Richie Vega's journey from Cuba to Parx Racing

Richie Vega's father was in Batista's Cuban military.  Following the Castro revolution and after Richie was born, Anibal Vega was sent to prison. His "crime" was political. He had been aligned with the wrong ruler.

Vega does not remember exactly how long his father was in jail, but he does remember visiting him there.

"We went to see him every weekend with my grandmom and my mom," Vega remembered Tuesday while seated in a near-empty restaurant at Parx Racing a few hours before the afternoon races.

He vividly remembers when his father left Cuba. It was April 1980, right after Castro announced what would become known as the "Mariel Boatift." Anibal was let out of prison and sent to a boat.

Facing major political pressure in his country because the Cuban economy was a mess over a shortage of housing and jobs, Castro decreed that anybody who wanted to leave for the United States could go. His father was on one of the early boats headed for Florida. A month or so later, his second oldest son Richard, who remembers being 16 (his birthdate suggests 18), was waiting in his house to get picked up for his trip to Mariel Harbor, 25 miles west of where he lived in Havana.

"The head of police in my town said, 'You're not leaving Vega because you're a great kid and you're going to be like your dad, a criminal,' " Vega said. "I was furious when he said that because my dad was not a criminal."

When Vega got on that boat, he had no idea his journey would lead him eventually to Bensalem in 1984 and, last Dec. 11, to the winner's circle at Parx, where he would stand for a picture next to Masio, a horse that won the seventh race by a nose and gave him his 1,000^th winner in a training career that began at what was then called Philadelphia Park on Sept. 13, 1992 with a Jersey-bred horse named Andre Britt, the same horse that would give him his first winner a week later in a race with a $4,500 purse.

Vega just knew there was something better out there and he was determined to find it. Once his papers were processed, he was told he had to be home when they called.

"There's only one time they're going to call you," Vega said. "Otherwise, you're out. You're staying in Cuba. I stayed in the house for two months, never went out."

His mom would ask him what he wanted to eat.

He would tell her: "I don't want to eat, I want to go."

When he got the call, he was put on a bus with no windows for the ride to Mariel. The buses were pelted with tomatoes and eggs, the government urging its citizens to shame those that were leaving, treating them like traitors.

"We smelled like garbage by the time we got there," Vega said.

And that was the good part. He was jammed onto a shrimp boat and set sail one morning for America.

"You're alone on the ocean with another 200 people,'' Vega remembered. "You're holding on for dear life. We saw a couple of boats, it's very graphic. They exploded.  You saw people burning. It was really bad … I was hoping it didn't happen to us."

What he saw that day on the 9 to 10 hours between Mariel and Key West is seared into his memory.

"They were just burning there, man.'' Vega said. "It was a nightmare, let me tell you. I had a lot of nightmares since then."

By the time the boatlift was called off in October 1980, 125,000 Cubans on more than 1,700 boats had made the trip. There were 27 deaths, including 14 on May 17 when a boat capsized.

School buses picked up Vega and his boatmates in Key West and took them straight to the Orange Bowl. After a week or so, Vega and other refugees were flown to Fort Indiantown Gap, north of Harrisburg, just a few miles from Penn National Race Course.

Attracted by the nearby lights, Vega remembers, "We used to escape at nighttime and we would go see the races. These army guys and their big trucks, they went looking for us and they got us back up there. It wasn't so bad. They treated us good."

Vega eventually went back to Florida to live with his aunt in Ft. Lauderdale.

"You had to have somebody to stay with here," Vega said. "They still live in the same house. They're really good people."

Vega learned English there, finished high school there, got his first racetrack experience there. The connection was that his dad was always on the track and his uncle was a jockey. So he ended up at Calder Race Course where his father knew several of the most successful trainers, also Cubans.

From 4 to 7:30 a.m., he would walk horses at the track. Then, he would head for school to learn English. One of the trainers he worked with also had a construction business. Vega worked there for two months.

"I couldn't stand it," Vega said. "When horses get in your blood, it's like a bad drug. You really cannot get out of it."

So he did not try. He went back to the track and never left, graduating from hot walker to groom, assistant trainer and then trainer.

"One day out of here, it feels like a hundred years in prison somewhere else," he said. "It's crazy. I always work with horses."

By 1984, he ended up in Bensalem and worked for trainers Freddie Velasquez, Bill Worthington and Andy Carter, all the while sending money back to his family in Cuba. Over 15 years, he got them all to America.

His father lived to 69 before dying after a stroke. His mother, Ernestina, 83, lives with her daughter a few miles from Vega.

"She went to the doctor the other day and she told her you are going to outlive your kids," Vega said. "She doesn't take a pill for anything."

Vega, 55, has 26 horses in his stable today. He has three children. He can "roll out of bed" and reach the track, his Bensalem home right around the corner.

He has started 5,744 horses with 1,010 wins and stable earnings of $16,465,534, solid numbers in an unforgiving sport where any win is a good win. Vega won 297 races between 1998 and 2000, his best years. He has never been close to having a horse good enough to run in the television races, but he's knocked out a solid living and 37 years after getting on that boat, is an established player making a nice living on a year-round circuit.

His favorite horse, Vega said, was Dulce Realidad, who raced in 2008, winning four of five races with a second. Her last start on June 14, 2008 was in the $200,000 Jostle Stakes. She won it, but suffered a tendon injury after a subsequent workout that ended her racing career. She is now a successful broodmare with several of her foals winning races.

"She would not get up before 7 o'clock," Vega said. "She would be laying down in there and she would look at you like you (don't bother me) …You put the saddle (on her) and you could see her like a boxer, how they pick up themselves."

Vega's first time back in Cuba was in 2013. He had promised his mother he would take her and have a family reunion.

"I've seen the island, I know what's it all about, I want to be somewhere else," he said.

Specifically Bensalem and the track, so far from Havana and Vega's first life, but not so long that he can't remember details from 37 years ago like they were yesterday.