Our good friend Spun Counterguy sits down with Cuban American historian and author Victor Triay to discuss Operation Pedro Pan, which helped 14,000 Cuban children escape Cuba alone in an effort to spare them communist indoctrination. Triay wrote the first book on the operation, titled Fleeing Castro: Operation Pedro Pan and the Cuban Children’s Program.
It didn’t take long for the people of Cuba to realize after the “revolution” of 1959, they were now under the rule of an even more cruel dictator. In an attempt to protect their children from indoctrination, persecution and being sent to the Soviet Union for “special training”, many parents looked for a way to get their young off the island until at least this newest dictatorship was overthrown. So a plan was hatched by an Irish priest in Miami and with the help of many others, including the Eisenhower administration, a British woman who had helped Jewish children exit Nazi-occupied Europe and even a Kentuckian working in Havana. When it was all said and done, over 14,000 Cuban children were flown to a safe but uncertain future in the United States. The first historian to write a book about this incredible feat- eventually known as Operation Padro Pan- was Victor Triay. The book is called Fleeing Castro and he’s Back By The Woodpile to talk about some of the finer points and mysteries of this modern day exodus.