From the Publisher

On August 11, 1961, at the age of ten, Yvonne M. Conde left Cuba in one of the world's largest political exoduses of children in history—Operation Pedro Pan. Between 1960 and 1962 over 14,000 children were sent out of Cuba alone by desperate parents who feared for their children's future under Castro. Unlike Peter Pan, however, these children continued to grow up even while separated from their families.

Yvonne M. Conde investigates the events and key figures surrounding the exodus, including the roles of the Catholic church and the State Department, and the extent of the CIA's involvement. As the children arrived in temporary camps in Miami, dedicated volunteers such as Father Bryan O. Walsh helped them find new homes across the country. Conde has tracked down hundreds of these children to tell their diverse stories—their uplifting, poignant, and sometimes tragic experiences in American foster homes and orphanages. Because she herself was a Pedro Pan child, others have opened up to her like never before to share their feelings about this painful time in their lives. Today, these children and their families struggle to heal the emotional scars of their long separation.

Writing with compassion and rare insight, Yvonne M. Conde uncovers the true tales of a little known episode of the Cold War.

Booknews

Having herself left Cuba at the age of ten as part of the exodus, New York-based freelance writer Conde describes how over 14,000 children were sent unaccompanied from Cuba to the US between 1960 and 1962. She describes their experiences in temporary camps, foster homes, and orphanages, and for a few a reunion with their families after many years. Annotation c. Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)

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Operation Pedro Pan

Routledge

Chapter One

Adiós Cuba: 1959-1960

1959 THE YEAR OF THE REVOLUTION

José Martí airport, 16 kilometers southwest of La Habana, had become a gloomy structure by 1961. It had lost the unbridled joy of encounters. The one-story building was instead rapidly becoming a depository of farewells, sadness, and memories, a site of estrangement and endings as several thousand Cubans had been leaving the island monthly. Since Americans traveling to Cuba could not be offered normal protective service, travelers required State Department permission; incoming passengers were thus reduced to mere few.

    Emotional, teary good-byes were followed by separation as outbound passengers proceeded into the immigration area where luggage was searched and luxury items such as jewelry confiscated. Strip searches were not uncommon. This immigration area was nicknamed the pecera, or fishbowl. It was a glass-enclosed room where passengers waited for their departure while looking at their bereaved family across the glass, the decision to leave their homeland bisecting their world. Just as mirrors are believed to hold a person's soul, the uncertainty of reunification made this glass wall a silverless mirror holding both past and future.

    On May 5, 1961, María Dolores and Juan Antonio Madariaga, then eight and eleven, sat alone in the pecera, nervously awaiting their departure. María Dolores could not contain her excitement, looking forward to the adventurous airplane ride. Juan was somber, for as he watched his parents, so near and yet so distant already, he rightly felt the weight of the world on his young shoulders. From now on he was his sister's protector.

    As they walked across the hot tarmac, María Dolores looked back to the second-floor observation area where families rushed for a last look at the voyagers. Juan stoically looked straight ahead. Suddenly, as María Dolores was turning around again, she felt a pull on her ponytail. It was her brother's hand, making her face forward. He told her, "Don't look back. You are never going to see our parents again." Almost four decades later the words are still etched in María Dolores's mind. The forecasted eternal separation turned out to be four years long.

    The Madariaga children did not know that their exit was making them part of history, as they were among the earliest of 14,048 children sent out of Cuba alone by their parents during a twenty-two-month period. When the Madariagas left, approximately 300 children had already departed from Cuba. Why?

    Something had gone terribly wrong with the brand new Cuban revolution. It was just twenty-nine months earlier that the nation joyfully greeted its new leader. Now they were shipping their children out of the country in order to protect them. Their dreams had disintegrated into an unbearable nightmare.

"Esta Es Tu Casa Fidel"

On January 8, 1959, the pavement of the streets of Havana was torn, chewed up by the treads of the Sherman tanks that rumbled through the city. To the jubilant crowds, it was as if the crumbled streets symbolized the obliteration of every trace of the tyrannical Batista government. Throngs cheered until hoarse, throwing confetti and serpentine. People stood on rooftops, waving the previously prohibited red and black flags of Castro's "26 de Julio" movement, forming a bicolor canopy that welcomed the youthtul bearded rebels riding atop tanks, jeeps, and military trucks. Many people had dug in their wardrobes for red and black clothing, trying to become walking banners. Hope was in the air, and the citizens of Cuba inhaled it gladly. The mantle of trust was placed on the revolutionary leaders—a new government of the people, for the people, was auspiciously starting with the new year.

    Fidel, where was Fidel? With a crescendo of anticipation the crowd awaited its new leader—a handsome, charismatic, thirty-two-year-old rebel named Fidel Castro Ruz. As he reached Havana, a passion of ecstatic dimensions seized the crowd. I know it seized me, an eight-year-old participant watching from the third-story balcony of our apartment in the El Vedado section, staring at the rolling tanks less than half a block away on Linea Street. The feelings are still alive in my memory—the sheer glee, an uncontrolled nervousness that made me run around like a battery-operated toy, from the television to the balcony—all because the "bad" tyrant was out and the "good" guy had won.

    I remember my surprise when I first heard my family discuss how they had been secretly involved in selling underground bonds for the revolution. After many years of secrecy, Cubans could now openly and proudly admit their clandestine cooperation with the 26th of July movement. Cuba's victory was also our victory.

    A big poster, about 3 x 2 1/2 feet, of a black-and-white photograph of Fidel, dressed in his fatigues and his cap with a white dove perched on his shoulder, graced the place of honor in the center of our living room. Many doors displayed signs reading "Esta es tu casa Fidel," or Fidel, this is your home. The fact that the young leader had turned thirty-three that year elicited mystical comparisons to Jesus and brought out the natural reverence of the people. The long hair and rosary beads worn by the rebels were suggestive of the Apostles, an image that would further elicit reverence. And as for the dove choosing to land on Fidel's shoulder during his first major address to the people, well, that was surely an omen that he was a man of peace and good will. Moreover, the Afro-Cuban religious figures interpreted it as a demonstration of "protection from the gods."

    Fidel could do no wrong. Bohemia, the most important Cuban weekly magazine, swooned, calling him "the man whose very name is a banner" and "the most outstanding figure of this historic moment without precedent in the annals of the Americas!" He accomplished something previously unheard of in Cuban politics—unity.

The Battle for Souls

Fidel Castro and President Fulgencio Batista locked horns when Castro, then a young lawyer and son of a Spanish landholder in the Oriente Province, led a group of 200 inexperienced students in a poorly planned attack against Batista's Moncada army barracks, in Santiago de Cuba, Oriente, on July 26, 1953. Thus, the political group acquired the name of the 26th of July movement. The attack was an effort to depose President Batista, who himself had gained his dictatorial position through a 1952 military coup. Castro was arrested and sentenced to fifteen years in prison, the longest sentence ever given to an insurrectionist in Cuba. However, he served less than two years, thanks to the implementation of a law passed by the Chamber of Representatives on May 2, 1955, which granted amnesty to all political prisoners.

    Once set free, Castro left Cuba to regroup and reorganize the 26th of July movement in Mexico. Castro returned to Cuba in a purchased yacht, the Granma, ready for an armed struggle. He landed on the coast of Oriente Province with eight-one men on December 2, 1956. He left the ensuing attack with only eleven men, among them Ernesto "Ché" Guevara, an Argentine doctor who had made Cuba's cause his own. These men headed to the dense mountains of the Sierra Maestra, which became Castro's guerilla headquarters for the next three years.

    On February 24, 1957, New York Times correspondent Herbert Matthews wrote the first of a series of articles about the rebels. According to the New York Times Havana-based correspondent, Ruby Hart Phillips, "From that time on youths flocked to join the ranks of Castro's insurgents."

    Aided by the local peasants the rebels held their own and became proficient in guerilla warfare, Radio Rebelde beamed their messages from the mountains and broadcast every battle won. Helped by Matthews's reporting, the Cuban Army was demoralized, sometimes not even fighting. The United States cut off military aid to Batista in March, and rebels won major battles in the Province of Las Villas. When they captured its capital, Santa Clara, on December 30, 1958, it was the decisive battle of the revolution. The improbable happened—President Batista fled for the Dominican Republic at 2:00 A.M. on January 1, 1959.

    That same day, Fidel heard of President Batista's flight over the radio, yet he refused to order a cease-fire until the news was confirmed. Speaking directly to the Cuban people over the radio for the first time, Castro called for a general strike until all weapons were surrendered.

    The Partido Socialista Popular (PSP) was Cuba's Communist Party at the time of Bastista's demise. Its president, Juan Marinello, proclaimed communist backing for the general strike. The strike proved unnecessary, since no one stood up to prevent Castro's total assumption of power, and it was called off three days later.

    After Marinello's condoning of the strike, rumors of Fidel's link to communism surfaced immediately. The PSP, banned by Batista in 1954, resurfaced as an organized party with 17,000 members. Hoy, the communist newspaper, was published again. The PSP took over Radio Union. After occupying small gambling locales and wrecking the slot machines and game tables, they hung signs announcing that a branch of the Communist Party was set up there.

    Opposition to Castro developed in waves, growing as different groups were affected by the changes brought about by the new government. The first exiles were Batistianos, the deposed president's sidekicks, government officials, and military personnel. About 400 persons fled by ship or plane to the United States and to the Dominican Republic, where Batista himself had sought refuge. Latin American embassies grew crowded with asylum seekers.

    Hearing of Batista's departure on January 1, mobs immediately looted and burned some of his followers' properties. Recently installed parking meters were smashed. Casino owners saw dice, roulette tables, and slot machines at the Capri, Seville, Biltmore, St. John's, and Deauville hotels destroyed. Fidel had been broadcasting the end of casinos for months from his mountain base.

    Castro believed that casinos destroyed Cuban morale and that the country could lure tourists through its natural beauty. He tried to convey this message to travel agents at the American Association of Travel Agents (ASTA) convention held in Havana that same January. Amid the wooing of the travel agents and promises of future resorts to be built, Castro was simultaneously sabotaging his public relations efforts. He stood up the agents at several activities, openly criticized the United States, and opened fire with antiaircraft shells and machine guns at an aircraft dropping antirevolution leaflets over Havana. Meanwhile, two persons were killed and forty-five injured when explosions rocked Havana streets. Chanting mobs roared past the Hilton, where the ASTA convention met, demanding death to all enemies of the revolution. The schizoid convention proved to be an exercise in how to lose tourists.

    Student leaders and representatives of the Castro movement took over the airwaves, exhorting people to stay home and stay calm. Castro himself, speaking from Camagüey, urged the resumption of normal activities.

    It should be noted that 1950s Cuba had an uncharacteristically large media market. There were fifty-eight daily newspapers available in the island, placing Cuba fourth in Latin America, superceded only by Argentina, Mexico, and Brazil. In 1957, Cuba had five television channels and twenty-three television stations, more than any country in Latin America, and it ranked eighth in the world with 160 radio stations, ahead of France and the United Kingdom.

    Castro played his undeniable charisma over the airwaves, and the new medium of television cemented his revolution. Almost every other day during his first year in power, Castro made a public statement carried by newspapers or television. He would interrupt programming at whim.

    The Communist Party, legalized by General Batista in 1939 during his first presidency and banned by him in 1952 during his second, sought to ride the wave of change and seized several unions. The 26th of July militia refrained from ousting the communists from the seized locals, but did evict them from the seized Replica newspaper.

    On January 3, during his first American press interview with Jules Dubois of the Chicago Sunday Tribune, Castro denied any ties with communists. During his university days he was involved with student organizations that harbored communists, a fact New York Times correspondent Herbert Matthew attributed to his having been "a wild harum-scarum ... careless with politics."

    Major Ernesto (Ché) Guevara was also busy denying the same rumors. "I have never been a Communist. Dictators always say their enemies are Communists," he said. However, Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev cited in his memoirs that his Latin America specialists had "information gathered from various channels. We knew that Raúl Castro [Fidel's brother] was a good Communist. Ché Guevara was a Communist too, and so were some of the others." Castro's new regime recognized the legality of the Communist Party. He explained that by restoring the full 1940 Constitution, ironically chartered by Batista during his first term in office, freedom was granted to all. The revolution was not afraid of any political party.

    On January 8, the day he triumphantly arrived in Havana, Castro continued the process of disarming the nation, calling for all rebel fighters to lay aside their arms. "No private armies will be tolerated," he said. 'Where is no longer an enemy." The following day on the radio and television program Meet the Press he announced that political parties would be organized in "eight to ten months" and that the elections, promised since the early days in the Sierra Maestra Mountains, would follow in "about eighteen months."

    During the first days of the new regime, approximately seventy Batista soldiers were tried and judged in a single day and shot by a firing squad. The bearded rebels and citizens, in general, thus sought vengeance upon the members of the dreaded Batista military group and the police, who were well known for their atrocities and tortures. Bohemia, a popular weekly magazine, fueled the avenging fires by printing gruesome photographs of exhumed bodies and instruments of torture used by Batista's followers.

    These shootings at the paredón, or the wall, sparked the first round of domestic and international criticism toward the new regime. On January 12, fourteen persons were sentenced to death, but the government denied the shooting of seventy-five others. Eyewitnesses differed with the government account. Three days later, Argentina urged Cuba to suspend executions. The Catholic Church, originally supportive of the revolution, because it considered many policies of the revolution Christian, asked for just and legal treatment such as clemency for the accused.

    In an interview for the CBS television program Face the Nation, Castro said that "an eighteen month period is necessary before elections can be held." In the same interview he claimed that "perhaps two or three dozen criminals" had been executed so far. Castro maintained that each had had a fair trial.

    However, these "revolutionary trials" had little resemblance to a court of law. They were patterned after the makeshift court Castro had set up in the Sierra Maestra Mountains during his three years of fighting against General Batista. The rebel code there provided for the death penalty for murder, treason, espionage, rape, armed assault, theft, and many major offenses against discipline. It should be noted that Cuba had no death penalty law before the revolution except for members of the armed forces convicted of military crimes or traitors, per article 25 of the 1940 Constitution. The Civil Defense Code also had a death penalty provision, Article 128, allowing the death penalty for espionage.

    As for the executions themselves, they were hard-hearted—the accused were lined up in front of trenches or along a wall or tied to a post and were shot with rifles and automatic weapons. The gory actions were given their full propaganda value. Cameras were allowed to capture many of the shootings, including one when a prisoner bravely faced the squad and gave the order for his own death.

    Senator Wayne Morse of Oregon, a Batista critic and rebel supporter, denounced what he called "blood baths" and appealed to Cuban leaders to "withhold executions until emotions cool." Castro replied with his characteristic defiance by telling newsmen that "the time for them [the United States] to have started worrying was during the Batista regime." He added, "We have given orders to shoot every last one of those murderers, and if we have to oppose world opinion to carry out justice, we are ready to do so." Most Cubans echoed the feeling and applauded this charismatic David willing to take on any Goliath who threatened his tiny country.

    Another jab at the United States followed on January 15 when Castro said, "If the Americans don't like what is happening in Cuba, they can land the marines, and then there will be 200,000 gringos dead." He later apologized for this statement and assured the press that he sought favorable ties with Washington. Relations between the United States and Cuba were beginning their precipitous decline.

    The revolution was fifteen days old.

    On January 21, as the world watched, 18,000 Cubans congregated for a mass rally in support of the executions. Two hundred and fifty foreign reporters and two United States congressmen gathered in Cuba to attend the trial of Batista aides, held in a stadium. One of the accused likened the scene to the Roman Coliseum. Chances for a fair trial in this pandemonium were nil. The U.S. press called them "blood baths." In reality, these shows served as warnings to anyone who dared commit "treason" against the new government.

    Of course, treason wore many different hats.

Castro in Control

Ruby Hart Phillips, the resident New York Times correspondent in Havana, sounded off an early alarm in her January 27, 1959, article titled, "Reds Drive to Win Top Role in Cuba." In it she detailed examples of growing communist influence, including the fact that leftist leaders living abroad were returning to Cuba, the communist newspaper Hoy reemerged, and the Communist Party attempted to gain control of labor. On January 30, an inkling of totalitarian control began to show when members of Castro's own 26th of July militia were ordered to surrender their weapons within seventy-two hours. On February 16, 1959, Castro became the island's prime minister, by his own decree.

    Economic hardships rocked the island. The government faced a debt of $1.5 billion, 75 percent of the sugar crop in the eastern provinces was damaged during revolutionary guerilla fighting, and there were about six to eight hundred thousand unemployed in a population of six million. Political unrest and the closing of casinos had disrupted the lucrative income-producing tourist industry.

    Another economic development pointing toward total government control was established. Intervención, or the government's confiscation of properties and businesses, began two months into the revolution and would not stop until all private entities were abolished. The Cuban Telephone Company, a wholly owned affiliate of International Telephone and Telegraph, was put under government management on March 4, 1959.

    Castro had chosen Manuel Urrutia Lleó, with whom he'd worked in the Sierra Maestra camp, to be the revolutionary president of Cuba, a puppet position whose strings were pulled by then Prime Minister Castro. On February 28, President Urrutia approved a law authorizing the confiscation of property owned by Batista collaborators, including cabinet ministers, armed forces officers, senators, representatives, all those who sought office, and every provincial governor and mayor, effectively wiping out an entire political class, corrupt as much of it may have been.

    During his first official visit to the United States in April 1959, Castro promised that Cuba would not confiscate foreign private industry. He again denied that his regime was communist influenced. Simultaneously, Lazaro Peña, a longtime PSP member, was also traveling—to Moscow. He was under Raúl Castro's covert orders to ask for Soviet assistance to centralize control of the Cuban Army. Raúl specifically asked for men from the group of Spanish communists who were graduates from the Soviet military academy "to help the Cuban army ... on general matters and for the organization of intelligence work." The petition was granted on April 23, and two Spanish graduates of Soviet military academies were dispatched to Cuba to be followed shortly by fifteen more.

    Meanwhile, back in the United States during a Meet the Press interview on April 19, Castro pushed the general election still further away, this time to "within four years." By May, Castro was on the verge of breaking his promise to protect private industry. On May 17, the agrarian reform became law, forbidding foreign and sugar mill ownership of land. It also restricted individual land ownership to 30 caballerias, or 1,000 acres. Seven Cuban airlines and airport companies were seized, as well as the holdings of 117 other companies, and eighteen individuals were charged with enriching themselves under the Batista regime. American landholdings were "intervened"—revolutionary lingo for taken over.

Dissention in the Ranks

Pedro Luis Díaz Lanz, commander of the Revolutionary Air Force, became the first significant defector from the ranks of the 26th of July movement. Díaz Lanz escaped to the United States on July 1, 1959, after Castro forbade him from making anticommunist declarations, an order Díaz Lanz could not accept. He had become discontent after he noticed how previously unknown communists were given key positions in the rebel army. He wrote about this in a letter to President Urrutia.

    Once in the United States, Díaz Lanz testified before the Senate Internal Security Committee that he had left Cuba because "Castro had brought Communists to my country." He added that Castro had told him he would introduce a system like the Russian one, only better, and that he would "take land from everybody" and do away with banks.

    Díaz Lanz's defection cost President Urrutia his job. Going on television to criticize the defection, Urrutia was asked by the interviewer about his views on communism. He refused to deal with "that subject" but criticized the leaders of the PSP. Castro watched the exchange in his hotel suite and exclaimed, "All this talk of communism makes me fired."

The Seduction

Plotting to remove President Urrutia, the next day, June 15, 1959, Castro summoned Revolución editor Carlos Franqui and asked him to print a false story about Castro's resignation in large headlines. In his editorial Franqui wrote, "very ... serious and justifiable reasons have led to this decision of one who has always been characterized by the resolution, firmness and responsibility of his action." As expected, when the paper hit the street there was general outrage. Castro was not to be found anywhere. Two tension-filled days later he went on television, a medium he mastered, saying that he found it impossible to work with President Urrutia. The crowds swallowed the bait and asked for Urrutia's resignation; Urrutia quickly sought asylum in the Venezuelan embassy. Osvaldo Dorticós, a pliable lawyer who had drafted the agrarian reform legislation, was named president. Dorticós had been a member of the PSP since 1953.

    Major Ramiro Valdés, Castro's intelligence chief, was dispatched to Mexico in July 1959 for secret meetings with the Soviet ambassador and KGB. More than one hundred KGB advisers were sent to Cuba to guide Castro's intelligence and security systems. In an ironic twist of history, many of these agents came from the group of los niños, the children of Spanish communists who had been sent to Russia alone by their parents during that civil war. Because they spoke both Spanish and Russian, they were a logical choice for a Cuba-Russia link.

    Despite some dissention and concern, the prevailing mood was still very pro-Castro. Revolutions usually bring an affirmation of national identity, and Cubans were bursting with native pride. Consequently, the revolution had found a place in the hearts of most Cubans. It promised the hope of new beginnings for the republic after so many corruption-laden years and after a seven-year reign the people had just lived under.

    In a massive rally celebrating the anniversary of July 26, 500,000 Cubans gathered in the Plaza Civica and honored Castro with a ten-minute ovation. He claimed that it reminded him of ancient Athens, "where the people in the public plaza discussed and decided their own destiny," adding, "This is a real democracy," and that Cuba did not need formal elections.

    Other Cubans wanted the promised elections and a real democracy, not the totalitarian path along which Cuba was heading. There was unrest throughout the nation. Eighty "counterrevolutionary" men attacked an army post. A plot to unseat Castro's regime was crushed on August 10 and 11. By then the numbers of arrests had reached 4,500.

Political Correctness Castro Style

As the regime became more established toward a military order with total control of the armed forces and repressive organisms, resignations or replacements in the government were quickly filled with Castro's sycophants. Castro's power was infiltrating all aspects of Cuban life.

    In August, the Cuban Electric Company, an American & Foreign Power subsidiary, was ordered to cut its rates by 30 percent and its officers' expenses from $50,000 to $3,000 a year. In September, 330,000 tons of sugar were sold to the Soviet Union at a price slightly lower than the world price. A shift in economic partners was starting to occur, and Cuba was reaching out to the Soviet Union.

    A third of Havana University's professors were deemed unreliable by the government and were removed from their posts in October. Major Rolando Cubelas, the University Student's gun-toting president who fought in the mountains with Fidel, said, "Incompetent, immoral, and counterrevolutionary professors must go." He also asked for curricula, faculties, and examinations to be revised and foreign faculty allowed. The government secured control of institutions of higher learning.

    Meanwhile, at the Ministry of the Interior, a KGB-modeled intelligence service was installed, a secret police whose mission is to protect the state from its enemies from without or within. Cuban agents were sent to Moscow for training.

    On October 21, 1959, Major Hubert Matos, military leader of Camagüey Province and ex-aide of Premier Fidel Castro during the days of the Sierra Maestra Mountains insurrection, was arrested on conspiracy charges after he tendered his resignation. He had made the mistake of complaining that the revolution had not fulfilled its program and charged communist penetration of the government. He was to spend twenty years in a Cuban jail, courtesy of his former friend.

    Land and property seizures continued. Expropriated were 50,000 acres from United Fruit Company; the 33,500-acre King cattle ranch; 10,000 acres belonging to an American, Charles Buford; the 21,000-acre El Indio ranch; and 75,000 U.S.-owned acres in Oriente Province. Even Castro's own brother, Ramón, lost all but 1,000 acres of the 21,650 he owned. The U.S.-owned Havana Riviera Hotel, worth $15 million, was seized, as were fourteen tobacco farms in Piñar del Rio, Cuba's westernmost province.

    In the name of the revolution, individual rights were being eroded. The right of habeas corpus was suspended, as well as the requirement that persons be formally charged within twenty-four hours of their detention. The Supreme Court's right to decide the constitutionality of laws was eliminated, as was the powers of courts to intervene for detained persons.

    Not coincidentally, military tribunals were reestablished. Many Cubans simply opted to flee, and 285,967 passports were issued in 1959. Castro allowed dissatisfied people to leave, because it created the effect of a valve of a pressure cooker, allowing "steam" to escape before an explosion.

    The year ended with Premier Castro urging workers to spy on all people opposed to the revolution.

Continues...

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Excerpted from Operation Pedro Pan by Yvonne M. Conde Copyright © 2000 by Yvonne M. Conde. Excerpted by permission.
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