A Contentious History: How Operation Pedro Pan is Remembered in Cuba and the United States

Operation Pedro Pan, as labeled by a Miami journalist, was a program backed by the Unites States federal government and executed by the Catholic Church which brought over 14,000 unaccompanied Cuban minors to the U.S. between December 1960 and October 1962. I knew about this wave of immigration because my maternal grandparents were two of these children. I was surprised to find that most scholarship on Cuban immigration to the U.S. either neglects to mention the children’s exodus or only briefly references it in passing. This was even more surprising to me when I learned that Operation Pedro Pan was and still is the largest exodus of children in the Western Hemisphere. I was curious as to why it has been left out of a significant amount of scholarship on Cuban immigration, and in searching for answers, I instead came upon more questions. The most glaring of which was why there seemed to be two contrasting narratives about the history of Operation Pedro Pan