Elian, Operation Peter Pan and Msgr. Walsh Via NY Transfer News * All the News That Doesn't Fit December 24, 2001 Elian, Operation Peter Pan and Msgr. Walsh by Jose Perez It was mentioned in New York Transfer's intro to their post of the death of Father Walsh, but I think it bears repeating: There is an intimate connection between the CIA's "Operation Peter Pan" -- which Father Walsh, who ran Catholic Charities in the Diocese of Miami, was at the center of -- and the Elián case. What did "Peter Pan" consist of? The CIA printed up as handbills a "Law on the Nationalization of Children," said to have been "taken from the offices of the Prime Minister." This purported draft law provided that all children from the age of three on were to become wards of the state raised in state-sponsored institutions, in essence, orphanages. This canard got broad circulation in Havana in the fall of 1960 and after. Various "heroes" of the CIA have described in detail how, when, where and how this was done in their memoirs. But despite that, people believed it. A claim that this had been invented out of whole cloth by a couple of CIA agents would have been -- and was -- dismissed out of hand as ridiculously clumsy "communist propaganda." The political setting was this: In April or May 1960, the oil companies, at the behest of the CIA, had proclaimed their unwillingness to refine "communist" crude at their refineries in Cuba. The revolution had reached a sugar-for-oil barter agreement with the Soviets, and responded to the imperialists by adopting a law saying that you HAD to refine crude oil belonging to the Cuban State, and if you refused, you would be intervened, or taken over. The imperialist oil concerns DID refuse, and the refineries were intervened (taken over). The U.S. responded by adopting a whole new series of economic reprisasls, and Cuba did a tit-for-tat expropriation of all imperialist concerns on the island. Seeing their betters, nay, their masters, cut down to size by the revolution, the "national" bourgeoisie went crazy sabotaging the economy, decapitalizing left and right, violating export and foreign exchange controls. They did not think of it that way -- they were just trying to salvage what they could of their businesses and property and wealth, but from the point of view of Cuba's working people, sabotage was what the capitalists were doing. At the same time, the working people saw that they were doing just fine without imperialist bosses, and decided they could do just as well without domestic bosses, and were demanding that the revolutionary government expropriate also the national capitalists, not just the foreigners. And, of course, the leadership of the revolution was, in a sense, behind all this, channeling the class instincts of the working people towards the expropriation of the bourgeoisie as a whole, helping the question of property over the means of production to emerge as the central question in the revolution. And the revolutionary government did decree the expropriation of the capitalists in October. Fidel had warned them that if they insisted on undermining the economy they would be nationalized down to the nails in their boots and, as one American revolutionary wrote at the time, it turned out Fidel meant ALL the nails. And you know what? The next day the sun rose in the east just as it always did, and set in the west. The world did not end. Cuba did not get rubbed out by a US thermonuclear attack. Life went on. The "communists" got away with it -- that's how Cuba's richest people and the layer of managers, lawyers and other professionals around them viewed things. Then came the priests and the members of religious orders and the people from "Cristo Rey" and their ilk, the "periodiquitos" and manifestos in Miami, the CIA's "Radio Swan" and everyone else with the rumor that the revolution was going to nationalize the children, too. The pro-imperialist pitiyanqui (as they say in Puerto Rico) Cuban bourgeoisie and upper middle class believed it -- deeply, sincerely, wholeheartedly. If Fidel could even expropriate Standard Oil and Shell, if he could take away their farms and businesses, who was going to stop him from taking away their children? It is important to remember the anticommunist propaganda and hysteria of those days, which is perhaps a little easier to do in the wake of September 11, except that now this has gone on for maybe three months, and today, however weakly, other voices are heard, we communicate through the internet and bulletin boards, we read online newspapers from other countries not as swept up in the bloodlust of war. Then the unceasing bombardment had been going on for a decade or more; there was no internet and virtually no access to news or information save that in your local paper, the 15-minute nightly news on two networks (NBC and CBS), and the exact same material from some radio networks. There were no national editions of the New York Times or any other daily. And so, in a panic, the better-off-layers of Cuban society desperately sought a way out of the country. There was a problem: It was hard to get a visa, and it was soon to get much worse. And then divine providence intervened, in the form of Monsignor Walsh and the Papist cadre in Cuba. They had magic little slips of paper called "visa waivers," smuggled into the country by CIA networks. The thing was, only children could get them -- not their parents. And with the break in diplomatic relations (January 1961) getting a visa became impossible. But you could get a visa waiver for your children from the CIA/church hierarchy underground. Some accounts say that originally the idea behind this was to get the children of CIA collaborators and agents out of the country, but it soon expanded way beyond that. So thousands of parents were faced with what was for them the agonizing choice of sending their children away or risk having the government in Cuba confiscate them, or at least brainwash them into becoming communist heathens and (in the case of the girls) promiscuous and loose women. (There were even rumors that the government was planning to grind the kids up, make them into sausages and send them to Russia to pay the Soviets for weapons or oil or something. How many people believed that I don't know, for I was only nine then and am relating now things I learned about later. But the fact that such a rumor could circulate at all is telling evidence of the hysteria of those days). So at Chrismastime 1960, the theft of the children began. Stampeded by the CIA lies and overwhelmed by the reality that there really WAS something more powerful than the United States --the power of a conscious and organized working class, although, of course, they did not think of it that way-- parents began taking their children to the airport to send them to Father Walsh in Miami. Some had relatives or friends of the family to take them in when they arrived, others were shipped off all over the country, to orphanages or mostly well-meaning American foster parents who nevetheless had no clue who these children were or where they came from and tried to make them into good little Americans. Many others wound up temporarily warehoused at holding camps, the most notorious of which was Camp Matacumbe near Miami. My own family took in the son of the accountant at my father's business, who was four years older than I and two years older than my older brother. And so we were in the early '60s five children (I also have two younger siblings), two parents and a grandmother growing blind from cataracts and rapidly becoming incompetent from Alzheimer's --though we just called it senility then-- in a tiny 2-bedroom + a Florida room house where my parents still live. That boy, whose parents had sent him away into our care, had become a man without them in the years that intervened before they were reunited. And those who had been like parents to him in his high school years were then displaced, and those who had been his siblings and looked to him as the older brother as they became teenagers did not see him return home from college at Thanksgiving and Christmas or in the summer, for that boy's own parents had settled in another part of the country and neither they nor we had money for trips, or even too many phone calls. It is heartwarming to read in the wire copy and the Herald the grateful stories of the couple of Peter Pan children who thank their lucky stars Father Walsh intervened in their lives, but I know better. Nearly 15,000 children were separated from their parents by Father Walsh's and the CIA's "Operation Peter Pan." On the pretext of keeping the communists from breaking up their families, the CIA and the Catholic Church DID break up their families. On the pretext of keeping them from being sent to a foreign country to be indoctrinated into accepting a culture and way of life different from that of their native land, they were taken to a foreign country, they were indoctrinated, they were forced to accept a culture and way of life different from the one of their birth. Those affected were many, many more than those 15,000, or their parents. It was a trauma for an entire nation, and it left a wound that will heal, perhaps, when all of us who were touched by it in one way or another join Father Walsh six feet under, but certainly not before. Even from an American point of view, the idea was as cruel as it was calculated. The idea was that, freed from the responsibility of looking after their children, these parents would be all the more active in the CIA's campaign to overthrow the revolution. And prevented from coming to the U.S. by Washington's refusal to given them visas, the parents would know that the only way they would ever get their children back would be by overthrowing the revolution. And, I should add, so we understand these parents, for they were not trying to be uncaring or cruel, that they imagined a separtation of weeks or months, not years. The U.S. was actively plotting an invasion to overthrow the revolution, and I do not think it occurred to most of these parents to imagine that American efforts would be unsuccesful. But those efforts were unsuccessful. And the weeks or months became years instead. Because the truth is that the American government made a promise to the pro-imperialist Cubans, a solemn pledge, before the Bay of Pigs, to support them 100%. And after, to do it right next time. And the United States welched on those promises when it saw it wasn't just a matter of obliterating a little nation of six million people, but of having to confront the combined might of the socialist camp, which had declared that Cuba was an inviolable part of the socialist world just as much as Moscow or Peking or Kiev. So the American government shifted its focus to "containing" communism in Southeast Asia, and put Cuba --and the division of thousands of families it had created-- on the back burner. * * * To say I am not a religious person is probably an understatement. In fact, I'm not only an atheist, but I think it would not be unfair to describe me as militantly --even rabidly-- anticlerical. Yes, I know, it is not politically correct. It is an ultraleft and sectarian deviation. And when I think things through correctly, I don't send posts to this forum with subject lines like, "may he burn in hell forever," as I did for Fr. Walsh's sonofabituary the other morning. But sometimes, no matter how much I KNOW it's not the "right" thing to do, I can't help myself, because it's what I FEEL way beyond rational political thought, tactics and strategy. This isn't a position I choose to hold, it is what I am. But if I were, through some miracle, and it would take a mighty one, to go back to religion, and become a Catholic again, I'm certain I would pray to God every day to keep Monsignor Walsh in an especially hot corner of hell. And I would ask the Pope to canonize and get God to have near to him the man who, acting against his own immediate interests, put an end to the division of so many Cuban families. That man was Fidel. Operation Peter Pan lasted from Chrismas 1960 until the time of the missile crisis in 1962. When it ended there were still, supposedly, some 50,000 children with "visa waivers" waiting to get out of Cuba. This was all being done on the q.t. No publicity. A couple of children on one flight via Mexico, a few more on the direct flights, a few more via Jamaica. The American press, which got wind of the story early on, quite happily suppressed all mention of it. With the resolution of the missile crisis, the U.S. was forced to abandon its plans for an invasion and overthrow of the Cuban revolution as an immediate prospect. They dismantled the special all-Cuban army units that had been put together in South Florida in the wake of the Bay of Pigs fiasco in preparation for a direct U.S. invasion. The 5,000-strong CIA station in Miami began to be cut back. In Cuba, the revolution gained experience and strength and rolled up the urban networks and rural guerrilla bands the CIA had put together. By 1965, the United States was becoming increasingly bogged down in Vietnam, and in no position to divert the resources a full-scale Cuban invasion would have required. At that point Cuba had these tens of thousands of parents, and not just parents, but many other members of families with relatives in the States, who wanted to leave the island. By and large, these were skilled people -- doctors, lawyers, managers, technicians. Fidel could have forced them to stay and work for the revolution, and they would have, too, for any act of economic sabotage under those conditions, with the country under economic and military siege, in a state of war, would have been met, I am sure, with exemplary punishment. Yet the revolution decided NOT to do things that way. It has *always* been the position of the Cuban revolution, as a matter of principle, that the building of socialism is the task of free men and women. Yes, you can build a lot of factories and houses and trucks by forcing people against their will, but you can't build socialism that way, not, at any rate, the socialism Cuba wants. So instead, Fidel maneuvered to force the United States to open its doors to Cubans on the island with relatives in the States who wanted to go to Miami. Many of us will have lived through or heard of the 1980 Mariel boatlift, or the "balsero" crisis of the mid-'90s, when Cuba quite consciously decided to facilitate the emigration of those who wanted to leave by placing no obstacles in their path and waiving many normal emigration formalities. But those incidents were not the first. Those sorts of extremely unorthodox tactics were born in the mid-1960s, as the revolution sought a way to palliate the gaping wounds the CIA's Peter Pan rampage had left in the Cuban soul. In the fall of 1965, "someone" in Miami said, "This is unbearable. Enough is enough. These children need their parents." And they announced that they were going to take a boat to Cuba to pick up the parents of some niece or nephew in their care, no matter what the consequences. To this day, old-timers in Miami's Cuban community will tell you this was a plot by agents of the Cuban revolution, and to tell the truth, I'm not convinced they're wrong about that, although it really doesn't matter now, one way or the other. What does matter is that the revolutionary government announced that if boats came from Miami for such peaceful, humanitarian purposes, they would not be received with machine gun fire. The port of Camarioca was designated for the pick-ups, and the boatlift began on October 10, 1965. About 5,000 people crossed the Florida straits in the month that first boatlift lasted, at first in private crafts, then in U.S.-government-run charters, which were the result of an agreement between Cuba and the Johnson administration. The boat charters were soon replaced by twice-a-day flights between Miami and Havana, which brought a quarter of a million Cubans from the island to the U.S. until President Nixon abruptly and unilaterally cancelled them in 1971. The first to come, those with the highest priority, were parents with minor children in the States, the children of Operation Peter Pan, as well as many other parents who'd made their own "Peter Pan" arrangements with friends or relatives stateside in 1960. In the U.S., these Miami-Havana flights were dubbed the "Freedom Flights" and hailed as a brilliant victory for democracy. Nevertheless, President Nixon's gusano friends convinced him to cancel the flights with the argument that the U.S. could never hope to overthrow the revolution if it didn't force people disaffected with the process to remain on the island. (Ironically, some of his Cuban Mafia pals then screwed Nixon by getting themselves caught breaking into the Democratic Party's offices in the summer of 1972, and while the ensuing Watergate scandal did not gather enough steam to prevent Nixon's overwhelming reelection in 1972, it did eventually lead to the complete undoing of his administration and much else besides.) But, of course, those years of separation could not be erased. And as I've mentioned, reunification brought its own separations and emotional conflicts: The guilt of missing your foster parents when you finally had your real parents. Your parents' inability to comprehend the ways and mores of this land, treating you like the Cuban boy or girl you had been instead of the American teenager you had become. But the alternative --continuing the separation when it could be overcome-- would have been worse. Fidel did the right thing, the human thing. I said at the beginning that NY Transfer was right in highlighting the ties between the Elián case and Father Walsh and Operation Peter Pan. I think that Americans of ALL politicial persuasions were genuinely surprised, and even very few of those who followed the case with passionate interest could not fully comprehend, the depth of feeling the case of this one little first-grader evoked on BOTH sides of the Florida Straits. The proposition that the boy belonged with his father now that his mother was dead, instead of with a surrogate parent great-uncle who had only laid eyes on the child once before, and that this was true even if you didn't particularly care for the social and economic regime of the country where his father had decided to raise the child, that proposition seems so obvious as to be beyond question. But for the Miami Cubans who dominate the political, social and cultural life of that city, to have said that it was okay for Elián to go back would have been tantamount to saying that the parents who sent their children out in the early '60s through Operation Peter Pan had been wrong; that their heartbreak and sacrifices had been tragically misguided; that they had been the victims of the cynical manipulations of the government of their adopted homeland and of the earthly representatives of the God they believe in and worship. It would have been a statement that family is more important than politics for a child; that you may think the revolution is bad but that it is not, after all, the very distilled essence of everything that is evil; that Fidel isn't Satan incarnate; that for a child there can be worse things than picking fruit and singing patriotic songs -- for example, being deprived of the love of his or her parents. The gusano mafia, the Foundation and the politiqueros and the radio commentators instinctively understood this without even having to think about it. Elián was rescued on Thanksgiving day, and by Sunday night posters about his case had been printed and were going up all over town and Lázaro and Marisleysis were telling the Miami Herald that THEY were now the boy's family and he would stay here with them. And if the boy's father really loved Elián, he would move here, too, to raise his child in freedom. They pushed all the buttons of a nation that had been deeply scarred by the separation of parents and children, something so widespread that it wasn't simply a case of many individual misfortunes, but a national trauma. And those buttons were pushed, not just for Miami, but for Cubans on the island, too, although the reaction there was exactly the opposite. What led to the massive, historic mobilization of the Cuban people to rescue Elián wasn't Fidel's say-so, or something the party or the government did, not to begin with. It was the propaganda emanating from the gusano radio stations in Miami. Before Fidel or the Cuban media had said word one about the case, people in Cuba were seething in outrage, and the reaction of the people a few days later, when Fidel first spoke out about this issue and said, in effect, let's give the Clinton administration a couple of days to see if we can straighten this mess out, the reaction of the Cuban people --represented by technical school students who were having a congress in Havana that weekend-- was to march on the U.S. Interests Section the next day and basically place it under siege -- not, of course, a violent siege, but a moral and political siege. That's how the battle began. Why did young people in Cuba react this way? Because the entire country had been talking about it for days, even if next to nothing had appeared in the media. They had absorbed from their parents and grandparents and other adults the experiences of the Cuban nation, and were determined NOT to allow a repetition of Father Walsh's and the CIA's exploit, not even to the extent of a single child. The Elián case took the bandages off and rubbed salt into wounds that had never healed. I've gone out of my way to stress how what Walsh and the CIA did impacted not just those in Cuba, but those in Miami also, because what they did was not just a crime against the Cuban revolution, but against the Cuban nation, the Cuban people, over and beyond ideology and politics. Of course, the Miami mafia doesn't see it that way. For them, Walsh was a hero, a great humanitarian, and they will not even countenance discussing the subject because to do so would be to admit how cruelly they were used and what tremendous damage it did to their lives and, in the case of the parents, to the lives of their children. But I believe that many years from now, when all of us are dead and buried and historians look back and try to reconstruct what all the shouting was about, the books they write will describe Operation Peter Pan for what it was -- a monstrous crime. José ================================================================= NY Transfer News Collective * A Service of Blythe Systems Since 1985 - Information for the Rest of Us 339 Lafayette St., New York, NY 10012 http://www.blythe.org e-mail: nyt@blythe.org ================================================================= nytact-12.25.01-07:46:03-525