¡NO TE DEJES QUITAR A TU HIJO! OPERATION PEDRO PAN AND THE CUBAN CHILDREN’S PROGRAM By Jean Abreu Department of History A Thesis Submitted for Honors To the Department of History In the Trinity College of Arts and Sciences of Duke University Durham, North Carolina April 2008 1 CONTENTS ACKNOWLEDGMENTS………………………………………………………………....3 INTRODUCTION…………………………………………………………………………6 CHAPTER 1: The Catholic Church, the CIA, and the Bureaucrats………………………14 CHAPTER 2: Propaganda and Media Surrounding Operation Pedro Pan………………..43 CHAPTER 3: Firsthand Perspectives on the Operation…………………………………...73 CHAPTER 4: The Legacy of Pedro Pan ………………………………………………...104 CONCLUSION…………………………………………………………………………...125 BIBILOGRAPHY…………………………………………………………………..…….131 APPENDIX………………………………………………………………………..……...136 2 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS There are a number of people who helped in developing this thesis for the past year. First of all I would like to thank those who spoke candidly about their experiences and the politics of being Cuban American. Maria Ferrer both ignited my interest in the subject as a child and offered her home and car, and memories to me last summer. Magaly, Rosendo, Carmen Cecilia, and Raphael Ferrer were accommodating and allowed me into their most personal moments. Connie Cuello allowed me to sort through her personal collection of letters and official documents, and shared her own very unique experience. Her husband Tony gave an uncensored account of life as a young man during the Revolution. My grandmother, Zoila Abreu, has been supportive, honest, and open-minded in our conversations. Thanks to a generous grant from the Duke Undergraduate Research Support Program I was able to travel to Miami last May and find invaluable sources. The archivists in Miami were also generous with their time and collections. Sister Dorothy Jehle is doing an amazing job at Barry University with the limited resources she has to archive the personal collection of Monsignor Walsh. She also gave me her perspective as a member of the Catholic clergy in Miami and witness to researchers in the past two decades. Esperanza de Varona and hers staff at the Cuban Heritage Collection at the University of Miami were also very helpful. My professors at Duke have been generous with their time and patience for the past three semesters. My advisor Antonio Viego introduced me to this subject as an academic one, and agreed to oversee this project while completing his own research outside of Durham in the fall. Our seminar leader Professor Gavins has provided countless feedback and been an encouraging presence throughout the year. Dr. Holly Ackerman pointed me towards a plethora of sources and given her own perspective on many ideas. 3 Finally, I would like to thank my friends and family for their support. My father and grandmother have never hesitated to answer my most probing questions about their experience as exiles. My mother, sisters, and friends have read several drafts, and offered me support through the ups and downs of this project. 4 Speaking in Diasporas To Edward Said by Lourdes Gil There must have been a day like this one in your life: Orphaes ascending a plane full of children without a trail of crumbs no fairy tale. A day of scattered seeds to the four winds the solid blue line of terror. A day with footsteps echoing each other footsteps unrecognizable penumbras of exile. There must have been a day like this for you: new maps are drawn excluding us and others now inhabit our homes. A day of lilac trees in flames the dust of souls disturbed. New souls draw breadth from the wet grass; the living dead to walk among the living. A day like this one: 23rd of August, 1961 the veil of memory is torn the empty shell discarded. What choice but to be poets free, undaunted. A day like today when we can finally speak across our histories. 5 INTRODUCTION When I was eight years old, I received a gift from my father’s friend Maria Ferrer, an extraordinary woman who my family stayed with in Miami to visit Cuban relatives. The book, Children of the Flight of Pedro Pan,1 is a fictional historical account of the lives of two of the over 14,000 children who were flown out of Cuba in the 1960s and taken in by the Catholic Church in America. The story is told from the perspective of Lourdes, a ten-year-old girl who recounts her feelings about leaving Cuba with only her brother for company, living in foster care, and ultimately reuniting with her parents. My father explained that Maria went through a very similar experience, as had many of his fellow Cuban exiles. Operation Pedro Pan, as it was dubbed by a reporter, had become a cultural phenomenon in Miami. At the time of the book’s publication in 1994, children’s books were the only available literature on this part of Cuban history within the United States. The event was embraced by journalists who searched for a humanitarian piece, and children’s authors who were interested in the personal repercussions of the event, but not by historians or academics. Over a decade later, in a literature class at Duke, I came across a very different account of the Operation. Maria de los Angeles Torres’ work, The Lost Apple: Operation Pedro Pan, Cuban Children in the U.S., and the Promise of a Better Future, 2 is an intensely-researched academic piece. She combines the personal journeys of these children with the political and economic motives that funded them. She mentions the Catholic church, the CIA, the Cold War, and multinational corporations. This book had little in common with the gift that Maria had given to me so many years ago. Confused and intrigued, I searched my parents’ house for the 1 Maria Armengol Acierno, Children of the Flight of Pedro Pan (New York: Silver Moon Press, 1994). 2 De los Angeles Torres, The Lost Apple: Operation Pedro Pan, Cuban Children in the U.S., and the Promise of a Better Future (Boston: Beacon Press, 2003). 6 children’s story and found that Maria had asked the author to write an inscription to me. “Family is the most important thing. They teach us our traditions, culture, and customs,” she had written. This juxtaposition of personal and political information propelled me into a research trip to Miami, back to Maria’s house and into the homes and lives of several others, and eventually to this thesis. While the genesis of this project for me is predicated on the juxtaposition of the personal and the political, the origin of Operation Pedro Pan must begin with an account of what happened in Cuba on New Yar's day in 1959. On that day, Fulgencio Batista, the longtime dictator of Cuba and ally to the U.S., was exiled to Miami for the final time as Fidel Castro and his forces came to power. For most Cubans, this was an enormous relief. Castro promised to bring democracy to a country that was only six decades old, to halt social corruption and to end economic dependence on the U.S. In particular, the middle class played a large role in participating in the underground and legitimizing the revolution. Cuban parents would never have guessed that less than two years later, they would be caught up in the turmoil of the Cold War, so desperate to get their families out of the country that they would send their young, unaccompanied children to the U.S., not knowing where they would stay, who would take care of them, or how long the separation would last. But as Cuba quickly became a battleground in the struggle between the U.S. and the Soviet Union, and the Central Intelligence Agency worked overtime to fuel hysteria and backlash against Castro, thousands of parents committed the unthinkable. In fear of their children becoming nationalized and indoctrinated in new president Fidel Castro’s militaristic education model, over 14,000 families sent their children to Miami between 1960 and 1962. 7 At the same time, the Eisenhower administration was undecided about how to handle the Cuban Revolution. Along with the prevalence of anti-communist McCarthyism at the time, the administration had already demonstrated its fear of communist uprisings in Latin America. Just five years prior, in 1954, the CIA had led a coup d’état in Guatemala, overthrowing the democratically-elected socialist president Jacobo Árbenz Guzmán, in fear of the spread of communism and actions against U.S.-owned companies. Though the U.S. government feigned support for Castro’s democratic promises through 1960, by September 1959 the CIA had already begun working on a covert mission to oust the new leader. December 1960 marked the first international airlift of children in the Western Hemisphere, when the combined powers of the Catholic Church, the U.S. government, the CIA, and several multinational corporations with interest in Cuba altered the lives of thousands of Cuban families that were caught in the middle of the political vortex. By early 1961, ‘Operation Mongoose,’ or the Cuba Project to oust Fidel Castro, had officially begun under the administration of John F. Kennedy. Cuban parents were influenced by a combination of the push from the communist-veering actions of the Castro government and the pull from the U.S., as the CIA fueled rumors via radio and leaflet drops of drastic indoctrination and nationalization. The Catholic Welfare Bureau placed about half of the children who arrived in Miami into the foster care system. The other half went to live with relatives who already lived in the U.S. Placements included refugee camps, orphanages, boarding schools, and foster homes in 35 states. The U.S.