Plan Bush against Cuba: Children’s stories for adults

by SUNDRED SUZARTE MEDINA
Sep 28
It’s said that sequels are never any good, but 45 years after Operation Peter Pan, the U.S. government is still weaving dreams for the future of Cuban children

THE policies of the U.S. government for children in the context of the expedite desire of defeating the Cuban Revolution resemble the stories of Cinderella or The Sleeping Beauty, impregnated with fairies, fantasies and hallucinations. Perhaps such fairy tales served President Bush as an inspiration for this proposition. And it is a fact that the U.S. leader’s plan contains certain regulations concerning minors that are laughable or a cause for concern.

That the president of the most powerful country in the world and his collaborators should refer to literacy teaching or immunization in a country like Cuba that has been exemplary in humanitarian labors in diverse countries of the world – both underdeveloped and developed – in terms of health and education is worrying and makes one serious question his capacity to hold such a high position, and one that affects the entire world.

But U.S. policies referring to children have antecedents dating back to the early years of the Revolution. On September 19, 1961, the leader of the Cuban Revolution spoke out against the false rumor being promoted by the CIA on Cuban parents’ loss of custody of their own children to the state and castigated its masterminds. Due to the fact that laws proposed by the revolutionary government in that period were being successfully adopted and had major public support, the enemies of the Cuban process thought up a bill that, according to them, would be believed by the majority of the population.

Thus they invented a phony act in which the revolutionary government appeared to be depriving parents of custody over their children. A diabolical lie that took root in the mind of many parents when it was circulated clandestinely as a decree taken from a governmental department. It proposed that custody of persons under 20 years of age would be exercised by the state. That all minors would remain their parents’ care until they were three years of age, after which they would be entrusted for their physical and mental education and civic capacity to the Day Care Circles organization (OCI), agencies that by law had the faculty to acts as personal guardians and exercise custody over those minors.

They also stated that the OCI would draw up the necessary provisions to ensure that all minors between three and 10 would remain in the province in which their parents resided and would guarantee that that they spent at least two days per month in their parents’ homes so that they didn’t lose contact with the family nucleus. After the age of 10, any minor could be assigned to the place considered most appropriate for their education, culture and civic training.

At that historical moment Fidel Castro exposed that cruel fraud: “It has never occurred to anyone in any socialist country to make any kind of law on the problem of custody or to make any law to separate children from their families; that would never occur to anyone and has never been done in any revolution in the world.

“It might have been all right if that fraud had been used in the epoch when nobody knew what a socialist revolution was like, and had the world deceived in an evil way and tricked to the point of saying enough; but that in the middle of the 20th century, in 1961, they should have gone back to pulling their old tricks! Who is saying children can be taken anywhere by anybody? And to whom would such a mistake or craziness occur? It’s totally absurd from every point of view!”

Thanks to these despicable lies an operation, dubbed Operation Peter Pan by the CIA itself, was mounted via which certain parents, terrified at the supposed hecatomb that was hanging over them, sent their children to the United States and other countries. Many would be found again but others were sent to Never-Never land and never seen again.

This operation was conceived from the beginning as one of the most secret actions of subversion and psychological warfare developed by the CIA although it soon became public and received the support of the Catholic Church of Cuba and the United States. Its principal executor in coordination with the U.S. government was a priest of Irish origin, Bryan O’Walsh.

Operation Peter Pan was designed for the children staying in the United States for a short period, returning to Cuba after a successful invasion like the Bay of Pigs was not. Thus some 15,000 children left the island. Some time after that the United States suspended direct flights between the two countries. Many of those parents were unable to travel with their children, who drifted from orphanage to orphanage throughout the United States for years or were adopted by American families who in some cases mistreated them and forced them to work.

Among the principal problems they experienced were inadequate food, the existence of gangs in the reception centers and camps, the use of corporal punishment, being forced to do humiliating domestic tasks in some cases and unaccustomed ones in others, but described by all of them as enslaving due to feeling exploited by their tutors and teachers. They were also abruptly confronted by the differences of language, customs and culture, in some cases relocated in states like Michigan, Montana, Washington and New York – just to give some examples – and, in an exceptional way, to feelings of loneliness and abandonment.

SEQUELS WERE NEVER ANY GOOD

Once again these days, the U.S. government psychosis in terms of destroying the Revolution is touching on Cuban children and once more doing so via despicable lies. The current Bush policies include the immediate immunization of all children under five who still have to be vaccinated against the main childhood diseases within the current health system. To propose such an undertaking is either a crass error or an unequalled blatant misrepresentation. To propose such tasks would seem cynical in a country where the reserve of vaccinations for its own children has been almost completely drained and, as The Washington Post has reported, there are no immediate prospects of replenishing it.

Well, if the United States believes that it should undertake an immunization campaign in Cuba it could also be on account of the work of and thanks to the economic blockade imposed on the island, which has seriously damaged the normal rhythm of health care in the country and has produced so many ills for the Cuban people.

For the promoters of these policies apparently taken from fairy tales, it should be noted that, from when they are born, 100% of Cuban children receive the benefit of immunization against 13 ailments and that, starting September 1, the application of a new vaccine, nationally manufactured and capable of protected children against five diseases, got underway in Cuban polyclinics.

This immunization campaign is inserted within the Ministry of Public Health’s official vaccination plan to immunize infants against diphtheria, whooping cough, hepatitis B, tetanus and Haemophilus influenza type B. The vaccine, tested in an experimental pilot scheme on 500 children in Villa Clara province, possesses a high quality and guaranteed protection, given that it allows for the elimination of six shots to minors (before there were nine) and also the inconvenience and risks.

With the brand name of Heberpenta, it is a biotechnological preparation obtained by Cuban scientists and certified by the National Center for the State Control of Medicines. The Genetic Engineering and Biotechnology Center, the Synthetic Antigens Center attached to the Chemistry Faculty of the University of Havana, and the National Biopreparations Center also participated in obtaining the vaccine.

Preceded by France, Cuba is the second country in the world to manufacture a pentavalent vaccine guaranteeing immunity to more than 50,000 children throughout the country by the end of 2006.

The U.S. government has similarly confirmed its hallucinations in the area of education and intends to dismantle the Cuban system in order to promote new forms of conduct from the first years of life.

In this way the Bush Plan highlights that it is necessary in a future Cuba to facilitate the development of private education, to allow private providers and calls for being prepared to pay teachers in kind.

It also emphasizes organizing retraining programs for Cuban teachers and professors, and being prepared to keep all classrooms open or import volunteers on a temporary basis during the potential period of instability that will come, so that children and adolescents are not on the streets involved in crime.

This has been proposed without taking into account the significant holes in the U.S. educational system and with a total ignorance of current educational figures in Cuba, where not one school was closed down during the Special Period.

It signifies then that childhood has been a recurrent theme in U.S. policies on Cuba by utilizing campaigns of defamation and intrigue, separating families and distorting reality. Childhood is a highly sensitive issue in any part of the world, for which reason the United States has seized on it to create a climate of instability in the country by seeking to use it as yet another filter to corrupt the Cubans’ cause and their commitment to a better world.