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Plan Bush against Cuba
Children’s stories for adults
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
BY SUNDRED SUZARTE
MEDINA—Granma International staff writer—
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.
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