Sixty-five years and three months on, his predominant memory would be something so often an icon of promise: the portable staircase to an airplane. He remembers ascending to the Pan Am at age 14 even if he can’t quite hear his own bygone footsteps.

MIAMI - Operation Pedro Pan, conducted between 1960 and 1962, was the largest recorded emigration of unaccompanied minors in the Western Hemisphere. More than 14,000 Cuban children were spirited out of the island nation to escape the Castro Revolution.