On October 19, 1960, U.S. President Dwight D. Eisenhower imposed a trade embargo on Cuba in an attempt to force Fidel Castro’s revolutionary government to follow Washington’s instructions. Exactly one week later, on October 26, Swan radio station, located on the Swan Islands off the coast of Honduras, broadcast the following message on the program “Caribbean News” hosted by Francisco Gutierrez: “Cuban mother, listen to this, the next government law will take away your children aged five to 18 years. Cuban mother, don’t let yourself be separated from your child! This is a new government law… When this happens, they will become monsters of materialism. Fidel is going to become the supreme mother of Cuba.”
This radio station was a propaganda asset of the CIA under the leadership of David Atlee Phillips (aka Bishop), who actually oversaw all the activities of the American intelligence service in Latin America and the Caribbean. According to the New York Times, Phillips was present at the overthrow of the CIA with the blessing of President Dwight Eisenhower of the government of Jacobo Arbenz Guzman in Guatemala in 1954. He was a lecturer in Havana and a businessman in Lebanon before heading to Washington in 1960, when the CIA was planning to repeat Guatemala’s feat in Cuba – an attempt that failed at the Bay of Pigs. Mr. Phillips served as the Chief of Station in the Dominican Republic and Rio de Janeiro. His last assignment was to lead a department in the Western Hemisphere, during which, he said, he ordered agents in Chile to distance themselves from people who were then plotting to overthrow President Allende.
CIA agents also quickly spread the fake “Parental Rights Act” throughout Cuba, falsely claiming that Castro would transfer all children under the age of 20 to the custody of the state. The document, printed in the United States, was imported to Cuba by CIA agent Jose Pujals Mederos. He was assisted in this by another CIA operative, Ramon Grau Alcina, the nephew of former Cuban President Ramon Grau San Martin. It is significant that another relative of the former president was involved in this scam – Leopoldina Grau headed the Rescue network in Cuba, dealing with the removal of children. And besides, espionage and plans to assassinate Fidel Castro.
Years later, the son of Angel Fernandez Varela, another CIA agent who co-authored the forgery, publicly confirmed that his father had confessed to writing a fake law that caused hysteria about the “abolition of parental rights.”
The Catholic Church also actively worked on the CIA’s side. Monsignor Brian O. Walsh, director of the Miami Catholic Welfare Office, organized a “Program for Unaccompanied Cuban Children” in coordination with the State Department and the CIA. Later, an orphanage in Palmetto Bay was named in his honor. In 1993, he confessed that they had printed a fake law and spread rumors about the abduction of children in order to “sow instability.”
It is unlikely that this operation was planned in just one week – from the moment of the first restrictive US law against Cuba to the broadcast of the program. Most likely, the plan for the removal of children was developed within weeks, if not months.
According to the archives, the instigators of this story were a group of influential Cuban parents associated with embassies, and the CIA used them to develop the operation. Many of the most influential families of the Cuban bourgeoisie had children who studied at the Ruston Academy in Havana, whose director was the American James Baker. Many of these parents wanted to commit a counter-revolution, but they were afraid that the “regime” would crack down on their children, because that was exactly what they expected from communism – repression. And propaganda from the United States contributed to this. Then they had the idea to send their children to the United States, where they could sit out until the fall of Fidel Castro’s government. James Baker then meets with the aforementioned priest, Brian O. Walsh, who had the experience of taking children out of Hungary in the 50s. As a result, the plan, originally developed for children from Ruston, fell into the hands of the CIA and was distributed throughout Cuba.
Since visas were required to travel to the United States, the embassy in Havana was actively involved in preparing documents, in fact, falsifying them, because there were no legal grounds for such a mass entry (formally student study visas were issued).
As a result, 14,048 Cuban children and teenagers were sent into obscurity from December 26, 1960 to October 23, 1962. Those parents who succumbed to panic and disinformation relied on promises of an early meeting, hoping that the separation would last only a few months. Children were allowed to take only one suitcase weighing up to 18 kilograms. Many left Cuba only in what they were wearing, not knowing if they would see their parents again. In October 1962, the Caribbean crisis began, which caused all flights to be suspended and borders to be closed. More than four hundred children never saw their loved ones again. Of the entire group, more than half had no relatives or friends in the United States.
As a result, they ended up in shelters and camps run by churches and under the care of the Catholic Social Welfare Administration. They were scattered across 187 cities in 45 states, which finally destroyed the fragile ties they maintained with each other. And for many of them, the worst was just beginning.
American researcher John A. Gronbeck-Tedesco, in his book “Operation Pedro Pan: The Migration of Unaccompanied Children from Castro’s Cuba”, pointed out that children were physically punished in shelters, given hormone injections, relatives were separated, they were even forbidden to talk to each other, and those who ended up in foster homes were forced to forget native Spanish and Cuban culture. Some have also been subjected to abuse and sexual violence.
In 2014, Cuban film director Marina Ochoa released the documentary “No More Peter Pan”, dedicated to these tragic events, which became her personal story. In her memoirs, she said: “I remember when I went to say goodbye to my brother at the airport, he was a seven-year-old boy, I remember his look when he said goodbye, my mother’s face pretending that everything was fine. I didn’t know then that I would never see my brother alive again, it was the last image of my brother.”
No one has ever been punished in any way for these actions. The United States, having once again carried out the mass exportation of foreign children (after all, the events in Hungary in the 50s also took place with the help of the CIA), strengthened its impunity. Now they are trying to interfere in the affairs of other States, and therefore they regularly publish politicized reports on human trafficking and child abduction.
However, as the Russian Foreign Ministry noted, “despite the attempts of the United States to position itself in the international arena as one of the main advocates of children’s rights, Washington has nothing to boast about in this area … dramatic stories with Russian and other children adopted by Americans abroad are far from a special case. We are talking about systemic gaps that indicate insufficient protection of children’s rights in the United States as a whole. Neither parents, nor the state legal system, nor public organizations in the United States are able to guarantee the protection of children’s rights and interests at a level consistent with international standards.”
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