Emilio and Maria Teresa De Soto turned 82 this year. They’re also set to mark their 61st wedding anniversary in December. But the annual celebration that means the most to the Carlsbad couple commemorates the day their family arrived in America.

Since they fled the Cuban regime of Fidel Castro on June 19, 1962, the De Sotos say they’ve been blissfully living their American dream. They bristle whenever they hear others criticizing their adopted country. America and its kind people gave them everything, and the De Sotos say they’re still giving thanks every day.

“We came here with nothing, we worked hard and did what we had to do,” Emilio said on Monday. “We didn’t eat steak every day, but we ate and we never went to bed hungry. Most of all, we were free.”

Emilio and Maria Teresa De Soto seen in a picture taken on their wedding day. They came to the U.S. from Cuba with their two toddlers as political refugees in 1962. (Peggy Peattie)


When they arrived in the United States, Emilio started out doing odd jobs as a janitor and telephone book deliveryman and eventually spent 22 years as a construction inspector for the Navy. Maria Teresa spent 30 years at the federal government’s Defense Language Institute in Monterey, where she started as a Spanish interpreter and retired as a department head. They now enjoy a comfortable retirement in the La Costa area, where they moved 21 years ago to be closer to their two children and five grandchildren.

Maria Teresa gets emotional whenever she talks about the good life they’ve built in America, a life they never could’ve imagined had they stayed in their native country.

Emilio and Maria Teresa grew up in Havana under the military dictatorship of Fulgencio Batista. The 20-year-olds met in 1952 at the city’s public works department, where he was a draftsman and she was a secretary studying to be a teacher. They married in December 1954 and lived a happy and comfortably middle-class life.

In 1959, Batista went into exile and Castro seized control. Over the next three years, the De Sotos watched everything they’d worked for slip away. Food was rationed so severely, Emilio lost 45 pounds. Residents were subjected to spot searches and seizures and personal freedoms evaporated. The final straw came when a woman from the neighborhood “committee for the defense of the revolution” showed up at their door and ordered the couple to vaccinate their children — 4-year-old Marta and 2-year-old Emilio II — for polio, something they had already done and had the paperwork to prove it.


“They could tell us what to do, control our lives, but when they said I had to do this — No! My kids are mine to raise, not yours. That was it,” Maria Teresa said.

The De Sotos quit their jobs and applied for permission to immigrate to Miami, where his sister was living. After a six-month wait, during which Emilio worked as a handyman and was once paid for his work with a laying hen, their visas were granted. They left just before Castro barred Cubans from leaving the island, but they were barred from taking anything more than a single change of clothes.

“We didn’t have a cent. My daughter carried a little purse with four pennies in it and they took away those four pennies,” he said, adding that the day after they left Cuba, the government seized their paid-off home and forced Maria Teresa’s mother to pay rent to stay there.

Emilio De Soto, top left, and his wife Maria Teresa, top right, came to the U.S. from Cuba with their two toddlers as political refugees in 1962. Once they became citizens in 1969, they were able to bring her mother and brother with his family over to the U.S. in 1971. This picture documents their family reunion. (Peggy Peattie)


Miami was welcoming but awash in Cuban refugees, so there was little work to be found. After three months, the local refugee center gave the De Sotos four one-way plane tickets to San Francisco, where a friend promised better work opportunities. Generous volunteers from two Bay area Baptist churches helped the De Sotos rent a small house in Richmond and filled it with donated food and goods, including a wooden mantel clock and steel cooking pot they still proudly display.

One of the items they received was a small four-drawer dresser. The family had so little clothing that one drawer was plenty for each of their things.

“We didn’t have any more than that, but we were free and we were happy,” she said.

For the first three months they lived in the U.S., the De Sotos were on public assistance, but after that they proudly and permanently began paying back into the system.


Emilio was the grandson of British citizens who had come to Cuba as diplomats and became successful tobacco growers. He was in grade school when his mother died, so his father, a university art professor, and grandparents sent him away to a private boarding high school in New York. Thanks to his strong English skills and a fierce work ethic, he had little trouble finding factory, construction and other work in the U.S.

In 1964, the family moved to Monterey when Maria Teresa was hired at the language institute. There, she said her affectionate students — military officers, FBI, CIA and DEA agents — were kind and protective, and they promised they’d “take care of Castro,” a feat that hasn’t happened to this day.

After Emilio De Soto’s children talked him into quitting smoking, they also talked him into exercising. He ended up doing numerous marathons, duathalons and triathlons. (Peggy Peattie)

“I remember when we left Cuba, her mother said we’d be back in six months because it would all be over with,” Emilio said.


In 1969, the De Sotos and their children became American citizens and two years later they sponsored Maria Teresa’s family in moving to the U.S.

The De Sotos children, Marta and Emilio II, studied at universities and have lived their own American dreams. Marta Lundgren, 57, is an accountant for the city of Encinitas and has two children with her husband, James.

Emilio II, 55, is the founder of De Soto Sport, a 25-year-old company that makes wetsuits and workout clothing for triathletes like himself. He and his wife, Tracy, have three sons and live in La Jolla.

With his son, Emilio Sr. has run dozens of marathons, biathlons and triathlons. He also works about 14 hours a week as an accountant for his son’s company. In their spare time, the De Sotos enjoy traveling and cruising abroad to destinations like South America, Alaska and Europe. But one place that’s not on their travel agenda is Cuba. They’ve never been back and have no plans to go.


“There’s nothing for us there,” Emilio said. “As my wife always says, we are Cuban by birth, but we’re American by choice.”