Uprooted by History,
We are Cuba's Lost Children In Search of our Past
by Maria de los Angeles Torres

The Washington Post  February 1, 1998; Page C1 One July morning 36 years ago, shortly after my sixth birthday, my parents woke me before dawn. My mother dressed me in the blue-and-white checkered dress that my grandmother had made me. My father loaded one suitcase, a gray-and-red vinyl handbag and my favorite doll into the car. And we drove to the airport. There, they put me on a plane along with a group of children bound for a country whose language I could not speak and whose customs I did not understand. I didn't know when I'd see them again. Try as I might, I can't remember whether I cried when the Pan American flight took off from Havana. But I can still hear the stifled sobs of the other children. And I can still feel the shock of landing on foreign soil and searching anxiously among the waiting crowd in Miami for the familiar face of my old kindergarten teacher who, I'd been told, would meet me there. To this day, I can't imagine sending my own daughters, now 11 and 8, away like that. But circumstances were different then -- and my parents faced decisions I hope I never shall. More than seven generations of my ancestors are buried in Cuba. But in 1961, two years after Fidel Castro's revolution, my parents were prepared to break with that history. They were convinced that if we stayed in Cuba, they might lose what they viewed as their most basic right -- their patria potestad, or legal authority, over their own children. They wanted to get me off the island, and to safety, and they hoped to follow soon after. My 45-minute plane ride across the Straits of Florida was part of an exodus known as Operation Peter Pan, a secret two-year program run by the Catholic church with help from the U.S. State Department that transferred 14,000 children from Cuba to the United States between 1960-1962 -- probably the largest-ever evacuation of children in the Western hemisphere. Since my older daughter Alejandra's sixth birthday, I've been trying to make sense of that forced separation -- and it isn't easy. I had been brought up to love the island, its history, poetry and music. In the past 20 years, I've often made brief visits back there, drawn by childhood associations and somehow trying to come to terms with my parents' decision to leave. I have wondered time and again whether they had exaggerated the threat of communism or even whether we had been used as pawns. Like thousands of other Cubans, my parents at first supported Castro's revolution and its promise to restore democracy, help the poor and end government corruption. I remember vividly the day of Jan. 8, 1959, when the rebels marched into Havana: My father rushed home from work to take me out to greet them. When we got to their parade route, he put me on his shoulders so that I could see over the crowd. The people around us were wild -- dancing, chanting and reaching out to touch the bearded rebeldes in their olive-green uniforms with glass-beaded rosaries hung around their necks. But in the next two years, our optimism evaporated. Castro went from being our family's popular hero to a dictator. The weekend gatherings we used to enjoy with friends and family quickly gave way to somber discussions that we children barely understood. I remember my parents crying when they learned that Virgilio Campaneria, the 16-year-old brother of a close friend, had been arrested for the possession of firearms and shot by a firing squad. The grown-ups' fears scared me. I stopped collecting postcards of revolutionary heroes or waving the rebels' red-and-black flag as I rode in my toy Jeep. In April 1961, I spent the night of the Bay of Pigs invasion in the bathtub (supposedly the safest place) huddled close to my younger sister, listening to planes flying overhead and bursts of gunfire on all sides. When the new government shut down all Catholic schools that month -- including Nuestra Senora de Lourdes which I attended -- and rumors spread that Castro planned to indoctrinate children in special institutions, my parents began making plans to leave. They knew something of Operation Peter Pan -- that U.S. visa waivers, signed by a Miami priest, the Rev. Bryan Walsh, were available for children. But at the time they knew little about how the young Catholic priest had been granted such extraordinary powers. Later, we learned how Walsh's initial State Department mandate had been to take care of 200 students -- most of them the children of underground agents whose parents had voiced concerns about their safety to James Baker, head of an American school in Havana. The children were to be supported by the Catholic church. After the closing of the U.S. embassy in January 1961 and the failure of the Bay of Pigs invasion, Walsh was given blanket authority to issue visa waivers to anyone under 16. Since I was the oldest, I was to go first and, once in the United States, bring along the rest of the family by filing for their visa waivers with help from my parents' friends -- who had agreed to look after me until the rest of the family could come. It all went according to plan. I lived with the family friends through the summer waiting for my parents to arrive. They came just four months later, in November. We settled temporarily in Miami. But I could already tell that nothing would ever be the same again. My mother was depressed, constantly worried about the relatives she had left behind. My father began working nights in a hospital emergency room and using his few free hours to study for the medical license that would allow him to practice medicine in the United States. But at least we were together -- unlike many of the children who came over with me. Their hopes of being reunited were crushed abruptly by international politics. In October 1962, the Cuban missile crisis put the world on the brink of nuclear war. Flights across the straits ended, leaving as many as 8,000 of the 14,000 evacuated children stranded in foster homes and orphanages, supported only by grants from the U.S. government that were administered through the Catholic church. Although I didn't feel fully accepted in the United States, I was relieved that we were together in this country. Even after the crisis, the two governments maintained their mutual mistrust. The U.S. air-isolation campaign, designed to ensure that no further Soviet missiles would enter Cuba, served also to keep families separate. The State Department even turned down an offer by the U.N. high commissioner for refugee affairs to pay for the parents' flights. And it was not until 1965, when the Cuban government opened the port of Camarioca and let people come in small boats to pick up their relatives, that the United States relaxed its immigration policy and many of the children were able to see their parents again. My cousins were among those not as lucky as I was. They came over, believing that they would be given educational scholarships in the United States -- a program that never materialized. They stayed in makeshift camps and then went to a foster family in Albuquerque until my parents arranged for them to join us in our new home in Cleveland. From other Peter Pans, I've heard far worse stories -- of lack of understanding and emotional or even sexual abuse. The artist Ana Mendieta, who arrived in 1961, told me about her sense of cultural isolation as she was sent from one orphanage to the next and then to a home for delinquent children. Rafael Ravelo, now a social worker in Chicago, did not see his parents from 1961 when he left the island until 1981. While I was growing up, there was simply nothing I could compare our stories with until the early '70s. When I watched the evening news, images of thousands of Vietnamese children being boarded on planes, fleeing to the United States, brought my own memories rushing back. I wondered about the merits of this new evacuation, about the individual lives being upturned by the whim of international politics. I found myself at odds with my parents, our family split once again -- this time ideologically -- by the Cold War. Like many of my generation, I was critical of the U.S. involvement in Vietnam. And at the same time, I grew more interested in returning to Cuba. When I entered university, I started meeting other Cubans who shared my thoughts. We rejected the symbolic ways in which our parents wanted us to stay "Cuban" (by taking chaperons on dates, for example). We wanted to return to the island whose government our parents had fled. Our parents did not understand that we needed to form our own political visions -- and that we also simply needed to go back. But in the late '70s, when the Cuban government finally authorized short visits, we organized trips of young exiles back to the island. On my first three-day visit, I remember a strange sense of cultural familiarity. Memories of smells and textures came seeping back to me. I moved more freely, especially at the hips. I did not feel inhibited when I used my hands to talk. I felt at home. Like many events that crossed the great ideological fault lines of the Cold War, Operation Peter Pan has come to mean different things to different people. On the island, the evacuation is often viewed as an example of U.S. aggression against the Cuban revolution -- an attempt to rob the nation of its future. In the exile community, Peter Pan represents rescue from communism. For Baker, the educator who had been so instrumental in starting the program, it was a way to bring the children of the underground to safety and to educate them in democracy. For Ramon Gau, head of the opposition group Rescate, it was a cover to get young men who were in the opposition out of Cuba. And for some in the CIA it was, I believe, a propaganda ploy that included spreading false rumors about the loss of patria potestad -- which never happened. I'm now sure the program was some combination of all these things. To find out, I've interviewed many of the people involved in Peter Pan over the past six years, starting with my mother. With her, I've come to rethink my adolescent romanticism about the early years of the revolution and to understand how limited her options were at the time. But I still question the motives behind Peter Pan. Sure, some people only wanted to help, but I still can't help thinking that we were pawns in a game of international politics, and, like a child, if you don't know the whole story, you're inclined to imagine the worst. Having received little help from U.S. government bureaucrats, I've initiated a series of requests under the Freedom of Information Act. Some have resulted in declassifying materials, but the CIA is still refusing to "deny or admit the existence of files on the grounds of national security." My only hope of gaining more information is a lawsuit which I filed recently -- or an order by the president to make the files public. From a humanitarian perspective, 14,000 now-grown children and our relatives have a right to know about the circumstances that led to our unaccompanied journey to the United States. Our experiences may be varied, but our need to know is shared. It is hard to imagine what my life would have been like had my parents decided to stay in Cuba. Despite all those years of longing to return, I think now that I would have been at odds with the government. I no longer question my parents' decision. What I suspect, though is that the options they and others had were shaped far more by political strategies that valued security and ideological aims than by children's needs.

Peter Pan Wasn't Political
Margarita E. Lora

The Washington Post  Saturday, February 21, 1998; Page A17 As a Peter Pan child uprooted from Cuba in 1961, I have a different view of the program from that of Maria de los Angeles Torres ["Uprooted by History," Outlook, Feb. 1]. Operation Peter Pan, which was run by the Catholic Church and the State Department, transferred 14,048 children from Cuba to the United States between 1960 and 1962. Specifically, I refer to the author's discussion of the loss of patria potestad or parents' legal authority over their children in Cuba as the cause of the forced separations of families from their children. Torres states that the loss of patria potestad was rumored but never happened. She is wrong. She has blinded herself to the reality of life for children who remained in Cuba by covering humanitarian motives with political ones. My parents' firsthand accounts of the time between 1961 and 1966, before they finally left Cuba, tell of children put into ideological indoctrination at age 11. The first group of 800 children was sent to Minas de Frio en la Sierra Maestra in Cuba on March 27, 1960. They were removed from their parents and their family values to be indoctrinated in the values of the revolution for 45 to 60 days at a time. At 11 years of age, they were introduced into camps of adolescents with little supervision. These minors worked many hours a week in the fields in harsh conditions with poor nutrition and slept on hammocks. They experimented in new situations and mixed among those who would change the uneasy and unrooted moral, political and religious values their parents were still molding. They used the on-demand abortions at clinics far away from their families to reverse their errors in judgment as adolescents. Others returned pregnant and with head lice, parasites, hepatitis and venereal disease. My own parents sent four of their six children (6, 7, 8 and 9 years old) in September 1961 to Father Bryan Walsh's camps in Florida. We later spent four years in New York state with a foster family when my parents' imminent exit was delayed by new Cuban regulations against professionals. We did not reunite until November 1966 here in Washington. I still visit with "my second family" several times each year. My children call them Grandma and Grandpa and their natural grandparents Abuela and Abuelo. My separation lasted longer than Torres's four-month ordeal, and I too have come to accept my parents' decision. But I have grown up enough not to imagine the worst and politicize the motives of Operation Peter Pan's purely humanitarian effort.

Excerpt from:
Cuba on My Mind, Journeys to a Severed Nation,
by Román de la Campa

Chapter Two | Page 53 - 55 As the Peter Pan children settle into middle age in the United states, many of them living comfortable lives, a testimotinial moment has arrived. Most appreciate their parents' decision to send them out alone, but they continue to harbor a sense of trauma - whether it be the sudden separation from parents, the basis on which the decision was made, the loss of national identity, or the uncertainties they experienced in the United States at an early age. The need to speak and write about it all has reached a new intensity more than three decades after the fact. Indeed, the 1990s saw a stream of exile publications, films, news stories, and organizations totally dedicated to the Peter Pan story. There have been earlier attempts to collect or edit the stories of Peter Pan children. ... The most recent and most ambitious attempt to assemble Peter Pan voices is Yvonne Conde's Operation Pedro Pan, referred to earlier, published in 1999. It aims to provide a representative sample with data gathered from 442 Peter Pan participants through questionaires, including the author's personal account as a former Peter Pan child herself. The figure represents 3 percent of the 14,048 Cubans who participated in the program, but it is not a random sample. Readers do not learn why certain questions were asked or avoided in the preperation of two sets of mailed questionaires... ... One of Conde's declared aims is to increase awareness of the Peter Pan ordeal in the eyes of the American public; another is to offer participants a historical reenactment of what our parents must have gone through when they decided to send us out of Cuba alone. Both are laudable goals, but they have the tone of a self-appointed editorial mission on behalf of all the children involved. The author's own Peter Pan experience, as well as the testimonies she quotes, seem to be driven by a political project rather than a neutral voice organizing a collective memoir. In that sense, the pursuit of autobiographical insight is overridden by a larger cause: the need to defend the Peter Pan exodus against all doubts, as if the legitimacy of the entire exile experience suddenly depended on how public opinion regards this thirty-some-year-old story. The desire to explore the entire ordeal loses ground with the need to defend it - a duty that overwhelms the testimonies, making them all confirm or sound alike, depriving them of contradictory flair. In the end, Operation Pedro Pan submits the reader to an omniscience consigned to justifying the roles of the Catholic Church and the United States government in the project - a full court defense of the operation nearly four decades after the exodus. It is always suspected that Castro or his sympathizers lurk behind any doubts raised about the motives of the Peter Pan program. After all, who else would question a program that saved so many children from communism, and bought them to freedom in the United States? Yet that logic does not quite satisfy the middle-aged curiosity of the very protagonists of that story concerning their own past - the fourteen thousand Cuban children and adolescents sent to the United States alone in the early 1960s. Behind their anxieties lies a need to come to grips with a complicated national history that affected them so deeply at an age at which they could not act for themselves. Any in-depth Peter Pan flight into its own past will necessarily be ticklish, if not risky. Can people ever sit in judgment on their family, Church, and nation, even after they turn fifty? Can they ever recapture a lost past, or register suspicions about historical events that engulfed everyone, most of all themselves?

Excerpt from:
The Bay of Pigs and the CIA,
by Juan Carlos Rodriguez

Page 55 | Legal Custody of Children Operation Peter Pan began to take shape in Washington in mid-1960. (It was called that because Peter Pan had taken the three darling children away to Never-Never Land.) The name was sadly ironic: for many of those children who were sent out of Cuba, the United States would be a land from which they would never, never return home. The operation formed part of the arsenal used to psychologically soften up the Cuban people. With it, the Propaganda Section in Quarters Eye decided to unleash a propaganda campaign to make ordinary Cubans believe that, under a communist government, children - like the land, industries, stores and housing - would become the property of the state. If that happened, parents would lose legal custody of their children. The CIA experts were confident that, if they managed to sow that doubt in some of the people, the fear would gather momentum and could lead to the exodus of thousands of children, split up families and thus undermine the families' support of the government. Undoubtedly, it would be a most effective destabilizing measure. The first phase of the operation consisted of having the radio station carry a "news" bulletin that would alarm the people and be spread by word of mouth. Therefore, one October night in 1960, Radio Swan made its first reference to this subject in its 8:00 news broadcast: "Cuban mothers, don't let them take your children away! The Revolutionary Government will take them away from you when they turn five and will keep them until they are 18. By that time, they will be materialist monsters." During the following months, over and over again, the station would rebroadcast that false "news item" about children being taken away from their parents. In December 1960, the CIA experts felt that the idea had taken root on the island and decided to go on to the next phase, which would split Cuban families and finally cause some of them to oppose the government. That would guarantee solid support for the invaders. Under apparently legal cover,using the services of the Catholic Church, the children's exodus began. Operation Peter Pan was carried out under a religious cloak as "humanitarian assistance" provided by the Catholic Services Bureau in Florida. Its main protagonist, who allowed himself to be used as a figurehead, was Monsignor Bryan O. Walsh. As he recalled some years later, he entered the State Department by a side door. It seemed very mysterious to him, as if he were working for the FBI or some such thing. He reported that, in the course of a three-hour-long conversation, he was asked to take part in a plan to take children out of Cuba, being assured that visa waivers would be issued. High-ranking officials in the State Department and in the Attorney General's Office, plus the CIA officer in charge of the program, who said his name was Harold Bishop, took part in those initial meetings. In fact, "Bishop" was David A. Phillips. Naturally he had to be there. He had created Radio Swan and Operation Peter Pan… By the time the State Department meetings ended, Monsignor Walsh had the first 500 visa waivers in his briefcase. The CIA had been clear: authorization would be granted only to children and adolescents between five and 18 years old. Not to their parents, who would remain in Cuba to swell the ranks of the opposition to Fidel Castro.

Excerpt from:
Operation Pedro Pan,
The Untold Exodus of 14,098 Cuban Children
by Yvonne Conde

Pages 204 and 216 Born between 1943 and 1956, the children of Pedro Pan are now grown and leading lives which are most certainly colored by their earlier experiences. Thinking about the time alone in the United States, some believe their parents deceived them and feel somehow betrayed, while others admire their parents' courage. Some think that the experience, difficult as it was, was for the best in the long run. Some are ambivalent. Others are angry. In response to a questionnaire answered by 442 Pedro Pans, when asked if their experience was negative or positive and why, a majority, 69.60%, found the experience to be a positive one ... ...When asked if I think my parents made the right decision, I always answer, "yes, because I was given choices." Once in this country, any one of us could have chosen to return to Cuba or to be a communist.