Operation Pedro Pan: The Untold Exodus of 14,048 Cuban Children (review)

Operation Pedro Pan: The Untold Exodus of 14,048 Cuban Children. By Yvonne M. Conde. New York: Routledge, 1999. Plates. Appendixes. Notes. Bibliography. Index. xiv, 248 pp. Cloth, $27.50. Paper, $16.95.

Imagine one of the largest migrations of children in the history of the world going unnoticed. A children's crusade of sorts, twentieth-century style, silent, invisible, ideologically driven, and painful beyond belief. Imagine also the Central Intelligence Agency and the White House cooperating with an Irish-American monsignor and the Archdiocese of Miami to establish and maintain an efficient exodus machinery that created thousands of instant Cuban orphans and scattered them all over North America. Imagine thousands of Cuban parents sending their children to a foreign land willingly, even eagerly, into a void of sorts, where they knew no one, penniless, not knowing who would look after them or where they might end up. Imagine these parents seeing their children fly away from them, not knowing whether they would ever again be reunited. Imagine thousands of children, some as young as two or three years old, sundered from their families and their native land, flying blindly into an uncertain future. Hard as it is to imagine, all of this happened.

It happened to the author of this book, and it happened to this reviewer. It also happened to 14,046 other children, and to their families.

Between 1960 and 1962, at the height of the cold war, enough children to fill an entire Midwestern town were sent by their parents to the United States, unaccompanied, virtually unacknowledged by the American press. The vast majority of these children had no relatives or friends to take them in once they arrived in the States, yet, somehow, they were whisked away upon arriving at Miami International Airport by representatives of a well-organized program, taken to various camps in Florida, resettled throughout the country in foster homes, boarding schools, juvenile detention centers, and orphanages, to await the arrival of their parents from Cuba. Some, like the author herself, who was also part of the program, were quickly reunited with their families. Others, like this reviewer, spent years waiting, or never saw their parents again.

What drove thousands of Cuban parents, most of them middle-class, to do something so desperately odd and agonizing? What circumstances led to such a strange emigration from Cuba, and to such a puzzling acceptance of it by American immigration authorities? How was this all arranged with such efficiency, and why?

Yvonne Conde's book cannot provide the definitive answers to these questions--it is not likely that any single book ever could--but it does provide the best account to date of what happened on both sides of the Straits of Florida, and the best available analysis of the mind set of those who created this peculiar migration. Conde does an excellent job of narrating the essential outline of the history of Operation Pedro Pan, and an equally superb job of analyzing the circumstances that created this exodus, from the viewpoint of those who felt compelled to create it and keep it going.

In terms of breadth and depth, this book is more substantial than Victor Andres Triay's Fleeing Castro: Operation Pedro Pan and the Cuban Children's Program (1998), but it resembles it in various ways. Both Triay and Conde are Cuban-Americans; Triay is American-born and Conde is a Pedro Pan alumna. Neither book is dispassionate. This is not to say Triay or Conde are unduly biased, but rather that both write from within. In the case of this book by Conde, the passion seems stronger, for she was herself a participant in the very history she is writing, albeit fleetingly. Compassion has its place in the writing of history, but not without cost. Readers beyond the Cuban-American exile community will undoubtedly raise [End Page 821...