PLAINS TWP. — U.S. Army Veteran Juan DeRojas was just seven years old in 1961 when he and his family escaped Cuba and the repressive, Communist regime of Fidel Castro.

“We had no freedoms; you could be thrown in jail for talking against the government and sometimes put to death,” DeRojas told a crowd of veterans and their families who gathered at the Woodlands Inn and Resort on Sunday for Luzerne County District Attorney Sam Sanguedolce’s annual Veterans Day brunch.

DeRojas, his father, mother, and four sisters fled Cuba by boat and made it to the shores of Florida, where the U.S. Coast Guard picked them up and then, as he said, “our life here in the United States started.”

The Dallas resident said his parents taught him and his siblings “patriotism and tremendous love of this nation —

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