Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

Operation Pedro Pan: The Untold Exodus of 14,048 Cuban Children

2001; Duke University Press; Volume: 81; Issue: 3-4 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1215/00182168-81-3-4-820

1527-1900

Carlos Μ. N. Eire,

Diverse Education Studies and Reforms

Imagine one of the largest migrations of children in the history of the world going unnoticed. A children’s crusade of sorts, twentieth-century style, silent, invisible, ideologically driven, and painful beyond belief. Imagine also the Central Intelligence Agency and the White House cooperating with an Irish-American monsignor and the Archdiocese of Miami to establish and maintain an efficient exodus machinery that created thousands of instant Cuban orphans and scattered them all over North America. Imagine thousands of Cuban parents sending their children to a foreign land willingly, even eagerly, into a void of sorts, where they knew no one, penniless, not knowing who would look after them or where they might end up. Imagine these parents seeing their children fly away from them, not knowing whether they would ever again be reunited. Imagine thousands of children, some as young as two or three years old, sundered from their families and their native land, flying blindly into an uncertain future. Hard as it is to imagine, all of this happened.It happened to the author of this book, and it happened to this reviewer. It also happened to 14,046 other children, and to their families.Between 1960 and 1962, at the height of the cold war, enough children to fill an entire Midwestern town were sent by their parents to the United States, unaccompanied, virtually unacknowledged by the American press. The vast majority of these children had no relatives or friends to take them in once they arrived in the States, yet, somehow, they were whisked away upon arriving at Miami International Airport by representatives of a well-organized program, taken to various camps in Florida, resettled throughout the country in foster homes, boarding schools, juvenile detention centers, and orphanages, to await the arrival of their parents from Cuba. Some, like the author herself, who was also part of the program, were quickly reunited with their families. Others, like this reviewer, spent years waiting, or never saw their parents again.What drove thousands of Cuban parents, most of them middle-class, to do something so desperately odd and agonizing? What circumstances led to such a strange emigration from Cuba, and to such a puzzling acceptance of it by American immigration authorities? How was this all arranged with such efficiency, and why?Yvonne Conde’s book cannot provide the definitive answers to these questions—it is not likely that any single book ever could—but it does provide the best account to date of what happened on both sides of the Straits of Florida, and the best available analysis of the mind set of those who created this peculiar migration. Conde does an excellent job of narrating the essential outline of the history of Operation Pedro Pan, and an equally superb job of analyzing the circumstances that created this exodus, from the viewpoint of those who felt compelled to create it and keep it going.In terms of breadth and depth, this book is more substantial than Victor Andres Triay’s Fleeing Castro: Operation Pedro Pan and the Cuban Children’s Program (1998), but it resembles it in various ways. Both Triay and Conde are Cuban-Americans; Triay is American-born and Conde is a Pedro Pan alumna. Neither book is dispassionate. This is not to say Triay or Conde are unduly biased, but rather that both write from within. In the case of this book by Conde, the passion seems stronger, for she was herself a participant in the very history she is writing, albeit fleetingly. Compassion has its place in the writing of history, but not without cost. Readers beyond the Cuban-American exile community will undoubtedly raise questions about objectivity. Both books are based entirely on limited sources available in the United States, not on any that may be available in Cuba. Both books rely heavily on personal anecdotes and oral history. Conde’s book, especially, is constructed around personal narratives, gathered from a handful of former Pedro Pan children, and from some of the adults who ran the Cuban Children’s Program. Operation Pedro Pan is therefore as much a primary source as it is a work of history, as much a window onto a mentality as it is a guide to events, names, and institutions. This is not a comprehensive history, nor is it a quantitative study, despite its use of questionnaires and selective statistics. It is a snapshot, and a story told by various participants, under the direction of a sympathetic narrator who was part of it. As we all know, snapshots and first-person narratives do not ever reveal the whole truth, but often they do give us a much better glimpses of history as it was actually lived than studies written by outsiders and detached expert scholars.A full scholarly assault on this subject is sorely needed. It will not be an easy enterprise to mount, given the fact that the sources are still under wraps in both the U.S. and Cuba. María de los Angeles Torres, a political scientist at De Paul University (and another Pedro Pan alumna), has been denied access to many American government documents, and is aiming to take her case as high as the U.S. Supreme Court. As far as the Cuban side is concerned, how much openness can be expected while freedom of expression and inquiry is routinely denied by the present regime? Besides, Fidel Castro’s recent stance on parental rights in the celebrated Elián González case might ring all too hollow, should the full history of this exodus be revealed.Yvonne Conde has opened a door that needs to be opened further, and she has done a marvelous job of piecing together a narrative that is compelling precisely because it is not emotionally detached from the subject. All that she includes in this book rings true—even the most seemingly mawkish Dickensian tableaus. Believe me, though my area of expertise is the history of early modern Europe. I was there. It is not often that a reviewer can say this about the book he is reviewing, especially a reviewer who strains to eschew emotion and first-person narratives in his scholarship. I lived through this minor holocaust, and I know that Conde does not embellish here, or seek to be sensational. My brother and I took a KLM flight to Miami on 6 April 1962, and though we did not know it then, we would never see our father again, or most of our relatives. Once on U.S. soil, I was immediately separated from my older teenage brother, and whisked away by a van to the camp for pre-teens in Florida City; then I was sent to one foster home in Miami, and my brother to another, for a few months. Thereafter we sank to the very bottom of the system, at a house full of juvenile delinquents a few blocks from the Orange Bowl, where we were only fed one meal a day. Eventually, we were fortunate enough to end up living with an uncle who arrived after we did. He had been relocated to a Midwestern town where no one else spoke Spanish and the total population was frighteningly close to 14,048. Finally, in November 1965 my brother and I were reunited with our mother, in Chicago, but the tables turned on us: since our mother was unable to find employment, we both had to work full-time jobs while we attended high school.All this in the name of freedom, a concept that is not at all as abstract as we intellectuals like to think.This book is written by a journalist, and it is aimed at a broad reading audience, not at scholars, but anyone interested in the cold war, modern Cuban history, or simply in the role played by ideology in human affairs might want to read it. If you pick up Conde’s Operation Pedro Pan you might find yourself drawn into the story she tells, often through other’s voices, and you might also wince when confronted by the brutal simplicity of values, and their place in history.