Every good story has a little mystery. In the latest episode of The Miami Book Hub, mine began with the number eight.
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My guest, Dr. Rolando M. Ochoa, joined me for Episode 8 and immediately explained that the number has been “pursuing me my entire life.” He was born on November 8, weighed 8 pounds, 8 ounces, was born in the eighth year of his parents’ marriage, and even noted that the Cuban lottery that week produced the number 808. Add in his wife and six children, he joked, and “that makes us eight in the family.” I then added that his name, “Ochoa,” also played on the number (“ocho” being Spanish for “eight”).
It was a fitting beginning for a conversation with a man who seems to have lived at least eight lives.
Born in Havana to parents deeply rooted in Cuba’s entertainment world, Ochoa began performing as a child. His father was one of Cuba’s leading television comedians, and young Rolando soon found himself with his own Sunday night television show, sponsored by U.S. Royal. He later came to the United States as an exile, tried his luck in Los Angeles, worked factory shifts, chased auditions, and eventually built a long career in banking, education and music.
“I was in banking for 41 years,” he said, while also teaching at Miami Dade College and performing for two decades with his band. With characteristic humor, he described playing “weddings and divorces,” adding that he once told brides that if the marriage did not work out, he would offer “half price for the party.”
But beneath the humor is a deeply reflective writer shaped by faith, family, exile and history. His first book, Cuba 18, U.S. 50, tells the story of his life after leaving Cuba. The title refers to his arrival in the United States as a young man at eighteen and the fifty years that followed. In the episode, he read from a moving passage about his time in the U.S. Army, when a chaplain asked him to help prepare Puerto Rican draftees for baptism and First Communion. Ochoa recalled wondering whether that unexpected act of service was “the real reason why I was drafted.”
That same sense of purpose carries into his novel, The Five Seekers, a historical thriller rooted in one of the most consequential chapters of the Cuban exile experience: Operation Pedro Pan. After the Bay of Pigs, Ochoa explained, many Cuban parents feared their children would be taken from them by the Castro regime. Thousands sent their children alone to the United States.
“I have a lot of respect for the kids of Pedro Pan,” Ochoa said, “but I have even more respect for the parents. As a parent and a grandparent, imagine sending your kid by yourself to a country that you don’t know.”
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That anguish becomes the emotional foundation of The Five Seekers. The novel follows five fictional Pedro Pan children who grow up in the United States, become successful adults, and develop a daring plan to help bring freedom to Cuba. Their theory: Cuba’s fate might have been different if the island had something the United States needed… oil.
Wrapping the story in suspense, romance, espionage, infiltration and Cuban-American history, the book, as he put it, “has everything,” including danger, history and the complicated relationship between Cuba and the United States.
Most importantly, he hopes the novel reaches younger readers who may not fully understand what happened. One of his editors told him she loved the book because she “learned so much history that I didn’t know.” For Ochoa, that was the point.
“This book will give them the idea and entertain them along the way,” he said. “And if you’re dealing with what’s happening today, this book will give you the base to analyze what’s happening today.”
That is the gift of writers like Dr. Rolando Ochoa. They do more than tell stories. They preserve memory, challenge assumptions and remind us that history is never as distant as we think. And sometimes, it takes a novelist, banker, teacher, musician and former child entertainer to help us see it more clearly.
You can find Rolando M. Ochoa’s books, under his full name, on Amazon.
To view this full interview and other episodes of The Miami Book Hub visit my YouTube channel at YouTube.com/@J.AdrianBetancourt.
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