World apart and years away : operacion Pedro Pan and the Cuban children\u27s program

Between December 1960 and the Cuban Missile Crisis of October 1962, 14,048 Cuban children were sent by their families out of the country to the United States through a program known as Operacion Pedro Pan. The children\u27s memories of their homeland, their adopted country, and the program itself were formed by such factors as their age at the time of their expatriation, the length time that they spent apart from their families, and the communities that they were exposed to in the United States. While several novels and scholarly works have been written about Operation Pedro Pan, many authors have debated its purpose- whether or not the Central Intelligence Agency was trying to destabilize Fidel Castro\u27s government- and its effectiveness because, having been a part of the exodus, their experiences influence how they report the stories of others. This paper analyzes newspaper articles, surveys, interviews, and literature written by Pedro Pans such as Carlos Eire\u27s Waiting/or Snow in Havana, to determine how the widely accepted narrative of the United States saving Cuban children from communist indoctrination was formed in the United States and how this compares to the experiences of the Pedro Pan Children