Track and field: Triple jumper has found a home in Tucson after unhappy stays in U.S. foster homes and being kicked off Cuba's national team.

Associated Press

TUCSON -- When triple jumper Yuliana Perez fled Cuba after being kicked off the national track and field team, she chose to go to Tucson only because she was
born there.

Just 18, she spoke no English and knew no one. Her mother had been shot to death when she was 3. The father she didn't know was in a Georgia prison.

Back in Arizona and exhausted from a day's work as a waitress, she climbed aboard the wrong city bus, and fell asleep. Had she boarded the right bus that day two
years ago, she might not be the rising young American star she has become. But Yuliana Perez has a knack of turning bad circumstances into good.

When she awoke, she was alone, except for the bus driver. He spoke Spanish, and she told him of her athletic past. He said he would talk to his good friend, Mario
Pena, an assistant track coach at Pima Community College, to see if he could help her.

"Man," Perez says, "I was born again."

The name "Yuliana" dances off the tongue and matches a cheerfulness and positive attitude that defy the reality she has endured.

Her father was among those sent from Cuba to the United States by Fidel Castro two decades ago, a so-called humanitarian act that actually was a way for the
dictator to rid his country of a batch of criminals and mental patients.

Her parents settled briefly in Tucson, where she was born in 1981. A short time later, they moved to Las Vegas. The father was arrested and sent to prison, and
Perez moved with her mother and two younger brothers to San Diego.

The circumstances of her mother's death are murky. It may have been an accident, some sort of drive-by shooting.

"That was a long time ago and I'd really rather not talk about it," Perez says. "I can't even remember her face."

At 3, Perez was sent with her brothers to San Diego and put in the care of a woman at a foster home.

"Oh my God, that lady was bad," she recalls. "My brothers, they both had problems wetting the bed, and she'd hit them. I had long, nice hair and she went snip, snip,
snip."

Perez says she would sneak out of bed at night to get food for her brothers.

"Once I got caught, and she hit me. I didn't care," she says.

At 5, she was shipped to Cuba to be raised by her paternal grandmother.

After just one year there, her natural athletic ability caught the attention of the country's coaches. She began running, high jumping and throwing a softball, and she
excelled at them all.

"One day one of my friends goes, 'I've got something for you that you might not be able to do,'" she says. "I laughed and said, 'You know, I can do everything.'"

At 14, she tried the triple jump.

"I was like, 'That was hard,'" she says, "I tried it again, and then I told my coach, 'I would like to do that.' I kept working and started getting good and good and
good, and I liked it."

A few months before she was to graduate from high school, she was told she was being removed from the national team because she was born in the United States
and was considered a threat to defect.

Her athletic career in Cuba was finished, and she was shattered.

To make matters worse, she was removed from school, too.

"It was so hard for me to keep going, but I did," she says. "I thought, 'There's got to be something better than this. I miss my mother. I miss my school. I miss my
sport. What am I supposed to do now? I have to keep going.' That was when I decided to come to the United States."

The U.S. section of the Swiss Embassy in Havana lent her money to leave Cuba. After arriving in Tucson in February 2000, it took her five months to finally get a
job. To ease the stress, she began running again.

The bus driver was true to his word, and Pena brought Perez to meet John Radspinner, Pima's head track coach.

"She says she used to be a triple jumper," Radspinner remembers. "We told her there's not much we can do, because at that point we thought she was from Cuba,
and there's just no way we can get someone from Cuba on our team. But I told her this year she can just work out with us if she wants, and she lit up. She was just
so happy."

He asked her what her best mark was. She told him 45 feet, 31/2 inches.

"I'm thinking, 'That ain't right,'" Radspinner says, "because we have a pretty good history of triple jumpers and she's talking four feet past our best ever."

He went home, checked the Internet, and found Perez's mark was just what she said it was. Still, Pima offers scholarships only to Arizonans, and there was no
thought of getting her on the college team until one day when she and the coaches were talking in Spanish.

"I think one of the coaches said, 'Wouldn't it be nice if we could put her on scholarship,'" Radspinner says. "I said, 'Nope, she is from Cuba.' Then she said, 'Wait a
minute. I was born in Tucson.'

"The next day she brought me this old, yellow Scotch-taped birth certificate all in Spanish from the Tucson Medical Center. That just cleared everything."

In 2001, Perez won the national junior-college indoor and outdoor championships, finished second in the U.S. outdoor championships, and then took fourth in the
World University Games in Beijing with a personal-best 46 feet, 103/4 inches.

After just a little practice, she also won the national junior college long jump title.

"With normal improvement I think she can be the best in the world by the time she's 26," Radspinner says.

Perez has never met her father. A U.S. writer who befriended her in Cuba several years ago sent her a stack of documents last year detailing her father's criminal
history.

"It was real bad," she says. "He used to steal with a gun in stores, all that stuff. They don't want him here in America. I haven't talked to him. I haven't seen him. I
don't feel that I need him, but I would like to ask him some questions."

She has no desire to go back to Cuba, except to bring her younger brothers to America.

"I have no communication with them," she says. "They don't know if I'm dead or alive. They love me so."

Whenever she has needed someone, Tucson has provided.

The Conquistadors, the service club that operates the Tucson Open golf tournament, paid her way to international meets last year and paid off the Swiss loan to clear
the way for her to travel abroad. A dentist repaired her teeth for free. She considers three women her "new mothers"--one who took her into her home, one who
runs an investment company where she works part-time, and one who is her academic advisor.

"People love me. They treat me good. They help me out," she says. "There are too many people that I can name that helped me. That is something I am so proud of."

She will need at least another year of schooling at Pima to qualify for transfer to a four-year university. While she speaks English well after just two years, studying in
English is tough. Overcoming difficulties, though, is her stock in trade.

"Sometimes bad things happen, and I start crying and crying," she says. "When I get tired of crying, I start thinking, 'Hell no, I'm going to do what I can.' I think it's
part of me, that attitude.

"If you make a cake and don't like it, you make it again. I have to do it. I'm a believer."