‘Pedro Pan’: An inhumane uprooting

By Luis Sexto

Let us begin with a personal story: I could have been a victim of Peter Pan. And that operation, described in Miami as the biggest child exodus in the West, is also included — at least in the migratory circumstances of Cuba — among the projects of psychological terrorism most lacking in ethics and kindness, even though it adopted the gestures and language of Christian charity.

My links with the indispensable childhood character, paradoxically utilized against the weakest link in the Cuban family, are limited to two or three. At the age of 16, I had just left a Catholic seminary, because education had been nationalized. Although I hoped to travel abroad to continue my studies, nobody could pay the 300 dollars required for my ticked to Madrid, although the Apostolic Nuncio made an effort to pay for it in Cuban currency.

After learning that the Rev. Bryan O. Walsh was sending out “visa waivers” as if they were Christmas cards, I wrote to him, and soon thereafter I received in the mail the document from the Catholic Welfare Bureau that certified that the State Department had granted me permission to enter the United States. At the time, crossing the Straits of Florida cost 25 dollars, which I borrowed from a nun I knew from childhood.

As you can figure out, I didn’t reach the then-resort of Miami. A few weeks before I could board a plane from the now-defunct Pan American Airways, President Kennedy suspended U.S.-to-Cuba flights. The missile crisis had begun. Predictably, my life took a different course. Predictable, too, is my intention as I disclose this rather typical personal history: I want to illustrate how easy it was for a teenager in 1962 to do what it is so difficult — almost impossible — for an adult in Cuba to do today and for a long time now.

Certain propaganda in Miami evokes Operation Peter Pan (Pedro Pan, in a belated and almost false Spanish) as a virtuous, even providential deed. Again, forgetfulness, a culpable forgetfulness, alters the nature of things. And what smelled bad begins to smell good. What was tragedy becomes a romantic dream; what was crime, charity. Today, everything is jumbled in an environment where politics justify everything, politics that hatred contaminates almost completely.

Very few would dare to see today, principally in Miami, what I said at the start of this article: “Peter Pan” was a project of psychological terrorism with the political purpose of destabilizing the Cuban family.

More than 14,000 children, between the ages of 3 and 17, traveled without their parents to Miami and were dispersed to 40 states of the Union, sheltered in schools or in the homes of their relatives or unknown people. The facts are well known. Why did they come about? Is anybody wondering about the causes? And if someone does, will he find the true cause for this child exodus? The children fled from the “communist paradise,” some people might say. And that’s that. They attempt to ignore, or forget, that many of those who were torn from their families (not to mention country) at such an early age were raised in an affective and cultural vacuum and suffered such an uprooting and loneliness that they could say: “I never want to remember what we went through.”

Some historical accounts say the operation began when someone took to the Rev. Walsh a child whose parents were in Cuba. The priest welcomed the boy and later realized that many of them were in the same situation: outside of Cuba, without their parents. But, according to my participation in that story, Father Walsh also invited children in Cuba and made it easy for them to travel to the U.S.

Otherwise, why was my “visa waiver” signed by him? And I wasn’t in the United States, without my parents. Instead, with his cooperation, I was about to become one of those boys.

The fact is that everything started when some counter-revolutionary radio stations began to broadcast the lie that the revolutionary government would take way parental rights — patria potestas — from all parents. In particular, I remember Radio Swan repeating that threatening litany, and I remember families becoming terrified and believing that concoction.

All that amid the economic, diplomatic and even violent attacks that President Eisenhower aimed at the Cuban government: the suspension of the sugar quota, sabotage against stores, factories, cane fields; the creation of training camps in Guatemala and Nicaragua to train the future Brigade 2506. State Security even found a printed version — apocryphal — of the alleged patria potestas law.

In general, these facts can be confirmed by reading any document declassified in Washington or in Havana, or in any newspaper from that era.

It seems clear that the recipe for “Peter Pan” was conceived and spiced in the kitchens of the U.S. secret services. Until that time in Cuba (1960-62), the ones who emigrated were mainly those with links to Batista’s dictatorship, the repentant revolutionaries, the early reformers, and the landowners whose estate was confiscated or about to the confiscated. Beginning with Operation Peter Pan, a migratory wave was created of parents who sought to be reunited with their children; that way, the family-migration trend could be presented as an expression of popular rejection to “the odious communist dictatorship.”

“All those who participated in the historical operation were branded,” I recently read in a digital summary from a U.S. website. Branded, I repeat, by a formula of psychological terrorism. I don’t know if Msgr. Walsh at any time — in his reflections or examinations of conscience — acknowledged that his Christian fervor was brutally manipulated. I don’t pretend to disturb the dead; rather, to give them the benefit of the doubt. Because Walsh was never in Cuba, he may have accepted the information he was given as true. Like so many others who accept any vision of the Cuban reality without ever having stepped on a street in any Cuban city, or like those who have not done so in decades.

In Havana in 1993 or 1994, I ran into a Cuban journalist who migrated to the United States as a very young boy. He is an honest man. One night, we went out for a walk and strolled down Fifth Avenue. As we walked down that broad boulevard, brightly lit and flanked by trees, he began to weep. Ah, he told me, I grew up hearing that the communists had destroyed Fifth Avenue. And they also told you — I said to him — that the communists cut down all the palm trees in the country. But if I take you anywhere, you’ll see that the palm tree, despite the errors of some well-intentioned ignoramus, continues to be the proudest, most gregarious and abundant tree in our countryside.

Of course, “Peter Pan” has another face. I do not deny that those children and teenagers, few or many, could have been able to emigrate once they assumed the responsibility of adulthood, or when their parents decided so, all together. But when you see the other face, covered with scars, you can’t help being honest and breaking into tears because you accepted that uprooting a child from his family and homeland was a noble act. And a Christian deed.

Cuban journalist Luis Sexto, winner of the 2009 José Martí journalism award, writes for several Cuban publications. He is now a regular contributor to Progreso Semanal/Weekly.