Mike Brunker Horse racing editor • Profile • E-mail

LOUISVILLE, Ky. - Few, if any, have traveled a more improbable and circuitous route to the Kentucky Derby than Carlos Juelle and Jose Prieto. The Cuban émigrés journey to the owners’ suite at Churchill Downs traces back nearly four decades to hard-labor camps and a maximum security prison run by Fidel Castro’s communist regime.

Juelle, a 68-year-old semi-retired business executive from Rolling Hills, Calif., and Prieto, a 78-year-old medical practitioner from Glendale, Calif., are the owners of Gayego, the winner of the prestigious Arkansas Derby. The overachieving colt, purchased at the 2006 Keeneland yearling sale for the relatively paltry price of $32,000, is the only horse the two friends own.

“It’s a special sensation,” Prieto said when asked about the feeling of owning a Derby contender. “You can’t describe it. … We have a saying in the medical profession. We say, ‘If you didn’t have the measles, you don’t know about the measles.’ It is like that.”

Juelle, the more outspoken of the two men, prefers to frame the experience in political terms. “It’s all a dream, and it’s what this country is all about," he said.

Juelle and Prieto are in a unique position to appreciate the rarity of what has happened to them and to savor the experience, in large part because of the horrors and hardships they endured after the Cuban revolution in 1959.

The then young men did not know each other in Cuba, though, as they found out many years later, they shared a love of horse racing and regularly attended the races at Oriental Park in Havana.

Juelle’s uncle and cousins operated the Roxana Stud Farm in Cuba and as a boy Juelle remembers spending endless hours working with the horses, watching workouts and attending the races.

“I remember seeing (Bill) Shoemaker ride at Oriental Park,” he said, referring to the legendary U.S. jockey who like many other top riders would venture southward to ride in major stakes at the Cuban track.

While Juelle was most interested in the breeding of racehorses, and spent years learning about the various prominent bloodlines in Cuban racing, Prieto was drawn to the sport by the handicapping and betting.

Carlos A. Juelle Carlos Juelle, 13, squatting front left, celebrates with family after a victory by Roxana Stud Farm color-bearer Rose Ann Lily at Oriental Park in Havana, Cuba, on March 15, 1953.

“I liked animals and the horses, and we went as a group of teenagers and we fell in love with the sport,” he said this week by phone.

While Prieto quickly became a skilled handicapper, he backed the wrong horse after Castro and his guerrilla band overthrew the U.S.-backed dictatorship of Fulgencio Batista. In addition to working for a more-democratic Cuba, he would care for wounded militiamen fighting Castro’s forces in the Sierra Maestra mountains. This led to his capture by Castro’s forces and a death sentence.

Prieto spent the next five years in a Cuban prison, waking up each day to the grim realization that this could be the day that he would be taken out and shot.

“I was very quiet,” Prieto recalls when asked if despondency ever gave way to panic. “… Because I knew that I was fighting for the freedom … I think I was ready for that.”

He did not find out until later that his life was spared thanks to his wife, Araceli, who persuaded an uncle who was a high-ranking official in Castro’s government to intervene.

Even without the death threat hanging over him, Prieto said, life in Castro’s prison was no picnic.

“It was worse than you can imagine,” he said. “There were beatings, and they made me write letters saying good-bye to my mother.”

Prieto was finally released in July 1973 and allowed to emigrate to Spain, though his property and all his possessions were confiscated by the government.

“When we arrived in Madrid … I didn’t have 5 cents for a Coke,” he said. “We were without a penny.”

While Prieto was languishing in prison, Juelle was enduring a different form of harassment. In 1968, he and his wife, Magali, applied for an emigration permit after realizing that, under Castro’s policies, they would have almost no say in the education and upbringing of their two young children.

The government’s response was to force Juelle to resign his accounting job and spend the next 21 months working in a series of hard-labor camps.

“I call it a concentration camp, but it really wasn’t,” he said. “… They would take you to one camp or another, away from your family to discourage you from leaving the country.”

Juelle said he worked at a series of camps, building fences, harvesting sugar cane and helping build military jails, always living in substandard conditions and at one time camping in what had been a pig pen. He said that he and the roughly 20 others in his “brigade” were always transferred to their next job in the dead of night.

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“They would come in the middle of the night and put us all in a truck,” he said. “You only had a minute to grab your hammock and whatever you could of your belongings.”

Finally, in 1970, Juelle and his family were allowed to emigrate to Spain, though the government also confiscated their property and belongings.

“I didn’t have anything when we arrived,” he said. “But my wife had some relatives there and my brother also was there. They gave me guidance and help looking for a job. … We had the advantage that we both spoke English and in Spain they were looking for bilingual people to hire at the time.”

Prieto spent only six months in Spain before immigrating to California on the advice of a cousin who also was a doctor and who had established a practice there.

The Juelles made their move four years later, also on the advice of a cousin who said Southern California had “great weather and was a great place to raise kids.”

It was not until 1982 that Juelle and Prieto met, a connection that was made because Prieto and Magali Juelle, a pharmacist, worked in the same medical building.

“He recognized my name from Cuba … and he said maybe one day we could buy or breed horses in this country,” Carlos Juelle said. “It took us almost 10 years, but we finally did it.

Though both men had become financially successful over the years — Juelle eventually rose to become COO of women's apparel companies Max Studio and David Dart — they didn’t have a lot of money to throw into their new enterprise. But that didn’t stop them from aiming high.

“We created a partnership called Cubanacan Stables in 1992 and set the goal to try to buy a Kentucky Derby winner,” Juelle said. “Every year, we would go to the Keeneland yearling sale in September and buy one colt. But we couldn’t afford to spend more than $20,000 or $25,000.”

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