The Immigrant Divide

How Cuban Americans Changed the U.S. and Their Homeland

Susan Eckstein

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2009
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• eBook ISBN:
  9781135838331
• Subtopic: International Relations
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Are all immigrants from the same home country best understood as a homogeneous group of foreign-born? Or do they differ in their adaptation and transnational ties depending on when they emigrated and with what lived experiences? Between Castro's rise to power in 1959 and the early twenty-first century more than a million Cubans immigrated to the United States. While it is widely known that Cuban émigrés have exerted a strong hold on Washington policy toward their homeland, Eckstein uncovers a fascinating paradox: the recent arrivals, although poor and politically weak, have done more to transform their homeland than the influential and prosperous early exiles who have tried for half a century to bring the Castro regime to heel. The impact of the so-called New Cubans is an unintended consequence of the personal ties they maintain with family in Cuba, ties the first arrivals oppose.

This historically-grounded, nuanced book offers a rare in-depth analysis of Cuban immigrants' social, cultural, economic, and political adaptation, their transformation of Miami into the "northern most Latin American city," and their cross-border engagement and homeland impact. Eckstein accordingly provides new insight into the lives of Cuban immigrants, into Cuba in the post Soviet era, and into how Washington's failed Cuba policy might be improved. She also posits a new theory to deepen the understanding not merely of Cuban but of other immigrant group adaptation.

1 Immigrants and the Weight of Their Past

On January 1, 1959, Cuba’s then-president, Fulgencio Batista, fled the country. He was a military man, whose government mainly protected and advanced the concerns of the upper and middle classes. His notoriously corrupt government was known to torture opponents. Disrespecting the 1940 Constitution and the country’s 1944 election, Batista governed autocratically in the 1950s. The social order his government protected was conservative and highly stratified. Those who were born rich and poor, light- or dark-skinned, in the city or the countryside, had very different lifestyles, opportunities, and lived experiences.

Batista fled as Fidel Castro, an idealist young landowner’s son, led a populist movement with urban and rural support that captured many Cubans’ imagination. Riding to power as a nationalist and populist, within less than a decade he oversaw a radical makeover of the country.

The country’s social transformation was all-encompassing. Within a few years Castro declared himself a Marxist-Leninist and allied with the Soviet Union. The new government nationalized most businesses, and transformed the polity and the country’s values and norms. While the pre-revolution privileged classes lost their base of wealth and prestige, poor people benefited. Pre-revolutionary social classes thus experienced the country’s makeover very differently.

Under Castro’s rule Cuba underwent many changes that impacted islanders’ lives. Periods differed in ideological intensity and emphasis, repression, hardship, and labor demands. However, no change after Castro’s consolidation of power had as traumatic an impact on Cubans as the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 199l. At the time, the Cuban economy was so dependent on the superpower for aid and trade that in its absence Cuba experienced an economic depression from which it took about a decade and a half to recover.¹ Near-famine led most Cubans to rethink their perspective on life and to focus their concerns on family and survival. Many of them abandoned any lingering commitment they had to the utopian revolutionary project.

Islanders who left Cuba in different time periods thus had different experiences before uprooting. While I refer the interested reader to my book Back from the Future: Cuba under Castro for a detailed description of Cuba under Fidel Castro’s rule,² the era on which the book focuses, in this chapter I summarize key features of the different periods. In turn, I note the social backgrounds of those who joined the diaspora during each period. First, though, I summarize Cuba-to-US immigration, including a cross-national perspective, to contextualize the discussion of the Cuban diaspora and how, when, and why it changed over the years.

This chapter, intended to provide a context for the focus of the remainder of the book, draws heavily on secondary sources.³ I intend it to familiarize the uninformed reader with Cuban history under Castro, and how that history has shaped the diaspora. I also incorporate commentaries of Cubans whom I interviewed, to show how islanders who uprooted at different times saw themselves to have distinct experiences and different reasons, accordingly, for uprooting. And I draw on relevant official US and Cuban data on immigration.

Immigration Overview

Between the time that Castro assumed power and the early 2000s approximately one million Cubans emigrated to the US (see Figure 1.1 and sources). These Cubans account for an estimated 89 percent of the country’s diaspora.⁴

Figure 1.1 Immigrants officially admitted to the US by country of origin, 1951–2004

Sources: U.S. Bureau of the Census (USBC), Statistical Abstract of the U.S., National Data Book (U.S. Department of Commerce, Economics and Statistics Administration, U.S. Census Bureau, 1982–83), p. 90, and 1987, p. 11, and 2000, p. 10; U.S. Department of Homeland Security (USDHS), Office of Immigration Statistics, 2004 Yearbook of Immigration Statistics (Washington, DC: USDHS 2005), pp. 8, 12, 13; and 2005 Yearbook of Immigration Statistics (Washington, DC: USDHS, 2006), pp. 12, 13.

The first Cubans who arrived after Castro assumed power formed, along with Mexicans, the vanguard of the so-called new immigrant era.⁵ But as Latin Americans increasingly replaced Europeans as the majority of US foreign-born, Cubans became less exceptional in their numbers. Before the twentieth century closed, most Latin Americans who moved north of the Rio Grande had emigrated from countries which had not undergone a socialist revolution and had never experienced Communist Party rule. Cubans also became less exceptional in what drove them to uproot. In the post-Soviet era, most Cubans, like most other Latin Americans at the time, emigrated to improve their economic lot, even when they also moved to escape a political regime they disliked (see Appendix).⁶

Cuban immigration to America depended not merely on who wanted to uproot; it also hinged on official Cuban exit and US entry policies. The Cuban government periodically permitted emigration to diffuse domestic discontent. But it was consistently reluctant to let young men leave before serving in the military and young professionals whose skilled labor the economy needed.⁷ In turn, Washington most warmly welcomed Cubans when they served its Cold War geopolitical agenda. Once the US became the Cold War victor, US–Cuba bilateral crises, labor market priorities, and commitment to family reunification shaped its Cuban admission policy more. Its priorities contributed to a race and class bias to admission.⁸

With the revolution occurring in the throes of the US–Soviet contest for global domination, Washington initially turned the first émigrés into poster people for the virtues of capitalism and democracy over Communism. Cubans became the most privileged immigrant group. When Castro allied with the Soviet Union, US authorities exempted Cubans from country entry quotas then in effect, subsidized the emigration of some, and offered benefits to ease émigré adaptation.⁹ Approximately 225,300 Cubans took advantage of the opportunities Washington immediately opened up and emigrated between 1959 and 1962. Anti-Communist fervor was so strong during the first years of the revolution that the State Department and the CIA even collaborated in a program that the Miami archdiocese oversaw, Operation Peter Pan, which brought more than 14,000 children to the US unaccompanied by their parents.¹⁰

After the October 1962 Missile Crisis, Cuban emigration to the US became more difficult. The number of entrants totaled 58,500 for 1963 and 1964, and about 9,000 for 1965 (before Castro allowed islanders to leave without US entry permission from Camarioca, described below).¹¹ Then, between the end of 1965 and 1973, Washington admitted over 260,000 additional Cubans on what US officials called Freedom Flights.¹² The name of the airlift spoke of Washington’s Cold War stance toward Cuban émigrés. Following the sunsetting of the special flights, a mere additional 38,000 entered the US during the remainder of the decade.

In the late 1980s and early 1990s, Washington used immigration once again to advance its foreign policy agenda, but this time by clamping down dramatically on the Cubans allowed to enter. In doing so it sought to induce disenchanted islanders to press, instead, for change at home. Washington officials hoped Cubans would follow the example of their former East European comrades and take to the streets to bring their Communist regime to heel. As a result, the Reagan, Bush, and Clinton administrations, combined, issued as few as 11,222 immigrant visas between 1985 and 1994, even though an immigration accord that came into effect in 1984 specified that the US might admit nearly twice that number yearly.¹³

Yet, Washington did not always have the upper hand in controlling Cuban entrants. On three occasions—in 1965, 1980, and 1994—Castro unilaterally opened the door for islanders to leave, to defuse and deflect domestic discontent. In these instances the Cuban government lost control over who it let out and the US lost control over who it let in. Around 7,000, 125,000, and 33,000 islanders, known as Camariocans, Marielitos, and balseros (rafters), respectively, took advantage of these opportunities, before bilateral negotiations committed Cuban authorities to halt the unsanctioned Washington emigrations.¹⁴ Camariocans and Marielitos were named after the Cuban ports from which they departed. The Cuban government allowed the Camariocan exodus to rid the country of islanders who previously had been unable or reluctant to emigrate but who opposed the country’s radical transformation, which the other two exoduses occurred when the government faced outbursts of domestic unrest.¹⁵

In that the 1966 Cuban Adjustment Act, a legislative Cold War initiative, allowed almost any Cuban who touched US soil without an entry permit to qualify for residence status in a year and a day, and accordingly to qualify for work rights and a path to citizenship, the illegal 1965, 1980, and 1994 entrants could almost immediately adjust their status and enjoy legal immigrant rights.¹⁶ Such unique entitlements help explain the notable absence of Cubans from the 2006 protests across the US, in which immigrants demanded economic and political rights.

Each of the three large-scale illegal exoduses induced Washington to sign special bilateral immigration accords with Cuba. US authorities agreed to the accords to restore order to who it permitted entry,¹⁷ and as such reflected how Castro had orchestrated tumult in the Florida Straits to influence US immigration policy. The first agreement, a Memorandum of Understanding, established the previously mentioned Freedom Flights that brought more than a quarter of a million Cubans to the US between 1965 and 1973. The second accord, signed in 1984, entitled up to twenty thousand islanders yearly entry, while accords signed in 1994 and 1995 committed the US to accept a minimum of twenty thousand islanders yearly. The 1990s accords specified that a portion of admits be on the basis of a newly instituted lottery.¹⁸

With Washington having abolished individual country immigration quotas by the 1980s, the 1984 and 1990s accords formalized unique Cuban admission rights. And Cubans were almost unique among those admitted in being officially classified as refugees and asylum seekers.¹⁹ However, in their effect the accords proved not to favor Cubans over other immigrants. Figure 1.1 shows that in the closing decades of the twentieth century the US admitted more immigrants from the Dominican Republic and El Salvador, countries of roughly Cuba’s demographic size, and many more from far larger Mexico.²⁰ More Latin Americans from countries with market economies and (at least minimal) democratic polities than from Cuba moved to the US. They sought refuge from declining opportunities associated with neoliberal restructuring in their homelands. In the 1980s, Salvadoran émigrés also fled a civil war.

Washington, meanwhile, did not always honor the minimum Cuban entry allotment specified in the 1990s accords, after not having honored the maximum entitlement specified in the 1984 accord. In only half of the first ten years following the signing of the 1990s accords did Washington officially admit at least twenty thousand Cubans.²¹ And the 1995 accord, which calls for the US and Cuban governments to collaborate in returning to Cuba islanders found at sea trying to emigrate without official permission, contributed to containing the number of illegal Cuban entrants.

In sum, immediately following the revolution an exceptionally large percentage of Cubans emigrated, and Cubans accounted for an exceptionally large portion of US admits. By the turn of the millennium, however, that was no longer true.

The Self-Defined Exiles: The Pre-Revolutionary Generation that Opposed Cuba’s Radical Makeover, 1959 to 1980²²

Despite widespread unemployment, underemployment and political repression, few Cubans emigrated before the revolution. At the time, US admissions policy favored Europeans, while US immigration had yet to become part of Cubans’, and most other Latin Americans’, repertoire of responses to difficult homeland conditions.²³ And the well-to-do had little reason to leave. They were a close-knit group, with strong family ties, who enjoyed a life of luxury. They typically socialized together at racially and socially exclusive clubs and married within their social class.²⁴ One of the island clubs was so exclusive that it had even refused Batista admission, because members considered him a mixed blood laborer’s son.²⁵ They also participated together in civic groups. Batista’s autocratic rule was not so complete as to prevent them from doing so.

The exodus from Cuba under Castro began with the emigration of Batista’s close collaborators, known as Batistianos. The privileged classes soon joined them, in response to the new government’s expropriation, first, of large and then of medium-sized landholdings, and then of everything but small businesses by 1963. They soon were joined by the politically engaged who became disillusioned with the radical and autocratic turn of the revolution. These émigrés form the core of the cohort who define themselves as exiles.²⁶ Most of them left when they lost the basis of their livelihood and lifestyle. Despite their definition of themselves as exiles, only a small number of them had actually suffered for their political convictions. An important minority, however, as I illustrate, suffered deeply for their opposition to the revolution. They came to the US to escape imprisonment, discrimination, and execution for their political commitments.²⁷ To all intents and purposes, this émigré wave, which filtered the country’s social transformation through prerevolutionary lenses and interpreted their uprooting as politically driven, ended with the last of the Freedom Flights in 1973. They constitute the cohort of arrivals I refer to as Exiles.

Their Class Base

Indicative that pre-revolutionary well-to-do quickly fled the country’s radical makeover, Table 1.1 shows businesspeople, managers, and professionals, who had comprised 9 percent of the labor force under Batista, account for almost a third of the Cubans who moved to the US in the first three years of Castro’s rule. These elite Cubans typically were conservative Catholics, and almost entirely light-skinned. For them the revolution represented a rejection of all that they stood for.

The new island government required those who uprooted to leave most of their economic assets behind. They could not take more with them than would fit into what Castro loyalists called gusano bags, worm-shaped duffle containers. “Gusanos for the gusanos,” worms for the worms.²⁸ The new government pejoratively called the very émigrés who came to be viewed in the US as Golden Exiles as gusanos, crawling vermin.

Carlos Eire, in his eloquent memoir, Waiting for Snow in Havana, summarized the loss that drove his social class and race-based social world to flee. “[T]hat god-damned place where everything I knew was destroyed. Wrecked in the name of fairness. In the name of progress. In the name of the oppressed and of love for the gods of Marx and Lenin.”²⁹ Eire remembers well the personal nannies he and each of his siblings had. So too does he remember the private Catholic school he attended, where la crème de la crème of Havana boys were educated, which closed in April 1962 because too few of its teachers and students remained. They “vanished without saying a word. One day they’d be there, and the next day they’d be gone.”³⁰ Soon after the school shut, he too joined the exodus, at age eleven. He was one of the children who left in the Miami archdiocese-organized, US government-funded, Operation Peter Pan.

The pre-revolutionary privileged fled to an America they in many respects admired.³¹ They knew the country from Hollywood movies and television shows they saw, from the cars they drove, from the clothes they wore, from the Coke and Pepsi they sipped, from the comics they read, and from the US tourists who visited the island. They also knew US investors and ex-patriots, with their lifestyle of luxury and country clubs, and conspicuous consumption. Privileged Cuban children even played American games and had American theme birthday parties.³² Well-to-do Cubans, in turn, knew the US first-hand from their travels, and some from their studies at...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• List of Figures and Tables
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1 Immigrants and the Weight of Their Past
• 2 Immigrant Imprint in America
• 3 Immigrant Politics: For Whom and for What?
• 4 The Personal is Political: Bonding Across Borders
• 5 Cuba Through the Looking Glass
• 6 Transforming Transnational Ties into Economic Worth
• 7 Dollarization and its Discontents: Homeland Impact of Diaspora Generosity
• 8 Reenvisioning Immigration
• Appendix: Field Research
• Notes
• Bibliography