On the evening of July 26, 1953, just over 100 men and women charged Moncada, a military barracks in Santiago, Cuba. Fulgencio Batista, a former army sergeant, had established a military regime on the island, dismissing a popularly elected president. Batista’s opponents believed that an armed struggle was the only way to restore democracy in Cuba.
But most of the revolutionaries of The 26th of July Movement, as it came to be known, were killed within hours, and many of the captured were brutally tortured. At their trials, their leader, Fidel Castro, defended their right to take up arms against the Batista government. Castro, like the authors of the American Declaration of Independence, believed that rebellion was an inalienable natural right of men.
Castro promised a Cuba that would be proud of its national sovereignty, and not be beholden to the United States; it would also take care of its poor and democratic elections would be held. He claimed that at the end it would not be a tribunal of men who would judge him and his revolution; rather, history would absolve him.
Fifty years after delivering his famous speech, Castro still is in power. His attempts at providing universal social services have evaporated with the collapse of the Soviet Union that had backed his regime as part of the geopolitics of the Cold War.
Today the Cuban economy relies on tourism and remittances from an exile community born of opposition to his regime. Opponents of the Castro regime who reclaimed their right to rebel against a government they felt had betrayed them are given harsh prison sentences or sent to die at the hands of firing squads.
In part, the tragedy of the failure of the Cuban revolution is that it had promised a society where social justice and democracy could co-exist; socialism without the political repression of Stalinism. All those who fought for the revolution would create a “New Man.” Children were essential to this social experiment. As such, children became the battleground for which the future of Cuba would be fought. For the underground opposition and its allies, the first children in need of protection were the ones whose parents were fighting in the underground, although this group also included young men who feared losing their lives if they were not quickly evacuated from the island. Almost 500 youngsters were brought to the United States under the care of a Catholic priest who had the unprecedented authority to waive visas for anyone under 16 years old. The program came to be known as Operation Pedro Pan.
But immediately following the Bay of Pigs invasion, the Cuban government took control of the educational system. All schools were temporarily shut down. The public ones would eventually be reopened with a more ideologically rigid curriculum. Boarding schools were built throughout the country.
As the battle for the control of Cuba’s future intensified, Operation Pedro Pan became the means to the exodus of more than 14,000 additional unaccompanied children. I was one of these children.
About half of these children, myself included, were reunited with their parents within months, but in 1962, in response to the October Missile Crisis, the United States closed its Cuban immigration door. More than, 8,000 children, including many of my cousins and neighborhood friends, were scattered throughout the United States in foster homes, orphanages and boarding schools awaiting their parents’ arrival. Returning to the island was impossible.
Both countries cited national security needs in shutting the immigration doors, thus eclipsing the children’s needs to be with their parents. They were trapped between two feuding states.
Like me, many of these now grown children have a need to understand their histories, not as political slogans but in the ways they were experienced– as pawns of politics. As a result, these exiled Cubans who are trying to understand their histories, have become more tolerant of different opinions on the building of democracy in a post-Castro Cuba.
And the question of whether history (and Castro’s story) will be absolved can be left to a more open and democratic process of assessing our pasts. One in which all our stories, not just Castro’s, are included.
