Cuba Libre: A 500-Year Quest for Independence

by Philip Brenner

  When the Revolution triumphed, my family had enormous expectations. They disliked Batista enormously. We were not in politics or politically inclined, but we definitely supported the Revolution. My grandfather even hosted some of the rebels at the Havana Yacht Club. There was a feeling that this was a great new beginning for the country.

  But when [Soviet Deputy Premier Anastas] Mikoyan arrived [in 1960] my parents got nervous. The conversation became one of good and evil: good United States, evil Russia. End of the discussion. There was no compromise there. So that’s when my grandfather decided to send me and my cousin to the United States with Operation Peter Pan, for what they considered would be a short period of time. It was January 1961 and I was 14 years old. Everybody and their brother knew the invasion was coming. And they wanted me out of the country. And then when the invasion backed by the US won, we could come back to Cuba and resume our lives.

  By 1962 all of my immediate family had moved to Miami. They always thought they were going back to Cuba, especially in the first ten years, when they were in a holding pattern, making the best of it. And it was rough. My grandfather must have been in his late sixties, and he was parking cars as a valet in Miami Beach. He was also a night clerk at a hotel in Coral Gables because we had to eat. They brought nothing with them, maybe $50 or $100 dollars. We were not allowed to take more, not even jewelry. There were Cubans that did come out with a lot of money, millions that they stole, people tied to the Batista government. But the vast majority of Cubans who came in the sixties, came with nothing. It was five of us in two bedrooms and one bath. But I never felt poor, because we had the United States and my family had enormous dignity.

  I wasn’t politically active. I was trying to be an American, trying to make ends meet economically. I got married, had children. I was trying to survive in a very Cuban environment. In my workplace I only socialized with Americans. But my life was of a Cuban-American. There were so many of us here. All my friends that left were here. It was like transplanting Havana to Miami.

  —Silvia Wilhelm, July 20161

  Diaspora

  The Cuban diaspora has long been an essential part of Cuba’s story. In 1824, the poet José Maria Heredia referenced his exile in the stirring poem “Niágara,” a metaphor for Cuban independence, and the next year he wrote “Himno del Desterrado” (Hymn of the Exile).2 José Martí, Cuba’s independence leader, wrote from exile in New York in the 1880s. The literature about the Cubans’ sense of identity highlights exile as a primary element, especially in the way Cubans relate to the United States. “The experience of exile,” historian Louis Pérez informs us, “was decisive to the ways Cubans arrived at nationality and identity.”3 In Spanish, the infinitive form of the word “to exile” (desterrar), also means “to remove earth from.” It suggests, Pérez explains, “adaptation as a means of survival. . . . The deployment of migratory energies propelled vast numbers across boundaries to chart new territories and explore new possibilities. . . . Exile was an occasion to discard the old and adopt the new.”4

  About 5.5 million people lived in Cuba in 1959. That year, fifty thousand (about 1 percent of the population) left as quickly as possible. By the end of 1979, another 550,000 had departed. These émigrés were largely conservative Catholics and light-skinned—natural opponents of the Revolution, which “represented a rejection of all that they stood for,” sociologist Susan Eckstein points out.5 In leaving Cuba rather than opposing revolutionary changes from within, the exiles enabled the Revolution to develop without the kind of blood bath or wrenching civil war that other countries with similar upheavals have endured. Instead, some exiles sought to use the United States to achieve their aim of changing the regime. But the stereotype of a “typical” anti-Castro Cuban American misses the way the community has changed since 1959.

  Not all emigrants went to the United States. Some favored Spanish-speaking countries, and Spain became especially attractive in 2002 when the Madrid government allowed foreign-born children and grandchildren of Spaniards who had emigrated to claim Spanish citizenship. Still, Cuba’s diaspora community largely lives in the United States. Between 1959 and 2004, 89 percent of Cuba’s émigrés went to the mainland and Puerto Rico. A 2013 Pew study found that nearly “two million Hispanics of Cuban origin reside in the United States” (nearly 4 percent of the US Hispanic population), of whom 850,000 are US-born.6

  Waves of Cubans Go to the United States

  Cubans moved to the United States in five distinct waves after 1958. From 1959 to 1962 approximately 225,000 departed in the first wave. They comprised the wealthiest Cubans, those tied to US corporations or associated with the Batista regime, as well as professionals, engineers, and 80 percent of the country’s physicians—people whose expertise was essential for the country’s stability and the regime’s survival. Eckstein and Lorena Barberia aptly characterize this first wave as a “class exodus.”7

  This brain drain placed an immediate stress on the country and stymied plans for development. While many left because they opposed the economic and political direction in which the Revolution was heading, the United States also encouraged such people to leave, in order to undermine the revolutionary government’s viability. In addition, as we described in chapter 9, the CIA and the Catholic Church airlifted about 14,000 Cuban children to the United States in Operation Peter Pan after disseminating false information about alleged Cuban government plans to deny parents any rights over their children.

  Regardless of the reasons why Cubans left the country, they all tended to justify their exile in political terms, as anti-communist, even though the Cuban leadership had its own disagreements with members of the old communist party.8 The United States quickly classified all Cuban émigrés as political refugees, declaring that Cubans “fleeing from Communist oppression” were entitled to political asylum.

  Incensed by the US politicization of emigration, and seeking a way to defuse growing domestic discontent, Fidel announced in September 1965 that any Cuban with a relative in the United States could depart freely from the port of Camarioca, sixty-five miles east of Havana on Cuba’s northern coast.9 This began the second wave. Nearly seven thousand took advantage of the opening, with flotillas of small boats arriving from South Florida to retrieve them. In December 1965, Cuba and the United States signed a memorandum of understanding with the Swiss government, which provided for an orderly departure of refugees via Pan American Airways. There were 45,000 in 1966 alone, and by 1973, when the program ended, the Swiss had arranged for some 260,000 Cubans to migrate to the United States. The United States dubbed the program “freedom flights.”10

  Congress responded to the influx by passing the 1966 Cuban Adjustment Act (CAA), which allowed exiles to obtain permanent resident status—and ultimately citizenship—after being in the United States for one year and a day.11 In practice, that meant nearly all Cuban exiles could obtain citizenship because the review of an asylum case typically took more than one year. In effect, the review became moot once a Cuban was on US territory for more than one year.

  The CAA remains in effect today and continues to serve as a magnet for Cubans. However, in the waning days of his administration, on January 12, 2017, President Barack Obama did end the policy of presuming that any Cuban who arrives on US territory, with or without a visa, is a political refugee.

  Apart from the CAA, the US government provided more than $1 billion in assistance to Cuban exiles through the Cuban Refugee Program, which operated from 1961 to 1974.12 New arrivals received generous adjustment payments for food and clothing, housing, relocation assistance, and education, as well as health care and ready access to Small Business Administration loans. Historian Felix Masud-Piloto observes that the program was “the largest . . . and most expensive aid program for refugees from Latin America ever undertaken by the United States.”13

  Still, Cubans who applied for visas often did so at great personal cost. In some cases, they lost their j
obs. Local Committees for the Defense of the Revolution marked them as “anti-social,” and their children were taunted at school. Cuban government officials stigmatized them as gusanos, or worms.

  In chapter 16, we described the third wave of emigration, the 1980 Mariel exodus, during which more than 125,000 people left Cuba. Both islanders and exiles referred to them as Marielitos. In part as a reaction to this wave, the Reverend Jesse Jackson traveled to Cuba in 1984, seeking to spur Cuban-US negotiations on migration. Jackson all but dragged President Castro to a church service with him one Sunday and then encouraged the Cuban leader to engage with the United States in talks. As a result, Cuba agreed to allow the return of 2,746 Marielitos whom the United States had considered “excludable” from receiving permanent US resident status, and the United States agreed to allow the orderly entry of up to 20,000 Cubans annually. But the modifier “up to” became a source of dispute between the two countries. Cubans expected the United States would grant 20,000 immigrant visas annually. The actual numbers were far lower. In 1990, the United States issued only five thousand immigrant visas to Cubans, and the total went as low as two thousand in some years.

  The fourth wave of émigrés came in the 1990s, during the rafter episode that we discussed in the last chapter. Nearly forty thousand Cubans arrived in the United States in 1994 and 1995, and at least that number probably drowned as they challenged the terrifying Florida Straits. A fifth phase of emigration began in the aftermath of the 1995 accord, which eliminated the imprecision in the previous quota agreement. The words “up to” were removed—the number was to be 20,000 entry visas every year. The quota was reached by various means, including a lottery system in some years and by spousal entry. Between 1996 and 2015, there was a fairly regular legal exodus of at least 20,000 Cubans to the United States every year.

  After the December 2014 Cuban-US announcement of diplomatic relations, the number of Cubans trying to enter US territory without visas swelled. A Pew Research Center study found that at least 43,159 Cubans entered the United States without visas in the 2015 fiscal year (October 2014 to September 2015); that number was reached in just the first nine months of the 2016 fiscal year. The 2015 mark was a 78 percent increase over the previous year.14 The major reason for the sudden increase was that Cubans feared diplomatic relations would lead the United States to repeal the Cuban Adjustment Act.15

  In 2013, the Cuban government abolished the need for an “exit” permit to travel abroad and permitted most Cubans to obtain a passport. In addition, a Cuban could leave the country for up to two years without losing citizenship or property rights. This was a long-awaited and popular decision. Whether or not a Cuban used the new freedom, the creation of the opportunity was cathartic. Cuba is a large island, but many Cubans had felt island-bound or trapped, which is common to inhabitants of any island after a while.

  Some Cubans used their new passports to travel to countries—especially Ecuador—that would permit entry without a visa. From there, they attempted to go to the United States. The surge led Ecuador to close its doors to Cubans in 2015 and other countries, such as Nicaragua, to deny thousands of migrants the right to cross their borders, leaving the Cuban émigrés in limbo.

  A Changing Cuban-American Community

  At first, many in the US exile community did not learn English or try to assimilate. They believed—or hoped—their stay in the United States would be temporary.16 Even after fifteen years, some had not even purchased property or applied for US citizenship because of their expectation that they would be returning to Cuba. As a result, they were unable to vote in US elections. In part, this explains why Cuban-Americans had not developed a traditional lobbying group to represent their interests until 1981, when the Reagan administration encouraged Jorge Mas Canosa to form the CANF.

  But the Cuban exile community did not have only one set of interests because it was not monolithic. A stereotypical passionate animus against the Revolution and communism is far less evident among those who arrived more recently. The newer émigrés also tended to come from different classes than the earlier ones. For example, only 8 percent of the group that migrated between 1959 and 1962 held jobs in Cuba that were classified as semi- or unskilled. In the 1994–1995 cohort, 41 percent were in that category. A remarkable 97 percent of the exiles who arrived in the 1960s identified themselves as “white” in the 1970 US Census.17

  Newer arrivals also have been much more clearly driven by economic rather than political motives. Exiles of the 1980s and 1990s tended to be people who fled the island because they lacked economic opportunity or suffered harsh conditions during the Special Period. These economic migrants had grown up with and were educated by the Revolution. They have been more likely to favor rapprochement between the United States and Cuba because most still had close family members in Cuba with whom they wanted to stay in contact. One consequence of this demographic change is that the newer arrivals have been more comfortable voting for Democratic candidates who espouse a liberal agenda and favor engagement with Cuba than Republicans who tout traditional conservative values and favor maintaining sanctions. In the 2012 election, President Obama won nearly 50 percent of Florida’s Cuban-American vote.18

  By the 1980s, the early arrivals had become firmly planted in the United States. Most had settled in South Florida. (Today 68 percent of Cuban-Americans live in Florida.19) Their families included mature children and grandchildren who were US-born English speakers, well integrated into American society. A sizable proportion of the first wave had worked for US companies before the Revolution and were comfortable with US corporate practices and norms. Cuban exiles became among the first Latinos rising to national prominence. Carlos Gutierrez, for example, was the chief executive of the Kellogg cereal company and later secretary of commerce. Roberto C. Goizueta was chairman of the board and CEO of Coca-Cola.

  Yet the depiction of all Cuban-Americans as wealthy is belied by the fact that 20 percent live in poverty. The poverty rate for all Americans is 16 percent.20 With less desirable skill sets, later waves of émigrés tended to be less prosperous than the first wave. Their lack of advancement, no doubt, has been due also to discrimination they encountered from white America, as well as from lighter-skinned exiles who came before them. Eckstein reports that “earlier émigrés spoke to me disparagingly about Marielito language, dress, and demeanor, and their ‘weird slang.’”21 In fact, Miami was a cauldron boiling with racial hostility in the 1970s, as blacks watched white Cuban-Americans gain positions of power and wealth while job opportunities for blacks declined and their neighborhood schools deteriorated. In May 1980, the tension erupted during three days of violence in black communities that left eighteen people dead and property damage of more than $100 million.22

  Racial Inequality

  After the Revolution and prior to the Special Period, historian Alejandro de la Fuente asserts, “Cuban society had made remarkable progress in the reduction of racial inequality in a number of crucial areas, including education, indicators of health care, and the occupational structure.” Racial disparities still existed, he notes, “but the trend was unequivocally towards equality.”23 Then the Special Period intervened. The changes in Cuba’s economy undermined the advances, many of which had depended on government spending that declined after 1990.

  Darker-skinned Cubans also found fewer opportunities as market reforms took hold. Foreign hotel owners and Cuban managers seemed to assume that international tourists would prefer lighter-skinned service providers such as waiters, which gave these Cubans greater access to hard-currency tips.24 Moreover, darker-skinned Cubans received much less hard currency from remittances. Black Cuban exiles tended to have less disposable income to send to their relatives, and whites constituted the largest portion of Cuban émigrés—68 percent of US Cuban Americans identified themselves as “white” in 2004.25

  Racial differences in income also resulted from historic disparities in educational attainment
. To its credit, the revolutionary government had eliminated the disparity between whites and blacks/mulattos in terms of university graduation rates. In fact, a smaller percentage of whites graduated from college in 1981 than blacks and mulattos. (In contrast, the US percentage of white twenty-five-year-olds who had graduated from college was twice as great as the black percentage in 1987.)26

  However, the exclusion of darker-skinned Cubans continued to exist at the best schools. For example, black and mulatto students make up only 3 percent of the total at Havana’s Lenin School, Cuba’s most prestigious high school to which adolescents are admitted after achieving the highest scores on a nationwide competitive exam. In a 1977 interview with then minister of education José Ramón Fernández, Philip Brenner remarked that the admissions process was likely to function against black youths. Their parents would have been less well educated than whites before the Revolution, and so they would tend not to have a home environment as oriented to professional achievement as whites. Fernández dismissed the concern, arguing that his ministry was overcoming the problem by setting aside 10 percent of the places in highly competitive schools for darker-skinned applicants. But by the 1990s, the effect of such institutional racism was evident from the skin color of the best trained doctors and skilled professionals who were able to supplement their regular incomes with hard currency because the government had sent them on missions abroad.

  While “Cubans today are more than ever equal before the law,” social scientist Esteban Morales observed in 2011, “we continue to be unequal in racial terms, to grasp the opportunities that social policy itself puts at our disposal.”27 In effect, those able to resolver successfully during the Special Period tended to be lighter-skinned Cubans.

  Even Fidel pointed to the widening gap between whites and blacks in a September 2000 speech in New York City, and remorsefully said,