Cuba’s ’Peter Pans’ Remember Childhood Exodus
▻http://news.nationalgeographic.com/2015/08/150814-cuba-operation-peter-pan-embassy-reopening-Castro
Dash was a member of Operation Pedro Pan, a program that ran from 1960 to 1962 and airlifted more than 14,000 unaccompanied Cuban children to the U.S. to avoid potential indoctrination by Fidel Castro’s Cuban government. The Catholic Welfare Bureau and the U.S. State Department spearheaded the program and placed children in foster homes or temporary camps. Some were reunited with family in the U.S., some weren’t, and most never went back to Cuba.
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“We are a brotherhood,” says Dash, who now lives in Fairfax, Virginia. “We all ended up in different situations, some better than others, but we all have a story to tell."
Away from Cuba, many of the Peter Pans’ hardships were just beginning. Unlike Vizcaino, who stayed in Miami, 13-year-old Eloísa Echazábal and her younger sister were sent to an orphanage in Buffalo, New York.
Two months later, they were placed in a foster home. “Life in the foster home was no happier than in the orphanage,” Echazábal, now 67 and living in Miami, writes in her Miami Herald Pedro Pan profile. “I always had a feeling of not fitting in.” She describes the family as “decent and proper” but cold.
Mercedes Dash says she was miserable with her Miami foster family. Despite their apparent wealth, Dash says the family fed her and her older sister powdered milk and canned meat supplied by the government. By the time her aunt and uncle landed in Miami and took them out of the home, the sisters were noticeably thinner.
In late 1964, Dash’s parents arrived in Miami. Unable to find stable work there, her father moved the family to Arlington, Virginia. “My parents are my heroes for doing what they did,” Dash says.
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