CATHY SHAW Herald Staff Writer

In hiring Cesar Odio as city manager, Miami commissioners have found a rich kid from Havana who learned stoicism from his father, discipline from American military schools and the art of negotiation from matters of life and death.

"My father is my role model," says Odio, who was born Jan. 30, 1936, the oldest of 10 children and heir to the Trafico trucking company. "He started from nothing, so I was not afraid."

He was not afraid to escape from Cuba twice, nor to go back with Mayor Xavier Suarez's cousin to try to get their parents out of prison, nor to negotiate for the release of his brothers and sisters, nor to start all over again and again in Miami.

Odio's father, Amador, a self-made millionaire who admired the United States and regretted his inability to speak English,
sent his son to summer camp in North Carolina when he was 10.

Military school

"I didn't know what was going on," Odio recalls. "Then one day we were watching a movie and it hit me like a ton. . . . I understood every word."

To prepare his son for family leadership, Odio's father
sent him to high school at Culver Military Academy in Indiana and Pennsylvania Military Prep School in Chester.

"I hated every minute of it," Odio says. "But the things from there stayed with me forever. I'm always on time, shoes shined, neat looking. They stick it in you."

After graduation in 1953, Odio went home to study business at Villanueva University. But by this time President Carlos Prio, a friend of his father's, had been overthrown by dictator Fulgencio Batista. Odio's home was a safe house for an anti- Batista revolutionary.

On March 9, 1954, police raided the house, fired bullets into his sister's bedroom and detained his mother.

Odio escaped because at a time when he was supposed to be home studying, he was out necking with his girlfriend, who had eluded her chaperone.

"That could have saved my life," he says. "God has his ways."

Hiding out

His father escaped because six choferes, drivers in a type of neighborhood taxi service, hung out on the street corners leading to Odio's home and warned him of the raid.

Father and son then hid out on a beach for two days, camped in the Guatemalan Embassy for a month, then went to Guatemala, Mexico City and finally to Miami.

Two years later they returned to Cuba under a general amnesty. Odio went back to school at night, married his first wife, Julia, had a son, helped his father run the family business, and thought he would never have to leave again.

But politics, this time the anti-Castro counter-revolution that his family supported, interfered once again. Odio left for Miami on Oct. 20, 1960, this time for good. His father and mother aided the Bay of Pigs invaders, and went to prison.

"I took charge of my brothers and sisters," Odio says. He worked first as a dishwasher at the Diplomat Hotel for about a week, then as a $55-a-week parts department clerk at South Florida Mack Trucks.

Rescues father

"Those were dark times," he recalls. He had to negotiate through the Catholic church in Miami, then through the Vatican's representative in Cuba, to stop Castro from executing his father. His three-bedroom house in Westchester was home to 20 relatives. He converted the garage into a dormitory, but had little furniture. He didn't understand about paying on the installment plan.

Soon he would have three children of his own -- Cesar Jr., Julia and Maria Cristina -- and then he negotiated through the Swiss Embassy in Havana for the release of his six youngest brothers and sisters. Fortunately, one had been born in the United States in 1954, and could claim American citizenship. An aunt kept one girl. Three went to Monsignor Bryan Walsh, who ran a children's program. Odio reared two as his own. He eventually helped his parents get to the United States, too.

"Those times were difficult, but even washing dishes I was singing and self-assured," he says. "We had three meals a day."

From Mack Trucks he went to Maule Industries, the company owned by the family of former Mayor Maurice Ferre. He started as a quality control clerk in 1961. By 1974 he had worked his way up to vice president of operations.

Finally, in 1978, he went into his own trucking business.

"That was a fiasco," he says. Fuel costs rose from 41 cents a gallon to $1.05 in six months, and the firm went under.

But in 1980, former City Manager Joe Grassie hired Odio as an assistant city manager in charge of beauty pageants, rock concerts, marinas and conventions. He soon earned a bachelor's degree in public administration from Florida Memorial College. Around this time he also divorced Julia and married psychologist Marian Prio, daughter of former Cuban President Carlos Prio.

They live in Coconut Grove with their son, Carlos, 3, and a 7-month-old daughter, Sarah.

Odio says he'll be ready for retirement in five years, at which time he would like to teach young people about their opportunities in public administration.

"To go from a dishwasher to a city manager is just incredible," he says.