'Operation Pedro Pan and the Exodus of Cuba's Children'

H-Diplo Lucero on Shnookal, 'Operation Pedro Pan and the Exodus of Cuba's Children'

Review published on Sunday, May 23, 2021

Deborah Shnookal. Operation Pedro Pan and the Exodus of Cuba's Children. Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 2020. 326 pp. $85.00 (cloth), ISBN 978-1-68340-155-1.

Reviewed by Bonnie A. Lucero (University of Houston-Downtown)Published on H-Diplo (May, 2021) Commissioned by Seth Offenbach (Bronx Community College, The City University of New York)

Printable Version: https://www.h-net.org/reviews/showpdf.php?id=55954

This exceptionally smart and timely book examines a large-scale departure of Cuban children, orchestrated by the US government and the Catholic Church following the 1959 Cuban Revolution. Operation Pedro Pan, as the exodus is commonly known, occurred between December 1960 and October 1962, a particularly tense moment of the Cold War, as anticommunist hysteria and US- sponsored regime change efforts greeted the first waves of revolutionary reform. The political polarization that characterized this historical moment has also come to define prevailing interpretations of Operation Pedro Pan—was it a benevolent rescue mission, as Cuban exiles so commonly portray it, or was it the mass criminal kidnapping that the Cuban government continued to denounce for years? According to Deborah Shnookal, neither of these facile representations fully captures the complexities of the exodus, let alone its profound human cost.

Operation Pedro Pan and the Exodus of Cuba’s Children offers a more nuanced narrative. Drawing on documents from several US government agencies and personal interviews with a range of people involved, it carefully reconstructs the circumstances leading to the departure of fourteen thousand children from Cuba. Shnookal shows how the exodus resulted from a purposeful and politically motivated manipulation of Cuban parents’ fears. The US government used emigration as a political weapon against the Cuba Revolution and specifically used Cuban children as pawns in its covert war to topple the Cuban government. Ultimately, the book exposes a “cruel and calculated immigration policy that resulted in the unnecessary and unexpectedly prolonged separation of Cuban families” (p. 217).

One of this book’s strengths is the author’s ability to challenge the political mythology surrounding Operation Pedro Pan without invalidating the anxieties, fears, and other intense emotions inspiring the families caught up in the events. This is evident in her careful discussion of the push and pull factors driving the exodus. In her discussion of the “patria potestad hoax,” for instance, Shnookal rightly acknowledges how rumors that the Cuban government intended to eliminate parental authority stoked very real fears among many Cuban parents. It caused the greatest concern to predominantly white middle- and upper-class families, many of whom believed the revolutionary government intended to “destroy” the Cuban family by undermining traditional family values (patriarchal gender roles), banning religious worship, and preventing Cubans from leaving the island.

The rumor resonated less with poorer families, who generally maintained more tenuous ties with the Catholic Church and were more likely to have benefited materially from early revolutionary reforms, such as the agrarian reform and the literacy campaign (chapter 3). However, Shnookal also presents ample evidence that these very real fears were grounded in lies intentionally orchestrated to evoke those emotional reactions to provoke an emigration crisis. She demonstrates, for instance, that counterrevolutionary networks drafted a fictitious law, which they attributed to the revolutionary government, outlining a supposed plan to terminate parental authority. Moreover, the appeal to parental authority appears to have been but a pretext in light of the 1999-2000 custody battle over Elián González, whom many members of the Cuban exile community argued should be kept in the United States in violation of his Cuban father’s custody rights (chapter 6).

Similarly, Shnookal examines how perceptions of the 1961 literacy campaign (chapter 2), particularly in the context of the Revolution’s broader reforms on youth and family (chapter 1), stoked fears about so-called communist indoctrination, declining parental control over education, and the disruption of “traditional family values,” including religious piety and patriarchal gender roles. The temporary closure of Cuban schools during the second half of the literacy campaign and the relocation of several prominent private schools from Cuba to South Florida fueled these fears. Responding precisely to those fears, the Cuban Children’s Program offered middle- and upper-class parents wary of social change the opportunity to preserve the status-based education of prerevolutionary Cuba by sending their children to private and religious schools.

Although the hysteria generated by the fictitious counterrevolutionary rumors was very real for some families, Shnookal suggests that many families did not simply accept wholesale CIA propaganda, but rather had varying motives for sending their children to the United States. To be sure, many families responded most of all to unprecedented pull factors. The US government lured Cuban parents to send their children by authorizing a Catholic priest in Miami to issue unlimited visa waivers for Cuban children to enter the United States as unaccompanied “students,” while making it more difficult for adults to migrate. The Catholic Welfare Bureau assisted with travel and administered care to new arrivals. Together these benefits amounted to an all-expense-paid education in the United States at precisely the moment many of Cuba’s prestigious private schools relocated to South Florida and as government relations with the Catholic Church reached their lowest point. As education abroad remained a cornerstone of privilege in Cuba, the opportunity to obtain “becas” (scholarships) to study in the United States proved exceedingly appealing to less prosperous families, who may not have been able to afford such educational luxuries for their children (chapter 4).

Another of the book’s strengths is its methodical explanation of how certain false narratives about Operation Pedro Pan emerged and why they remain so powerful today. A case in point is Shnookal’s discussion of the perceived and real identities of Pedro Pans. Prevailing interpretations of the exodus depict Pedro Pans as helpless young children who needed to be saved from communist indoctrination. However, Shnookal reveals that the average Pedro Pan was already an adolescent upon arrival to the US, and many were already involved in political activities. Moreover, the political orientations of Pedro Pans did not map neatly onto the anticommunist framework invoked in exile imaginaries. While some Cuban families undoubtedly sent their children away to shelter them from the political and criminal consequences of their own or their parents’ counterrevolutionary activities, other parents sent them away to halt their involvement in revolutionary activities, including the literacy campaign.

Although it diverged from reality, the image of Pedro Pans as helpless young children was politically expedient for the US government, the Catholic Church, and the growing exile community. It became a key pillar of the creation myth of the Cuban exile community, giving political credibility to people who claimed the label. It bolstered the Catholic Church’s humanitarian reputation and advanced the status of certain key players involved. And, perhaps most significantly, it formed a core part of the United States’ project to effect regime change in Cuba, most notably through its propaganda war against the Revolution. The specter of helpless young child refugees helped undermine the moral appeal of the Revolution, helped consolidate domestic support for the US government’s “Cuba Project” (a covert war aimed at toppling the Cuban government), and helped assuage the anti- immigrant backlash in South Florida and other US cities as the Cuban émigré population exploded (chapter 5).

Rather than the compassionate humanitarian response to children in distress, Operation Pedro Pan emerges as a product of the “cynical manipulation of parents’ deepest fears, and a callous disregard for Cuban families” (p. 196). The burden of this political experiment fell squarely upon Cuban families, especially Pedro Pan children. To be sure, Shnookal is right to point out that Pedro Pans were not necessarily better off in the United States. While half of Pedro Pans were reclaimed by relatives or friends, a significant number required foster care. The most fortunate of these children ended up in good families and schools, but too many of them languished in orphanages or state-run refugee camps. Some children faced racist and xenophobic discrimination in public schools and experienced abuse at the hands of their foster families. Moreover, while many parents assumed that the separation would be short-lived, as they expected the United States to intervene and topple the Revolution, the defeat of the Bay of Pigs Invasion in April 1961 dashed those hopes. Ironically, parents who feared losing parental authority ended up relinquishing custody of their children to face unknown traumas and extended separation.

The evacuation scheme drew to a close by the end of 1962. Following the Cuban Missile Crisis, the United States entered an agreement with the Soviet Union, which included a promise to refrain from further invasions of Cuba. By this time, counterrevolutionary networks inside the island were significantly weakened, complicating the logistics of the airlifts and reducing the probability of an uprising from within. With the suspension of direct flights between US and Cuba, Operation Pedro Pan was no longer viable.

As this book aptly shows, the lessons of Operation Pedro Pan are multiple and profound, reaching far beyond the Cold War context in which they are typically situated. For one, this book underscores that immigration policy is—and has always been—intensely political and cannot be separated from the long histories of US intervention and neocolonialism throughout Latin America. Welcoming with open arms certain migrant children, investing in their care and education, and bestowing them with special political status historically served a very real political purpose, in this case that of toppling the revolutionary government and restoring US hegemony in the region. The politics of Operation Pedro Pan, which this book so masterfully lays out, offer a stark contrast to the contemporary policies criminalizing migrant children, ripping them from their parents’ arms, incarcerating them in abject conditions, and withholding basic care to the point of death. Binding these disparate immigration policies together is a willful neglect of the ways long histories of US political, economic, and military interference in Latin America created the conditions of the exodus, and how family separation has become somewhat of an American tradition, at least when it comes to families of color. As more than

Citation: H-Net Reviews. Lucero on Shnookal, 'Operation Pedro Pan and the Exodus of Cuba's Children'. H-Diplo. 05-23-2021. https://networks.h-net.org/node/28443/reviews/7758785/lucero-shnookal-operation-pedro-pan-and-exodus-cubas-children Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License. 3 H-Diplo five hundred migrant children today remain separated from their families, this book offers a powerful reminder of the human cost of these politically motivated immigration experiments.

Bonnie A. Lucero is a historian of Latin America and the Caribbean. Her research centers on the intersections of race and gender in colonial and postcolonial contexts, especially in Cuba. She is co- editor of Voices of Crime: Constructing and Contesting Social Control in Modern Latin America (University of Arizona Press, 2016) and author ofRevolutionary Masculinity and Racial Inequality: Gendering War and Politics in Cuba, 1895-1902 (University of New Mexico Press, 2018) and A Cuban City, Segregated: Race and Urbanization in the Nineteenth Century (University of Alabama Press, 2019). Her new book manuscript, titled Race and Reproduction in Cuba since Colonial Times, is under contract with the University of Georgia Press. Dr. Lucero currently serves as associate professor of history and the director of the Center for Latino Studies at the University of Houston- Downtown. She is from Richmond, California.

Citation: Bonnie A. Lucero. Review of Shnookal, Deborah, Operation Pedro Pan and the Exodus of Cuba's Children. H-Diplo, H-Net Reviews. May, URL:2021. https://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=55954

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.