When Ysela Llort arrived in Miami 51 years ago, she was one of two young daughters of a couple who had fled Cuba after Fidel Castro seized power. Like thousands of other Cuban refugees, the Llorts did not have much money and relied on local buses to get around.

Five decades later, Llort is in charge of the buses and trains in the county as director of Miami-Dade Transit (MDT).

She is the first woman to head MDT, the county agency that operates Metrorail, Metromover and Metrobus.

Llort, 57, was formally appointed to the job on Feb. 3 by Miami-Dade Mayor Carlos Gimenez.

Her appointment comes after six months of serving as interim director, after the retirement of the previous director amid the worst crisis in the history of the transit system — Florida’s largest and the 14th largest in the country.

Llort temporarily took charge of MDT in August 2011 after having oversight of MDT, together with the airport, seaport and other areas of county transportation for several years as assistant county manager.

The MDT crisis began in November 2010 when the Federal Transit Administration (FTA) suspended $182 million in grants to MDT after accusing the agency of having weak internal financial controls.

Although Llort and other top county officials were criticized for not properly supervising MDT, Llort survived the crisis in part because of her stellar record as an expert in transportation.

“Anytime that something goes wrong, everybody up the chain of command has a responsibility for the wrongdoing,” Llort said. “The interesting thing, though, is that I’ve been given the opportunity to help make it right.”

While Llort has been linked to transportation issues for decades, when she was in college her initial interest was anthropology and economics.

During an interview last week, Llort detailed her personal and professional history.

Llort was born in Santiago de Cuba in the eastern portion of the island in 1954, five years before Fidel Castro seized power. Her father, Horacio, was a military veterinarian from Cárdenas, who met his future wife, Ysela “Lily” Mancebo, a high school teacher, during a visit to a park in Santiago.

“Women used to walk around the park in one direction and the eligible men used to walk in the opposite direction and he saw my mother and, according to him, he just loved her on sight, but you couldn’t just go and introduce yourself, so he had to go and find somebody that he knew and knew her to make the introductions,” she recalled.

Since he father belonged to the armed forces when Fulgencio Batista fled Cuba, he was arrested by Castro revolutionaries and sentenced to be shot by firing squad.

But a CMQ-TV journalist friend, who saw him in jail, demanded his release insisting to his captors that Llort was not guilty of war crimes or human rights violations.

After his release, Horacio Llort fled Cuba aboard a cargo ship that brought him to Miami in 1959.

His wife and two daughters, Ysela and Enid, frequently visited him in Miami but continued to return to Cuba because the family thought that Fidel Castro would not last long in power.

Horacio eventually joined fighters trained by the CIA for the Bay of Pigs invasion and in the summer of 1961 his wife and daughters finally moved to Miami.

Ysela Llort first enrolled at Miami Beach Elementary and graduated from Twin Lakes High School in West Palm Beach when her father began working with the Fanjul family at their sugar business in Palm Beach County.