Imagine for a minute that the anti-Castro militants in Miami get their way and, 40 years from now, Elian Gonzalez is still on our side of the Strait of Florida. Imagine him as a restaurant owner, a car-wash attendant, a state senator--whatever you like--but middle-aged, with children of his own. Fidel Castro is long dead, and democracy has taken hold in Cuba. And some historian wants to know what EliAn really wanted, and really felt, when he was a six- year-old cipher at the center of a political storm.

One place to look for clues is in the testimony of other Cuban children who, like Elian, were separated from their parents in the name of politics. Between December 1960 and October 1962, 14,000 unaccompanied children were sent out of Cuba as part of the so-called Pedro Pan Operation, run by the Roman Catholic Church in Miami. They arrived at the Miami airport, some as young as five, with notes pinned to their shirts: "My name is.... Please be good to me." In most cases, their parents expected to join them in the United States within a few months. But, when the Cuban missile crisis halted commercial flights to and from Cuba, many of the children were consigned to years of foster care in orphanages, makeshift camps, and private homes from Brooklyn to Spokane.

In a 1999 book called Operation Pedro Pan: The Untold Exodus of 14,048 Cuban Children, Yvonne Conde, a journalist who was herself a Pedro Pan evacuee, collects these children's stories. In light of the GonzAlez case, they make compelling reading--and the picture they paint of parental bonds swamped by cold war politics ought to give serious pause to anyone who wants to keep EliAn here.

In Conde's own view, Operation Pedro Pan was a daring and justified crusade. After Castro shut down the Catholic schools, saw 1,000 students off to the Soviet Union, and announced a literacy campaign in which uniformed adolescent brigadistas would be dispatched to the countryside, middle-class Cuban parents had good reason, she argues, to fear for their children's futures and to try to protect them from indoctrination. As Conde sees it, the Pedro Pan children were rescued, and their rescuers were heroes.

Yet the stories the former evacuees tell belie this pleasing narrative: they are all stories of traumatic loss. Some of the children were sent to homes or orphanages in which they were physically or sexually abused. And even those who found their way into loving homes were deeply scarred. They had still, after all, been abruptly parted from their mothers and fathers, with the ironic result that a mission meant to preserve families from the power of an overweening state ended up tearing them asunder.

Some of the book's saddest passages are in the letters home, written in the guileless prose of bewildered children:

Dear Parents,

We want you to come soon, because they are going to send us to Philadelphia and we don't want to go. We cry every night because we miss you very much. We are living in a hospital in the beds of the sick and also with their bed linen.

Come anyway that you can, we are doing very badly here. The food is very bad and we don't want to be here anymore. We are asking you to please come. We are waiting for you. Your four children who love you, Gabriel, Eugenio, Josefina, and Adolfo.

As adults, many of the former Pedro Pan children still feel bereft today. A woman named Ileana Fuentes told Conde about the painful memories that washed over her when she sent her eleven-year-old daughter on a weeklong visit to cousins in another city. "I was on the other side of the glass at the airport and all the suffering of that separation, the anguish by default that I felt at that moment was so horrible that I spent the afternoon crying.. .. In that moment I corroborated how traumatic this separation had been for me.... And we have never been the same." One man wrote, simply, "I cannot complete the questionnaire. I am sorry. All of these memories cause me too much pain."

Of the 442 Pedro Pans who responded to Conde's survey (she found only about 1,000 of them), 70 percent said their experience was positive. But 33 percent said they would not send their own children away under the same circumstances. As Antonio Garcia, who came to the United States as a Pedro Pan and is now a 51-year-old car washer in Miami, told The New York Times, "Over all, it was a good thing, because it saved us from Communism. But I have told my mother, and I know it pains her, that I would never do to my own children, if I had them, what my parents did to me."

These sorrows, and the pledges that they provoke, should not surprise us. We have known at least since World War II and the pioneering work of Anna Freud, John Bowlby, and others that young children separated from their parents suffer deep and sometimes irreparable emotional damage. For sound development to take place, as Freud put it, a child's fundamental need for an "unbroken continuity of affectionate and stimulating relationships" must be met. Freud believed that the three-, four-, and five-year-olds she cared for at the Hampstead Nurseries during the war were more traumatized by what they saw as their desertion by their parents (who sent them there to keep them out of bombs' way) than they would have been even by the air raids themselves. " The child is frightened," she wrote, "and suspects that their desertion may be another punishment or even the consequence of his own bad wishes."

Indeed, though the parents who sent their children away to escape the blitz surely did so for the best of reasons--8,000 children who remained in London were killed by enemy bombs--virtually all of the former evacuees who called in to a recent British radio program answered the question "Would you do the same to your children?" with a resounding no.

Partly because of such evidence, we have, as a society, accepted the idea-- which custody law embodies--that only grave physical or psychological jeopardy ought to override a child's right to remain with his parents (and his parents' right to remain with him). We have accepted that children are not shuttlecocks to be batted back and forth and that they thrive under steady and stable arrangements for their care. When politics, or tribal loyalties, cloud that insight, the results virtually never stand the test of historical scrutiny. We look at them later and wonder what even the best- intentioned of their perpetrators must have been thinking. The twentieth century is littered with cases in which "the best interests of the child" became synonymous with child-stealing in the name of some larger public good-- usually one that doesn't look so good at all anymore. Think of the Aboriginal children forcibly removed from their families to be raised in orphanages or adopted by white families in Australia; think of the "orphan" trains stocked with city children sent to the rural West. In all of these cases, someone decided that children needed to be saved from a blighted or inferior environment more than they needed the love and care of a parent. Someone decided to treat children as a means, not an end. We know better now, don't we?