Raisa Williams, 69, retired college dean and Cuban 'Pedro Pan' emigre

Raisa Williams, 69, of Philadelphia, a retired Haverford College dean who as a teenager in 1962 fled Cuba for the United States aboard the famous Peter Pan children's airlift, died Thursday, July 13, of cancer at Mount Desert Island Hospital in Bar Harbor, Maine.

In 1960, a year after Fidel Castro's rise to power, Cuban families opposed to his regime began evacuating their children via the twice-daily Pan American flights from Havana to Miami. The children's visas were waived in a deal with the U.S. State Department. The youngsters were lodged in camps in Florida and then placed with foster families or boarding schools throughout the U.S.

In all, 14,000 children, including Mrs. Williams, then 14, and her younger sister had their lives profoundly shaped by riding Operation Pedro Pan to freedom, NPR reported in 2011. Some were reunited with their parents in the U.S.; others never saw them again.

For the next 55 years, Mrs. Williams served the downtrodden: as a social worker helping aspiring students achieve college readiness; as the director of a bilingual child-care center; as a diversity specialist at an organization on aging; as a reproductive health counselor; and as dean of freshmen at Haverford College.

When word spread that she had died, the Main Line college tweeted: "Sad to announce the death of Raisa Williams, our inaugural first-year dean."

"She helped many students, particularly those who were feeling vulnerable and disoriented in the Haverford environment, through the critical transition and challenges of their first year," said dean of the college Martha Denney in an online obituary crafted by the college.

"She was warm-hearted, generous, funny, upbeat, and completely dedicated to her charges."

Though Mrs. Williams said in a 2007 college profile that "my door is always open," she extended the policy far beyond her office walls. She liked to confer with students while walking on the Nature Trail on the college campus or over coffee at the student center café.

"Students would emerge transformed in ways that I could actually sense and see," Theresa Tensuan, a Haverford College diversity dean and Mrs. Williams' longtime colleague, said in the college obituary. "It was the kind of magic that happens when someone takes on something that has been a burden to you, and you realize a way forward that you didn't see before."

Mrs. Williams knew firsthand what it was like to be plunked down without parents in a new and daunting environment. She and sister Mayra, then 11, lived in a camp in Florida and an orphanage in Pottsville, Pa., before the Chiles family of Bethlehem, Pa., agreed to foster them.

The girls lived with the Chileses for two years before the precocious Mrs. Williams — at the age of 16 — arranged for Mexican visas so that her parents could join them in the U.S. Once reunited, the family settled in Bethlehem.

Mrs. Williams graduated from Moravian College there in 1969, and earned a master's degree in education from La Salle University in 1997.

She was employed in the social work department at St. Luke's Hospital and by Roosevelt Hospital for the Disabled in Manhattan. After marrying painter James B. Williams, she moved in 1975 to the Philadelphia area, where the couple started a family.

Over the next three decades, Mrs. Williams "worked with people from every walk of life to empower communities and improve individual lives," said her son, Miguel.

In the 1970s, she worked with at-risk toddlers at the Center for Early Childhood Development in Philadelphia. In the 1980s, she supported teen reproductive health at what is now Planned Parenthood Southeastern Pennsylvania. In the 1990s, she performed college-preparatory work for underserved families at the nonprofit Philadelphia Futures.

Joan Mazzotti, who retired as the nonprofit's head in 2016, said: "More than anyone, she understood the challenges faced by first-generation students" — the first in their families to attend college. "She touched many lives. She was one of the kindest people I have ever met."

Mrs. Williams joined the Haverford College faculty in 2001 as the coordinator for freshmen, and rose to freshman dean in 2003. She held that post until retiring in 2013, although she returned from 2015-16 as interim coordinator of Haverford's student community service office.

"In short, Raisa was an on-campus grandma," Jay Garcia, Class of '16, said in the college obituary. "She [made] every other student willing to [accept] her support feel at home in an otherwise completely foreign environment."

After retiring, Mrs. Williams enjoyed exercise, community-supported agriculture projects, and trips with her husband to country music venues in the South.

Besides her husband and son, she is survived by her sister, Mayra Focht.

A potluck gathering to celebrate Mrs. Williams' life will be held from noon to 3 p.m. Sunday, July 30, in Founders Great Hall on the Haverford College campus, 370 Lancaster Ave., Haverford. Burial is private.

Memorial donations may be made to Planned Parenthood Southeastern Pennsylvania, Attn: Development, 1144 Locust St., Philadelphia 19107.