Operation Pedro Pan: The Untold Exodus of 14,048 Cuban Children

As a Pedro Pan child I can personally testify on this sad segment of Cuban history. The author of this book does a wonderful research job. The material shows both the good and negative sides of Operacion Pedro Pan, the children's own letters, and even their thoughts on the exodus forty years later, laudatory and condeming. I am thankful that our story was so well written and I was able to give copies of our story to my children.

This book narrates a very important chapter of the cuban exile history. I am one of the children of Peter Pan and proud of it. Buy it for your children and the generations to come.

This book brings to light a historical phenomenon hidden beneath the spotlight of cold war headlines of the early 1960s. Nearly forty years later, the exodus of 14,000 Cuban children whose lives were devastated by those headlines would still be hidden, if not for the diligent work of Yvonne Conde. Through painstaking research and sensitive, insightful writing, Conde has laid out in meticulous detail a more complete story of the effects of Castro's revolution on the lives of the Cuban people than I have read before. As a middle-class American who was fourteen in 1961, I was shocked to read of this all-but-lost piece of history-14,000 Cuban children sent alone from their homes, many of whom were my age at the time. Impressive in her ability to combine a clean, journalistic style with empathy and deep insight, Conde has written a beautiful and important book that lays out a timeline of political events even as it captures the personal pain, loneliness and fear of innocent children. The author tells each story in a way that compels the reader to imagine being a child again, suddenly sent away from parents and home to adjust, at best, to a foreign language, strange food and customs and harsh climates and, at worst, to endure the nightmare of physical, emotional or sexual abuse at the hands of strangers. This is essential reading for anyone who wants to know the whole story.

I just finished reading Operation Pedro Pan and I found it engrossing! I couldn't put it down. Although I am Cuban and a Pedro Pan child myself, I believe I am objective when I say that, yes, the book has a couple of typos, but nothing that detracts from the overall quality of this important historical work. As for it not being "organized"according to the Booklists review, Ms. Conde has presented a wonderful chronological sequence of events, starting with a thorough explanation of the political events in Cuba 1959-62 that made our parents take the drastic action of sending us away. It is followed with information on how the program started, how the visas were distributed clandestinely in Cuba, the temporary shelters in Miami where we were placed, letters from the children back then, and chapters on orphanages, living with foster families, abuse, forgetting our Spanish, the reunions with our parents, what happened to some of us in the 60's and 70's and comments from the children today on how this experience affected us. It finishes with the very valuable results of her questionnaire to 442 of the children, the only research of its type to date, as far as I know. Not well organized? C'mon! As for "not particularly well written"(Booklist again) people either like or dislike different authors and their styles, I found hers to be journalistic and easy to read. Who are these critics and what are their hidden agendas?

To Yvonne M. Conde I want to say, thank-you, thank-you, thank-you for writing this book. This true story is very close to my heart, for I am also, a Pedro Pan child. Reading this book was painful at times but at the same time it validated my part in it. As time goes by sometimes you wonder, did all that really happened or is my memory playing tricks on me? For me it has been almost 38 years. The book is very easy to read and the research that was involved comes through. I am buying two more copies to give my american born daughters. They have heard some of the stories from me, but again this is validation. I can identify with many of the feelings expressed by the other stories and I could not have said it as eloquent. This book will be with me forever.