Separation and sacrifice: 'Pedro Pans' who fled Cuba see echoes today
Decades later, they still remember the pecera. The fishbowl.
They remember being ushered away from their parents with dozens of other children. They remember the room of glass that made them feel like they were in a different world from their families. They remember waving goodbye, unsure of the next time they would meet.
“They separated me from my grandfather and my father, but I could see them,” says Luis Galup, who was 7 years old at the time. “Through the glass, all I could see was my family.”
Mr. Galup is one of more than 14,000 Cuban children who left the island between 1960 and 1962 as part of Operation Peter Pan, the largest recorded organized mass exodus of unaccompanied minors in the Western Hemisphere.
When Fidel Castro took over the Cuban government in 1959, overthrowing the U.S.-backed authoritarian regime of Fulgencio Batista, his revolutionary promises made many parents fear for their children’s future. Amid Cold War anxiety, the United States government and the Catholic Welfare Bureau created the operation, known in Cuba as Pedro Pan, to bring them abroad. The program covertly distributed visa waivers to thousands of Cubans between the ages of 6 and 18, who filled up the fishbowl before boarding
A bond of separationNow or neverFamilies old and new