Saving Cuban Children: Operation Pedro Pan
A new exhibit opens at the Victims of Communism Museum in Washington DC
Operation Pedro Pan: The Cuban Children’s Exodus officially opened yesterday at the Victims of Communism Museum located at 900 15th Street, NW Washington, DC 20005. There is also a permanent exhibit that provides a global view of the human costs of communism in the world. Tickets are available online.
Placing Operation Pedro Pan in context
Prior to Fulgencio Batista’s dictatorship that came to power on March 10, 1952, Cuba’s two previous democratic governments diligently upheld civil liberties while making significant contributions to the advancement of international human rights.
Ramón Grau San Martín was president of Cuba during two periods, the first between 1933 and 1934 and the second between 1944 and 1948.
During his first term, since he was a bachelor, his niece, Maria Leopoldina Grau-Alsina, served as the country’s first lady. Polita Grau was her more well-known name. She actively resisted the dictatorships of General Gerardo Machado, and Fulgencio Batista but initially backed the 1959 revolution.
However, she turned against the new regime after Fidel Castro began using firing squads in 1959, and by 1960, she was actively opposing it.
Cuban author and academic Victor Andres Triay addressed the opening of the new exhibit yesterday, in which he provided a more detailed overview of the first three years of Castroism, and the concerns it raised among Cubans on the island.
For example, Fidel Castro declared in the spring of 1960 that secondary schools would close and that “youth camps” would be established in rural areas, where Cuban children would be taught to work in agriculture and adopt a revolutionary way of life.
The dictatorship’s new ally, the Soviet Union, offered scholarships to the best and brightest to study abroad.
Castro said he would “terminate the school year and mobilize all the students from sixth grade up and send them to revolutionary schools in the countryside,” in a speech that sent shivers down the spines of many Cuban parents.
In an attempt to eradicate religious instruction, the Cuban dictatorship seized the majority of seminaries and confiscated private schools, including Catholic schools in May 1961. 131 priests, brothers, and a bishop were rounded up by the Castro regime at gunpoint in September 1961, loaded onto the Spanish ship Covadonga, and sent out of Cuba. A large number of the priests who remained were sent to forced labor camps. In 1961 alone, more than 300 priests, nuns, and brothers were expelled from Cuba.
Together with her brother Ramón Grau-Alsina, nicknamed “Mongo”, and Albertina O’Farrill (the wife of a Cuban diplomat) and Monsignor Bryan O. Walsh of the Archdiocese of Miami beginning on December 26, 1960 Polita Grau assisted the exodus of thousands of Cuban children from the Castro dictatorship. Eloísa Echazába, a young woman rescued by Operation Peter Pan, interviewed Albertina O’Farrill in 2011 and asked her about it.
Parents correctly feared losing their parental rights and their children being indoctrinated. Feminist author and columnist for CubaNet News, Ileana Fuentes and also one of the girls rescued from a life under the Castro dictatorship, wrote an account of Operation Peter Pan on the 60th anniversary of the start of the exodus that she has translated to English. Eloísa Echazába has shared a 20 minute video that also provides an overview of the exodus.
Polita Grau, her brother Ramón Grau-Alsina and Albertina O’Farrill helped thousands of children reach freedom. They paid a high price for their courageous action. They were jailed in 1965, and sentenced to 30 years in prison in 1966, for organizing the Peter Pan exodus. Polita spent over 12 years in prison before being sent into exile in 1978, and Mongo was sent into exile in 1988 after he had spent over 22 years in Castro’s prisons. Albertina spent 14 years in prison before being exiled.
Others in the network also jailed with them in 1965 were Nenita Caramés (maiden name Gloria Álvarez), Alicia Thomas, Hilda Feo Sarol, Nena Nietze, Estrella Arián y Margot and Julia Calvo, participants all in the Operation Pedro Pan network that was headed by the Grau siblings.
What of the Cuban children who remained behind, and the parents who successfully got their children out, but themselves could not leave? Author and Professor Carlos Eire addressed these questions in the presentation he gave yesterday at the Victims of Communism Museum.
Cuba expert Tania Mastrapa also found that parental fears were well founded reporting in Volume 2 of the 2013 Encyclopedia of Transitional Justice, “state control over children was officially validated in Articles 37, 38,and 39 of the 1976 Cuban Constitution, which read that the communist state controls education and parents are obligated to educate their children to be useful citizens in a socialist society.” Parents who wish to teach their children something other than communist indoctrination to their kids face up to a three year prison sentence.
This still continues today in Cuba.
According to Christianity Solidarity Worldwide, a Baptist student in Cuba was threatened with expulsion from his university on May 3, 2023, for refusing to take an oath pledging to defend socialism and Marxist-Leninism.
Two Christian pastors were jailed for homeschooling their children, and an independent journalist was beaten and jailed for covering their trial in April 2019. Pastor Ayda Expósito was released from prison on April 3, 2020, and her husband Pastor Ramón Rigal was released on July 1, 2020.
Christian Solidarity Worldwide on December 23, 2019 also reported that Liusdan Martínez Lescaille, a twelve year-old Jewish boy was forbidden by Cuban educational authorities from entering his school wearing a kippah ( also known as a yarmulke) since December 11, 2019.
His younger brother, Daniel Moises, was also subjected to the same ban and officials threatened to open legal proceedings against his parents (Olainis Tejada Beltrán and Yeliney Lescaille Prebal), jailing them and taking custody of their children for “threatening the children’s normal development.”
This is the same government that for decades has taken children out of school during the school day in order to gather outside the homes of dissidents to shout these brave men and women down for the Castro dictatorship in acts of repudiation (actos de repudio). They indoctrinate them in school and use these children for acts of hatred against non-violent dissidents.
Operation Pedro Pan was the largest children’s rescue operation in recorded history, and the organizers in Cuba paid a high price, but they saved so many innocent children from a perverse cult of personality, and a murderous ideology.
A los sufrimientos que se enfrentan los padres para salvar a sus hijos. Gracias a Dios tuvieron la visión del terror que iban a vivir si se quedaban en Cuba.