Operation Peter Pan, or Pedro Pan, freed some 14,000 Cuban children from living under the dictatorship. The operation took place at the very beginning of Fidel Castro's regime, since the latter was inaugurated on the last day of 1959, and the Pedro Pan operation took place between 1960 and October 1962, when the missile crisis occurred.
It was organized by the U.S. Government, mainly by the CIA, together with the Catholic Church and the now defunct airline PanAm. One of those Pedro Pan's children is Vicente Méndez, and he has been interviewed for Voz Media by his daughter Flor Robledo.
The interview shows the plight of a 9-year-old boy, who says goodbye to his parents because of a situation he cannot understand. All his parents' wish is that he could live in freedom, which he found in the United States since March 1961. Mendez refused to be relocated to Colorado: "I was terrified of everything that had to do with Colorado. In my mind, I thought it was a red land, with the communist flag everywhere." He ended up in New Jersey.
This extraordinary interview can be seen in Voz Media.
