From oppression to freedom

During the 1960's 14,000 Cuban children were sent from Cuba without their families ,supposedly as refugees, to be kept safe until such time as they could be reunited with their parents. There is so much more to that story -
 Former Cuban children rescued by Operation Pedro Pan: “Parents wanted to get kids out of Cuba before the opposition period,” said Victor A. Triay, Ph.D., professor of history at Middlesex Community College. “Most people thought that this wasn’t going to last.”
“Anything that parents feared happened. They were dead on. They were almost prophetic,” said Triay about the chaos that happened in Cuba.
Baker, along with Walsh — director of the Catholic Welfare Bureau — created a way for unaccompanied minors from Cuba to be able to have student visas and visa waivers that allowed children to come over to the U.S. as a way to escape and save their lives from communist control in Cuba. From there, Operation Pedro Pan was born.
Families received the visa waivers from churches, from underground sources and also from private schools (before they were shut down) in Cuba. More than 14,000 children came to America through the operation
Operation Peter Pan
The origins and purpose of Operation Peter Pan have been hotly contested by both the Cuban revolutionary government and the Cuban exile community in the United States. According to some reports, Cuban radio fostered—or even invented—fears that the revolutionary government would abduct children from their parents to indoctrinate them; one such broadcast in 1960 is remembered as proclaiming, "Cuban mothers, don't let them take your children away! The Revolutionary Government will take them away from you when they turn five and will keep them until they are 18." One "Peter Pan child", Maria de los Angeles Torres, now a professor of Latin American and Latino Studies, believes that the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) initiated the visa waiver program and deliberately spread the rumors that Cuban children would be taken from their parents by the Cuban government. She has repeatedly requested that 69 relevant documents be declassified, but even some 50 years later the U.S. government refuses to do so. Her assertion is confirmed by Fidel Castro, who has recently explained that Cuban people's "Revolution had not placed any obstacles whatsoever to prevent those who wanted to leave the country from doing so. The work of the Revolution had to be voluntarily made by a free people. The imperialist response, among many other serious aggressions, was Operation Peter Pan." He further argues that the CIA, in its early counterrevolutionary efforts before progressing to the more aggressive Bay of Pigs invasion and later Cuban Missile Crisis, was attempting to use Operation Peter Pan to spread fear and doubt among the Cuban people, especially lower middle-class families (the source of most of the Peter Pan children). Without declassifying any documents as evidence, the CIA has nonetheless denied these assertions.
In 1962, the US government commissioned a documentary film created for the children who came to Miami, called The Lost Apple. The film named Cuban premier Fidel Castro as being responsible for the parents' non-appearance. According to Torres, then-Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy approved making the documentary as part of the US government’s campaign against Communism.
Nelson P. Valdes, a University of New Mexico sociology professor who left Cuba at 15, said he later became convinced that the airlift was a Washington-concocted plot to drive wealth and knowledge from Cuba.
Operation Pedro Pan
During the following months, over and over again, the station would rebroadcast that false "news item" about children being taken away from their parents. In December 1960, the CIA experts felt that the idea had taken root on the island and decided to go on to the next phase, which would split Cuban families and finally cause some of them to oppose the government. That would guarantee solid support for the invaders. Under apparently legal cover, using the services of the Catholic Church, the children's exodus began. Operation Peter Pan was carried out under a religious cloak as "humanitarian assistance" provided by the Catholic Services Bureau in Florida. Its main protagonist, who allowed himself to be used as a figurehead, was Monsignor Bryan O. Walsh.
High-ranking officials in the State Department and in the Attorney General's Office, plus the CIA officer in charge of the program, who said his name was Harold Bishop, took part in those initial meetings. In fact, "Bishop" was David A. Phillips. Naturally he had to be there. He had created Radio Swan and Operation Peter Pan…
By the time the State Department meetings ended, Monsignor Walsh had the first 500 visa waivers in his briefcase. The CIA had been clear: authorization would be granted only to children and adolescents between five and 18 years old. Not to their parents, who would remain in Cuba to swell the ranks of the opposition to Fidel Castro.

Some more links -
Cuban exile
Exporting the counter revolution
The Story of Elian
Peter Pan
My parents' firsthand accounts of the time between 1961 and 1966,before they finally left Cuba, tell of children put into ideological indoctrination at age 11. The first group of 800 children was sent to Minas de Frio en la Sierra Maestra in Cuba on March 27, 1960. They were removed from their parents and their family values to be indoctrinated in the values of the revolution for 45 to 60 days at a time. At 11 years of age, they were introduced into camps of adolescents with little supervision. These minors worked many hours a week in the fields in harsh conditions with poor nutrition and slept on hammocks. They experimented in new situations and mixed among those who would change the uneasy and unrooted moral, political and religious values their parents were still molding. They used the on-demand abortions at clinics far away from their families to reverse their errors in judgment as adolescents. Others returned pregnant and with head lice, parasites, hepatitis
and venereal disease.
Their stories and suffering is not forgotten.....................