Religious Cold War: Operation Pedro Pan in the United States and Cuba relationship
Operation Pedro Pan; Cold War; Catholic church; anti-communism; Cuban Revolution
This thesis seeks to understand the role assumed by Operation Pedro Pan in the political and religious conflict between the United States and Cuba in the Cold War. This dramatic episode in Cuban history after the revolution of 1959 was marked by the departure, most of them definitive, of approximately 14,000 unaccompanied young people from the island to Florida, with the help of the US government, the Catholic Church and a network of opponents of the revolutionaries. Initially, the keynote is to understand how the religious anti-communist imaginary was decisive for the emergence and development of the operation, so that, later, its configuration as an important part of Washington’s covert war against Havana and against international communism is analyzed. In this sense, it is also intended to highlight the operation as a component of a larger project of the global struggle of the Catholic Church against leftist movements in the sixties. Then, the focus is dislocated to the importance that this episode acquired in Cuban rhetoric towards the United States at different moments in the long history of conflicts between the two countries, especially in those in which the regime sought greater popular support as a mechanism of internal legitimation. Finally, it is intended to discuss the position of the Pedros Pans in maintaining the (long-standing) hostility policies against their country of origin.