MIAMI — On Saturday evening, exactly 48 hours before kickoff of the College Football Playoff National Championship Presented by AT&T (7:30 p.m. ET, ESPN), an alley draped with strands of white lights and tucked into the hustling heart of Coconut Grove was packed with Mendozas. Granted, any location where Mendozas choose to gather, it always becomes packed. That’s how they roll. Deep.
Every five years they hold a family reunion, and the last one, in 2022, drew 850 kinfolks, an assemblage of such mass it landed them on the front page of the Miami Herald. They wore color-coded T-shirts, a dozen different hues signifying which of the 12 branches of the family tree was theirs. At that reunion, the official Mendoza headcount of direct descendants was 2,836, backed by a genealogy flowchart so detailed that everyone on it receives a designated number that tells their story.
“I hope your boy plays great Monday night,” the man said, handing the ball to the kid and immediately throwing his hands into a “U.” “But not too great. Go Canes.”
An hour later, repeating that last sentence to Fernando Mendoza caused the quarterback to pause. And smile. And want to give us a history lesson of his own.
“My grandparents have always worked hard to teach us that history, so that we know where they came from and where we come from,” he explained, nodding. “But when you see it for yourself, when you stand there in it, it changes you.”
The redshirt freshman who won back-to-back state titles at Columbus caught himself getting emotional.
A total of 14,048 boys and girls were flown 90 miles north to Miami and freedom, but also into a frightening, uncertain future. Among them was 13-year-old Marta Menocal.
Her siblings were initially spread out around Florida, unlike thousands of others who were scattered throughout every corner of the nation. Eventually, though, Marta’s family, like a large majority of the Pedro Pan kids, found their way back to Miami, including a pair of future Miami mayors and a U.S. senator.
That’s where she met her Fernando, aka Fernando III, or No. 3411. The Havana that Mendoza’s grandparents knew was like Miami today. A growing, bustling, playground of the rich. It was Miami that was the quiet town behind the times. The people who once powered Cuba now power South Florida. And more increasingly, South Florida football.
“I know people might be torn, and we get it. We used to go to Miami games all the time as kids. Our mom played tennis there,” Alberto said that morning to a semicircle of three reporters, including one from Columbus High. Meanwhile, a hundred yards away, Fernando V could barely be seen behind all of the cameras and reporters.
Little brother pointed to that crowd, the one that resembled any old run-of-the-mill Mendoza family reunion.
But this particular meeting of Mendozas, which after 30 minutes had already surpassed 100 attendees, featured only a few different shirts, and most were football jerseys. An impromptu rally of support for family member No. 314111. He of Group 3, aka the descendants of Don Claudio Gonzalez de Mendo and Dona Maria Teresa Feyre de Andrade and their firstborn, Fernando, aka No. 31, who begot No. 314 Fernando II and so on and so forth until landing on Fernando Gabriel Mendoza V, who himself will be donning a football jersey Monday night.
Around picnic tables between bars and boutiques, the Mendozas hugged, they nursed beers and laughed aloud. A few of the younger cousins tossed a red Indiana Hoosiers football. When one of them sprinted through a post route that ran a bit too deep, he nearly crashed into a family of four, all of them dressed in the orange and green of the University of Miami Hurricanes, the campus only three miles away. When the kid in the red No. 15 jersey dropped the ball, the dad in The U gear picked it up for him.
The Heisman Trophy-winning quarterback that this “Mendoza Mania Meetup” had been organized to support, Fernando V, was not among the crowd. Neither was his little brother, backup QB Alberto, aka No. 314112. They were at the Hoosiers team hotel, having completed a day of media appearances and practice. So, in their stead, the focus of attention here on Fuller Street was the woman with the stylish grey hair, Indiana red glasses and a “Mendoza Mania” T-shirt. Marta Mendoza, or as she’s known on that flowchart, Dona Martha G. Menocal y Simpson, is the paternal grandmother of the Indiana signal-callers.
The Mendoza boys stood there in it in 2019. Fernando was in 10th grade, Alberto in eighth. Their maternal grandparents were going back to Cuba for a church-sponsored relief trip and took the boys with them. Alberto and Alicia Espinoza hiked their grandsons throughout Santiago, on the eastern end of the island, and through the Sierra Maestra, the mountain range from which Fidel and Raul Castro launched their overthrow of the Cuban government. That was in the 1950s, when the eventual grandparents were kids themselves.
On Saturday afternoon, sometime between CFP media day at the Miami Beach Convention Center and Mendoza Mania at Coconut Grove, a few people were indeed seeking that knowledge. At the American Museum of the Cuban Diaspora, a couple from Indianapolis, the McClains, dressed in matching Mendoza jerseys, held hands as they moved through the museum’s displays. Those exhibits that start out so bright and hopeful descend into darkness as patrons follow the timeline of Cuba and Miami’s conjoined yin-yang of a history. The island losing track of democracy due to struggles for power and resources throughout the early 20th century. The fleeing of president-turned-dictator Fulgencio Batista. Castro’s initial promises of restoring the nation’s 1940 constitution but instead reversing course on freedom to install a Soviet-backed regime of control powered by fear.
Across from that exhibit is a replica of an execution wall. The sounds of gunshots rattled a lone pole that stands in the center of the room, riddled with bullet holes and framed by the faces of dozens of people whom Castro had killed by firing squads. That’s what Mendoza’s grandparents witnessed as children. There are also cramped, rusted recreations of the cells where Castro imprisoned anyone whom he viewed as a threat. Both of Cristobal’s grandfathers were held in those prisons before fleeing to Miami.
In stark contrast to the endless images of warring adults is a child’s suitcase packed with nothing but a pair of dolls. It, too, is surrounded by faces, but they are of the children who were airlifted out of Cuba between December 1960 and October 1962. When Castro seized control of all churches and schools, he began a “reeducation” of Cuba’s youth. Panicked parents who were unable to secure exit visas sent their children to the United States via an effort devised by the Catholic Charities of Miami and the Eisenhower White House, titled Operation Peter Pan, or in Cuba, Pedro Pan. The idea was to get the kids out first and find them shelter through camps, foster care or family who already lived in the United States until their parents eventually could join them.
“The world we grew up in, it was baseball first, because in Cuba it was always baseball first,” Fernando IV explained around his son’s Heisman ceremony weekend. “Then we got into the ’80s and you had Dan Marino and the Dolphins. And when Miami became The U and all of that happened, the championships and the swagger, now football wasn’t just a game they played at other schools. At Columbus we were like, I think we want to be football players! Now, maybe because of what Miami kids have seen this fall, that will only increase.”
At Columbus High on Saturday afternoon, fans posed with the brand-new banner that hangs from the wrought iron fence lining the school’s main building: “FERNANDO MENDOZA CLASS OF 2022 HEISMAN WINNER.” And the three-story wall that overlooks the football field is adorned with a massive modern tapestry of seven individuals, split with the five Explorers-turned-Canes players and coaches on the left and the Mendoza boys on the right. A football shrine and a school that has become a football factory, right smack in Miami’s Cuban heart known as Westchester, long the domain of hardball and soccer.
Fernando Mendoza discusses playing against Miami in the national championship, growing up just miles from campus. (1:50)
“I guess if you are from Miami, then you can’t lose.”
Fernando Mendoza excited to go home and play title game in Miami (1:50)Fernando Mendoza discusses playing against Miami in the national championship, growing up just miles from campus. (1:50)