Operation Pedro Pan:
The Untold Exodus
of 14,000 Cuban Children
by Yvonne M. Conde
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On August 11, 1961, at the age often, Yvonne Conde left Cuba thinking she was going to visit a school friend in Miami. It was not until 1990, when Conde, now a successful journalist, discovered that she was one of 14,000 Cuban children sent to America between 1960 and 1962 by parents fearing Castro’s new communist regime. Her flight was part of an underground program called "Operation Pedro Pan."
Beautifully written and emotionally charged, OPERATION PEDRO PAN: The Untold Exodus of 14,000 Cuban Children sheds light on an almost unknown chapter of the Cold War. With the pace of a political thriller, Conde details the events of her childhood—in a family originally supportive of Castro—against Castro’s rise to power. She powerfully recounts the closing of her school to be conscripted into Castro’s "Army of Education," the fear of being taken away from her family to be sent to the mountains—or even worse, Russia—and her final days in Cuba before journeying to Miami.
Upon discovering that she was a part of the largest political exodus of children in the Western Hemisphere, Conde embarked on a different kind of journey. This time she went back into the past to find out how "Operation Pedro Pan" came about, who was involved, and what happened to the other 13,999 children who came to the United States alone.
In OPERATION PEDRO PAN, her journalistic and investigative work uncovers the heroic people who risked their lives in Cuba to see the children to safety in a free land and those on the American side who helped the children obtain visa waivers and provided shelter for them. Conde also features interviews with hundreds of former Pedro Pan children who talk frankly about how this covert operation changed their lives forever—for some in a positive way, and for others in a way that still haunts them to this day.
Expanding on the commonly accepted version of events, Conde proves that the Catholic Church was the only organization behind this underground movement. The wife of the Dutch ambassador to Cuba smuggled visa waivers in and out of Cuba for years; the U.S. State department—in an unprecedented move—gave a church official the power to issue visa waivers; the U.S. Welfare department paid for most of the program; and the C.I.A., which to this day claims ignorance on the subject, has its complicity brought into question in documents uncovered by Conde. She also provides information about how the Cuban government continued to trace the Pedro Pan children long after they left Cuba and would often use this knowledge against parents during police interrogations.
Some of the most interesting parts of OPERATION PEDRO PAN are the personal stories that fill its pages: painful accounts about the struggles of life in the overcrowded Miami camps; fond remembrances of life in a caring foster home where lifelong relationships were formed; humorous anecdotes of culture shock; horrific tales of racism, sexual and physical abuse in foster homes and orphanages; the excitement of impending family reunions and the heartbreaking realization that those reunions would not happen because families could not leave Cuba. Conde closes the book with a chapter that documents where the children are today—psychologically and professionally. They range from security guards and housewives to doctors and teachers to famed recording artists and ultra-wealthy business professionals. To each of them, Conde poses the question, "Would you do to your children what your parents did to you?"
Pedro Pan children were first sent to refugee camps in Miami, Florida. As the camps became overcrowded, the children were scattered across the United States with the most children going to California, Colorado, Illinois, Indiana, Kansas, Michigan, Montana, Nebraska, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, Ohio, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Texas, Washington, Washington D.C., and West Virginia. Conde praises towns in Oregon and Illinois for reaching out to the children. At the same time she exposes orphanages in New Mexico and New York City where the kids were abused and treated as young criminals.
OPERATION PEDRO PAN is an important contribution to the history of Cuba as well as a major historical work that captures a world event that many know very little about. The story of Operation Pedro Pan, somewhat similar to that of the Kindertransport of World War II that carried 10,000 Jewish children out of Germany, further illustrates that children are often the innocent victims when nations are in turmoil.
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