Operation Pedro Pan and the Children Who Could Fly

Abstract

Chapter 4 considers who initiated the airlift and how it was organized. This chapter suggests parents had many varied motives for sending their children to Miami. After the nationalization of education in Cuba, some Cubans regarded Operation Pedro Pan and the Cuban Children’s Program, which was set up by Father Bryan Walsh of the Catholic Welfare Bureau and funded by the federal government, as a free, all-expenses paid beca (or scholarship) to a U.S. private school. Other parents wanted to prevent their children from becoming involved in pro-government political activities, such as the literacy campaign, or alternatively become young anti-Castro activists. The author argues that the special visa waiver scheme for unaccompanied minors acted to encourage family separation rather than assist the emigration of Cubans as family groups, and that Catholic clergy, if not the Catholic church as an institution, played a significant role in promoting and organizing this scheme.