In 1961, as Maria de los Angeles Torres said goodbye to her tearful parents at the Havana airport, a guard tore Torres’ red-headed doll, Isabel, out of her arms, suspecting that valuables were being smuggled out of the country in the doll’s plastic body.
“I gave him a dirty look,” said Torres, then 6. “He gave me the doll back.”
Torres had fled Cuba under a secret U.S. government program to evacuate thousands of children from the communist country with the help of the Catholic Church.
The secret airlift, dubbed Operation Pedro Pan, still stirs emotions among many of the children, particularly the thousands whose reunion with their parents was delayed for years, or never took place. In the final analysis, a program designed to help families–by laying the groundwork for resettling in the U.S.–fractured many families and left permanent scars.
For the Cuban-Americans who ended up in Chicago, the memories can still be painful.
“What I remember from the trip was the crying–all the kids crying on the plane,” said Maria Masud, 49, a Spanish professor at DePaul University who left the island nation with her little brother when she was 14.
It was almost two decades before another local Pedro Pan child, Rafael Ravelo, now 50, saw his parents again.
“I couldn’t go back, nor did I want to,” said Ravelo, who left when he was 13 and began studying with the Christian Brothers.
Ravelo eventually left the Catholic religious order, becoming executive director of Erie Neighborhood House on Chicago’s Near Northwest Side.
“It was painful going back to family that grew up without me,” Ravelo said of his visit back to Cuba. “My mother was in her early 30s when I left. She was in her 50s when I came back, so there were marked changes.”
Despite the trauma of family separation, many of the Pedro Pan children became high achievers and leaders in the communities where they settled, including Chicago.
Torres, now 42, and a political science professor at DePaul University, is one of those success stories. She was Mayor Harold Washington’s liaison to the Latino community from 1983 to 1987.
Through the years, the girl who didn’t want to give up her doll to government officials has become a woman who is unafraid of challenging government authority.
On Monday, Torres filed a lawsuit against the Central Intelligence Agency, seeking a court order compelling the agency to release all documents relating to the secret airlift of the children out of Cuba between 1960 and 1962, during the height of the Cold War. The CIA, she suspects, has files on the operation and likely played a key role in its formation.
“I believe scholars, the public and those whose lives were affected have a right to review documents about the history of government actions that led to the unaccompanied journey of 14,000 children to the United States,” Torres said.
At the root of this quest for information is whether the operation really was a humanitarian effort, or whether it was conceived and carried out to destabilize Cuba.
The Pedro Pan children were to stay with relatives or with social service agencies while they petitioned the federal government to allow their parents to emigrate. If the parents passed extensive security checks by the FBI, CIA and other government agencies, they were allowed to join their children in the U.S.
The original intent of the program, under the auspices of the Catholic Church, was to evacuate the children whose parents were involved in the Cuban Underground against Fidel Castro, but the operation was expanded to include families whose parents were simply seeking a better life for themselves and their children.
The U.S. government gave Rev. Bryan Walsh, a Miami priest, authority to bring the children to the U.S. without visas, and in exchange, the church would look after the children.
The program worked for about 6,000 of the children, who, like Torres, were reunited with their parents within a few months.
The other 8,000, though, had to live in a variety of settings, usually arranged through religious groups. These included Catholic summer camps, orphanages, boarding schools and foster homes.
“Some never saw their parents again,” Torres said. “In 1962 they were more worried about nuclear weapons than children.”
Masud described the temporary Catholic Charities camp she and her brother stayed in as chaotic.
“A lot of children had emotional difficulties; there was a lot of shouting,” she said. “Luckily, my parents came. I think it was 36 days after. It was raining. I didn’t care. I ran out of the house to meet them.”
The program continued after the Bay of Pigs invasion in April 1961, but President John F. Kennedy stopped the flights after the Cuban missile crisis in October 1962, separating the remaining children from their parents.
“A program that started out as trying to save the children from communism, a system that was said to destroy families, ended up dividing families,” Torres said.
Torres termed the lawsuit a last resort, saying she had tried unsuccessfully for the last five years to gain the documents through Freedom of Information Act requests to the CIA.
“The more I came to understand the present moment in U.S.-Cuban relations, the more I knew there was something of the past I didn’t understand,” Torres said. “When my daughter turned 6, the same age I was when I left Cuba, I realized I had to search for the answers.”
Anya Guilsher, a CIA spokeswoman, said the agency would not comment on pending litigation. She said, however, that “no relevant documents were discovered” when the agency researched the Freedom of Information requests.
Walsh, then director of Catholic Charities of Miami and now a monsignor, said, “I’d be horrified at the idea that the CIA was not aware of what was going on. I’m curious to know what the CIA knew about it.”
He disagreed with Torres’ assessment of the program, asking, “Would they rather have stayed in Cuba and be cutting sugar cane now?”
It may seem unbelievable that the airlift went undetected under Castro’s nose, but it was not unusual to see middle-class Cuban children traveling alone to the U.S., where for years they had customarily gone to boarding or military schools.
Though she was taking the journey of a lifetime, Masud packed nothing but three dresses, giving her prized stuffed toy lion to an aunt.
“I begged to keep that animal,” she said. “When I went back to Cuba in 1979, my aunt still had it.”
