped his life more than any other.

Before Castro, life in Sagua La Grande was filled with baseball games and family. Martinez's grandfather had run a soda bottling company and served as mayor and his father worked as a country veterinarian.

Once Castro took power, the institutions in Martinez's hometown began to crumble. The Bay of Pigs invasion failed in the spring of 1961. The new government closed Martinez's Catholic school and kicked out the priests. Fears spread of children being brainwashed. Locally, neighbors grew frightened when a firing squad executed a teen suspected of working with the anti-Castro underground.

"The whole life around us was changing very fast," said Ralph Martinez, his younger brother.

With mounting concerns and the basketball game still fresh in their minds, Martinez's parents decided to enter their son into a secret program run by the U.S. Catholic church to help children flee the country.

When Martinez reached the Havana airport on Feb. 6, 1962, he was taken to "la pecera," or the fish bowl, a room with a large glass window that separated children from their families. Before any child could leave, three or four uniformed military officers reviewed their paperwork.

When an officer checked Martinez's papers, he said the teen owed about 30 pesos for an overdue phone bill. Puzzled, Martinez pleaded with the officer to no avail, and then signaled to his family standing nervously behind the window. His uncle handed him a wad of cash to give to the guard.

Martinez boarded the flight bound for Miami and tried to comfort a younger girl who was already homesick. When the plane crossed into international air space, the pilot announced they were free and cheers erupted on board.

The separation anxiety began when he arrived at Camp Matecumbe in Miami, where several hundred children in the program were staying. He reached the camp late at night, got a glass of milk, some cookies and an army blanket and slept on a cot in the dining hall.

It began a difficult period. He talked to his family about 10 days after his arrival - from a hotel pay phone - and tried to keep busy playing baseball and attending daily Mass. But the camp was overcrowded, with children sleeping in triple-decker bunks, and he became homesick.

"The memories are just of this deep, deep loneliness and feeling of being alone in the world and of just, I guess, despair," Martinez said.

About a month after his arrival, he was relieved to learn he was headed to a camp near Jacksonville, where several of his friends were staying. By custom, teens who left Matecumbe were usually tossed into the swimming pool in their clothes. Martinez jumped in by himself.

At Camp St. John, Martinez joined nearly 100 teens and met Tom Aglio, then a young social worker running the camp. Aglio said the teens were mostly well behaved, even as many realized their separation from their families might not be temporary.

"They were beginning to accept the fact that 'I don't know when I'm going back," said Aglio, who was commonly called "padre segundo," or the campers' second father.

By June, organizers decided that the teens needed more stability and began seeking Catholic families to provide foster homes. Martinez and his friend, Cesar Calvet, were sent to families in Orlando, where they lived across town from each other.

Martinez first stayed at the home of Walter and Eileen Young - on Amigos Avenue - and then lived with Jim and June Berkmeyer in Orlando. His first year was an adjustment at Bishop Moore High School - "a total fish out of water" - where he struggled to learn English and didn't understand normal events such as the homecoming dance.

Sports provided a bridge for Martinez, who played on the baseball and basketball teams. He and his friends from Cuba worked odd jobs and adjusted to the different customs in Orlando, then a sleepy Southern town.

"Our two personalities were ones of being able to follow the rules and gain acceptance and we both did," said Calvet, now an executive with SunTrust Banks.

Martinez learned English but he was annoyed when others laughed at his diction. He became determined not only to master the language, but to lose his accent.

"I wanted people to hear what I said, not how I sounded," he said.

By 1966, Martinez was attending a junior college, financed in part by a local scholarship, while his brother, Ralph, who had left Cuba three months after his older brother and was living in Miami with relatives. In March, Ralph called from Miami to tell him their parents were bound for the United States. The family reunited at the Orlando airport.

Martinez helped guide his family in their new country and helped them through savings from jobs as a YMCA counselor and work in retail and construction.

The family first stayed with the Berkmeyers before renting a home. Martinez also went to T.G. Lee Dairy and sold the owner on his father's skills as a veterinarian. By the time his father arrived, he had a job. And after they settled down, Martinez used about $300 from his bank account to buy a used, puff blue 1959 Chevy Bel Air.

He later graduated from Florida State University and became a successful trial attorney, earning millions in his law practice in Orlando. He entered politics in 1994, as the running mate of GOP gubernatorial candidate Ken Connor, his FSU roommate. After they lost, Martinez led the Orlando Utilities Commission and then won the race for Orange County Chairman in 1998, becoming the county's mayor.

Martinez, married with three children and two grandchildren, said he still draws upon his Pedro Pan past, lessons that he believes will help him in his latest challenge.

"It's taught me to be self-reliant. It's taught me to stand up to adversity. And it's taught me that there's a wonderful God," he said. "A lot of Pedro Pan people have been very successful - not to say that there's not some tragic stories - but we just learn to make do."