Blowback - S2 Bonus 6 - “Neverland”

Episode Date: October 18, 2021

A discussion of Operation Peter Pan with Prof. Nelson Valdes, with a detour into Hungary, 1956. Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brandsPrivacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

Hey, everybody, it's Brendan. Before we start the show this week, I just wanted to announce the blowback soundtrack is now available. Anywhere you stream your music, Spotify, Apple, it's also available on Bandcamp if you want to purchase the album and support us. These are full tracks, fully fleshed out versions of the musical themes and cues that you've been hearing this season. Music's composed by yours truly under the pseudonym The Great Vorelli. I co-produced it with Marty Solkow and Joe Valley of the band Wet, who also have an album coming out soon, by the way. And there's a very special track co-written and co-performed by the synth prophetess Robin Hatch.

So if you like the music in the show, go check it out. It's streaming everywhere, Spotify, Apple, the blowback soundtrack for season two. All right, welcome to blowback. I'm Brendan James, and this is bonus episode six, Neverland. In this episode, we will be talking a bit more about a particularly shocking and quite tragic event that followed the Cuban Revolution, one we mentioned back in the main run of the show, episode three, I believe. That's Operation Peter Pan, or Pedro Pan. This was a massive project instigated, we now know by the U.S. government to transfer about 14,000 Cuban children out of the island and into the United States following false rumors that the revolutionary government planned to seize all children on the island from their parents. We will be speaking with someone who was one of those children sent to America. Our guest, Nelson Valdez, Professor Emeritus at the University of New Mexico, has, in addition to that personal experience written extensively about Cuba.

and about Pedro Pan in particular. But before we get to that, I wanted to provide a little historical prelude to this story, one that Nelson actually brings up in our interview, because it provides, for one thing, a greater sense of continuity

in the kinds of U.S. policy that we talked about on this season, and it involves many of the same tactics, one in particular, and some of the key players in the Cuban counter-revolution, among them, the Catholic Church. What we're talking about is the 1956 revolt in Hungary.

On November 4th, 1956, Soviet tanks crossed into Budapest in Hungary. The local Hungarian communist government had essentially collapsed, unraveled during days of unrest in the capital. and after a more U.S.-friendly liberal government took over, it failed to stop the unrest and the USSR moved in. But let's look a bit closer at this incident, because in it we find not only some context for our story this season, but more than a few similarities and similar characters that showed up in the campaign to smother the Cuban Revolution.

Of all the underdeveloped countries in Central Europe, in the early 20th century, Hungary was a particularly rough case. A handful of aristocrats owned the majority of the land, workers and peasants lived in poverty, modern industry, infrastructure, and social services were essentially non-existent. And apart from a wonderful culture of music and art, one of the deeper-held traditions in the land was anti-Semitism. So a left-wing government had come to power very briefly in 1919, but was quickly torn down and replaced. placed by more or less what we think of as a fascist government, a hyper-nationalist, xenophobic blood-and-soil-type gang that employed some of the nastiest recorded methods of what you think of

as white terror. The Catholic Church, in addition to being a powerful landowner, controlled education across the country in charge not only of school funding and things like that, but also the curriculum itself. This was the character of Hungary's government for the next 25 years. And in the Second World War, Hitler was very pleased to rely on the hypernationalist Hungarian government. Now, all of this changed, however, after the Second World War. A coalition government, which included communists, ended up leading the country not only out of the devastation of the war, which was severe, but also out of its pre-existing backwardness. The first major achievement was, would you look at that, land reform. You also had the nationalization of the country's coal industry and its banks.

Standard of living began to rise. Modernization began to happen and recognized as central to this progress was the small but determined communist party. A non-communist politician and one time Hungarian prime minister said, quote, the communists had been admirable in their efforts to repair the destruction caused by the Red Army and the Germans. He meant in the war. The currency was stabilized. bridges rebuilt, wreckage cleared, factories reopened. Their dynamism dragged the apathetic population in its wake. Even those who were hostile or neutral had to recognize their merits.

The bourgeois parties were of little consequence. A couple years later, in the 1947 election there, the Hungarian communists got the highest chair of the vote, and when combined with the share of the socialists, were now by far the most powerful bloc in Hungary's new government. In 1949, adopts a new constitution, pretty similar to the Soviet constitution under Stalin, and is named a People's Republic. This would lead to the relatively small and fragile Moscow-backed Communist Party as the only legitimate political party. This, of course, pleased the Soviets, some of whose troops remained in Hungary post-World War II, much in the way that U.S. troops remained in West Germany and other places. But this People's Republic, smack dab on the border between East and West,

also put Hungary on the hit list for the U.S. of A. And in a way that should be familiar to our listeners regarding this season, the U.S. began to support, fund, and equip reactionary elements looking to turn back the clock in Hungary. One U.S. diplomat, who then retired, wrote at the time that, quote, the Americans gravitate toward the most dubious elements remaining in Hungary, the remnants of the gentry, industrialists, the higher clergy, and the motley assortment of fashion.

and opportunists. This all coagulated into a bad situation. The government was spending valuable revenue on military preparation against possible Western or American attack. The party became very closed off and authoritarian. It's forced industrialization, breakneck drive to modernize, basically backfired and slowed and eventually stopped the encouraging rise in the standard of living. And over several years, things descended into a frenzy of censorship and locking people up. So by the mid-1950s, this is generating unrest in Hungary. And as far as the class character goes, there were workers' councils that started to get established. So segments of the working class were also part of this unrest, unlike, say, in Czechoslovakia, about a decade later, the

so-called Prague Spring, which was really a middle class and professional phenomenon. This was including the workers and the party knew it. So the government actually started to change course, economically and politically. But by 56, it was too little too late. They had left themselves vulnerable to this kind of discontent and also vulnerable to a big push by the homegrown and foreign-backed counter-revolutionaries. So autumn of 56, peaceful demonstrations start. The government pretty much lets them go through. Soviet troops actually leave Budapest. But then things start to really degenerate. And it must be said, there is a greater and greater share of hyper-nationalist, openly anti-Semitic forces that are among the broader and more general uprising.

There were assassination attempts on government officials, lynchings of Jews and communists, and it soon becomes clear that those types of guys were suspiciously well-armed. There was a correspondent from United Press who, when talking to these types of armed rebels, asked, how did you get so many guns? and they gave him a, quote, stony silence. Another correspondent said it was, quote, fairly obvious today the Hungarian revolution had been planned for months or even years. One DC reporter wrote that, quote,

by some strange coincidence, practically every exiled satellite leader now living in Washington went back to Paris just before the Hungarian revolt. One Hungarian politician, no communist himself, told a U.S. reporter, quote, many of the exiles the Americans are backing are men who are marked because of their war crimes. Some of the voices that come to us over Radio Free Europe in particular

are not welcome here. During the unraveling of this government, you get a more reform-minded one that drops socialism out of its public pronouncements and is clearly motioning toward the U.S. The Eisenhower administration secretly offers them $20 million, which is a lot back then. And the reactionary forces get even stronger once this very prominent cardinal who embodied a lot of the hypernationalist side of Hungary,

his name was Cardinal Minsensi, he's released from house arrest. So now that side of the movement has a spiritual leader that's starting to become a possible contender for who might lead Hungary if the squishy liberal middle gives way to a right-wing government. The Soviet Union, for its part, viewed Hungary, as the West did, as a powder keg that could set off a chain of NATO and US-backed attacks against all of its socialist allies in Europe. So you have a general discontent. You have inside that certain cells that are clearly aligned, if not directly funded by the United States and its allies that are some of the nastier sides of reaction in Europe that are starting to kill people in the streets and threaten the direction of where all this might be going.

With that, on November 4th, the capital now spiraling out of control, the Soviets send tanks into Hungary and put down the uprising. And this was a bloody business. Fatalities, the number of them is disputed. It's safe to say that they were in the thousands. After the fighting died down, a new Hungarian Workers' Party was reinstalled as the government in a country with a far more fragile future than the one it had only a few years earlier. Now, as we mentioned at the top, this was a no-brainer for the United States and its allies to use as evidence of the uniquely evil nature of the Soviet Union. It also caused some communists in the West to break with the Soviet Union under the idea that this was an act of imperialism. Supporters of the Soviet Union,

be they individuals, or say the People's Republic of China, argued that the trajectory of uprising pointed toward a complete repeal of the social programs and progress made since after the war, which only a Soviet intervention, however brutish, could have prevented. Now, a couple reasons why I thought it would be interesting to sketch this prelude before our conversation with Nelson. First of all, in the course of our season, the Americans justifying aggression against Cuba would point very often to Hungary as an analogous case of intervention when they chided their Soviet interlocutors. JFK specifically brought it up to Khrushchev's son-in-law during the latter's visit in February 1962. Whether or not the comparison holds water, I will leave

up to the listener. Second, whatever the overall character of the protests in Hungary, we can see similar tactics at play from the U.S. State Department, the Defense Department, and of course, CIA, providing material support to armed gangs, often of the right-wing, theocratic, fascist variety, just over the border of the targeted country, pitching these types of guys as part of a movement for freedom in the region, and relentless propaganda, pamphlets, radio broadcasts, you name it, that urge overthrow of a local government that will be replaced by one friendly to the United States. And on that note, the final aspect to connect us to this season, and, in fact, Operation Peter Pan,

as our guest, Nelson Valdez, will mention, during the chaos in Hungary, in 1956, the U.S. government worked with the Catholic clergy, even more powerful in Hungary than it ever was in Cuba, to smuggle children out of the country, most to never return. During 1956 and 57, there was a massive American program driven by a logic of competition with the Soviet Union,

to bring in specifically Hungarian refugees to the U.S., coordinated with Catholic groups and clergy, in a plan that clearly echoes what will happen years later in Cuba. This was, in other words, another example of a Cold War policy dressed up as humanitarian work. And there were even similar rumors to the rumors that fueled Operation Peter Pan. Rumors in Hungary that were initially picked up by the American press, designed to scaremonger parents into getting their children out of the country. It was, for example, published that the Soviets had slaughtered 300 infants in a clinic, which was subsequently retracted by everyone from the New York Times to Reuters to the Associated Press.

In one of the retractions, it read, quote, none of the 300 or more children had been injured. We may not call this the original case, as Nelson will mention, and this sort of thing was also done during the wars against indigenous people of North America, but we can certainly call it an early example that preceded Operation Pedro Pan in the Cold War. Now, before we go to our chat with Professor Valdez, let's jump ahead in time and briefly review the broad strokes of Operation Peter Pan. And I want to play a clip here from Amazon.com. As a refugee, when you leave, you're always thinking that you can go back.

My name is Miguel Angelo Bethos. I was born in Cuba. My dad was just 16 when he came to America, and not with his family. He was all by himself. I have a hard time even imagine that. But his parents sent him here because under Fidel Castro, they felt like they had to to protect him. And fortunately, they could get him a visa. His dad owned a lumber mill, and the government had just taken it over.

They were nationalizing businesses, and everything was changing. And that was the last time that he was able to step in his personal business. My parents were not allowed to go into the airport with me, so they dropped me off. I got on an airplane and landed in Miami 45 minutes later. I remember that everybody on the airplane started clapping. It was an almost barely used passport. It has just one stamp. My dad's story really shows that people help each other.

He had an enormous amount of grit and determination, and he had incredibly kind and supportive people who guided him all along the way. It is truly unbelievable. I look back in my life, and I have lived the American dream 30 years ago. It is just really out of this world. Okay, so that was the story of... Jeff Bezos' stepfather or adopted father, Mike Bezos, who was a so-called Pedro Pan kid. He was a part of the program. He was one of the kids who came into the United States as a result of Operation Peter Pan. So I'm looking at an NPR story about Operation Pedro Pan from 2011. Children of Cuba remember their flight to America.

Sounds pretty innocuous. In Miami this weekend, a group of Cuban Americans. now in their 50s and 60s are commemorating the 50th anniversary of Operation Pedro Pan. That was the name given to a program that between 1960 and 1962, airlifted more than 14,000 Cuban children from Havana to the United States. Jose Azel today is a research associate at the University of Miami. Back then, he was an 11-year-old living in Havana. It was clear very early on that the regime was moved.

moving in a totalitarian direction with confiscations, expropriations of properties, and that sort of thing. Azelle was soon involved in underground activities. By 1961, his mother had died, and his father decided to send him out of Cuba to America. Azel says the Castro regime had started separating children from their families as part of its literacy campaign. He recalls having just a short conversation in which his father told him he was sending him away to safety. It wasn't until much later that Azel learned he was one of some 14, thousand Cuban children who fled the island in similar circumstances. It was possible because of a deal, a priest in the Miami Diocese, Father Brian Walsh, worked out with the U.S. State Department,

allowing him to sign visa waivers for children 16 or under. His story in Victor Tray has written about Operation Pedro Pan in his book, fleeing Castro. They started closing down all the schools, including, and especially the private and Catholic schools. So that caused a mass panic. And of course, these visa waivers were photocopied in Cuba with Walsh's signature. they were accepted by the Cuban government. And so these visa waivers just started to spread around the island. Okay, so that's a pretty rich history there from NPR. I think that's the story that most Americans hear about Operation Pedro Penn, if they ever hear about it. And it's pretty great because you have propaganda, American propaganda from 1960, appearing in an NPR clip from 2011. Both the narrator there and the guest, or the interviewee, both say,

that what was happening, and the reason for this exodus of children, was that Fidel Castro was separating children from their parents and closing down all the schools, although they note it was Catholic and private schools. We heard this as well in the Jeff Bezos clip where he says, my dad's parents wanted to get him out of Cuba to protect him from Fidel. This is, as we'll discuss in a moment, the exact line of false propaganda that was being spread in Cuba, to get middle class families to send their kids to the United States, and it was coming from the CIA. Now, as Nelson, our guest himself wrote in 2011, quote, NPR's staff might have discovered a more complex and sinister story had they looked. The CIA refuses to release Peter Pan documents, but abundant testimony shows the agency forging documents and spreading lies with Father Walsh, one of the Catholic priests involved,

and the regional Catholic hierarchy. their goal, separate elite children from parents, a Cuban brain drain, and generate political instability. Now, what Nelson's referencing here are the rumors invented and circulated, both by counter-revolutionaries on the island and American agents at home and nearby on Swan Island, off Honduras, telling Cuban families that the revolutionary government was planning to seize children from the custody of their parents. This had been supposedly discovered by the Anticastro Underground. Children would become property of the state and even possibly shipped off to the Soviet Union for further clockwork orange-style brainwashing. This law was to be unleashed in just a matter of time. This was all nonsense, of course. The document revealing the law was a forgery. Now, why would anyone even begin to believe this? As listeners may recall, this was just, as the revolutionary government was about to launch a major overhaul of education on the island in 1960 and onward. This would turn a fragmented, deeply unequal patchwork of schools into a modern system of education that would, among other things, eliminate illiteracy on the island and eventually

become a model for third world development. The counter-revolution and its American backers were taking advantage of the fears of the middle class, which by this time had correctly, recognized that the Cuban Revolution was not just a liberal rebrand, but a genuine class-conscious program. So the fears they had about expropriation, a greater role in government, cutting into the lives of noble entrepreneurs, et cetera, et cetera, these fears combined with the skills that the middle classes had, things you need in an economy, professions like doctors, engineers, lawyers, as accountants, et cetera. This made parents and families who were afraid of change in general a perfect soft spot for the U.S. to strike with this kind of propaganda. Nelson in his article

goes on, the clergy circulated the phony document among their Cuban upper middle class flock. Catholic school officials feared Castro's rapidly expanding public instruction program would undermine their virtual educational monopoly among moneyed sectors. Priests and CIA agents both recruited kids and persuaded parents to trust us that U.S. government will care for them. The CIA's involvement was confirmed by none other than Antonio Vetsiana, who listeners will remember as the head of Exile Terror Squad Alpha 66 and client of Maurice Bishop. Quote, afterward, Vesiana later wrote, I wondered, was this the right thing to do because we did create panic about the government, but we also separated lots of kids from their parents.

And the visas, the tickets, and the fixers on the other side in the United States, all were arranged not simply by, you know, a humble collection of Catholic priests, but by the administration of a U.S. government that was using every tool at its disposal to sabotage Cuba. And as Nelson concludes in the article, quote, the U.S. government didn't maintain contact between parents and children, nor grant visas to most of the parents that remained in Cuba. The UN High Commissioner tried to reunite parents and children, but Washington didn't back him. We'll go now to the conversation we had with Professor Nelson Valdez. Okay, I think one way that perhaps we could begin, where this idea come from of taking kids out of Cuba and so forth. And there are two precedents to this, something that is seldom mentioned. One, of course, is Native American kids in the 19th century. But secondly, is that in the 1950s, in Hungary, when there was a revolt in Budapest,

you had the U.S. government, indeed, through the Catholic Church, began a process of recruiting and getting kids out of Eastern Europe. and so forth, and that is the precedent in which, in fact, some of the priests who participated in Eastern Europe later on would be in South Florida, and then will come up with a similar idea. Could you tell us a little bit about your family and your personal background and where you were born in Cuba and what your life was in Cuba? Okay.

I was born in 1945. My personal background is slightly different from most of the children who were involved with the Pedro Pan operation. In the sense that most of those kids actually came from a petty bourgeois or if you want middle class background, most of them had gone to private schools, not public schools. Most of the kids that came out came from Havana. And many of their parents work for American companies. This thing, Operation Peter Pan, takes place during an overhaul of the Cuban education system. The state began to fund more education, began to build schools, equalize the access to education between the urban and rural areas, and also began to change what was taught.

What was this moment of change like? Kids, regardless of whether they were in private or public schools, had to take a course about Cuba contemporary development. So there we had to discuss the agrarian reform, housing reform, US-QUR relations, revolutionary movements from the 19th century and Simon Bolivar. So all of this was creating a climate of rapid politicization of a young sector of the population who then will go home and engage in discussions with their parents and so forth. disagreements. So this was something else that was going on at the time. And so this was then taken advantage of by the United States and its push to overturn or roll back the revolution. Basically, there was, as we've discussed, a clandestine plan to spark something like a mass exodus of children during this rumor-mongering about the education

reform. It is true that indeed there was a bogus document that was prepared by an agent of the US government to the effect that soon it would be announced that Cuban parents no longer had authority over their children. This was called the patria potestas, that is the father's power over how to raise their children and so forth. Interestingly enough, the U.S. government and the Central Intelligence Agency by promoting the sending of these children abroad, and to the U.S. in particular, what they thought was that, well, this would then pull the parents out of Cuba as well. oddly enough, what

occurred is that the U.S. had created a program by which the potential opposition was leaving the country. So in a sense, Operation Pedro Pan, what it did is it created

more space that have been occupied by bourgeois kids in classrooms. Now you have kids that never had schooling coming into schools. And, of course, so what you lost on one side in terms of the parents, you gain in the other, in which parents are saying, wow, now my children are going to school and is free of charge to these fancy schools and so forth. The other thing that occurred was that as those conservative teachers also left, Spanish leftists began to indeed take the role of teacher that had been.

occupied by religious persons. So in a sense, the operation rather than hinder the revolution in the final analysis helped it. Now, not only were you swept up into Operation Pedro Pan or Peter Pan, you were sent out of Cuba right around the time of the Bay of Pigs invasion in I left Cuba on April 15, 1961. The invasion is on April 17, 1961. And consequently, after April 61, there is a period in which no airplanes are leaving Cuba. Then once the invasion was defeated and so forth, the planes continue flying. out of Cuba, still taking Pedro Pan kids. How important was the exfiltration of so many Cuban exiles?

Like, you know, the exit, their emigration from the country in aggregate, not just with Peter Pan. What effect did that have in total on consolidating the base of the Cuban Revolution? Well, it's interesting because, yes, you just touch on the two sides to this. On the one hand, he was in the short term lost engineers, architects, people who knew the stock market, you name it, they left the island. And that had a negative impact on the economy. At the same time, it created more upward social mobility so that people who may have had some of the training and so forth, but could not occupy that. position because you had an American there for a Cuban who had worked for the company

for 15 years. Now you have those below experiencing upward social mobility and of course it's a revolution that did it. So what was the actual process when you were basically evacuated out of the country? So the thing to keep in mind is that through this operation it was about 14,000 and there is a different of opinion, but about 14,060 to 68 children on a company came to the United States. We flew out of Cuba in a KLM Royal Dutch airline, and the flight was very short. They would be waiting for us at least two persons who will drive us away from the airport. We had no idea where we were going.

None of us were given any telephone numbers or addresses or anything as to where we were going to be. Could you describe the actual experience of leaving Cuba as a child and finding yourself in the United States as a result of this operation, Pedro Pan? The experience changed all of those who went through it, without doubt, boys as well as girls. The parents sent children were even seven and eight years old. I for one, the first foster home. I live in three different foster homes. In either case, it was a full year. And that was true for many other kids as well.

We had no choice, but to go through a mad rush of learning English and becoming Americanized. Most of us tended to form communities in the sense of becoming very, very close friends as a way of sort of saving each other and so forth. it was difficult and first to be integrated into American society and of course there is a difference between those who were sent

to Boston and those who were sent to Albuquerque or Socorro and so forth but for example here in New Mexico it's kind of interesting oddly enough the stepfather

of Jeff Bessus was a Pedro Pan kid in Apulchurki. There are many different interesting histories. There's also high incidence, it is seldom mentioned, but certainly at least in New Mexico, there was a high incidence of suicide among some of these kids. I live with one of these kids in one of these three homes that I live in,

and this young man, Enrique, his family and so forth was sent to the countryside here to a ranch here in southern New Mexico and he honed himself that was not the rule but that happened one thing there was one contribution of Qans my age at that time throughout the country Americans learn to dance better grew a bit older, how did you think about this massive shift in your life about Operation Pedro Pan, about U.S. policy toward Cuba more broadly? It was traumatic for both of us, those who left and those who stayed behind. I can tell you that many years later, in the

late 1990s, I went to Havana. I was taking tours. to Cuba and so forth. And I went to, there's a place called the Maqueta de la Ciud de la Havana, which is a huge model of the city of Havana and so forth. And in fact, the director and his assistant were students in the same school that I was at, and we were friends. And it was quite extraordinary for us to recall. Dave, from having stayed behind us or having left, that our most significant set of social

relations, friendships and so forth, have been so drastically broken. And we are adults in our 40s and 50s and so forth, and there we were crying about the experience, about the friendships, and the fact that for many years until Jimmy Carter, We could not have much news. Please note that after the Bay of Pigs, mail service to and from Cuba was terminated by the U.S. Phone lines no longer work and so forth. In other words, the U.S. side put an end to it.

So when we talk so much about, well, Fidel Castro is, of Fidel Castro that and look how long he speaks and so forth. And no one ever mentioned anything else. It was because Fidel Castro using short wave radio was the only way that you could get some information on Cuba because AP,

UPI, ANSA, you name it, did not have reporters in Cuba any longer. It was such a big deal when some woman went to Cuba and interviewed Che Guevara and then magazine published it and so

force. But it's not because Cuba was a close society, it's rather because a wall was built around Cuba. And that wall included telephone, telegram, mail service, or even traveling to Cuba, for that matter. We want to thank Professor Valdez for giving us his time. We'll be back next week with another bonus episode. One more shameless plug. The season two soundtrack is out now. If you like the music in the show,

if you've enjoyed the music that you've heard, go check it out. It's the blowback soundtrack by The Great Vorelli. It's free anywhere you want to stream at Spotify, Apple, whatever. And if you'd like to pitch in for the album, you can get it on Bandcamp as well. See you next time.