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3 Cuba’s Monumental Children Operation Peter Pan and the Intimacies of Foreign Policy Karen Dubinsky As common sense tells us, and political scientists are beginning to analyze, the alleged separation of children from political citizenship is one of the mainstays of our world. “The concept of the ‘political,’” writes Helen Brocklehurst, “is formulated . . . as if separate from children. The contribution children may make to a community is often not recognized as political until it is invited to be so by adults.”1 Anyone who believes that children are not political subjects has not been paying much attention to Cuba. The politics of children are inscribed in the iconography and geography of Havana, to take one example. A stroll along the city’s seafront Malecón takes one past the U.S. Special Interests Section and, strategically located next to it, the “Anti-Imperialist Tribunal.” This large open-air plaza was built during the Elián González crisis and was a perfect site for staging the many Cuban rallies and speeches demanding young Elián’s return from his extended family in Miami to his father in Cuba. At one end of the plaza stands a statue of Cuban nationalist hero José Martí, who holds a child protectively in one hand and points an angry, accusing finger toward the United States with the other. Post-González this plaza still comes in handy. It is used for a variety of political and cultural events, so much so that it is now known, irreverently, as the protestódromo. There are plenty of reasons to point accusing fingers at the United States. Why, after years of political conflicts between Washington and Havana, did the custody battle over a single child occasion the construction of this permanent tribute? What makes this incident—of all those before and since—monumental? Elián González’s ill-fated journey across the Florida Straits in 1999, and the subsequent intra-familial and international debate about where he ought to grow up, represent an especially prominent instance of how children can act as lightning rods for—and thus bear the burden of—adult political conflicts. In this Operation Peter Pan and the Intimacies of Foreign Policy 59 case, the fate of an actual child became a compelling metaphor for a fractured nation. But there is a world of symbolic children; González is just one example of how children are inseparably attached to politics. In this sense González belongs among the pantheon of children the world over who have become (mute) global icons of adult political dilemmas: the child soldier, the child laborer, the child sex worker, or the child in need in war- or disaster-ravaged countries. Such children do not simply absorb or experience adult-initiated political issues; they also sustain them. Several centuries of history have created the figure of the child as a near-hegemonic signifier of innocence. Because we equate children solely with emotion or affect, when children symbolize a story, an ideology, a social movement, or a war, the conceit actually explains very little. But at the same time children as symbols can move emotional and psychic mountains. Elián’s precursors, rather than his legacy, are my focus here. The key to understanding the commotion caused by one migrant Cuban child lies in the backstory—the tale of the 14,000 who went before him.2 This chapter takes its cue from scholars such as Ann Stoler, who have insisted that the “emotional economy” of parenting, domestic arrangements, and sexuality help to maintain political and economic authority the world over.3 “Most formal analyses of international politics,” declares political scientist Cynthia Enloe , “underestimate the varieties of power it takes to form and sustain any given set of relationships between states.”4 This chapter argues that fifty years of child migration conflicts have, just like missile crises, bombings, and assassination plots, nurtured profound animosities between Cuba and the United States. The Creation of Cold War Orphans—The View from Cuba Between January 1961 and October 1962, more than 14,000 Cuban children under the age of sixteen, unaccompanied by their parents, departed Cuba for Miami. “Operation Peter Pan,” as the press dubbed it, was a clandestine scheme organized by the Catholic Church in Miami and Havana, working in conjunction with the CIA and anti-Castro forces in Cuba. Parents were motivated to send their children out of Cuba for several reasons. Among them were rumors (organized by the revolution...

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