Miami Community Research Articles

Knowledge, attitudes, and practices towards HPV vaccination among reproductive age women in a HIV hotspot in the US.

Human papillomavirus (HPV) is the most common sexually transmitted infection (STI) in the US, responsible for cervical cancer and increased risk of Human Immunodeficiency Virus (HIV) acquisition. Despite an effective HPV vaccine, women's HPV vaccination coverage and rates remain far below desired levels. This study aimed to evaluate HPV knowledge, attitudes, and vaccination practices as well as factors associated with HPV vaccination among women of reproductive age living in Miami, Florida, a Southern US city with a high incidence of STIs and low HPV vaccination coverage. From April to June 2022, 100 HIV-negative, cisgender, sexually active women aged 18-45 years were recruited from the Miami community. Participants completed validated questionnaires using REDCap© electronic surveys, assessing socio-demographics and sexual behaviors; HPV knowledge, screening, vaccination practices; barriers and motivators to HPV vaccination. A cumulative HPV knowledge score (HPV score) was generated. Factors associated with HPV vaccination were analyzed by Chi-square, Fisher's exact test, studentized t-test, and multivariate logistic regression (MLR). A total of 100 participants were enrolled, and 84 who knew their vaccination status were included in the analysis. Of these, 43 reported receiving at least 1 HPV vaccine dose (vaccinated group) and 41 reported never being vaccinated (unvaccinated group). Mean age was 24.7 (SD 4.03) years for the vaccinated group and 31.4 (SD 8.33) for the unvaccinated group. Mean HPV score was 18.9/29 (SD 6.05) for the vaccinated group and 9.1/29 (SD 8.82) for the unvaccinated group. Amongst vaccinated participants, 76.74% reported a history of HPV/Pap smear screening vs 87.80% in the unvaccinated group. Barriers to HPV vaccination included: 14.6% low-risk perception, 29.3% healthcare barriers, and 46.3% vaccine hesitancy and personal beliefs. Motivators t HPV vaccination included: risk perception and vaccine beliefs (71.42%), healthcare-related (60.71%) and social motivators (55.95%). In the first MLR, one-point increases in HPV score were significantly associated with higher odds of HPV vaccination until an HPV score of 16, and a one-year increase in age was associated with a 16% lower odds of HPV vaccination (aOR = 0.84, 95% CI [0.72, 0.99]; p = 0.035). Contraception use was also associated with HPV vaccination (aOR 8.36 (95% CI [1.41, 49.62]; p = 0.020). Race, ethnicity, college education status, and number of sexual partners were not significant predictors of HPV vaccination. In the second MLR evaluating vaccination motivators as predictors of HPV vaccination, we found that individuals who were motivated by healthcare had 3.03 (95% CI [1.02, 9.00]; p = 0.046) times the odds of HPV vaccination compared to individuals without healthcare-related motivators. Findings suggest suboptimal HPV knowledge and low vaccination rates among women of reproductive age. Public health efforts should focus on increasing basic HPV knowledge among women with little-to-no HPV knowledge to increase vaccine uptake.

Trumpism, Cuban Americans, and the Fetishism of Politics

This article analyses the transfigured way in which President Trump and the Cuban-American far right exercised their power. It assesses both the underlying social relations behind this in both US society as a whole and in particular in its subset of the Cuban-American community in Miami, and the construction of what Michel Foucault called a truth regime which serves to hide the social actors’ true power-related goals. Theoretical perspectives about the nature of power in international relations, and society as a whole, are employed in this endeavour. It is concluded that beyond the predominant Cold War politics and narrative, Trump and the Cuban-American far right’s goal was to maintain the local and national power structure they have benefited from, given the perceived harmful impact of Barack Obama’s policies.

THE EFFECTS OF A SUMMER PROGRAM ON PHYSICAL FITNESS AND HEALTH OUTCOMES IN CHILDREN

https://youtu.be/uCkCVkd6kSY BACKGROUND High rates of adolescent obesity and its associated co-morbidities have been attributed to a lack of physical activity and unhealthy nutrition habits. This is especially apparent during the summer months, when adolescents are out of school and do not have the structure of the academic year and its planned extracurricular activities. The Translational Health in Nutrition and Kinesiology (THINK) program is a nutrition and exercise science curriculum that is interfaced with social emotional learning (SEL) to enhance to personal health and lifestyle behaviors in middle school youth. The purpose of this study is to determine whether the THINK program could improve physical fitness, nutrition habits, and SEL in a 6-week summer program across a 3 year period. METHODS/DESIGN Participants from the South Miami community were enrolled in the THINK (n =108, 58 males, 50 females, 12.03 +.56 years). The assessments of physical fitness included: cardiorespiratory fitness (CRF) using the Pacer test, flexibility using the Sit & Reach test, power using the Vertical Jump test, agility using the Shuttle Run, and muscular endurance using the Curl-up test. Body composition was analyzed using the Inbody 520 and SEL was measured using the Positive Youth Inventory. Food habits were measured using the Adolescent Food Habits Checklist. Means and standard error values were evaluated for all dependent variables. Paired sample t-tests (SPSS version 27) were performed to determine changes in dependent variables over time. RESULTS Significant improvements in CFF (p<.001), power (p<.006), flexibility (p<.001), agility (p<.001), muscular endurance (p<.001), lean body mass (p<.001) Food Habits (p<.001), and SEL (p=.038) were found. CONCLUSION An integrative and physically active summer program can result in improvements in physical fitness, nutrition habits, and SEL in as little as 6-weeks. The emphasis on physical activities in combination with nutrition, science and SEL in programs such the THINK program may serve as novel approach for improving physical fitness and lifestyle behaviors in middle school adolescents during the summer months. Future studies should include control groups to determine whether these changes occur independent of typical maturation and developmental processes in youth.

90 millas: Relaciones económicas Cuba–Estados Unidos, 1898–2020

90 millas: Relaciones económicas Cuba–Estados Unidos, 1898–2020

Exogenous windborne debris: Definition and required extent of surrounding buildings for modeling in hurricanes

Modeling and estimating the damage to the built environment caused by hurricane winds is an essential requirement to enhance community resilience. Consideration of damage to a building’s envelope caused by windborne debris impact is necessary. To model this damage for a certain subdivision of houses, debris generated in neighboring subdivisions, defined as exogenous debris, must be taken into account. Existing physics-based damage estimation models do not consider the effect exogenous windborne debris has on the estimated damage due to hurricane winds. This paper provides a methodology to identify the extent of the neighboring subdivisions that needs to be considered during damage simulation to accurately account for exogenous windborne debris. The presented methodology is based on first identifying the extent of the neighboring subdivisions through a simulation-based strategy which follows an iterative scheme. For each size increment, the iterative scheme estimates the number of exogenous windborne debris using a physics-based damage estimation model. The single building solution is then generalized to a subdivision of any arbitrary shape. The proposed methodology is applied to analyze a hypothetical residential community in Miami, FL. Analysis results show the effect on the required extent of the neighboring subdivisions of the hurricane maximum wind speed, the floor-area ratio and the resistance of the building envelope components. The analysis concludes with a regression model that can be used to estimate the size of the neighboring subdivisions to be used in damage estimation models.

Re-Narrating Mariel: Black Cubans, Racial Exclusion, and Building Community in Miami

Re-Narrating Mariel: Black Cubans, Racial Exclusion, and Building Community in Miami

Diplomacy Meets Migration: US Relations with Cuba during the Cold War by Hideaki Kami

Reviewed by: Diplomacy Meets Migration: US Relations with Cuba during the Cold War by Hideaki Kami Patrick Iber Hideaki Kami, Diplomacy Meets Migration: US Relations with Cuba during the Cold War. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018. In recent years, some of the most innovative work in the history of Latin American international relations has moved away from analysis of bipolar relationships between Washington and other actors, and toward a multipolar consideration of the exercise of power. Tanya Harmer's Allende's Chile and the Inter-American Cold War, for example, argues forcefully for the importance of Brazil's foreign policy in the Chilean transition from socialism to military dictatorship. Renata Keller's Mexico's Cold War considers the covert and overt aspects of the triangular relationship of Mexico, Cuba, and the United States. Hideaki Kami's Diplomacy Meets Migration takes a similar approach, but with something of a twist: the third player in his analysis (to go along with the United States and Cuba) is not another country, but Miami. It is a decision that makes a good deal of sense. As Kami puts it, "Because Cuban emigres in Miami intervened in international politics at critical moments, relations between Washington and Havana also intermingled with the political dynamics of the Cuban-American community" (5). After the Cuban Revolution, Miami became the center of many a counterrevolutionary effort, some aided by the Central Intelligence Agency, others independent of it. Who Miami's Cubans were, what they did, and who might join them were matters of ongoing dispute. And of course, there was (and is) the importance of Miami's Cubans to Republican politics in a crucial state. [End Page 310] The book begins with a chapter on the origins of the Cuban émigré community in Miami in the years after the revolution and proceeds chronologically through to the end of the George H. W. Bush administration, at which point the paper trail ends, presumably on shelves of classified boxes. Kami makes use of a wide range of sources; beyond the US presidential libraries and those located in Miami, he has consulted records from the United Kingdom, Canada, Japan, and Mexico. Many of his most interesting discoveries come from Cuban diplomatic archives. The analysis here is unlikely to radically revise understandings of Cuban-US relations. Though full of sound judgments and based on prodigious research, parts of the book have a rather familiar feel. Perhaps one of the book's contributions is inherent in its methodology and borne out by its findings, which show all of the ways in which Cuban Miami was not identical to Washington in its interests or its actions. Émigrés were not puppets; they were frequently frustrating to various administrations in Washington. But nor were they, as US diplomat George Kennan wrote in 1977, a lobby capable of "bending us to their purposes." Consider, for example, the case of the Cuban American National Foundation (CANF), founded in 1981 by Jorge Mas Canosa. Mas Canosa was able to bring Reagan to Miami in 1983 and help lobby for the creation of Radio Martí, and later for the Cuban Democracy Act of 1992. In the 1980s, CANF acted both like a lobby and like a government-in-exile, drawing up plans for a postcommunist Cuba with the assistance of right-wing free-market economists like Arthur Laffer and Manuel Ayau. But even with these ideological points of contact and the background of shared anticommunism, CANF and Reagan were sometimes at odds, especially over issues of migration. The Mariel boatlift had drawn much negative attention in the United States to the issue of Cuban migration. (A 1982 poll showed that Cubans, remarkably, were the least welcome migrants in US history, and popular culture in the 1980s, from Scarface to Miami Vice frequently associated Cubans with criminality.) Kami shows remarkable evidence of harebrained schemes the Reagan administration considered, but never carried out, to dump Cubans deemed criminal or insane back on the island. CANF, by contrast, deemed resistance to migration a betrayal of the cause of freedom. All in all, Kami portrays the triangular dynamic generated by Washington-Havana-Miami as a kind of a trap. Miami's Cubans, at least...

Un paso adelante, dos pasos hacia atrás. Las relaciones de Estados Unidos con Cuba bajo los presidentes Obama y Trump

Desde el triunfo de Fidel Castro en Cuba en 1959, las relaciones de Estados Unios con la isla caribeña fueron caracterizadas durante más de medio siglo por una alta hostilidad y conflictividad. Eso cambió durante el segundo mandato de Barak Obama con una serie de medidas que parecieron señalar el despegue de una nueva época de cooperación entre ambos países. Esa estrategia de descongelamiento de las relaciones bilaterales terminó, sin embargo, con lavictoria electoral de Donald Trump y su estrategia favorita América first, que instrumentalizó de manera extrema la política externa para fines de la política interna. Para satisfacer a sus adherentes, entre ellos los cubanoamericanos en el Estado de Florida, Trump revertió paso por paso una gran parte de la política de apertura de su antecesor con efectos económicos negativos tanto para los cubanos como, aunque menos, para empresas y ciudadanos estadounidensesy empeoró sustancialmente la imagen de Estados Unidos y de su gobierno tanto en la región como en Europa. Un cambio generacional en la comunidad cubana en Miami, protestas de la Unión Europea y de ciertos sectores económicos en Estados Unidos despiertan por otra parte dudas si la política rígida de sanciones de la administración Trump sobreviva realmente a las próximas elecciones en Estados Unidos en 2020. Como conceptos analíticos nos sirven el neorealismo, el socialconstructivismo y el concepto intermestic polictics.

1650. Knowledge and Attitudes Toward Influenza Vaccination Among Hispanics: A Survey Conducted in Latin American Consulates in South Florida

BackgroundEach year Influenza causes between 12,000 and 56,000 deaths, and over half a million of hospitalizations in the United States. Despite the widespread availability of vaccination, immunization coverage is low. Less than half of American adults receive the influenza vaccine, and there is a disparity between Hispanic and non-Hispanics, with only 35.9% of Hispanic compared with 45.9% of white non-Hispanics receiving the vaccine. In Miami, South Florida, over two-thirds of the population is Hispanic, and rates of influenza vaccination are low. This study aims to identify the knowledge and attitudes toward influenza vaccination among members of the adult Hispanic community in Miami, and to identify barriers to vaccination in this population.MethodsThis is a cross-sectional study conducted during the influenza season in 2017 and 2019 (October to December). A survey was administered in the waiting rooms of participating Latin American Consulates (Argentina, Colombia, Ecuador, Guatemala, Honduras, Mexico, Peru, and Uruguay) in Miami. Participants included were older than 18 years, Hispanic, and with residence in the United States for more than 6 months. The participants accepted the inform consent orally. The survey was voluntary and anonymous.ResultsWe enrolled 970 adults. The median age was 43 years, 50% were male, 60% had health insurance, and 67% had completed education of high school or higher. Knowledge regarding influenza and vaccination was low (78% believed asymptomatic individuals could transmit influenza, 14% knew that vaccination is recommended during the winter months, 50% felt not everyone should be vaccinated, 25% believed the vaccine causes influenza, and 7% autism). About one quarter (27%) received the influenza vaccine annually, 35% sometimes, and 38% never. Using multinomial logistic regression, we identified age χ2(2) = 19.38, P < 0.001, consulate χ2(6) = 160.21, P < 0.001, and insurance status χ2(2) = 23.04, P < 0.001 as predictors of receiving vaccination. Neither gender, nor education level found to be associated with vaccination behavior.ConclusionImmunization rates in the adult Hispanic population are low. Interventions to improve vaccination among Hispanics who are older and lack of health insurance are urgently needed in the diverse Hispanic community.Disclosures All authors: No reported disclosures.

The Limits of Dialogue: Washington, Havana, and Miami, 1977–1980

This article explores the complex interactions between diplomacy and human migration as a fundamental component of U.S.-Cuban relations in the late 1970s. It assesses U.S. and Cuban leaders’ intentions in pursuing bilateral normalization, as well as their responses to the competing opinions of the Cuban-American community in Miami. The article also examines the opening of the secret U.S.-Cuban talks, the growing mistrust and suspicion among Washington and Havana, and the breakdown of communications prior to the Mariel boatlift of 1980. Drawing on U.S., Cuban, and Cuban-American resources, the article shows that the complex triangular relationship linking Washington, Havana, and Miami was crucial in the short-lived U.S.-Cuban dialogue. The article demonstrates that miscommunication and disagreements over Cuban migration were just as important as the U.S.-Cuban clash over the Cold War in Africa in undermining the spirit of that dialogue.

Dialect perceptions in real time: A restudy of Miami-Cuban perceptions

Perceptual dialectology investigates nonlinguists’ beliefs about their own and other varieties. This paper fills a gap in longitudinal research in this area with a restudy of the perceptions of Miami Cubans carried out twelve years after the first study. Perceptions are examined in relation to social and demographic changes with a sample of 84 participants of Cuban origin who responded to a questionnaire about the correctness of regional varieties of Spanish. The results showed that perceptions of non-Cuban varieties remained relatively stable over time, continuing to correlate with race and poverty. Perceptions toward the Cuban Spanish of the Miami community were also stable and, as in the earlier study, were highly positive, reflecting strong beliefs in its correctness-status. In contrast, perceptions of Cuban Spanish on the island were significantly more negative; it was ranked the least correct of the regional varieties evaluated. Factors underlying perceptions are examined in relation to demographic changes, political ideology, and beliefs about race and poverty. This paper highlights the contribution of the longitudinal study of dialect perceptions to the understanding of language attitudes, intergroup relations, and language change.

Physical activity and stress in adult Hispanics.

Physical inactivity and obesity are major U.S. health concerns. Hispanics have higher rates of obesity and lower incidence of meeting physical activity (PA) recommendations, however most studies on PA focus on non-Hispanic Whites. This study examined type and amount of physical activities, and their relationship to age, BMI, employment, and stress in adult female Hispanics. Sixty-three female Hispanics (mean age 34 years, SD = 10.5) were recruited in the Miami community. By BMI, of 47 women reporting both weight and height, 8.5% were underweight, 38.3% were normal weight, 27.2% were overweight, and 26.0% were obese. Women completed two instruments measuring PA and two measuring stress. Attitudes toward PA were positive; greatest concerns were job security and finances not exercise. Leisure walking (14.3%) was the most common type of PA followed by activities watching TV (32.8%) and using video games (32.8%). Women with greater stress had higher BMIs and were less physically active (p < .05). In this sample, exercise was not a main priority although 53% were overweight/obese. Stress related to employment and finances was a major concern. Interventions on stress reduction and incorporating exercise within their daily lives are important strategies.

Making mediated memory work: Cuban-Americans, Miami media and the doings of diaspora memories

How are mediated memories brought into being? In other words, how can we understand the ways personal and public memories are enacted in environments that have become increasingly digitally networked? Following this fundamental question for current interrogations of the entanglement of media and memory, we first develop a concept of mediated memory work. Instituting experiences and senses of the past, these time- and space-bound efforts interweave with arrangements of people and their social relations, cultural discourses, objects and media environments. Capitalizing on such an understanding of mediated memory work, the article demonstrates how and to what ends the enactment of memories can be empirically studied by using the example of the Cuban-American community in Miami. In particular, building on participant observation, in-depth interviews and media ethnography, we outline practices, cultural artefacts, communal bonds, compassionate relations and a media manifold that have been employed by different segments of a diasporic collective in shaping how the country of origin and the exile is to be remembered.

Geographies of the Caribbean in Cristina Garcia’s The Agüero Sisters

Marked by a two-fold estrangement - from her native Cuba and from the Cuban American community in Miami - Garcia’s first two novels, Dreaming in Cuban (1992) and The Agüero Sisters (1997) - mirror the vagaries of a divided Cuba, its spatial and symbolic dissemination. This article argues that grafting, whether literal (botanical, anatomic) or metaphorical (textual, cultural or linguistic) is a central trope in The Agüero Sisters, functioning as a recurrent trope in the processes of discovery, dissemination, depletion and recovery explored in the novel. The paper further argues that Cuba’s political turmoil and economic disorder are mirrored in the unleashing forces of the natural elements, in the ravaged landscape of the human body and of the island. Conversely, there reigns an opulent but sterile (dis)order on the other side of the Florida Straits. By examining the shifting perspectives, the contrapuntal narrative structure and deterritorialized (borderless) language in Garcia’s novels, the paper will probe the thematic and textual representations of a “diaspora consciousness” (James Clifford). Ultimately, Garcia’s novel seems to question the very possibility of “at-homeness” (Adorno, Minima Moralia), conceived in strictly territorial and cultural terms.

Earthquake Impact on Miami Haitian Americans: The Role of Family/Social Connectedness

Individuals who are indirectly exposed to disasters may be affected psychologically. The impact of the 2010 Haiti earthquake reverberated throughout the Haitian American community in Miami, Florida. Many within the community held strong transnational family and friendship bonds to their homeland. We examined associations between indicators of family and social connectedness and symptom levels for generalized anxiety disorder, major depression, and physical and mental health status for Haitian Americans and non-Haitian Americans who were living in Miami at the time of the earthquake. Results showed that family and social connectedness to earthquake victims strongly predicted symptom levels for Haitian American survey participants.

Disclosing the Ethnographic Self

Disclosing the Ethnographic Self

Cultural Erotics in Cuban America (review)

Although belonging to the medieval period, one misses mention of the historical development of slavery during the middle ages (Charles Verlinden, etc.) and the uses of genealogy (biblical and modem) in conditioning the European emergent views on race. After all, the races of man descend from the sons of Noah (Shem, Cham, and Jafet), who populate different parts of the world (Asia, Africa, and Europe), and who are in different hierarchical relationship to each other. That story constantly appears in European chronicles and paintings , relating to the myth of the Visigothic origins of the Spanish, and conditions the treatment of the subaltern. The introduction also suffers from overuse of critical terminology, often not privileging the texts it explores but what the critics have written about them or about the concept of race. It also makes early reference to some critical concepts (narrativized and denarrativized vision, defamiliarization, subaltern approach, the hegemonic eye, etc.) that often are not explained until pages after their first use. There other aspects of the work are bothersome. Beusterien often tells anecdotes (21, 141, 151, etc.); summarizes what each chapter will treat (25, 29-34, 59, 101-102, 142-143, 173, etc.); and, engages with critics (36, 44, 141, 143 etc.) using the first person. The book also varies labels (for example, Afro-Hispanics 40 and Afro-Iberians 41), and cites titles of works in English followed by Spanish in brackets or Spanish followed by English in brackets. (He clearly indicates that he is doing this on purpose, but one wonders why Eye on Race does not stick to one type of citation.) Many of these stylistic faults (including the occasional typo) should have been caught by an editor and are not the fault of the writer, but good editors are an increasingly rare commodity. In spite of these observations, Professor Beurestein’ s study of this enticing array of texts dealing with race gives much food for thought. The book breaks new ground in the field. FRANK A. DOMÍNGUEZ The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Ortiz, Ricardo L. Cultural Erotics in Cuban America. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2007. 337 pp. In response to the growing interest of the last two decades in Cuban-American diasporic studies, in his latest study Ricardo Ortiz looks at the sexual wars that have accompanied various political and cultural wars since the 1959 Cuban Revolution. Reaching beyond the typical Miami community and incorporating diasporic cultural expressions from New Jersey, New York and CaliRese ñas 135 fornia, he proposes that these conflicts have taken a “rather distinctive, certainly spectacular form [of] ‘erotics,’ sexuality, passion, kinship, and other often body-based manifestations of nonrational forms of human connection and interaction” (8). Throughout the book, the critic successfully addresses the ramifications of Cuban-American writers and artists that confront the cultural heteronormativity both on and off the island, in order to portray what remains of a Cuban in [North] America. Divided into three distinct parts with a total of eight chapters, the book focuses almost entirely on post revolutionary, U.S.-based, Cuban-American writers . Singling out the novels Antes que Anochezca (1992) and El Portero (1989), in his first chapter Ortiz suggests that Reinaldo Arenas’s writing wrestles with the transition of one cultural and economic environment to another. He effectively adds that within this transition there exists a particular “erotics” that works in and between spaces and subjects of the Cuban-exile imagination. In short, Ortiz analyzes the “the symbolic construction of Cuban political reality as a function of a quasi-oedipal struggle between the hysterically, murderously hated Fidel, el hombre, él, and Cuba bella, la patria…” (44). Accordingly, in his second chapter the critic investigates the unique production of Cuban exile prison writing, concentrating on the literary works of Senel Paz, Ricardo Pau-Llosa, Reinaldo Arenas and Severo Sarduy, as well as Tomás Gutiérrez Alea’s film, Strawberry and Chocolate (1993). Arguing that Pau-Llosa’s work is actually more political than the poet cares to admit, Ortiz uses his poetry as an example of how patriarchal traditions and repressed homophobia are carefully hidden among many Cuban and Cuban-American works. By comparing “bodies” of prison...

US–Cuban Relations: Is There a Light at the End of the Tunnel?

U.S.–Cuban Cooperation Past, Present, and Future. By Melanie M. Ziegler Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2007. 182 pp., $59.95 cloth (ISBN: 978-0-8130-3087-6). This excellent book is an important contribution to the literatures on US–Cuban relations, foreign policy analysis, international cooperation, and security studies. It tackles the neglected issue of US–Cuban collaboration in areas of mutual interest for both countries, such as illegal immigration, drug trafficking, managing tensions around Guantanamo Naval Base, and diminishing the danger of accidental war. The triangular relationship between US policymakers in Washington, the Cuban exiled community in Miami and the Cuban government underlies the persistence of the “Cuba problem” in US foreign policy. Many analysts believe that the continuation of the US economic embargo on trade with Cuba (imposed after the Cuban revolution in 1959) is an anachronism in the post-Cold War era, when the United States has normal relations with China and Vietnam and is negotiating the normalization of relations with North Korea. The refusal of the US government to seriously consider a normalization of relations with the Castro regime is greatly determined by the top-heavy influence of the Miami-based Cuban exiled community in US policymaking, which reinforces the hegemonic presumption (see Lowenthal 1976) in US policy toward the island and becomes an obstacle to consistently implement even mild confidence-building measures (CBMs) such as the migration agreements discussed in this book. The United States helped Cuba to become independent from Spain by winning the Spanish–American war of 1898, but Cuba soon became a US protectorate with the Platt Amendment to the 1903 treaty with the island, which gave the United States the right to intervene in Cuba to protect Cuban security. Since then, the United States has considered that it has a “natural right” to exercise hegemony in Cuba. The Cuban revolution in 1959, “challenged United States hegemony in the Western Hemisphere to an unprecedented degree” (Connell-Smith 1974:226) not only due to the revolutionary Cuban government's alignment …

Elián González and the ‘‘Real Cuba’’ of Miami: Visions of Identity, Exceptionality, and Divinity

This essay explores the significance and meaning of the international custody battle forged between Miami Cubans and the government of Fidel Castro over six-year-old Elián González, one of only three survivors of a boat loaded with fourteen other Cubans that capsized at sea in late November 1999. It argues that the massive legal and political campaign launched by exile leaders in Miami to prevent Elián from being returned to his father in Cuba dramatized the creation and growth of what many Miami Cubans understand to be the ‘‘real Cuba’’ in the United States. Critical to this vision of the ‘‘real Cuba’’ are two related myths of Cuban exceptionality. Articulated today by exile leaders for their own ends but conceived by powerful, founding groups of exiles who arrived in Miami in the 1960s, these myths posit U.S. Cubans as uniquely entitled to special treatment from the U.S. government and as uniquely qualified to defend the interests of democracy and anticommunism better than any non-Cuban U.S. citizen and even better than the U.S. government itself. Using popular mobilizations of Miami Cubans around Elián as a window on the political and ideological underpinnings of these myths, this essay also suggests that the ‘‘real Cuba’’ of Miami has, as the case of Elián showed, little legitimacy or resonance with island Cubans, today or in the post-Fidel age. Resumen Este ensayo examina la importancia y el sentido de la batalla internacional entre los cubanos de Miami y el gobierno de Fidel Castro por la custodia del niño de seis años Elián González. Elían González fue uno de los tres sobrevivientes de un bote que transportaba a otros catorce cubanos y que naufragó a finales de Noviembre de 1999. El mismo argumenta que la masiva campaña legal y política lanzada por los lideres del exilio de Miami para evitar que Elián fuera devuelto a su padre en Cuba puso en escena la estructura y la existencia de lo que muchos cubanos de Miami entienden como la ‘‘Cuba real’’ en Estados Unidos. Al centro de esta visión de la ‘‘Cuba real’’ de Miami están los dos mitos relacionados con la excepcionalidad cubana. Articulados hoy en día por lideres del exilio para servir sus propósitos, pero creados por grupos poderosos de patrocinadores exiliados que llegaron a Miami en los sesenta, estos mitos ratificaron a los cubanos de Estados Unidos como excepcionalmente investidos de un tratamiento especial de parte del gobierno estadounidense y excepcionalmente calificados para defender los intereses de la democracia y el anticomunismo mejor que cualquier otro ciudadano americano no cubano y mejor aún que el propio gobierno de Estados Unidos. Usando las movilizaciones populares de los cubanos de Miami alrededor de Elián como una ventana hacia los elementos políticos e ideológicos que sostienen estos mitos, este ensayo también sugiere que la ‘‘Cuba real’’ de Miami tiene, como el caso de Elián mostró, poca legitimidad o resonancia entre los cubanos de la isla tanto hoy como en la era posFidel.

Is the factor structure of the metabolic syndrome comparable between men and women and across three ethnic groups: the Miami Community Health Study.

The metabolic syndrome (MS) is conceived as a cluster of disorders that increase risk for coronary heart disease and type 2 diabetes. Studies examining its structure primarily have used an exploratory factor analytic technique, but yielded discrepant results. There also is a lack of research that investigates whether the clustering pattern is similar across sex and ethnic groups. This study uses confirmatory factor analysis to evaluate the factor structure of the MS and examines its similarity between men and women and across three ethnic groups (Caucasian, African, and Cuban Americans). A hierarchical four-factor model with an overarching MS factor uniting insulin resistance, obesity, lipid, and blood pressure factors was tested with 517 individuals from the Miami Community Health Study. Findings show that the proposed structure was well supported (comparative fit index=0.97) and similar between men and women and across ethnic groups. The MS was represented strongly by insulin resistance, followed by obesity, lipid factors, and, to a lesser extent, a blood pressure factor. This study provides empirical support for identifying and diagnosing the MS by its component factors in a diverse population.