Lamelas accepted sacrifice to start life anew in U.S. Cuban refugee was lawyer, Castro foe

   By GEORGIA PABST

   gpabst@journalsentinel.com

   Printed: May 18, 2005

As a lawyer in 1950s Cuba, Francisco Jose Lamelas Blanco enjoyed wealth and privilege, even as he worked to overthrow the country's dictator, Fulgencio Batista.

Francisco Jose Lamelas Blanco graduated from University of Havana Law School in 1941.

But after he realized the true direction in which Fidel Castro's revolution was taking Cuba, Lamelas abandoned his comforts and the profession he loved to flee the newly communist nation.

Joining thousands of other Cuban refugees in the 1960s, Lamelas started his life over in the United States. He began with menial jobs and never was able to practice law again. He did, however, see one of his daughters become not only a lawyer but a judge in Milwaukee.

Lamelas died Tuesday at Mount Carmel Nursing Home in Wauwatosa after a long illness following a stroke. He was 85.

Lawyer for 20 years

"My father was a modest, principled man," Milwaukee County Circuit Judge Elsa Lamelas said Wednesday. When he left Cuba at age 42, he had been a lawyer for 20 years, she said. "Here he became someone who spoke with a foreign accent and someone who wore through the soles of his shoes from walking in Miami looking for a job." She said he found his first U.S. job in Lafayette, Ind., cleaning airplanes inside and out, including the toilets.

"Quietly, he accepted the sacrifice," she said. "He believed that at times the sacrifice of a generation is necessary. The immensity of that defies description."

In a 1998 Wisconsin Lawyer article about lawyers carrying on family traditions, he clung to the legal roots he loved. "I am a lawyer by nature," he said.

"By that he meant that despite the Cuban revolution, he believed in the law as a just instrument," his daughter said, for resolving disputes, social change and "the search for the truth."

Lamelas was born in Havana, the son of a lawyer and the second of six children. He grew up in a large, comfortable home with servants, said Elsa Lamelas. "I remember driving to the country to visit the families of servants who had retired to their home villages," she said. "It was a different sort of world, where relationships meant much, even relationships across class lines. Decades after we had left Cuba, my father corresponded with the son of his childhood nanny."

In 1941, Lamelas graduated from the University of Havana Law School and joined his father's successful practice in Old Havana. He also became active in Castro's Partido Ortodoxo, the party working to overthrow Batista. In 1953, a small group of revolutionaries led by Castro attacked the Moncada Army Barracks. The attack failed, and the Havana bar asked Lamelas to take on the potentially dangerous assignment of defending Castro. Castro chose to represent himself.

Until the overthrow of Batista on Jan. 1, 1959, Lamelas actively raised and moved money and supplies in support of the revolution, often risking arrest, Elsa Lamelas said. She remembers that his passion for the cause so permeated their lives that as a little girl one of her birthday parties, a big affair with starched petticoats and little canapés, was called an Agrarian Reform party. The yard was decorated with shovels, forks and Agrarian Reform banners.

But as it became clear that Castro favored collective farming, rather than individual ownership, and that he would not hold elections, her father became increasingly disenchanted, Elsa Lamelas said.

A moment of truth came when Lamelas was offered a job as a justice of Cuba's Supreme Court - and rejected it, she said. Still, Lamelas said, her father was determined to remain in Cuba as long as the Catholic schools were open. In April 1961, when Castro closed the schools, Lamelas found a way to get Elsa, then 10, and her sister, Blanca, then 6, out of Cuba on the so-called Pedro Pan airlift sponsored by the Catholic Church and the U.S.

They were sent to an orphanage in Toledo, Ohio. Later, her brother and mother joined them and finally her dad.

When Lamelas couldn't find work in Miami, he headed for the Midwest. He tried to study the law part time as he worked to support his family, but his English was weak and the challenge too great, she said.

In 1964, the family came to Racine, and Lamelas taught Spanish at Dominican College and earned a master's degree in Spanish. After Dominican closed, they moved to the Milwaukee area around 1973. He worked as a bank loan officer and later as a juvenile probation officer and didn't retire until his 70s.

Milwaukee County Circuit Judge Mel Flanagan said she knew Lamelas when she was in Children's Court.

"I never knew he was Elsa's father because he never brought it up," she said. "He was the most humble, respectful, dedicated probation officer who made kids accountable but also gave praise when due. He held kids to high standards, and for some of the kids who weren't used to that it was a first, and I think they appreciated that. He was so good at what he did."

Elsa Lamelas said her father often reminded her and the rest of the family that being in the U.S. was a privilege and that "we had an obligation to study, succeed and to give back."

He was proud that all his children graduated from college, she said. Her brother, Francisco, has a doctorate in physics and teaches at a college in Boise, Idaho.

In addition to Judge Lamelas and her brother, survivors include her mother, Elsa, of Wauwatosa, and her sister, Blanca McKenna, of Waukesha.