The documentary goodbye to hopeby the Cuban actor and presenter based in Miami Lieter Ledesma, is a tribute to the more than 14,000 Cuban children who suffered the “uprooting of separation” when they were sent alone to the United States by their parents between 1960 and 1962, according to what he told EFE its new director.
This first film by Lesdema reveals those painful experiences through the testimony of five people who as children participated in Operation Pedro Pan, a massive and heartbreaking exodus that was carried out clandestinely in the early years of Castroism.
Ledesma says that there were many Cuban parents who soon noticed the course that the “radicalization of the revolutionary process” was taking, which entailed “the closure of private schools, the prohibition of religious education and the stigmatization” of those who did not sympathize with these changes.
Many of those parents made the tough decision to take their children on those flights to Miami to start a new life in freedom.
The 52-minute tape presents “intimate details” of the family separation caused by this exodus in the testimonies of Antonio Tony Argiz, today a successful businessman who founded and directed a firm with 800 employees in various parts of the US, or the rector emeritus of Miami Dade College (MDC), Eduardo Padrón.
“During the filming we met people whose memory is a childhood broken by separation from home. Some can’t help but break down in tears with those memories”
“During the filming we met people in whose memory is a childhood broken by the separation from home. Some cannot help but break down in tears with those memories,” explains Iliana Lavastida, executive director of the Newspaper Las Americasnewspaper responsible for the production of the documentary recorded in Spanish and subtitled in English.
Memories, anecdotes and testimonies of those children from Cuban exile, continues Lavastida, who were marked by the “traumas of experiences in orphanages or with unknown families”, in addition to having to learn to communicate in an unknown language.
These children, now adults, have a deep feeling of gratitude towards their parents, “whom they identify as the true heroes for having had the courage to give up watching them grow up in order to ensure them a better future,” the producer points out.
For Ledesma, Operation Pedro Pan was a “dramatic event that many families found a desperate way out. Most of the Pedro Pan children grew up marked by the longing for a broken home and a land where they were born, yearn for and feel hers”.
The operation, which began on December 26, 1960 and officially ended on October 23, 1962, with the suspension of all commercial flights between the United States and Cuba, took place shortly after the triumph of the Cuban Revolution.
The details of what to this day is considered the largest mass exodus of unaccompanied children in the Americas serve to “also demystify a certain narrative” that says it was an operation organized by the US State Department and the CIA to destabilize Cuban society in the 1960s.
“In the statements of those interviewed in the documentary, it is precisely answered that it was Operation Pedro Pan,” point out Ledesma and Lavastida.
The architect of Operation Pedro Pan was Monsignor Bryan Walsh, who was in charge of receiving the minors who were later transferred to camps, orphanages or adoptive families.
The architect of Operation Pedro Pan was Monsignor Bryan Walsh, who was in charge of receiving the minors who were later transferred to camps, orphanages or adoptive families, initially until their parents managed to leave Cuba.
The other three testimonies that appear in the documentary correspond to the Miami businesswoman Aida Levitan, president of The Levitan Group; Enrique rich Prado, who was director of Special Operations at the CIA Counterterrorism Center, and Eduardo eddy Alvarez.
The five interviewees for the documentary are joined by the artists Willy Chirino and Lissette Álvarez, the Archbishop of Miami Thomas Wenski, the former mayor of Miami Tomás Regalado or the well-known Miami real estate developer Armando Codina, among about twenty testimonies.
The documentary directed by Ledesma will be screened on March 6 at the Miami Film Festival, organized by Miami Dade College.
This year’s programming includes more than 140 productions of various genres from 30 countries, including feature films, shorts and documentaries, and includes more than a dozen world premieres, 3 North American premieres and 7 in the United States.
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