As a Peter Pan child uprooted from Cuba in 1961, I have a different view of
                  the program from that of Maria de los Angeles Torres ["Uprooted by
                  History," Outlook, Feb. 1]. Operation Peter Pan, which was run by the
                  Catholic Church and the State Department, transferred 14,048 children from
                  Cuba to the United States between 1960 and 1962. Specifically, I refer to
                  the author's discussion of the loss of patria potestad or parents' legal
                  authority over their children in Cuba as the cause of the forced separations
                  of families from their children.

                  Torres states that the loss of patria potestad was rumored but never
                  happened. She is wrong. She has blinded herself to the reality of life for
                  children who remained in Cuba by covering humanitarian motives with
                  political ones.

                  My parents' firsthand accounts of the time between 1961 and 1966, before
                  they finally left Cuba, tell of children put into ideological indoctrination at age
                  11. The first group of 800 children was sent to Minas de Frio en la Sierra
                  Maestra in Cuba on March 27, 1960. They were removed from their parents
                  and their family values to be indoctrinated in the values of the revolution for
                  45 to 60 days at a time. At 11 years of age, they were introduced into camps
                  of adolescents with little supervision. These minors worked many hours a
                  week in the fields in harsh conditions with poor nutrition and slept on
                  hammocks. They experimented in new situations and mixed among those
                  who would change the uneasy and unrooted moral, political and religious
                  values their parents were still molding. They used the on-demand abortions
                  at clinics far away from their families to reverse their errors in judgment as
                  adolescents. Others returned pregnant and with head lice, parasites, hepatitis
                  and venereal disease.

                  My own parents sent four of their six children (6, 7, 8 and 9 years old) in
                  September 1961 to Father Bryan Walsh's camps in Florida. We later spent
                  four years in New York state with a foster family when my parents'
                  imminent exit was delayed by new Cuban regulations against professionals.
                  We did not reunite until November 1966 here in Washington. I still visit with
                  "my second family" several times each year. My children call them Grandma
                  and Grandpa and their natural grandparents Abuela and Abuelo.

                  My separation lasted longer than Torres's four-month ordeal, and I too have
                  come to accept my parents' decision. But I have grown up enough not to
                  imagine the worst and politicize the motives of Operation Peter Pan's purely
                  humanitarian effort.

                  -- Margarita E. Lora