By Shasta Darlington, CNN
February 4, 2010 -- Updated 0004 GMT (0804 HKT)
Havana, Cuba (CNN) -- Marina Ochoa keeps a handful of photos of her
little brother in a faded yellow envelope.
She has a black-and-white snapshot of him as a baby and some color
portraits of him as a successful banker in Miami, Florida.
And then there's one of him as a 7-year-old, about to be airlifted out
of Cuba. That was the last time she ever saw him.
"I went to the airport to see him off," the Cuban filmmaker said at her
Havana home.
Her brother Frank was one of 14,000 Cuban children quietly sent to the
United States between 1960 and 1962, at the start of Fidel Castro's
revolution.
Their parents were terrified the new government would strip them of
parental authority and ship their kids off to work camps in what was
then the Soviet Union, or send them into the countryside on literacy
campaigns.
Those fears deepened when the state nationalized industries, confiscated
private property and closed religious and private schools.
"Our parents thought they would soon join my brother or that this
government wouldn't last," Ochoa said. "My father thought, 'Americans
won't put up with this radical revolution.' "
Her parents wanted to send Ochoa, then 11, but she refused to go.
The clandestine program came to be known as Operation Peter Pan. It was
backed by Washington and coordinated by the Catholic Church, which
helped Cuban children get U.S. visas and once in America, find a family
or go to foster homes or orphanages.
But things didn't play out as expected. To begin with, a CIA-backed
invasion failed to topple Castro.
With the subsequent Cuban missile crisis, relations between Havana and
Washington broke off completely, making travel and even communication
almost impossible.
Many parents couldn't get U.S. visas, and others couldn't get permission
to leave Cuba.
Latin pop star Willy Chirino and former U.S. Sen. Mel Martinez of
Florida are perhaps the best-known of the "Peter Pan" kids.
The operation inspires mixed feelings. Many Cuban exiles argue that the
airlift saved children who might have died trying to escape on rafts or
grown up under a repressive regime.
Others say the clandestine program put many kids at unnecessary risk,
with a few suffering abuse in foster homes and orphanages.
Silvia Wilhelm was airlifted out when she was just 14. She didn't come
back to Cuba for more than 30 years but now visits frequently and
promotes cultural and religious exchanges.
"I will always respect my parents' decision, because they made it at a
juncture in time that was when their whole world was falling apart," she
said.
Her parents managed to get coveted U.S. visas a year later and moved to
Florida.
"I think at the end of the day we were pawns between political powers,
two countries."
But it took years for other families to be reunited, and 20 percent of
the children never saw their parents again.
Ochoa's brother Frank drifted from home to home, and his family
eventually gave up trying to join him.
"He felt so alone that he wrote to my mother, filling pages with the
same sentence: Come Mommy. Come Mommy," she said.
In 1993, Frank died. He was only in his 30s.
"When the bureaucratic hurdles started to ease, it was too late. My
brother was already sick. My mother had already died without ever seeing
him again," she said.
Ochoa started work on a documentary about the exodus a year later.
Politics still divide the countries, but many families touched by
Operation Peter Pan have started to reach out to people and places they
thought they had lost. Last year, President Obama lifted restrictions on
allowing Cuban-Americans to visit relatives in Cuba and made it easier
for them to send money to relatives.
1960s child exodus still echoes in Cuba - CNN.com (4 February 2010)
http://edition.cnn.com/2010/WORLD/americas/02/03/cuba.child.exodus/index.html?eref=edition_americas&utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+rss%2Fedition_americas+%28RSS%3A+Americas%29
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