Cuban American Community Research Articles

La comunidad cubanoamericana y la política de Estados Unidos hacia Cuba: Historia y presente

Este artículo examina la evolución de la comunidad cubanoamericana, teniendo en cuenta las transformaciones sociodemográficas así como los niveles de inserción dentro del sistema político de Estados Unidos, para intentar explicar su posible influencia en la conformación de la política hacia Cuba.

The Cuban Vote by Carmen Pelaez (review)

Reviewed by: The Cuban Vote by Carmen Pelaez Horacio Sierra THE CUBAN VOTE. By Carmen Pelaez. Directed by Loretta Greco. Colony Theater, Miami New Drama, Miami Beach. April 22, 2022. Carmen Pelaez’s The Cuban Vote demonstrated just how vital regional theatre is and how well it is able to reflect the realities of local communities and the sociopolitical discourses they sustain. Inspired in equal measure by the international attention Miami’s Cuban American community garners every election cycle, William Shakespeare’s The Taming of the Shrew, and the snappy writing of Aaron Sorkin’s The West Wing, Pelaez’s play buzzed with urgent energy and left the audience pealing with laughter at jokes that lampooned the three-ring circus that is Miami’s political scene. But just as the retort “Fidel Castro is dead”—delivered deadpan by the play’s main character, Carolina Clarens (Carmen Pelaez) when she was being interviewed by a right-wing, Spanish-language radio host—sent shudders through the audience, The Cuban Vote takes everyone to task for the political mayhem of the last twenty years. Liberals, conservatives, candidates, political consultants, mainstream media, social media, naïve Cuban Americans nostalgic for pre-Castro community, cynical Cuban Americans who are “over the whole Castro thing,” and every disengaged Miamian in between are all held to account. Carolina is an intelligent and wonky candidate for mayor of Miami-Dade county. Despite having managed the office of a former mayor, who also happens to have been her father, Carolina is faltering in the polls. With a skeleton crew consisting of her seen-it-all mother, Ofelia (Evelyn Perez), and social media influencer sister, Blanca (Marcela Paguaga), the campaign needs help. Blanca’s boyfriend, the obnoxiously charming bitcoin bro Benji Carbonell (Kristian Bikic), is eager to wed Blanca. But Blanca [End Page 87] has informed Benji that her mother won’t consent to the marriage until Carolina is elected mayor. Benji calls in a favor from a Miami native, Alex Mesa (Andhy Mendez), who has made a name for himself in Washington, DC as a slick political consultant. Benji pays Alex’s salary to ensure Carolina wins her campaign and Benji can marry Blanca. After Alex convinces another formidable candidate not to enter the race, he realizes how unlikable Carolina is. To offer voters a clear contrast between Carolina’s governing prowess and the clueless schmucks who usually dominate Miami’s political scene, he recruits a drunk viejo sitting at a bar, the scene-stealing Gilberto Ruiz (Jonathan Nichols-Navarro), to run for office. Gilberto—a character clearly inspired by the Christopher Sly lark at the beginning of Taming of the Shrew—believes he has what it takes to be mayor. The play soon amps up the didacticism as it serves up a cautionary tale with which we are all too familiar: experience, merit, and know-how are often overshadowed by superficial showmanship. Especially in a city as flashy as Miami. Click for larger view View full resolution Andhy Mendez (Alex Mesa), Carmen Pelaez (Carolina Clarens), and Kristian Bikic (Benji Carbonell) in The Cuban Vote. Photo: Stian Roenning. Pelaez’s keen appreciation for the local vernacular of Miami’s Cuban American community not only makes for great jokes, it also underscores regional theatre’s ability to offer representation to communities that are often excluded from Broadway and from canonical theatre that is deemed to be representative of the American experience. As The Cuban Vote makes clear, political machinations, ambitious individuals, and falling in love, may be universal, but the way in which these themes are expressed have more power when the audience feels a visceral connection to them. For example, a popular meme riffs on how Hispanic communities will take someone’s insecurity (big nose, skinny, red-headed) and make it a loving nickname (narizón, flaco, peliroja, respectively). The double-edged sword of such nicknames is on display in The Cuban Vote when Gilberto continually disparages Carolina by calling her “la gorda” (the fat woman) during interviews. In response to a debate question about climate change and rising sea levels, Gilberto’s anti-intellectualism is subsumed by his callousness: “Let the seas rise. I float! [To Carolina] Especially...

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.

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

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

Dictatorship, Machismo, and the Cuban Exile Drama in a Tragicomic Mode: Cristina García’s King of Cuba

"Dictatorship, Machismo, and the Cuban Exile Drama in a Tragicomic Mode: Cristina García’s King of Cuba. Three years before the death of Fidel Castro, Cuban American author Cristina García published a fictional account of the Cuban dictator’s death in a darkly funny and sentimental story of intertwined destinies, ironies of fate, machismo, failure and suffering. With El Comandante and a fellow octogenarian émigré as protagonists, García launches into a fictional exploration of Cuban masculinity, machismo, the dictator’s fate, vanity, and failure. Written in what I will argue is a tragicomic mode, balancing the tragic and the comic, the horrendous and the laughable, the pitiful and the ridiculous, the novel reflects different perspectives on sensitive topics for Cubans on both sides of the Florida Straits, challenging preconceived ideas and inviting the reader to reflect on the relativity of truth. Keywords: Fidel Castro, dictatorship, machismo, Cuban American community, satire, tragicomic mode "

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...

The Mariel Boatlift and comprehensive planning: humanitarian crisis, demographic data, and Cuban-American community development

ABSTRACT The Mariel Boat-lift represents the largest immigrant humanitarian crisis to ever hit an American city. This paper traces the history of this humanitarian crisis in the City of Miami to consider how comprehensive planners were involved in the collection of demographic data and the empowerment of Cuban Americans. Comprehensive planners had to confront the absence of demographic data as they sought to deal with the physical and social impacts of the refugee influx. The Boatlift took place immediately after efforts to conduct the 1980 U.S. Census, and its effect was to dramatically disrupt any new understanding of Miami’s urban population, its locations and needs. Nevertheless, the collection, recording, and interpretation of demographic data during and after the Mariel Boatlift eventually played a crucial role in energizing an apparatus of Cuban-American community development and a new framework that justified not only political-asylum policies but also provisions and services empowering new trends in political representation at the local level. Miami thus offers a historical case study of how the work of comprehensive planners may become politicized through episodes of humanitarian crisis, community response, and ethnic empowerment. The history of the Mariel Boatlift and the response of comprehensive planners advance understanding of political change in cities and the role of urban spaces, immigrant groups, and comprehensive planners in bringing about ethnic empowerment.

The Cuban-American Sound Machine: Nostalgia and Identity in the Music of Celia Cruz, Gloria Estefan and Pitbull

This article examines how Celia Cruz (1925–2003), Gloria Estefan (born 1957) and Pitbull (born 1981), each of whom represents different generations, immigration statuses, gender performances and racial identities, have employed their musical hits and public personae to simultaneously shorten and widen the 90-mile distance between the US and Cuba. Their musical and political commentary parallels the evolving attitudes and identities of the Cuban-American community towards Cuba and its politics. Each successive artist is a little more ambiguous about his or her political leanings in the American political sphere, but all of them continue to oppose Cuba's Communist regime while trading in the musical currency of nostalgia for the Cuba of yesteryear. In the vein of Gustavo Pérez Firmat's watershed analysis of Cuban-Americans' hyphenated identity, these artists demonstrate how Cuban-American identity exists in a liminal cultural space that lives in the present and plans for the future with one foot planted firmly in the fantasy of an Edenic past.

Another Cubanidad, another Latinidad: Latinx African diaspora in Nilo Cruz’s Anna in the Tropics

This research proposes that, in taking 1929 Ybor City as its setting, Nilo Cruz’s drama Anna in the Tropics (Dramatists Play Service, New York, 2003) simultaneously enacts an alternative origin story for Cuban American community in the United States—one inclusive of Afro-Cubans—and creates a bridge between Latinx, African American, and Afro-Latin American experiences. Constitutive of that bridge is what this essay identifies as the drama’s subtle invocation of the African diaspora worldviews, practices, and aesthetics of Orisha worship common in the Americas. This spiritual component of the play is central to the resolution of gender, financial, and national conflicts that erupt in this drama, and suggestive of an Afro-Cubanidad that is gender-bending, decolonial, and cosmopolitan. This interdisciplinary analysis situates Anna in the Tropics in both Latinx and African American performance contexts, while also drawing from research in history, religion, gender, and feminist thought.

The Many San Lázaros of Hialeah: Material Practice in the Celebration of a Cuban-American Saint

Each year on December 17 the Cuban American community of Hialeah, Florida celebrates the feast of San Lázaro with the veneration of statues, dramatic rites of incarnation and mortification, and grand processions through the streets. San Lázaro is a figure of intersection among a variety of religious histories and interests. His devotion materially juxtaposes African, European, Catholic, and Spiritist aspirations and meanings in an evolving iconography and practice. And his veneration in embodied rites involves direct confrontation with frightening powers of disease, decomposition and death. This essay explores the many San Lázaros expressed in his statuary, his ritual garments, and embodied rituals.

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.

Normalizing US-Cuba relations: escaping the shackles of the past

President Barack Obama explained his historic reversal of half a century of US antagonism towards Cuba as necessary because of the failure of the policy of hostility pursued by his ten predecessors. But the old policy's failure was not new, and thus was not, in itself, an adequate explanation for the dramatic shift. This article uses theories of agenda-setting, policy failure and policy change to explain the persistence of the US policy of hostility from 1959 to 2014 and the policy change announced by President Barack Obama in December 2014. Four structural factors account for the continuity in policy and, as a result of gradual changes in those factors, the eventual policy shift. They are: the security threat Cuba posed to the United States during the Cold War; the political influence of the Cuban American community; the diplomatic cost to Washington, especially in Latin America, of maintaining the status quo; and domestic changes under way in Cuba.

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.

Perceptions of Adolescents, Parents, and School Personnel From a Predominantly Cuban American Community Regarding Dating and Teen Dating Violence Prevention

The purpose of this study was to explore perceptions of dating relationships and teen dating violence prevention within a predominantly Cuban American community in Miami-Dade County. Eight focus groups (n = 74 participants) with adolescents of Hispanic origin (n = 29), their parents (n = 29), and school personnel (n = 16) were conducted and analyzed using content analysis. Four themes characterized the nature and context of dating relationships among adolescents of Hispanic origin: YOLO -You Only Live Once, cultural unity but social division, dating is not going out, and the social environment challenges healthy relationships. The information generated from this study can be used to develop culturally tailored teen dating violence prevention programs targeting youth of Hispanic origin.

American hýbris: US Democracy Promotion in Cuba after the Cold War — Part 1

Cuba is probably one of the best examples of the significance of the democracy promotion discourse in US foreign policy: the efforts to democratise the island have been one of the main features in the US—Cuba bilateral relations since the end of the Cold War. Even the embargo against the island has evolved from a tool to generate regime change to an instrument of democracy promotion to foster a democratic transition. Today, the Cuban embargo, after the codifications of the 1990s, is intimately connected to a ‘Cuban democratic future’. Moreover, in the last three decades, US presidents have committed themselves to promote democracy on the island, inaugurating a sort of ‘state policy’ with little or no evolutions or changes. The main aim of this two-part article is to explore the rationale behind US decennial efforts to promote a peaceful democratic change on the island, while trying to answer some crucial questions about US strategy in Cuba: Why promote democracy in Cuba? Why did democracy promotion become a long-lasting feature in US—Cuba relations? The first part deals with the security framework, and American economic interests in Cuba as a crucial push factor for democracy promotion, while the role of the Cuban-American community and the problems and perspectives of US strategy will be included in the second part, to be published in the next issue of the Journal.

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.

The Political Incorporation of Cuban Americans

This article examines the political implications of the changing demographics of the Cuban American community. Over the past decade, pundits have predicted a massive shift in Cuban American voting behavior owing to demographic changes in the community. The authors find evidence that the attitudes of Cuban Americans have undergone significant changes, driven largely by the increased number of post-Mariel (1980) immigrants. The authors also find, however, that these dramatic changes have not yet been reflected at the ballot box, nor are they likely to be soon, owing to the slow process of immigrant political incorporation.

Cuba después de la Guerra Fría : ¿cuál debería ser la política de los Estados Unidos?

Cuba has always been a particularly emotional issue in US foreign policy. However, given the current scenario, What should be the United States policy towards Cuba now that the Island no longer represents a security concern or even a foreign policy problem? This paper analyzes the internal situation of Cuba, the need for reforms, the issue of Human Rights, the position of the Cuban-American community, the interests of the United States and, the Cuban Democracy Act, to finally propose an appropriate approach to the Post-Cold War War period, and conclude that through a process of engagement, the United States can do its utmost to encourage Cuba to carry out transformations.

Structuring Liminality: Theorizing the Creation and Maintenance of the Cuban Exile Identity

In this article, we examine the exilic experience of the Cuban-American community in South Florida through the dual concepts of structure and liminality. We postulate that in the case of this exilic diaspora, specific structures arose to render liminality a persistent element of the Cuban-American identity. The liminal, rather than being a temporal transitory stage, becomes an integral part of the group identity. This paper theorizes and recasts the Cuban-American exile experience in Miami as explicable not only as the story of successful economic and political incorporation, although the literature certainly emphasizes this interpretation, but one consisting of permanent liminality institutionalized by structural components of the exiled diaspora. We argue that the story of exemplary incorporation so prevalent in the academic literature is a result of structured liminality. We apply Turner's conceptualization to the creation and maintenance of the Cuban-American Exile Identity (Grenier and Perez, 2003). While testing the theoretical postulates is beyond the scope of this article, we interpret previous research through our new theoretical lens.

Disclosing the Ethnographic Self

Disclosing the Ethnographic Self