Personal Memories of a Historic Event “The Peter Pan Program” (Excerpt)*

My name is Francisco Rodriguez. My sister Nieves and I were twelve and fourteen years old when, suddenly on a summer day in Havana in 1961, our parents asked us if we were willing to go to the United States alone. They explained to us the difficult political situation in Cuba and that they believed things would get worse before they got better. They told us that we would go to school in the United States and return to Cuba when communism had fallen.

Our mother, Cristina, worked at the Calixto Garcia University Hospital where she had been singled out as an opponent of the regime. She wanted to go with us, but her parents were old and sick, so my parents had to stay in Cuba to take care of them until "the storm" passed. We agreed to go. Since my parents did not want us to go to a communist school, they put us with an English teacher until the day of our flight, August 4, 1961.

We had already been to Miami as tourists aboard the ferry City of Havana and had stayed at the Maxim Hotel on Collins and 17th Street in Miami Beach, so we thought we would go to school in Miami. Many of our classmates from La Luz School in El Vedado would disappear in the 1950s and reappear two or three years later because their parents had sent them to the United States or Canada to learn English, so it didn't seem like such an unusual idea. We were part of a Cuban sector of society that was very oriented towards everything American, from baseball to Hollywood movies. 

José Martí Was Never a Communist (Excerpt)

Once in a movie theater in the Focsa Building in the darkness of the movie someone was heard to shout "ouch my vaccine" which was a joke since everyone had been vaccinated to leave Cuba. The movie theater employees turned on the lights when the movie showed an American flag in a Western cowboy scene. And again, they turned them on when a ham came out, yes, a ham, because food was already scarce in 1961. 

Thus it was that we became part of Operation Peter Pan (a name applied years later by the media in Miami), which allowed 14,048 children to leave Cuba between December 1960 and October 1962, destined for American foster homes or orphanages by means of the so-called Visa Waiver, which years later we would realize that what it means is that we were allowed to enter without a visa.

As an aside, I don't like the term “Estadounidense,” I say American, in the style of my Cuba in the 1950s.

On October 20, 1961, we left the camp in Kendall for Miami airport. At 4:00 a.m. my aunt Nilda showed up and said that godmother was downstairs with her foot on the gas. It was the case that my two aunts were remorseful for not taking us in, but in their two-bedroom apartment they already had four cousins, and so my sister and I preferred to head for Montana. We were four brother-and-sister pairs who boarded the plane with no one to accompany us, the stewardesses would take care of us. At that time, they were all beautiful and very elegant. The planes were also elegant, the windows had curtains and the service was impeccable. The passengers wore suits and ties, but we children did not have coats, we wore shirtsleeve shirts.

*This essay will appear in full in issue 9 of the "Anuario Histórico CubanoAmericano", 2025, published by the Academia de la Historia de Cuba en el Exilio (Academy of the History of Cuba in Exile, AHCE). 

Julio Shiling y Francisco Rodríguez nuevos miembros de la Academia de la Historia de Cuba en el Exilio

Operación Pedro Pan y Martí anticomunista este viernes en el Museo de la Diáspora