You have to be terrified of seeing your children abused or reduced to slavery to accept that they leave their country alone, in a place where they risk not knowing anyone, and without knowing when we can find them. Yet this is the choice made by thousands of Cuban parents between 1960 and 1962, after hearing rumors indicating that the revolutionary government of Fidel Castro was going to “nationalize” the children of the island, or send them to Russia …
Thus, as part of the operation Peter Pan, nearly 14,000 Cuban children and adolescents were flown to the United States, thanks to the efforts of the Catholic Church and the United States government, with the promise that they would be reunited with their parents soon. Most of them have never found or even seen their parents, who were unable to join them after the airspace between the two countries was closed following the missile crisis.
In this French documentary following the classic format of commented chronology, several “beneficiaries” of this unusual immigration program recount the memories, sometimes painful, linked to their young life in pre- and post-revolutionary Cuba, but especially those of their hasty exile and its retinue, which had nothing of the fairy tale. Historians and actors of this turbulent political era (including the head of the Cuban secret service at the time) put into context this American attempt to harm the Castro regime which shattered the lives of too many families, separated forever.
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