Back at Penn, Lafuente and Fernandez held late-night brainstorming sessions. Among their ideas – a textbook marketplace, a store stocked with donated items where everything was free, advertising on movie theater seats. “We were thinking about novel business models that had a social impact,” Fernandez said, citing companies like TOMS shoes and Bombas socks, which combine commerce and charity with a one pair purchased-one pair donated model. After studying abroad in Prague and completing his degree, Lafuente returned SPRING 2026 Ransom Everglades LOG 9 “I had fun every day,” he said. “It was a magical place.” His mother said he never obsessed over materialistic comparisons. “I dropped him off to visit at some grand houses,” she said. “I asked him how he felt. He said, ‘Our house is smaller and that makes us closer.’” Lafuente was not every teacher’s pet. “I spent a lot of time in detention for goofing off in class or for not shaving. I cracked jokes, fooled around, acted like a smartass,” he said. “On senior prank day I hired a mariachi band to follow the head of school around the entire day.” Lafuente was admitted to Penn via early decision, received significant financial aid and majored in international relations. He and Fernandez joined the Beta Theta Pi fraternity and started a campus chapter of the Cuban American National Foundation (CANF), the prodemocracy, anti-Castro organization founded in Miami in 1981 by Jorge Mas Canosa and other Cuban exiles. Lafuente took the second semester of his sophomore year off to come home and start a business he invented called Miami Waiter. It was a precursor to Door Dash or Uber Eats but he was ahead of his time and it didn’t last. “I sold the brand and broke even, learned a lot about a good concept versus a well-executed plan,” he said. “Other than our families, nothing gave us more of a rocket launch into life than Ransom Everglades.” – Larry Waks ’72 to Miami and was hired as CANF’s director of media and government relations. He worked with U.S. Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen and Sen. Marco Rubio on such issues as family travel and funding for human rights activists in Cuba. Along the way he grew disillusioned with the nonprofit model. Danny Lafuente ’05 at LAB Miami
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