More than 65 years before Fernando Mendoza led Indiana to a historic national championship, his grandfather Alberto Espino began the journey of a lifetime.

The Washington Post - USA and Canada

BY CHUCK CULPEPPER

26 Jan 2026

Sixty-five years and three months on, his predominant memory would be something so often an icon of promise: the portable staircase to an airplane. He remembers ascending to the Pan Am at age 14 even if he can’t quite hear his own bygone footsteps. He had a limited notion of the heaviness of the situation and a small measure of confusion, but he remembers this: “To tell you the truth, I was excited, a kid in an airplane.” He remembers gentle sunshine.

Having flown north before, to an adored summer camp in Massachusetts, he probably found the ride at least somewhat routine, and he recollects nothing from the Pan Am on which his devastated mother, two older brothers and four younger sisters rode the blip of a trip from Santiago de Cuba to Miami International Airport. The years have blotted out the arrival as the years are adept at doing. He does know his father already had come to South Florida and had put $17,500 down on a house so that when the family arrived on that Wednesday, Oct. 26, 1960, it proceeded to that smallish three-bedroom, a house so unfamiliar that his mother wept, a house so much on the edge of Miami that his schoolmates “would kid me, ‘Did [you] hear the Miccosukee Indians out there?’”

From two large two-story Cuban houses where servers brought daiquiris on silver trays during family gatherings on Sundays, a reality crafted largely by an industrious grandfather, they had reached a new country and an out-there house with three bedrooms — one for parents, one for daughters, one for sons ages 19, 16 and 14, plus one male cousin — and two bathrooms — one for parents, one for all others. The boys’ room measured 12 feet by 14 feet, enough to cram in two bunk beds. “To go in between them, we had to go sideways,” Alberto Espino said this week, “because we were big boys.”

He wondered about things around him, about the disorienting truth his parents had spared him in hopes of preserving the cheer of his childhood. Why, after having swell cars in Cuba, did his family have one gold Volkswagen Beetle for everybody? Why, after attending a Jesuit boys’ school in Cuba, was he attending a public school with so many girls? Even the adults presumed the stay fleeting, something Espino would realize later on. “We all thought it was temporary,” he said. “There was no way the United States would allow a communist regime 90 miles away.”

It takes Espino, the maternal grandfather of Fernando Mendoza, the freshest American sports star, a chunk of time to list all of the endeavors of his own maternal grandfather, Octaviano Navarrete, a civil engineer. He operated a salt mine and a copper mine. He ran a construction company. He owned and oversaw two bus lines — one in Santiago, Cuba’s second-largest city, and one outside of town. He and the family had a farm away from town that raised Brown Swiss cattle. He had six children, sons-in-law who worked with him. “He was very studious, a very serious man, very disciplined, very correct,” his grandson said. “Had his office also at home. He was not a drinker or a dancer. I wouldn’t say ‘stern,’ but you know the type. He doesn’t smile much, always trying to figure out something, always thinking, always working.”

In the immediate years after Fidel Castro grabbed the helm Jan. 1, 1959, government authorities began showing up at the businesses, even if a lad just beginning his teens remained unaware, years from learning how it happened. “They would show up with a paper,” Espino said, “and they say they’re going to be intervening. They’re going to ‘take the business for the benefit of the people.’ And that’s it. You have to give them everything. They had judges.” All recourses had dissolved.

That did not mean the family had to flee pronto, “because we were not with the dictatorship,” he said, referring to Fulgencio Batista’s regime from 1952 to 1958. For his parents, the next 22 months presented a slow erosion of the known and a slow realization of the prudence of seeking the unknown. The family had just enough means to hatch a new life, if a threadbare one by contrast, but it had agony particularly in the case of Espino’s mother, Maria, who cherished her parents, who opted to remain in Cuba at the house in front of the one where Espino lived until he was 14. “She really, really, really, really missed, you know, her family,” Espino said, soon adding, “It broke her heart to leave her father.”

She never saw him again.

She faced further depths of anguish for a spell when, in spring 1961, her eldest son, Ramon, then 19, went back to Cuba to join the Bay of Pigs invasion. He did return. “He later got a PhD at MIT,” Espino said. The family began its recovery and its climb. His father, Ramon, worked for a banana company and then a shipping company and sometimes heightened his business ties through his excellence at golf. “She tried to hide [her sadness] and tried to keep us optimistic,” Alberto Espino said, and she sought her own solace through an instrument the family managed to wedge into the house. “She was a good pianist. Her hero was Van Cliburn. When she would be depressed, she would go to the piano. It would be like she would go somewhere else. She would play the Tchaikovsky ‘[Piano Concerto] No. 1’ and the ‘Polonaise’ [by Chopin] and the great Cuban pianist [Ernesto] Lecuona.”

Steadily, Alberto found his way into the unprepossessing American life and into high school, where he couldn’t play football because he delivered 400 Miami Heralds every morning — “Rain, shine, Christmas Day,” he said — and worked in a food market every afternoon. All three brothers went to LSU, whose professors often had ties to Cuba because of the sugar industries of Louisiana and Cuba, and Alberto retains a great fondness for a certain former LSU quarterback, never imagining his own grandson would follow by six years Joe Burrow to the Heisman Trophy lectern, their speeches both stirring.

Into his 20s at a party in Miami, Alberto met Alicia, nowadays his wife of 50 years, then an immigrant from Havana, all that way across the long island from Santiago. “Oh, my God, she was very pretty,” he said. “Very, very, very pretty. Very well-mannered. Elegant.” At one point this week he said, “I guess I have to thank Fidel to meet her because, if not, I wouldn’t have met her,” and he followed that remark with a boomlet of a laugh. Their three daughters included Elsa, whose three sons include Fernando and his brother Alberto, Fernando’s backup this season at Indiana. All along Indiana’s gobsmacking trail to 16-0 and its first national championship, both Fernando and the younger Alberto spoke effusively about their Cuban heritage — all four grandparents — and birthed a concept for a Cuban breakfast sandwich in Bloomington, Indiana, the proceeds aimed at fighting multiple sclerosis, which their mother has battled for 18 years.

“My grandfather, actually, gives us history lessons all the time,” Alberto Mendoza said in Miami Beach on the Saturday before the national championship game, and near the turn of last decade, with Fernando in 10th grade and Alberto in eighth, their maternal grandparents took them to Cuba, a trip that wound up emblematic of the fates of different generations. “I have all this [emotional] baggage, I think you call it in English,” the elder Alberto said. “Our house, our summer house …” He briefly trailed off just there.

He had returned to Cuba several times by then, finally able to face “I guess, my ghosts, you would say.” The lads two generations down, though, had no possibility of feeling the woe in their bones. “For them,” their grandfather said, “they enjoyed the hell out of it. They were dancing and laughing, which is okay, you know. The food and getting into these old cars that didn’t have a [door] handle if you wanted to get out [other than for the driver].” The teens got a huge kick out of that. “Everything was okay,” their grandfather said. “It was, how do you call it, something new for them, a new experience. They danced salsa with the girls.”