On July 21, 1962, a 16-year-old from Santiago de Cuba boarded a plane at Havana airport carrying a single pair of shoes, three shirts, three pairs of pants and a jacket his family had made by hand. His parents were not allowed past the terminal door. Forty-five minutes later Miguel Ángel Bezos Pérez landed in Miami, speaking no English, with no relatives waiting. Thirty-three years on, he and his wife would hand their son Jeff a loan of $245,573 to start an online bookshop called Amazon.
“My parents were not allowed to go into the airport with me, so they dropped me off,” Mike Bezos said in a video the company published about his journey. “I got on an airplane and landed in Miami 45 minutes later.”
The Pedro Pan airlift, explained
Mike Bezos was one of 14,048 unaccompanied Cuban children flown to the United States between December 26, 1960 and October 23, 1962, in a program later nicknamed Operation Pedro Pan. It began when Father Bryan O. Walsh of Miami’s Catholic Welfare Bureau and James Baker, headmaster of Havana’s Ruston Academy, met on December 12, 1960 to work out how parents frightened by the direction of Fidel Castro’s revolution could get their children out.
After Washington broke diplomatic relations with Havana on January 3, 1961, the US State Department let the bureau tell Cuban parents that visa requirements had been waived for their children. A letter signed by Walsh became a ticket out, and relatives in Miami sent waivers home along with a $25 money order for the round-trip fare. Roughly half the children were met at the airport by family or friends. The other half went into church care, first in Miami shelters and then in foster and group homes across 35 states.
The picture of Pedro Pan as an exodus of small children is misleading. Of the roughly 7,000 minors the bureau took into care, 85% were between 12 and 18 on arrival, and 70% were boys over 12. Mike Bezos, a teenager traveling alone, was the typical case, not the exception.
The flights stopped when the Cuban Missile Crisis shut down air traffic between the two countries in October 1962. Families were reunited only slowly: the twice-daily Freedom Flights began on December 1, 1965, and by June 1966 close to 90% of the children still in care were back with their parents.
Timeline: Havana 1962 to Seattle 1995
- September 29, 1945: Miguel Ángel Bezos Pérez is born in Santiago de Cuba; his father Salvador runs a lumber mill and his mother sells fabric and baby clothes.
- 1959 to 1962: the family, early supporters of Castro, loses the mill when the government seizes it and applies for a US refugee visa for Miguel.
- July 21, 1962: he flies Havana to Miami, aged 16, and is housed at Camp Matecumbe with about 400 other Cuban children.
- Three weeks later: he and his cousin Ángel are sent to Salesianum School in Wilmington, Delaware, lodged by the Oblates of Saint Francis de Sales.
- Age 17: he graduates from high school and wins a scholarship to the University of Albuquerque, switching from mechanical engineering to computer science.
- 1968: he marries Jacklyn Gise, whom he met at night school, graduates in the fall and joins Exxon in Houston, where he stays 32 years. He adopts her son Jeff.
- 1995: the couple lend Jeff $245,573 to launch Amazon, taking a 6% stake.
What the numbers say
Here is the Badiyaa arithmetic, using only the figures above. The loan of $245,573 is equivalent to about $518,900 in 2025 money, so inflation alone has multiplied it by roughly 2.1 times. Divided by the 6% stake it bought, the parents were valuing the whole of Amazon at about $4.1 million in 1995.
The airlift numbers are just as stark. Spreading 14,048 children over the 22 months from late December 1960 to late October 1962 gives about 640 arrivals a month, or roughly 21 children a day landing in Miami without a parent.
What the 6% stake is worth now depends on how much of it the family still holds and on Amazon’s share price on any given day; neither figure appears in the sources we read, so we leave that sum alone. The couple did go on to co-found the Bezos Family Foundation, which has given $710.5 million to the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Center in Seattle. Jackie Bezos died on August 14, 2025, after more than 57 years of marriage; Mike now chairs the foundation’s board alone.
“People help each other”
Father and son told the story together for a tribute shown at the Statue of Liberty Museum, which includes a grainy photograph of the old sign on the family mill in Cuba, the name Bezos still readable. Mike has never been back to the island, though he says the whole family still loves Cuban food.
“You do learn the language very quickly when you’re immersed in it,” he said of his first year in Delaware. “You can see my grades improving semester by semester.”
Jeff Bezos, who says he can hardly picture doing the same thing at 16, put it this way: “He had an enormous amount of grit and determination, but he also had incredibly kind and supportive people to help guide him along the way.” Other Pedro Pan children include the artist Ana Mendieta, the historian Carlos Eire, the singer Willy Chirino and the former US senator Mel Martinez; the full list is on the Operation Peter Pan page. The handmade jacket Mike wore onto the plane in 1962 is still in the family.
Further reading
Image: Daniel Oberhaus, CC BY 4.0 via Wikimedia Commons
This article was produced with AI assistance and reviewed by our Editorial Desk. How we work.
