Opinion: Operation Peter Pan brought 14,000 Cuban children to the U.S. I was one of them. – The San Diego Union-Tribune

Garcia is a retired real estate developer/builder/designer, a novelist, painter and a filmmaker. He lives in Bankers Hill.

On Dec. 15, 1961, I became a Cuban American. That unforgettable day began when my parents drove me to the airport in Havana, Cuba, where I was born, and at age 13, I boarded a Pan American airline flight to Miami by myself. It was a short 90-mile trip, but a very painful one, leaving everything I knew and loved behind with no assurances that I would ever again see my family, my friends or my country.

After we landed in Miami and stepped out of the airplane, a Catholic priest asked all the children if they had arrived alone. There were three boys and one girl around my age. We were easy to spot by the redness of our eyes.

I first heard the term Operation Peter Pan when the priest walked us to the immigration office. Officials there quickly reviewed and accepted our entry using our visas, which I later learned had been facilitated by a joint effort between the Catholic Charities organization and the U.S. government, and I believe led by the CIA.

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After the Catholic priest dropped off the girl at a girls camp, he drove on to a boys camp a few miles out of Miami run by Catholic Charities. There we were welcomed by many other Cuban boys curious to see who had arrived that day from Cuba. We were given additional clothes since we had basically arrived with just the clothes we wore, were assigned sleeping places, and learned from the other boys as the long days and especially long nights wore on.

Until I was able to be settled with relatives in Miami, my stay at the camp was difficult, as it was for all of us. The expression Theres strength in numbers did not apply in this case. It seemed the opposite in that the sadness and uncertainty was pervasive.

Between 1960 and 1962, 14,000 Cuban children came out of Cuba to the United States as part of Operation Peter Pan. Cuban parents were willing to part with their children and risk permanent separation because of the fear that the Cuban communist government was initiating programs to separate children from their families, including sending them to the Soviet Union like had happened during the civil war in Spain, resulting in never hearing again from their children.

In retrospect, Im one of the luckier ones because I was reunited with my parents and baby brother when they were able to come to the U.S. a year later. Many of the other kids at the camp had no family in the U.S. to take them and instead ended up dispersed throughout the country to various Catholic Charities facilities. Some never saw their parents again.

The very unlucky ones were and are the millions of Cubans who over the past 60 years have been oppressed and controlled by the Cuban government in the name of a long ago revolution. That oppression has denied Cubans the human rights to choose how to live and pursue their potential and instead suffer from the despair of seeing day after day, year after year, decade after decade their dreams and aspirations slipping away.

The Cuban government is always quick to point out the high rate of literacy in the country, but then keeps employment opportunities low for the sake of controlling the economy to remain in power in perpetuity. Its cruel for the Cuban government to educate people while at the same time purposely deny them the ability to use that education to achieve their potential.

The level of despair is now to a point that everyday Cubans are willing to risk everything they have left to demand change. Change so that jobs are created so that they can make a decent living. Change so that theres sufficient food production so that they can feed themselves without having to stand in line for hours every day for their food that is rationed by the government. Change so that there are medicines available for when they get sick.

And change to have the most basic freedom of all the freedom for Cubans to express themselves, including expressing their frustration and unhappiness about how their government, that falsely goes around the world claiming to be for the people, denies them the freedom to hope and demand a better future.

Im very proud to be a Cuban American, and I am for the first time since leaving Cuba very hopeful that Cubans will in the near future have the same opportunities in Cuba that the United States has given me since my arrival on Dec. 15, 1961.

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Opinion: Operation Peter Pan brought 14,000 Cuban children to the U.S. I was one of them. - The San Diego Union-Tribune