Operation Pedro Pan: The Flight to Neverland for more than 14,000 Cuban Children

Ivonne Garay was just finishing fifth grade in her native Cuba when her world was turned upside down. It was April 1961 and a military invasion of the island by Cuban exiles based in Miami, Florida, had been unsuccessful. At Ivonne's school, teachers had taken students outside to see the captured men: They paraded the men in trucks and then they asked the school to bring out the kids so that they could throw things at them. I remember how upset that made my parents—and not because they were not with Castro, because they were Castro supporters at the beginning—but that whole scene, the cruelty of it.…I remember my parents picking us up at school and saying, “This might be the last day that you come to school.” We didn't return.