Political practice and the rise of an ethnic enclave

Abstract

The Cuban American community shares many of the structural features commonly associated with other types of immigrant enclaves. But its specific mode of political incorporation into the United States distinguishes it from other enclaves, making it a unique sociopolitical formation: “authoritarian enclave.” The Cuban American enclave arose out of Caribbean geopolitics as an unintentional byproduct of four state-sponsored movements. These movements interlocked in an uneven manner, sometime via the civil, other times via the military, and still other times based on a combination of both. The internally divided Batistianist movement interlocked via its military wing with Trujillo's relatively unified Dominican state. In contrast, the highly unified Conservative movement interlocked with the military wing of the internally divided U.S. state. The Liberal movement, like the previous movement, was internally unified but, unlike them, its contacts were with the civil, not military, wing of the U.S. state. Preliminary research on the Terrorist movement, a community-generated movement that responds to changing geopolitical situations, suggests that its civil and military wing are discreetly and flexibly linked to each other. These movements had the cumulative and unintentional effect of creating a new organizational space within the Caribbean geopolitical system from which the Cuban American community was later to emerge. The Cuban American enclave rooted in Miami is today an important actor in the Caribbean Basin.