Remembering Pedro Pan: Childhood and Collective Memory Making in Havana and Miami, 1960–2000

This article makes use of a transnational historical lens to interrogate the entangled politics of childhood and memory in postrevolutionary Havana and Miami. Drawing on oral histories, government, civic and church documents, memoirs, films, news and magazine articles, and other forms of cultural production, it critically analyzes the form and content of the stories told by and about the more than fourteen thousand Pedro Panes during the forty years between Fidel Castro’s assumption of power on the island and the international custody battle sparked by the rescue of five-year-old balsero Elián González off the coast of Florida in November 1999. During this time, influential memory workers on both sides of the Florida Straits have promoted an increasingly institutionalized series of narratives about Operation Pedro Pan, structured by mutually opposed “frames of remembrance.” The article concludes that this dialectical process of memory making has obscured the lived experiences of the actual boys and girls who came alone to the United States, even as it has served the shifting social, cultural, psychological, and political needs of revolutionary leaders and powerful sectors of the Cuban American community and their Anglo-American allies.