THE FATE OF CUBAN CHILDREN VIA OPERATION PEDRO PAN

Shortly after President Trump announced his U.S./Cuba policy in Cuban-Mecca Miami on June 16, 2017, the official newspaper of the Communist Party of Cuba Central Committee (Granma) took umbrage because the President thanked the children of “Operation Peter Pan” in the audience during his remarks. The Cuban newspaper blamed President Trump for leaving out the fact that this operation was a sinister ploy concocted by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) to besmirch the Cuban Revolution with the goal of creating panic in Cuban families.

I am fully aware of the ploys that the Cuban Government uses repeatedly to insult those Cubans who voted with their feet by emigrating to the United States. I am also fully cognizant of the attempts by the same government to belittle the moral character and accomplishments of Cuban-Americans. 

They called Cuban refugees the worst insults imaginable: worms, lumpen counterrevolutionaries, loafers and parasites.  When referring to Cuban-Americans, they use pejoratives as Batista sympathizers, members of the Miami mafia, and “hysterical” exiles. This explains why after fifty-eight years of totalitarian rule in Communist Cuba, there is no hope of any reconciliation between Cubans in the Caribbean Island and members of the Cuban diaspora in the United States. 

The commentary by the Cuban newspaper piqued my curiosity to do a bit more research about the genesis of “Operation Peter Pan” (also referred to as “Operation Pedro Pan”) to determine the authenticity of its alleged CIA connection.

First, a little background about events that led to the creation of “Operation Pedro Pan.”

Shortly after Fidel Castro took over the Cuban Government in January of 1959, over 200,000 “alleged” supporters of the Batista regime or who turned against the revolution that they had once supported were arrested, tried by revolutionary tribunals presided by individuals with no legal or judicial training, and executed by firing squads or given long prison sentences. Ernesto “Che” Guevara, who served as the head of revolutionary tribunals, told one of his subordinates “Do not delay the proceedings. This is a revolution. Do not use bourgeois legal methods; evidence is secondary. We must proceed to convict.” This circus-like environment led a majority of Cubans to fear for their own lives and what to expect next. 

And 1960 did not disappoint those Cuban families who were expecting the worst from the Cuban authorities. In the spring, Fidel rolled out an initiative to close all secondary schools and set up youth camps in the countryside. The main purpose of these camps was to teach Cuban children from the sixth grade up how to work in agriculture and how to become loyal supporters of the Cuban Revolution. 

By May of 1961, the government closed all private and religious schools, and in September it expelled large numbers of priests and nuns from the country. The only schools left were the public ones run by the Cuban Government. Many Cuban parents saw these measures as a way by the Castro government to indoctrinate their children with Marxist-Leninist ideas. 

I was unaffected when the youth camps were set up in 1960, as I was only six years-old. But I was able to see first-hand the children of friends who attended these camps and were taught to give their complete allegiance to the state, to report any alleged anti-revolutionary activity by their parents to government officials, to renounce their religious beliefs, and to ignore all social and moral mores of their parents’ generation as bourgeois anachronisms that had no place in a communist society. To have total control over the upbringing of these kids, the government gave them temporary permits for short visits to their parents. With no adult supervisions at these camps, it was no surprise that many of these young girls got pregnant. 

The goal of the Cuban Government was to sever all ties of young adults to their families. And by limiting the time spent with family members, government officials gained the upper hand. But the majority of Cubans are a very resourceful people who concentrate on finding solutions to challenges. In order to prevent this tragedy from getting worse, many Cuban families started looking for ways to get their children to the United States. 

And this is what gave genesis to Operation Pedro Pan, which became the largest recorded exodus of refugee children in the Western Hemisphere. 14,048 Cuban boys and girls left their homeland without their parents to come to the United States between 1960 and 1962. Its name comes from the late Miami Herald Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter Gene Miller.

Operation Pedro Pan was the creation of Father Bryan O. Walsh, director of the Catholic Welfare Bureau for the Archdiocese of Miami, in 1960. In Cuba, some Cuban parents contacted James Baker, head of the Ruston Academy, an American school in Havana, to provide an escape route to save the children. Father Walsh met with some high federal government officials in Washington, DC, who came up with a plan that allowed Walsh to sign U.S. immigration visa waivers for the Cuban children. It became the American Embassy’s job to distribute the signed waivers throughout the island.

The purpose for Operation Peter Pan can be summed up in the following way: Baker would arrange the children's transportation out of Cuba, and Walsh would arrange for accommodations in Miami until they could be reunited with their parents. The Federal Government paid about $100 a month per child to help pay for their care.

Some of the children were placed in foster homes or temporary camps. Some were reunited with family throughout the U.S., some weren’t, and most never went back to Cuba as a matter of principle. After the Cuban Missile Crisis of October 1962, Operation Pedro Pan ended when all air traffic between the United States and Cuba ceased.  

Among the Pedro Paners who distinguished themselves in the U.S. are:

U.S. Senator Mel Martinez – former U.S. Senator from Florida, Florida Senator and Chairman of the Republican Party, and Secretary of the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development under the President George W. Bush;

Miguel Bezos – Jeff Bezos (Amazon.com’s founder) stepfather, who raised him since he was four years-old.

Eduardo Padrón – current President of the Miami Dade College;

Willy Chirino -- salsa musician recognized worldwide as the creator of the Miami sound (a unique fusion of Cuban music tinged with rock, jazz, Brazilian and Caribbean rhythms); and,

Carlos Oliva – singer and songwriter who formed the popular band Los Sobrinos del Juez (The Judge’s Nephews);

Now, there are some critics in Cuba and in the United States who think that the Operation Pedro Pan was nothing more than a sinister, CIA-sponsored propaganda program designed to spread fear and misinformation with Cuban parents. By taking advantage of the terror created by the measures to control education, these people alleged that the CIA operatives spread rumors that the Cuban Government passed a Patria Potestad law – which, in effect, took away the right of parents to determine their children’s futures. 

There was no need to spread any rumors by CIA operatives. There was no better evidence than the infamous youth camps to convince Cuban parents that government officials wanted to abolish the role that traditional families played in molding the moral and religious character of their children. 

Author Maria de los Angeles Torres filed a Freedom of Information Act suit to get files on Operation Pedro Pan from the CIA. In 1999, the U.S. District Court for Northern Illinois issued a definitive ruling on this issue where it stipulated that “evacuation of Cuban children turned out not to be a CIA operation at all.”

In 2010, the Board of Directors of the Pedro Pan Group, Inc., penned a letter of protest to the coverage of the Operation Pedro Pan Program in the CNBC documentary entitled “Escape from Havana: An American Story.” Its writers objected to the willful misrepresentation of the history of Operation Pedro Pan, which they attributed to the producers’ heavy reliance on Professor María de los Angeles Torres’ revisionist and antagonistic views towards the Operation. It is heartwarming to know that this group of Pedro Paners realized that when the history and reputation of their trajectory had been maligned, it was time to rise up as one and fight back with the truth. When you add honor and conviction to the plentiful supply of sugar-cane that most Cuban-Americans have in their DNA’s, you get a winning combination.  

I’ve been told that the distortions that the Cuban Government generates via its propaganda machine are well-known to the outside world. The defamation of the Operation Pedro Pan is just the latest lie du-jour. I disagree with this logic. There is a leftist mindset entrenched in liberal media outlets that ignores the conservative views held by the majority of Cuban-Americans, and glamorizes those held by the liberal sector of this community. This is exactly what happened with the CNBC documentary on the history of the Operation Pedro Pan. Therefore, the conservative majorities within the Cuban-American and the Pedro Pan communities cannot afford deal in a fifty-shades-of-grey manner with the truth. Instead, it is incumbent that they expose the fabrications of their history by their detractors and proclaim the truth in a direct and candid manner. 

In conclusion, Operation Pedro Pan was a gift to Cuban families who wanted to ensure that their children lived in freedom and democracy and were able to choose the religion that they wanted to practice. It was a program that put the Cuban parents in charge of their children’s destinies by denying the government officials in Communist Cuba from a role that always has belonged to parents in all civilized societies.