"To Save Our Children”: The Politics of Childhood in the Anti-Castro Struggle, 1959–62

Between 1960 and 1962, Cuban exiles in southern Florida dedicated themselves to the anti-Castro movement that they hoped would quickly topple Fidel Castro’s Revolution. Aware that a quick return to the homeland rested upon mobilizing the material and political resources of the entire refugee population, a nascent exile media dedicated itself to the production of counter-revolutionary propaganda as a powerful complement to the exile paramilitary struggle. They targeted a hemispheric audience with morally and emotionally resonant child-centered messages, seeking to foment anti-Castro opinion and activity among Cubans on the island and to create consensus among the multiple counter-revolutionary factions in Miami. They also used images and discourses of childhood to discredit the Castro regime among Latin Americans whose progressive politics and latent anti-U.S. sentiment might otherwise predispose them toward sympathy for the Revolution. At the same time, the transplanted institutions of an emerging exile civil society rapidly reorganized in Miami and rallied around a shared objective: to promote the unity of the exile community, on behalf of its children and in service of the anti-Castro struggle. Working together, the exile media and civil society would help to forge a powerful moral consensus on the need to suppress refugees’ political differences in order to defeat Castro and restore the Cuban nation to their sons and daughters. However, the community's growing sense of unity could not make up for the structural weaknesses of the anti-Castro movement, which remained vulnerable to the whims of the U.S. government. By1962, when the resolution of the October Missile Crisis failed to produce the downfall of the Revolution, anti-Castro Cubans nonetheless clung to their dreams of return to a redeemed republic and to their belief that exile must be endured in order to safeguard the future of their beloved children.