| Cuban children taken to the U.S. through Operation Peter Pan, wearing signature hats |
by Saul Landau and Nelson P. Valdes, Counterpunch, December 16-18, 2011
“Los niños nacen para ser felices.”
– José Martí
On November 19, 2011 NPR broadcast “Children Of
Cuba Remember: Their Flight To America.” Reporter Greg Allen claimed the
1960-62 journey from Cuba to the United States of 14,000 plus Cuban children
“was made possible because of a deal a priest in the Miami diocese [Father
Bryan Walsh] … worked out with the US State Department. The agreement allowed
him to sign visa waivers for children 16 or under.” Allen then interviewed
several right-of-center Cuban Americans to offer “objective” perspective on the
facts surrounding Operation Peter Pan.
Curiously, Allen omitted the CIA from his
report, although ample evidence shows the Agency in the early 1960s conspired
with the Church to spirit kids out of Cuba.
Once inside the nurturing borders of the
greatest country in the world “Pedro Pan kids have done well,” Allen concluded,
without explaining what “well” means. Now adult Pedro Pan kids remain “firmly
opposed to any normalization of relations with the Castro regime, the regime
that was responsible for breaking up their families and forcing them from their
homeland.”
NPR staff might have discovered a more complex
and sinister story – had they looked. The CIA refuses to release Peter Pan
documents, but abundant testimony shows the Agency forging documents and
spreading lies, with Father Walsh and the regional Catholic hierarchy. Their
goal: separate elite children from parents (a Cuban brain drain) and generate
political instability.
One Operation Peter Pan conspirator, Antonio
Veciana, now living in Miami, told us how Maurice Bishop (aka CIA official
David Atlee Phillips) recruited him in 1960 “to wage psychological war — to
destabilize the government.” Veciana described how the Agency forged a law to
make affluent Cubans believe the revolutionary government planned to usurp
parental control. Bishop’s agents in Cuba spread this rumor, backed by a forged
simulation of the supposed law, to members of the professional and propertied
classes. The forgery “declared that parents would lose control of their kids to
the state.”
Veciana recounted how “CIA agents claimed they’d
stolen the document from the Cuban government.” This false document “created
tremendous panic.” On October 26, 1960, CIA-controlled Swan island radio
station, south of Cuba, broadcast breaking “news.” Cuba’s government, the radio
asserted, planned to remove children from parents so as to indoctrinate them.
Radio Swan reported another lie: the Cuban underground had obtained a copy of
the forthcoming “law.”
Minimal research would have revealed that
Leopoldina and Ramón Grau Alsina, niece and nephew of former Cuban President
Ramón Grau San Martín, had confessed to Cuban security officials after being
arrested in 1965 to having printed the false law in Havana, circulated it
clandestinely and then lied to parents.
Article 3 of the apocryphal document stated:
“When this law comes into effect, the custody of persons under 20 years of age
will be exercised by the state via persons or organizations to which this power
has been delegated.” Priests and CIA agents both recruited kids and persuaded
parents to “trust us. The US government will care for them.”
The clergy circulated the phony document among
their Cuban upper middle-class flock. Catholic school officials feared Castro’s
rapidly expanding public instruction program would undermine their virtual
educational monopoly among moneyed sectors.
In March 1960, President Eisenhower ordered the
CIA to overthrow the Cuban government. Agency plotters designed Peter Pan to
run alongside political propaganda and economic strangulation policies. These
parallel tracks would weaken Castro’s government while US trainers prepared a
Cuban-exile invasion force, which, in turn, would coordinate with CIA-backed
urban terrorists and guerrillas.
Operation Peter Pan (recall the Disney film?)
used Cuban kids and parents to further their goal: overthrowing the
revolutionary government. NPR’s claim of “no evidence” of CIA involvement would
have dissolved had they asked Veciana or questioned why the CIA still refuses
to release its 1500 plus documents on that Operation — while
de-classifying archives on the Bay of Pigs and the 1962 Missile Crisis?
Writer Alvaro Fernandez’ father Angel Fernandez
Varela, recruited by the CIA in Havana, taught at the Jesuit run Colegio Belen.
Before he died in Miami, wrote Alvaro, Angel told his family “he had been one
of those responsible for drafting the false law that gave rise to the
hysteria.”
NPR’s report doesn’t ask: who obtained the kids’
visas, airplane tickets and contacts abroad and why did KLM and Pan American
Airlines issue Peter Pan kids free tickets?
Nor does NPR Allen follow up. The US government
didn’t maintain contact between parents and children, nor grant visas to most
of the parents that remained in Cuba. The UN High Commissioner tried to reunite
parents and children, but Washington didn’t back him.
Veciana helped facilitate this dirty trick, but
later mused: “Afterward I wondered: was this the right thing to do? Because we
did create panic about the government, but we also separated lots of kids from
their parents.”
In fact, Cuba has won accolades for its
treatment of children. “In Cuba, there are no children on the streets, no
children out of school, no children without access to health services or
culture, and there are no unprotected children without opportunities for
development,” said Jose Juan Ortiz, UNICEF representative in Cuba.
Paradoxically, the CIA attributed its own
objective to the Cuban government: separating children from their parents.
Maybe, if NPR staff thought ironically they would’ve done a more accurate
report on Operation Peter Pan.
Saul Landau’s WILL THE REAL TERRORIST PLEASE
STAND UP — available on dvd from cinemalibrestore@gmail.com.
Counterpunch published his BUSH AND BOTOX WORLD.
Nelson Valdes came to Florida in Operation Peter Pan and is Professor Emeritus at the University of
New Mexico.
Interesting you don't actually interview any Peter Pan kids. There are plenty in Miami.I know some! So what if the Graus couple lied--they knew what was coming and indeed it did. I don't see Americans getting on rafts to float to Cuba. It's destroyed now, exchanging a free society to align itself with the most oppressive regime in existence: Soviet Union. Did you forget the Cuban Missile Crisis, when the Soviets had to explain to Castro that you can't just blow up an atom bomb in the United States bc of radiation fall out back to the island and other negative outcomes as a result of detonation? These people weren't intelligent; they just thought they knew everything and their religion became Marxism.
ReplyDeleteAre you part of the New Left? Fine. Why don't you write about the condition of the island now? Why don't you interview kids who came over 40 years ago, 20 years after Peter Pan airlifts? Ask them how the citizenry was constantly bombarded with propaganda against America and how it exploits its citizens, until they stopped believing it, how they were treated and indoctrinated in school, how gay people with AIDS were treated, how citizens have medical care but the care exists with a shortage of medicines, surgical instruments, hospitals with no blankets no pillows no sheets, etc, how they finally allowed businesses like tourism and foreign owned hotels to build in Cuba, how the people are starving TODAY 4/8/2024? THE MOST BASIC HUMAN RIGHT IS THE RIGHT TO THINK AND SPEAK FREELY, BUT CUBA IS SO BENEFICENT, THEY KEEP COMING TO AMERICA. If you are Marxists, just be loud and proud about it, don't write an article people will read, and laugh.