As a Pedro Pan child, Yale professor Dr. Carlos Eire arrived in the U.S. as a 12-year-old boy with only his brother after escaping communist Cuba. It was his faith that carried him through it.
Dr. Carlos Eire returns to talk about how his life as a Cuban refugee and being taken in by Jewish foster parents affected his faith, how he has tried to honor the sacrifices made by others to assist him and why Christianity was generally been a positive force in spite of its un-Christ-like aberrations throughout history.
So much to think about.
A cursory search for numbers will verify most of what I am going to summarize here.
Whenever people say to me more people have been killed in the name of religion than anything else, I scoff. With the 20th century behind us, we know that more people have been killed because of NO religion. Listening to the Professor in this podcast bears me out. And as for those who hate Nazis but think Communism is hunky dory, they are forgetting that Mao and Stalin eclipsed Hitler in the number of murders and tortures of other humans. Everything Hitler knew about his concentration camps he learned from Communists. And no religious oppressors, even in today’s age of easy killings by technology, can hold a candle to what Mao and Stalin accomplished in their specialty of destroying their opposition.
But here is something you could look up and find interesting.
If the missile crisis had not happened, it is estimated that about 100,000 Cuban children would have been sent out of Cuba from the Pedro Pan exercise.
In Nazi run Europe, Jewish children were sent out of harm’s way, The number of Kindertransport rescued children was around 10,000. If you compare numbers saved from Naziism and Communism in Cuba, you will see that the potential saved from Cuba, per population, was about 100 times more than those saved in Europe.
Imagine that..
There were no death camps in Cuba. There were no gas chambers. Yet those parents knew they had to get their kids out, knowing perhaps they might never see them again.
Even though the numbers in Kindertransport were comparatively low, there are books and plays and movies about that and lectures and conferences. Comparing populations and potential numbers rescued, you could say 100 to one could have been saved from Cuba. Yet how many people even know about it? Why don’t those who seem so enamored of Communism these days know about this?