Operation Peter Pan: Flying Back to Cuba

Overview

Between 1960 and 1962 more than 14,000 cuban children were sent alone by their parents to the USA. This clandestine operation -with the participation of the CIA and the Catholic Church- became known as "Operation Peter Pan". Many of the parents had expected to follow their children, who had been granted visa waivers by the US government, but the Missile Crisis terminated the flights between the two countries and the children found themselves stranded in the USA. In 2009, for the first time a group of the Peter Pan children, now adults visited Cuba to give "closure and make peace with the land where they were born".