José María de Lasa
By Kyle Shinseki, SJ @ 5:49 PM :: 1015 Views
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For agrupado José María de Lasa, the ACU will always be linked to the struggle for a free Cuba.  When his friends invited him to the ACU in Havana, Cuba found itself in the midst of great civil conflict.  Many of the key counterrevolutionary leaders were agrupados and the ACU itself played an important role in the resistance movement.  As José María describes, many agrupados like him felt that Christ called them to be part of the struggle to save their homeland.  He sees his role in this struggle, inspired by the ACU’s values, as the one apostolic work that most inspired him as an agrupado.

In the midst of this strife, José María had fallen in love with María Teresa Figueroa.  At the time, José María had been given asylum in the Venezuelan Embassy in Havana, after the Bay of Pigs offensive.  However, María Teresa, daughter of renowned agrupado Miguel Figueroa, was already in exile in Miami.  In order to communicate with her, he would send her letters by tying them to a stone and tossing them over a fence to ACU Director Father Llorente, who was hidden in the building next to José María’s at the Embassy.  Father Llorente then passed the letters on to María Teresa’s uncle for them to be delivered surreptitiously to Miami.  Stones tossed by Father Llorente back over the fence would bring José María letters from María Teresa.  

Once José María made his way to freedom in the United States, he was married to María Teresa and their marriage has given fruit to 4 children and 8 (soon 9) grandchildren.  Exiled in Atlanta, José María became a congregante in 1963.  He eventually became a lawyer and worked his way up to becoming General Counsel of a major U.S. corporation.  José María notes that his Catholic formation and participation in the ACU’s Spiritual Exercises each year have helped him keep the strictest ethnical standards in his legal career.  Aside from his profession, he participates in several civic organizations, like the Council of Foreign Relations, the Resource Foundation, and the Cuba Study Group.