Cuban Migration Research Articles

Impacto socioeconómico de la migración en Cuba, 2022

Migration is undoubtedly one of the oldest demographic variables. Human beings by their nature have been driven for various reasons to explore other territories. However, currently migration is generally caused by various factors not being quite right in the issuing country, and/or by the receiving country offering better opportunities. This article addresses one of the most controversial issues in Cuban society, the impact of emigrating. The idea is to address where and why Cubans emigrate as well as its socioeconomic implications, based on an interpretive paradigm grounded in the conceptualisation of what emigrating means in theory, and the causes of this socioeconomic phenomenon in Cuba. Although previous studies on Cuban migration have focused on the exodus to the United States, this is not the only destination, as Cubans have increasingly emigrated to various other countries as well in recent years.

The Pliable Page: Turn-of-the-21st-Century Reworkings of Villaverde’s Cecilia Valdés

This essay examines turn-of-the-21st-century responses to the foundational 19th-century novel by Villaverde, Cecilia Valdés, pointing to the ambivalence toward textual authority and migration as key elements in Cubans’ relationship to historical memory. The analysis of two plays, a puppet show, a novel, and works of visual and performance art, all of which have a textual element and were produced between 1994 and 2006, demonstrates the ongoing use of the Cecilia story to question key elements of Cuban historical memory. While contesting the legacy of the colonial and nation-building era, these contemporary works open a dialogue regarding narratives about Cuban migration, from the 19th century into the present. They unpack the established narratives about Cuba’s colonial period—slavery, race, socioeconomic class, and sexuality, and also contribute to new narratives about migration. The relationship between movement, authority, and textuality in these responses to Villaverde’s novel points to how 19th-century historical memory, and intertwined with that migration, are central to the ongoing renegotiation of Cuban identity. By re-working Villaverde’s novel—figuratively or literally manipulating the pages of Cecilia Valdés—Cuban writers and artists participate in a ritual of resignification that redefines lo cubano.

Welcome to Fairyland: Queer Miami before 1940 by Julio Capó Jr.

Reviewed by: Welcome to Fairyland: Queer Miami before 1940 by Julio Capó Jr. Albert Sergio Laguna Julio Capó Jr., Welcome to Fairyland: Queer Miami before 1940. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2017. 383 pp. In Julio Capó Jr.'s fantastic account of Miami before 1940, we are treated to a queer history that puts the popular understanding of Miami as a site for fun, sun, and sex into a fascinating and much-needed context. Early twentieth-century boosters came up with the idea to market Miami as a "fairyland," where paradise and the pleasures therein could be had in a warm, accessible climate. The fairyland of Miami meant different things to different people, and in this book, Capó privileges "the complex ways queer women and men negotiated their own space, role, and understanding of themselves in this budding international city from the 1890s to 1940 (5). The result is a simply riveting read that takes us through the complex gender and sexual politics that made Miami, well, Miami. Although the book's primary focus is on gender and sexuality, Capó provides a master class on intersectional analysis and its critical potential. For [End Page 308] example, the first chapter explains how the growth and shifting borders of Miami in the early years of its incorporation must be understood through an analysis of the relationship of space, sex, race, and labor—particularly in the context of red-light districts in black neighborhoods. In chapter 2, the labor migrations of Bahamians to Miami are detailed to tell a story about the queering of gender and sex roles in both the Bahamas and Miami. In the chapters that follow, Capó adds another layer of complexity by examining the lives of the white, queer elite men and women who helped to fashion the city as a space where gender and sexual norms could be transgressed through financial investments and by exploring the staging of Miami in both tourist marketing and public entertainment. Of course, this queer fairyland did not go unchallenged, and the book captures the pushback that occurred at various moments to deftly sketch the uneven policing of queerness (a burden that often fell along racial and class lines) in a city that relied on its transgressive image to attract tourist dollars. To do this work, Capó brings together a diverse collection of primary source materials: newspapers, tourism ad campaigns, court cases, migration statistics, arrest records, minstrel performances, literary works, and more. In one of my favorite moments in the book, Capó analyzes watercolors featuring nude black Bahamian laborers by the famed American painter John Singer Sargent. Through these watercolors, Capó further details his history of "the homosocial world of early Miami and the elite's gaze and fetishization of the black laborer's body" (74). This expansive collection of sources makes possible a multilayered, thorough historical rendering of this time period that also acknowledges the archival silences around sex and sexuality. Capó's patient and insightful readings make these silences a key part of the overall analysis. Cuba's role in the book builds on the work of other scholars like Louis Pérez who have highlighted the relationship between Miami and the island as essential for their respective growth and development. The emphasis here is on the sexual and gender politics of this relationship through an examination of the ways in which Miami was cast as an exotic locale in the spirit of Havana with a lax moral code to compete for visitors. There are many other moments when Cuba factors into this history: improvements in infrastructure as a product of military mobilization in Miami during the Spanish-American-Cuban War, the visual culture of Miami and Havana, sexual politics and empire, and even Machado-era Cuban migration to the city during and after the dictator's rule. Cuba's role in the book goes beyond what I have outlined, but it is crucial to note how Cuba is not at the center of this study—a major strength, in my estimation. Instead, Capó develops the transnational scope of the book by acknowledging the role of Cuba but also insisting on the crucial part played by other Caribbean influences...

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 Challenge for the Central American Integration System (SICA): The Withdrawal of Costa Rica During the Cuban Migrant Crisis 2015

Central America has the longest experience with regional integration efforts apart from Europe and regional integration was on its rise with the establishment of the Central American Integration System (SICA). However, the organisation has been struggling to move the integration process further; experiencing a climax of fragmentation when Costa Rica left SICA during the Cuban migration crisis in 2015. This article focuses on the factors which contributed to the withdrawal of Costa Rica by looking at: (1) the institutional level of SICA; (2) Costa Rica’s policies that have hindered Central American integration; and (3) Costa Rica’s main reasons for its non-integrationist actions. This article argues that the cause can be found at both the institutional level and the national level. It further shows that SICA failed at deepening its integration due to its supranational ambitions installed in its institutional framework. Moreover, through qualitative research methods, it has been found that Costa Rica’s foreign policy is characterised by defying SICA’s organisational bodies. This article concludes by proposing four major reasons to explain Costa Rica’s non-integrationist actions which can be subsumed under (1) historical aspects, (2) no trade benefits from its membership, (3) immigration issues and lastly, (4) the legitimacy problem of SICA.

La cuestión migratoria cubana. Algunas apreciaciones

El trabajo tiene como objetivo introducir al lector en algunas cuestiones de interés en relación a la normativa migratoria cubana, resaltando algunos conceptos de relevancia para los lectores ávidos en la materia y sobre todo en el complejo mundo del derecho cubano sumergido en las indefiniciones. Destacando además la incidencia de esta norma en el ámbito de la persona y la autonomía de la voluntad.

Tendência da imigração cubana e seu impacto na América Central

In recent years, the migration of Cuban population has taken new directions; this is mainly due to the migration policy flexibility adopted by the Cuban government and other Latin America governments, such as Ecuador, Grenada, Trinidad and Tobago, Dominican Republic, and Haiti, among others, by issuing visas in favorable conditions for the population. Although there are varied reasons to migrate, this population has traditionally migrated motivated by the United States Cuban Adjustment Act which grants administrative advantages for regularization; no other country of the continent offers this privilege. Due to their political exile condition, whoever arrives to the United States will easily have access to legal mechanisms for migrant regularization. Although there has been great work on migration in general terms, little has been addressed on the Cuban migration in the Central American region; possibly this is due to the difficulty to find quantitative information in this regard. The article aims to facilitate the understanding of migration in a context of flexibility and establishment of new relations between the Caribbean and Central America.

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.

Un pueblo disperso: Dimensiones sociales y culturales de la diáspora cubana ed. by Jorge Duany

Reviewed by: Un pueblo disperso: Dimensiones sociales y culturales de la diáspora cubana ed. by Jorge Duany Daniel J. Fernandez-Guevara Jorge Duany, ed. Un pueblo disperso: Dimensiones sociales y culturales de la diáspora cubana. Valencia, Spain: Aduana Vieja Editorial, 2014. 572 pp. Un pueblo disperso: Dimensiones sociales y culturales de la diáspora cubana, edited by Jorge Duany, contributes to the field of Cuban and Cuban American migration scholarship, by analyzing the evolution of Cuban migrants from exiles to members of a transnational diasporic community. The book forces the reader to look beyond traditional perceptions of Cuban migrations as affluent, hard-line, patriarchal, and socially conservative, in order to analyze the seismic shifts in attitudes and cultural production in the more recent Cuban migrations. Although this approach is not new to the field of Cuban migration studies, the monograph complies twenty-six chapters whose authors apply an array of theoretical approaches from postmodern to area studies in order to underscore the transnational character of current Cuban diaspora, accessed through literary criticism, visual arts, cultural studies, sociology, history, anthropology, and geography. Collectively, the chapters mark the shift that began post-1980, characterized by a proclivity for greater "espacios de encuentro" among families, scholars, and producers of culture. As Jorge Duany writes, "Muchos de los emigrados cubanos en la época postsoviética no encajan bien dentro de las representaciones convencionales del exilio histórico, tanto en su perfil socioeconómico y racial como en sus actitudes y prácticas políticas" (34). Although Duany's introduction is mostly descriptive, what ties these chapters together is the interplay between memory (or postmemory), cultural bifurcation, and an increase in exchange between Cubans on and off the island. The monograph's chronological framework divides migrations into three time periods: 1959–1979, 1980–2000, and 2001 to the present. Although Duany cautions us not to prematurely declare the death of exile (34–35), chapters like Gustavo Pérez-Firmat's "Destierro y destiempo" clearly stand out because of an absence of interpersonal connections with the island. As Pérez-Firmat says, "No digo que el futuro haya pasado para todos. Solo digo que ha pasado para mi y para gente como yo, últimos sobrevivientes del llamado exilio histórico" (428). Un pueblo disperso underscores that the Cuban diaspora no longer takes its cues from "el exilio historico," but from the people, interpersonal relationships, authors, singers, and writers on the island. Several chapters engage Marianne Hirsh's theory of postmemory (González, Urbistondo, Alvarez Borland), whereby the works of island authors—Wendy Guerra, Cuban American, Daína Chaviano, and American of Cuban parents Ana Menéndez—utilize "a powerful connection to traumatic events a generation beyond the lived experiences" (387). To this end, these authors embark on journeys to places inside and outside Cuba, reconstructing fragmented histories and creating an alternative archive. In addition, Un pueblo disperso evidences the central role of female characters as transformational [End Page 397] beings, representing nation and identity (Rosales, Rubio, Gossler Esquilín, Celaya, González, Fajardo-Cárdenas). Un pueblo disperso engages leading Cuban musicologists, filmmakers, authors, and musicians who thematically incorporate returning diaspora into their work (Díaz Ayala, Gámez Torres, Ro-sales, Granados, González), signaling cultural exchanges through scholarly and artistic production. Un pueblo disperso employs sociological data (Portes and Puhrmann, and Aysa-Lastra, Grenier, and Gladwin) to underscore the changes in Cuban diasporic attitudes and economic power. Although the authors omit the larger problems of a lack of social and economic mobility that plague the "99 percent" living in the United States, the Cuban migrant trends of "downward economic averages," a proclivity for transnationality, an appreciation for social achievements of the Cuban Revolution in education and health care, and a downward assimilation pattern of the children of emigrants from Cuba since the 1980s point to an end of the "American dream" for more recent arrivals (144–146). This perhaps explains why an increasing number of migrants have chosen to migrate elsewhere. Nora Gámez Torres's chapter "La Habana está en todas partes: Young Musicians and the Symbolic Redefinition of the Cuban Nation" exemplifies how a transnational discourse has occurred in the...

Reflections on Cuban Migration. Antonio Aja PhD, University of Havana's Center for Demographic Studies.

Dr Aja (pronounced á-ha) himself, is a product of the ebbs and flows of Cuban migration. His father, son of Lebanese merchant immigrants to Cuba, later studied medicine and emigrated to New York. There he met Antonio's mother, a garment worker and daughter in a poor family of Cuban émigrés. The young couple moved to Tampa, Florida-following a pattern of settlement for Cubans in the USA at the time-where Antonio was born in 1953. The whole family later returned to Cuba, amidst the 1950s rebellion against Batista. They stayed, but relatives are still sprinkled abroad…as they are today for many Cuban families. Dr Aja, says his own history is part of what prompted him to explore the relation of families, demography and migration, the complex subject he has studied for a quarter century. Under the broader scope of health and society, MEDICC Review editors asked Dr. Aja to share insights from his years of research and experience.

Cuban Artists across the Diaspora: Setting the Tent against the House by Andrea O’Reilly Herrera (review)

Andrea O'Reilly Herrera. Cuban Artists across the Diaspora: Setting the Tent against the House. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2011. 272 pp.Critical texts on the subject of Cuban art from the diaspora have been scant. With few exceptions, the existing literature, frequently the province of exhibition catalogs and artists' monographs, has mainly offered traditional arthistorical analyses or curatorial perspectives on the subject. Most studies about contemporary Cuban diasporic art have understood this artistic production through the limited pathos of exile, construed as one of two opposites in fixed binary: displacement versus rootedness, here versus there. Cuban Artists across the Diaspora: Setting the Tent against the House is muchwelcome departure from these dominant narratives. O'Reilly Herrera sets out to intentionally move away from essentialist, and territorially and linguistically based, concepts of racial, national or cultural identification, embracing instead relational, multi-axis analysis in order to capture the movement of culture across borders (9). To that end, the author draws from range of theoretical frameworks that include cultural and literary studies, postcolonialism, and poststructuralism, citing the likes of Stuart Hall, Homi Bhabha, Hamid Naficy, and the oft-quoted Nicolas Bourriaud from more obscure work titled The Radicant, to locate the (contemporary) narrative of Cuban migration as constitutive of the island's historical identity since its inception. More important, the groundwork she lays serves to problematize the discourse of Cuban displacement outwardly toward more transnational way of thinking about issues of migration, beyond ruptures and continuities, locating notions of exile and diaspora as multidimensional and contemporary processes of identity formations always in flux. Without eschewing the political and affective realities that result from Cuban emigres' loss of the homeland, the author reminds us that cultural identity can be best understood as what Stuart Hall succinctly describes as a state of becoming.O'Reilly Herrera first introduced these identitarian preoccupations in artistic practices in ReMembering Cuba: Legacy of Diaspora (2001). However, in Cuban Artists across the Diaspora, her scholarly propositions enter in conversation with other scholars, such as art historians Kobena Mercer and Margo Machida, whose studies on the intersection between identity construction and visual art practices have been pioneering, principally in looking at the work of African American and Asian American artists, respectively. Thus, situating and contextualizing Cuban artistic production from the diaspora within this growing discursive field is one of the author's most valuable contributions.However, there is an unfortunate disconnect between the fertile critical ground O'Reilly Herrera lays out and her curatorial methodology, which drove the selection of artists and artworks highlighted in the book. The author hung her theoretical propositions on the armature of one single project, the artists who participated in CAFE (Cuban American Foremost Exhibits): The Journeys of Cuban Artists, an itinerant group exhibition initiative conceived by painter and performance artist Leandro Soto. …

Changes in Cuba’s Migration Policy and Its Impact on Baseball

Baseball is an essential constituent of the Cuban national identity. For nearly a century, Cuban baseball players had joined high-ranking international leagues, including the Negro Leagues and Major League Baseball (MLB) of the United States. After the triumph of the Revolution in 1959, the professional practice of sport was banned in the country. On the other hand, the revolutionary government instituted migration rules that disallowed Cuban citizens to travel abroad freely. Until the collapse of the Soviet Union, the Cuban national baseball team reigned in amateur competitions worldwide. Sporting successes in general and those of baseball in particular, were managed by the government as a political tool; the government used to display the loyalty of the athletes as a triumph of the Cuban system. However, since the nineties there has been a growing departure of Cuban top baseball players who have had the target of entering in MLB franchises, disregarding that the Cuban migration policy had remained unwavering. On the other hand, after the enactment of changes in the Cuban migration policy in 2013, the unconventional departure of high performance baseball players has increased sharply. The relationship between the migration reform and the increased leakage of baseball players has not been studied by scholars. The relevance of this paper is that it is the first academic approach to that relationship. This paper discusses the migration reform in Cuba and focuses mainly on its impact on baseball.

Cuban Migration to the United States and the Educational Self-Selection Problem

The aim of this article is to study the educational self-selection problem of Cuban migration to the US. For this analysis, we specify and estimate a binary logit model to analyse the observable covariates that explain migration probability. The data used in the study came from the 2010 Census of Population and Housing in the US and from the 2002 Cuba Census of Population and Housing, both data set have been provided by IPUMS (2010) and IPUMS International (2011). The results indicate that education, age and occupational covariates explain migration probability. Moreover, there is a positive educational self-selection problem, that is, those people with a higher education migrate. The principal contribution of this article is to demonstrate how high-level education increases the probability of Cubans emigrating. The positive educational self-selection problem has significant negative consequences, for example, loss of human capital.

From “Contrarevolucionarios” to “Economic Migrants”: Portraits, Perspectives and Meanings of Cuban Emigration Phenome

In the aftermath of 1959, Cuban citizens’ social behaviour became subject to political interpretation and emigration practice was openly defined as a form of political dissent. Since then, the Cuban Government has maintained a rigorous control over exits from the island and emigrants have been excluded from the nation and been branded as “counterrevolutionary”. This resulted in strict politics of mobility control and in the creation of the juridical category of Emigrado [lit. emigrant], a status defining “counterrevolutionary” emigrants and which implied important restrictions of citizenship rights in Cuba. Nowadays, even if de facto it is a figure no longer considered a political traitor but an “economic migrant”, de jure the Emigrado is still political, because the normative and juridical corpus concerning migration has remained almost unchanged since 1961. Tracing the origin of these divergent interpretations of the Cuban migration - as political or economic act - to the different phases of the Revolution, this paper aims to analyse the polar perspective regarding Cuban exodus and discuss the meanings of this case as a migration phenomenon. DOI: 10.5901/mjss.2013.v4n10p347

Transnational families in Cuba and Germany: on the intersection between isolation, restrictions, and agency

This article will analyze the formation of transnational family networks between Cuba and Germany in the context of late socialist Cuba. Drawing on multi-sited field research with a biographical theoretical approach, I will discuss whether Cuban migration is an exceptional case and demonstrate how it challenges key assumptions of transnationalism theory; that is, growing simultaneity through the development of communication technologies and a supposed blurring of nation-state boundaries and migrants’ agency. Furthermore, the two case studies discussed in this article demonstrate the fundamental impact of the migration of one family member on the relatives back in Cuba and the Cuban society as a whole. In the face of economic crisis, growing social inequalities resulting from the dual economy and increasing economic liberalization, transnational households emerge as new sustainability projects for the families and the system in Cuba. At the same time, they pose a potential challenge to the status quo. Thus, emigrants’ transnational involvement provides economic and development aid for Cuba and fills the gaps of the reduced Cuban social welfare system. Yet, migrants’ remittances also produce a social division in the neighborhood between those who have access to hard currency and those who are excluded from this possibility. Socialism is thus sustained and undermined by these transnational family networks.

The Story of Benny “Kid” Paret: Cuban Boxers, the Cuban Revolution, and the U.S. Media, 1959-1962

Abstract This article examines the personal life history and professional boxing career of Afro-Cuban boxer Benny “Kid” Paret between 1959 and 1962. Paret died nine days after suffering a brutal beating in the ring at the hands of Emile Griffith, and this article focuses on the public discourse surrounding his death in the context of strained U.S.-Cuba relations, increased Cuban migration to the United States after 1959, and race and ethnic identity formation. Using major U.S. newspapers, magazines, and boxing periodicals as well as African-American and Spanish-language newspapers, this article contributes to a growing body of literature on Latino/as, race, and sport.

Migraciones y teatro: conformación de un nuevo mapa teatral cubano, más allá de la insularidad palpable

Cuban migration to Europe and America (North, Central and South) has designed a creative and pedagogical map that expands its original theatrical geography into the new “lived spaces” (Ortiz & Mendoza) -sometimes these being bilingual spaces. In the last fifty years Cuban migrants have processed their journeys of displacement by recovering their own cultural History through the generation of new Imaginaries and Institutions, creating in consequence new aesthetic scenarios articulated by a “frontal discourse” or a “rhetorical tissue” (Azor). These new aesthetic scenarios reveal the multicultural dialogue of a transcending “cubanidad”.

Segmented Paths and the Differential Role of Primate Immigrant Centers

New York, Los Angeles, and Miami are primate immigrant centers within the U. S. metropolitan system, attracting new immigrant arrivals as well as serving as focal points for internal migrants. Using the segmented assimilation framework as a foundation, this paper emphasizes the role of geography and migration within the assimilation process. Focusing upon selected origin groups, migrant selectivity and the determinants of migration are evaluated and compared, highlighting the differential role of primate centers. While the New York and Miami metropolitan centers clearly dominate Dominican and Cuban migration systems respectively, the role of primate centers is less clear among other national origin groups.

Segmented Paths and the Differential Role of Primate Immigrant Centers

New York, Los Angeles, and Miami are primate immigrant centers within the U.S. metropolitan system, attracting new immigrant arrivals as well as serving as focal points for internal migrants. Using the segmented assimilation framework as a foundation, this paper emphasizes the role of geography and migration within the assimilation process. Focusing upon selected origin groups, migrant selectivity and the determinants of migration are evaluated and compared, highlighting the differential role of primate centers. While the New York and Miami metropolitan centers clearly dominate Dominican and Cuban migration systems respectively, the role of primate centers is less clear among other national origin groups.

In-Country Refugee Processing of Haitians: The Case Against

Reviewing past experience with in-country processing in Haiti and its links to American interdiction policies, as well as the history of Cuban migration to the United States, this paper argues against in-country processing for Haitian refugees. The paper asserts that in-country processing in Haiti in the early 1990s was a failure, and arguably was used as a justification for returning to persecution far more people than it saved. The very existence of a small aperture through which relatively few selected individuals will be able to pass for legal admission to the United States is likely to erode the rights of many more Haitian asylum seekers seeking to leave spontaneously and, in particular, to serve to rationalize migration control measures that seriously compromise the fundamental principles of refugee law.