Since the late 1990s, a growing number of scholars in and outside Cuba have struggled to move beyond their own passionately held ideological convictions to make sense of the origins, purpose, and legacy of Operation Pedro Pan, a semiclandestine effort by which approximately 14,000 Cuban children were sent alone to the United States during the revolution's tumultuous early years. The latest is Deborah Shnookal, who proposes to move beyond the Cold War oversimplifications of earlier scholarship—much of which has portrayed the operation as either a humanitarian mission to rescue children from communist indoctrination or a Central Intelligence Agency–sponsored mass kidnapping—to offer a more complex analysis of the multiple “push and pull factors” that drove the children's exodus (p. 4).Adopting a generational and youth-centered focus, Shnookal argues that the exodus was driven by parent-child conflict brought to a head by the mass mobilization of youth as instructors during the 1961 literacy campaign. She argues that parents sent their children away not out of fear of communist brainwashing or due to objections about the revolutionary state's intervention in education, religious, or family life but rather to ensure their children's adherence to traditional values and to “circumvent their growing independence and political activism” (p. 9). However, Cuban scholars will recognize this ostensibly post–Cold War reframing as a translation of official discourse from the early 1960s, which relied heavily on a Marxist analysis of the generational dynamics of proletarian revolution. Unfortunately, even if we take this argument at face value, the book fails to deliver a comprehensive, consistent generational analysis of the exodus's origins.After an opening chapter synthesizing the literature on the revolution's social and educational policies, the author proceeds to a discussion of the literacy campaign. But this is the only chapter focused on the campaign, despite its centrality to the book's framing. Drawing mostly on secondary sources supplemented by interviews with a handful of Cuban educational leaders, state security officials, and former literacy volunteers, it mostly rehashes truisms about the campaign's role in both creating a new revolutionary identity among youth and stimulating the exodus of other children from the island. But while Shnookal rejects as a “Cold War trope” that the campaign was “a mass indoctrination campaign and a conscious plan” to remove children from their parents' corrupting influence—premises implicitly acknowledged by Cuban leaders at the time—she nonetheless maintains that the campaign had both pedagogical and political objectives and that there was “no way” that its goals could be achieved “in an apolitical manner” (pp. 9, 74).The author's struggle to reconcile her revolutionary sympathies with scholarly objectivity becomes more visible later in the chapter, when she interrogates the complex issue of Cuban youth's agency. Rightly celebrating the principled autonomy of those who freely chose to serve as literacy volunteers, she notes that the campaign transformed their lives. But this was not, she insists again, due to deliberate ideological formation; rather, by participating in something bigger than themselves, these youth were organically transformed into “self-confident, committed, and independent-minded” agents of a revolution by and for their generation (p. 103). And Shnookal only extends the privilege of agency to those children who remained on the island. Despite her earlier recognition that most Pedro Panes were politically conscious adolescents, some of whom “actively lobbied their parents to send them to Miami,” this chapter sets up a false dichotomy between the autonomous, capable, and idealistic brigadistas and the Pedro Pan youth whom she (now) claims were compelled by parents to go to Miami—where, according to one of Shnookal's interviewees, they “did nothing by themselves” (pp. 15, 101). This is a portrayal that unaccompanied Cuban minors, many of whom struggled to learn English, adapt to US culture, and succeed at school while working part-time jobs to fund their parents' emigration, would justifiably resent.In subsequent chapters Shnookal returns to synthesis, offering an overview of the operation's origins, structure, and organization—territory exhaustively covered in María de los Angeles Torres's The Lost Apple: Operation Pedro Pan, Cuban Children in the US, and the Promise of a Better Future (2003)—before concluding with a final chapter on the “apparent paradox” of why an operation “generally regarded in Cuba as a criminal act against the revolution” never resulted in criminal charges (p. 17). The straightforward answer, of course, is that it was entirely legal in the early 1960s for Cuban parents to send their children to the United States, as Shnookal concedes (p. 207). Despite this, Shnookal reproduces the official revolutionary condemnation of the operation as illegal “child smuggling,” arguing that the Cuban government tolerated it because it actually benefited from the emigration of dissenters (p. 199). While previous scholarship has recognized this migratory dynamic, Shnookal's description of the operation as a “natural ‘cleansing’ process” that strengthened the revolution falls well short of scholarly—and is an especially chilling turn of phrase, given her previous references to the inappropriate comparisons drawn by some exiles between Operation Pedro Pan and the Kindertransport of Jewish children out of Nazi-occupied Europe (pp. 9, 202).There is more to be said about this book's many weaknesses and occasional strengths—including a discussion in chapter 3 of new material on the patria potestad hoax and a more nuanced interrogation in chapter 4 of youth agency and the “magnet effect” of US-funded educational opportunities on the children's exodus (pp. 112, 146–47). But none of it would change the fact that the book fails to do what it sets out to do. Instead of moving beyond Cold War distortions, its overreliance on previous scholarship's insights, coupled with its uncritical reproduction of official revolutionary narratives, serves only to further obscure a dauntingly complex, often misunderstood, and ultimately heartbreaking episode in Cuban-US history.