Introduction

The story of Operation Pedro Pan (or Operation Peter Pan) and the Cuban Children’s Program remains a highly contested one, still regarded in Miami as an urgent humanitarian “rescue” mission while in Havana it is viewed as a scheme that hoodwinked parents into sending their offspring out of the country as unaccompanied minors and sometimes even described as a mass kidnapping. This book moves beyond Cold War tropes about threats to the Cuban family by the revolutionary government and uses the episode to examine in detail the social reforms that unfolded in the wake of the 1959 Cuban Revolution and how these changes encouraged a new revolutionary youth culture of political activism and challenged the United States’ historical, political, and economic control and cultural influence in Cuba. By focusing on the generation of young Cubans who came to maturity in the early 1960s and tracking the parallel trajectories of the Pedro Pan children and their siblings, friends, and classmates who stayed on the island (100,000 of whom participated in the 1961 national literacy campaign), this book for the first time takes a broader view and presents a more nuanced explanation of this history.

Operation Pedro Pan and the Exodus of Cuba's Children

This in-depth examination of one of the most controversial episodes in U.S.-Cuba relations sheds new light on the program that airlifted 14,000 unaccompanied children to the United States in the wake of the Cuban Revolution. Operation Pedro Pan is often remembered within the U.S. as an urgent “rescue” mission, but Deborah Shnookal points out that a multitude of complex factors drove the exodus, including Cold War propaganda and the Catholic Church’s opposition to the island’s new government. Shnookal illustrates how and why Cold War scare tactics were so effective in setting the airlift in motion, focusing on their context: the rapid and profound social changes unleashed by the 1959 Revolution, including the mobilization of 100,000 Cuban teenagers in the 1961 national literacy campaign. Other reforms made by the revolutionary government affected women, education, religious schools, and relations within the family and between the races. Shnookal exposes how, in its effort to undermine support for the revolution, the U.S. government manipulated the aspirations and insecurities of more affluent Cubans. She traces the parallel stories of the young “Pedro Pans” separated from their families—in some cases indefinitely—in what is often regarded in Cuba as a mass “kidnapping” and the children who stayed and joined the literacy brigades. These divergent journeys reveal many underlying issues in the historically fraught relationship between the U.S. and Cuba and much about the profound social revolution that took place on the island after 1959.

Back to the Future?: Timor-Leste, Cuba and the return of the mass literacy campaign

In December 2005, eleven Cuban educational advisers arrived in Timor-Leste to begin work on a national literacy campaign. Adapting the program known in Latin America as Yo, Sí Puedo (Yes I Can), the Cubans trained over 400 local tutors to run classes in every part of the country, using a method they call ‘alphanumeric’, delivered via audiovisual technology. The campaign was launched in March 2007, and the first classes began in June of that year. By September 2010, three years later, over 70,000 adults, over one fifth of the total illiterate population, had successfully completed a thirteen week basic literacy course. Drawing on original research undertaken in Timor-Leste between 2004 and 2009, followed by further investigations in May 2010 in Havana, Cuba, this paper describes the Timor-Leste campaign, locating it within the historical commitment of the country’s independence movement to adult literacy, and the broader context of Cuba’s international literacy work.