Disaggregating the Cuban-American community

One of the perceived obstacles in the way of changing current U.S. policy toward Cuba is the Cuban-American community in the United States, largely localized (and certainly most vocal) in Miami-Dade County in Florida. It was only two years ago that the Miami-Dade County school board voted to ban the book Vamos a Cuba, a children’s book that was part of a series discussing travel around the world and the acceptance of different cultures, from elementary school libraries. They argued that it was “rife with omissions,” including the existence of a “48-year-old dictatorship” on the island, and furthermore, the page asserting that Cuban people “eat, work, and go to school like you do” was misleading, and “simply not true.”

Yet many media outlets are highlighting the generational shifts in the Cuban-American community and a shift in attitudes—away from “hard-line” rejection of any form of engagement, toward more openness: indeed, a poll released today shows that 67% of the Cuban-American community supports the removal of all restrictions on travel to Cuba.

But that leaves one third of this community on the opposite side of the issue, and more still stand on the side of the embargo. While they will probably not end up being an obstacle to policy changes—their numbers are relatively small and, as previously discussed, President Obama never garnered their support in the first place—their concerns are real and are founded in the deep pain of having left their home country to rebuild and protect for themselves and their children the freedoms that they saw disappearing in Cuba.

The community itself is fascinating. As Jackie Sousa points out in this Miami Herald post, even the term “community” is largely misleading. There are huge differences among the various waves of Cuban migrants, and split opinions over recent policy changes are merely revealing social fractures that have existed for years. Sociologist Silvia Pedraza classifies the waves as:

• “Those who wait,” the exiles that arrived in Miami between 1959 and 1962, and who believe that one day they will return to a free Cuba;
• “Those who escape,” the professionals who were pushed out in the early 1960s;
• “Those who search,” small merchants and farmers who fled the island between 1965 and 1973 after their businesses were taken over;
• “Those who hope,” the poorer and more racially diverse groups that came in the 1980s searching for a better future; and
• “Those who despair,” the discontented who arrived in the 1990s when the Castro regime encouraged them to leave the island.

The fact that the name given to each wave is a word based in emotion is apt, I think, and hints at what the embargo means for each group and what engagement with Cuba might mean for each. So when policymakers talk about gaining the support of the “Cuban-American community,” they’re missing a lot of nuance.