Pierre Pan: A tall tale retold

By Varela

It is said that history is first made as trauma and later repeated as a joke. In Miami, where everything is recycled, history always returns as tragicomedy and its protagonists are the everyday, recalcitrant ideologues.

Local demagogues and crooks – chasing any federal money they can get out of Washington – sprang from the woodwork right after the earthquake hit Haiti and, in collusion with some Sunday priests, invented and proposed Operation Pedro Pan 2, a parody of Pedro Pan 1 in which, half a century ago, 14,000 pseudo-pubescents from well-to-do Cuban homes (all of them white) descended from the skies onto Miami, under the pretext that Fidel Castro was going to send them to Siberia to turn them into canned meat.

That child crusade in reverse – from atheist soil to holy land – sponsored and supported by the U.S. government, was noisily hailed and earned much credit to the flag that bears the cross. It was the Catholic Church’s first international achievement since Richard the Lionhearted defeated Saladin in the battle of Apolonia (even though he didn’t reconquer Jerusalem.)

Because our TV-radio evangelist and masseur Alberto Cutié had been fired, I thought the Archdiocese had returned to its normal, serious activities of prayer and litany. But nooo. It seems the hanky-panky continued, this time with the Diaz-Balart brothers, the Ros-Lehtinen woman, and some black-robed penguins (still smarting from the recent local scandals about pedophilia) who have no credibility whatsoever in Obama’s crowd (no surprise) to receive million-dollar funds this time around.

Using The Herald as a lectern, they proceeded to baptize the caravan as Operation Pierre Pan and trumpeted that they could bring 4,000 or 5,000 Haitian orphans to Miami to be adopted by illustrious families from the historic core of exiledom and later be relocated. I imagine that after they had placed Ten Little Negroes (à la Agatha Christie) in homes in Key Biscayne and Coral Gables to perform as servants or sexual slaves, and after taking their pictures for the Olga Connor gallery, they would resettle the rest in the Everglades, next to the Miccosukee Reservation.

Apparently, the Obama administration paid little attention to this human trafficking for publicity and merchandising purposes. The first Peter Pan project may have had a political pretext, but the second was not going to use the humanitarian excuse. That would be much too cruel. And it is said that the White House did not bless Pierre Pan despite the pleas from the Abbott Faría, the Corsican Brothers and Joan of Arc.

I think that, in order to resurrect the past, our perennial opportunists have to wait until Marco Rubio is elected president in 2010, as our ultrarightists foretell (this time without Walter Mercado, because he had a run-in with Univision.)

José Varela was born in Cuba in 1955. He was editorial cartoonist in Miami for 15 years, working for the magazine Exito (1991-97) and El Nuevo Herald (1993-2006). A publicist and a television writer, he is a member of the Progreso Weekly team.