MIAMI
Barry University and the Miami Herald, which has been credited with coining the phrase Operation Pedro Pan in a story in 1962, are creating a public, searchable Internet database of the names of all children airlifted from Cuba as part of the project that began the day after Christmas in 1960.
“In terms of cultural wealth, we want to maximize the potential of the archives and make them available to the people that came with this program, their families and future generations,” said Thomas Paul Severino, associate vice president at Barry, a private Catholic university in suburban Miami.
The newspaper recently launched a similar database for Cuban exiles who arrived in the United States on the Freedom Flights from 1965 to 1973.
When Eloisa Echazabal looked through the Operation Pedro Pan archives housed at Barry University a few months ago, her eyes filled with tears.
Echazabal had found a written record marking her arrival in Miami as part of a historic migration. Nearly a half-century had passed since Fidel Castro’s climb to power that prompted Roman Catholics to assist in the airlifts that brought her and 14,000 other unaccompanied Cuban children to the United States. Those arrival records, including a handwritten log, represent the most complete registry of the only political exodus of children in this hemisphere.
Cuban families sent their children to the United States alone for various reasons: the rumors in Cuba of legislation that declared all children the property of Castro’s Revolution, the fear of Communist indoctrination, the closing of Catholic schools and the deportation of clerics. The parents intended to reunite eventually with their children in the United States. In some cases, that took years.
