Never Never Land

**This transcript comes from an earlier broadcast of this episode. There may be small differences between the text and the audio you hear above.**

PETER: On January 1, 1959, the rebel army in Cuba declared victory over a nasty dictator by the name of General Fulgencio Batista. There was jubilation on the streets, but a lot of middle- and upper-class Cubans who had supported the revolution turned against it when Fidel Castro, the rebel leader, suspended plans for elections, nationalized major industries, and started to cozy up to the Soviet Union.

BRIAN: A little more than two years after Castro took over, his government beat back a CIA-sponsored invasion by about 1,500 Cuban exiles at the Bay of Pigs. And it was at this point that the government really clamped down on anything that smelled like opposition. A lot of Cubans panicked, and many wanted to flee the island, but visas were scarce. So many parents– thousands of them, in fact– decided to put their children all by themselves on flights to Miami.

The exodus came to be known as Operation Pedro Pan. The logic behind it promoted by those running the program was to, quote, “save these children from communism.”

PETER: The newest member of our team at BackStory grew up in South Florida and has lived in Cuba. We asked Robert Armengol to file this report about Operation Pedro Pan, and what that episode in American history can tell us about the place of children in the national psyche.

ROBERT ARMENGOL: My cross-country coach back in high school was a guy named Carlos Barquin, but we all just called him Barq. His trademark was barking orders at us.

CARLOS BARQUIN: Okay, boys. Stay sitting down. Close all the windows, please. Let’s do it.

ROBERT ARMENGOL: That’s Barq. He’s loading a bunch of football players on a bus for a game in Fort Lauderdale. Barq is actually the school’s athletic director, but–

CARLOS BARQUIN: Don’t have enough drivers today, so I gotta drive one of the buses.

ROBERT ARMENGOL: Barq has worked at Belen Jesuit Prep in Miami for the better part of four decades. And he’s grown the sports program from next to nothing to something of a little powerhouse. He was a wrestling champ in high school. And when he coached us, well, let’s just say his running drills introduced us day in and day out to new worlds of pain. So I was surprised the other day to hear him say this about coming to the States for the first time.

CARLOS BARQUIN: Oh god, that was hard. It took me up to about three months, but I cried every night, especially when I thought I was not going to see them again.

ROBERT ARMENGOL: He’s talking about his parents.

CARLOS BARQUIN: Because a whole new life. Here is a little farm boy coming to a big city, big language barrier.

ROBERT ARMENGOL: Barq was a child of Operation Pedro Pan. His mother and father sent him with his younger brother to the United States from a tiny town in central Cuba in 1962. Barq was 12. Like many Cubans, Barq’s parents had celebrated when triumphant rebel soldiers made their way across the island a few years earlier.

CARLOS BARQUIN: They actually marched through town. I remember seeing them with the long beards and stuff like that. Everybody came out to greet them as they were going up towards Havana.

MARIA DE LOS ANGELES TORRES: It was a moment of joy, I think, for many Cubans who had wanted change in Cuba.

ROBERT ARMENGOL: This is political scientist Maria de los Angeles Torres. She has researched Operation Pedro Pan extensively and was herself a Pedro Pan child. She was just six when the revolution came to power.

MARIA DE LOS ANGELES TORRES: I remember the excitement about the change becoming at some point more of a worry. But I think, in my family, more than the lack of free elections was the fact that the Castro government started using firing squads as a way of quashing dissent. Where a lot of young men were picked up and some of them were brought to trial, summary trials. One was a very close friend of my parents. He had just turned 17.

ROBERT ARMENGOL: Rumors were spreading– they were false, it turns out– that Fidel was going to take exclusive rights over children from their parents and maybe ship kids off to Russia for indoctrination. At the same time, there was word on the street about a special program for children, supported by the church, that could provide US visa waivers for kids, offset their travel costs, even find scholarships for them to attend American boarding schools. The program was actually the offshoot of a clandestine CIA operation. One day, Barq was on horseback riding through cane fields near the sugar mill where his father worked, when–

CARLOS BARQUIN: My brother came riding a bicycle with a telegram in his hand. And he was waving. He was happy. He says, the telegram is here, the telegram is here.

ROBERT ARMENGOL: Their travel permits had come through.

CARLOS BARQUIN: We saw that as a [? great ?] [? event. ?] We said, of course, we’d love to go. And that’s how it all started.

ROBERT ARMENGOL: Over two years, more than 14,000 minors would board flights out of Cuba in the care of the Catholic Church, but largely on Uncle Sam’s tab. The Miami Herald reporter covering the story called it Operation Pedro Pan, a Cuban version of the Peter Pan story where children get whisked away, not to Never Never Land, but to America. In October 1962, everything changed.

JOHN F. KENNEDY: Good evening, my fellow citizens. This government, as promised, has maintained the closest surveillance of the Soviet military buildup on the island of Cuba.

ROBERT ARMENGOL: With the Cuban Missile Crisis, all flights from Cuba ended, along with hope for many refugee kids that they would see their parents anytime soon. Pedro Pan had lost its wings, but the name stuck. In Cuba, though, people came to call it Peter Pan to emphasize its US origins and Fidel Castro’s own narrative that these children were stolen from the revolution.

Remember those rumors about Castro stealing children? Well, it seems they were broadcast from a pirate radio station in the Caribbean run by American intelligence agents. And Torres’s research uncovered proof that the Kennedy administration secretly funded the production of a propaganda film, in Spanish and English, that depicted Cuban children adjusting to life in a refugee camp while playing up fears about the communist brainwashing that kids were said to be escaping.

MALE SPEAKER: It’s like the story about a dog who swam from Havana to Key West just to be able to bark a little. Sure, it’s lonesome at first, but you’ll make friends. Children always do.

ROBERT ARMENGOL: The truth is, for many Pedro Pan children, fleeing Castro’s Cuba came with serious hardships and sometimes lasting trauma. Torres tells one story of a close friend who, along with his four brothers, ended up in an orphanage where abuse was common.

MARIA DE LOS ANGELES TORRES: In that orphanage, the older boys were oftentimes put in showers where there was a lot of rapes, and the priest would be outside watching. For the younger ones, if they for whatever reason didn’t eat the food, the nuns would punish them. If they started wetting their beds– these were six-year-old kids– the nun would wake them up to beat them up.

ROBERT ARMENGOL: The story told among Cuban exiles is that Pedro Pan kids thrived and were immensely successful. Like Barq– he doesn’t have any harrowing tales to tell. It wasn’t easy. He bounced from camp to camp in Miami.

But along the way, he met strong mentors, including Monsignor Bryan Walsh, who ran Pedro Pan for the church in South Florida. Another was a Jesuit priest who helped Barq get his first job at Belen. Still, he didn’t see his mom and dad for almost five years. When his father arrived in Miami in 1967, he had cancer. He died within the year. So I had to ask Barq, do you feel your childhood was stolen from you?

CARLOS BARQUIN: No, at all. I thank my parents for making the tough decision that they made. I know that it was much harder on them than it was on us. I know my parents suffered a lot, but I thank them for it. Because had it not been for this, I would not have done what I’m doing today. I love what I do, and I think most of the children that came feel the same.

ROBERT ARMENGOL: My own family is Cuban. My parents left in the early ’60s with their parents and siblings. I don’t have any close relatives who were Pedro Pan, but I guess the operation has touched me, too, through Coach Barq and other teachers and friends. The funny thing is I still don’t know exactly what to make of it. What I do know is that if we compare Pedro Pan with the current situation on the southern border, the contrast, at first glance, is striking.

Today, parents already in the States want to bring their kids and raise them here in stable homes, but they face huge legal hurdles. Children in grave and immediate physical danger want asylum, but have trouble making their case because their plight isn’t, quote, “political.” And the same country that rounded up kids to save them from communism, talks about sending home children who risked everything to make it here.

But these two migrations do have a couple of things in common. In both cases, fear seems to be driving public policy. And in both cases, grownups’ ideas of good and bad seem to trump the most commonplace wish of children everywhere, to be with their family.

PETER: Robert Armengol is one of our producers. You can read more about Operation Pedro Pan– or is it Peter Pan– on our website, backstoryradio.org.

ED: It’s time for us to take a quick break, but don’t go away. When we get back, two very different takes on humanitarian aid for children.

BRIAN: You’re listening to BackStory. We’ll be back in a minute.

[MUSIC – LOS CUATRO DE BELEN – “EL CARRETERO”]