The Lost Apple: Operation Pedro Pan, Cuban Children in the U.S., and the Promise of a Better Future
In the early 1960s-40 years before Elian Gonzalez was found tied to an inner tube off the Florida coast-more than 14,000 unaccompanied Cuban children arrived in the United States through a clandestine airlift program known as Operation Pedro Pan. Unable to get their own visa waivers, many Cuban parents chose to send their children abroad (with the help of U.S. church and government groups) rather than subject them to the uncertainty of Fidel Castro's new Communist state. Torres was one of those children. In this blandly written book, she weaves her own experiences as a six-year-old waiting for a family friend to fetch her in the Miami airport with historical facts and interviews with the program's leaders, from the Miami priest who placed the children in temporary homes to the underground anti-Castro activists who helped facilitate matters on the island. The author of In the Land of Mirrors: Cuban Exile Politics in the United States and a political science professor at DePaul University, Torres is thorough in her research but fails to present a whole and compelling picture of the largest child refugee movement in the Western hemisphere. It's a failing she admits, one that she attributes in part to her inability to gain access to classified Cold War documents held by the CIA. While she touches on issues that will resonate with readers of any background (xenophobia, sexual abuse by priests, the agonies of family separation), Torres is at her most insightful when comparing the Elian Gonzalez saga with the plight of the Pedro Pans and addressing the broader issue of the time-worn use of children as political vehicles.Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc.--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.