Article from Jan. 2010:

Haiti Child Evacuation:: A New Operation Pedro Pan?

In a move mirroring Operation Pedro Pan in the 1960s, Catholic Charities and other South Florida immigrant rights organizations are planning an ambitious effort to airlift possibly thousands of Haitian children left orphaned in the aftermath of Tuesday's horrific earthquake.

``We will use the model we used 40 years ago with Pedro Pan to bring these orphans to the United States to give them a lifeline, a bright and hopeful future,'' Catholic Charities Legal Services executive director Randolph McGrorty said at a news conference in the offices of Rep. Mario Diaz-Balart.

Operation Pedro Pan was launced (sic) on Dec. 26, 1960, as part of a successful clandestine effort to spirit children out of Fidel Castro's new Cuba as communist indoctrination was spreading into Catholic and private schools.

According to the official Pedro Pan webpage, the operation (1960-1962) was a joint venture of the US State Department and the Archdiocese of Miami (without the cooperation with the Catholic Church in Cuba) to remove Cuban children to the US-with parental consent--to escape "Marxist indoctrination" and rumored seizure and relocation into Soviet-style camps, by the new Castro government. About half were placed immediately with family members or friends in the US. The others were "relocated" in Florida and throughout the US.

Tales of physical and sexual abuse

About 8,000 unclaimed children were housed in crowded camps in Florida before being shipped to orphanages, boarding schools, foster homes and schools for delinquent children across the country. There, some of the Pedro Pans say, they endured a multitude of horrors, including physical and sexual abuse.

Torres, now a political science professor writing a book on the operation, filed a Freedom of Information lawsuit against the CIA Jan. 12, seeking policy papers, congressional testimony, internal notes and anything else that will help put to rest the personal and academic questions that have dogged her for nearly four decades. "I've received information from INS, the FBI, the State Department," Torres said from the living room of her apartment on Chicago's north side.

"The only ones who've flat-out refused is the CIA. . . . I've pulled a million political strings. 

The origins and purpose of Operation Peter Pan have been hotly contested by both the Cuban revolutionary government and the Cuban exile community in the United States.

One "Peter Pan child", Maria de los Angeles Torres, now a professor of Latin American and Latino Studies, believes that the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) initiated the visa waiver program and deliberately spread the rumors that Cuban children would be taken from their parents by the Cuban government. She has repeatedly requested that 1,500 relevant documents be declassified, but even some 50 years later the U.S. government refuses to do so.