Cuban Miami Research Articles

Robert M. Levine (1941–2003)

Robert M. Levine (1941–2003)

Beyond Miami: The Ethnic Enclave and Personal Income in Various Cuban Communities in the United States

It is frequently noted that Cubans living in Miami are successful because they benefit from the formation of an enclave economy. Using the 1990 Census Public Use Microdata, this study broadens the examination beyond Miami to address the question of why Cubans living elsewhere have higher earnings than those in Miami. Specifically, I address the question of whether there is a relationship between Cuban ethnic enclave participation and Cuban income. Findings indicate that Cubans in Miami have the lowest personal income. Cubans living in areas with the lowest Cuban populations have the highest incomes. These findings are evidence against the enclave economy hypothesis.

Days of Awe (review)

Reviewed by: Days of Awe Sharon Solwitz Days of Awe, by Achy Obejas. New York: Ballantine, 2001. 371pp. $24.95. Days of Awe, Achy Obejas’s second novel and third book of fiction, centers on its Cuban American protagonist’s discovery of her family’s concealed Jewishness. At twenty-eight Alejandra San Jose believes both her parents to be loosely practicing Catholics. When she visits Cuba for the first time as an interpreter, ignorant of her Jewish roots, she is also dismissive and somewhat embarrassed by her Cuban heritage, [End Page 123] clinging to her difference from the natives, her superiority as an American woman. She “could care less about Cuba,” which to her is no more or less interesting than other countries she hasn’t seen yet. She flaunts her perfect American English, using body language to show her preference for the American speakers. Being Cuban, for her, is “an accident of timing and geography.” Then she meets the Menachs, old family friends who enlarge the boundaries of the known world for her—with regard not only to religion but sexuality, nationality, identity itself. The book’s title and central image, Days of Awe—the ten days between Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur in which the Almighty is deciding who will be written up in the “Book of Life”—is the darkest period in the Jewish year, with its focus on sin and atonement. It is this sense of sin and the quest for atonement that fuels the book. Even in the United States where Judaism can be practiced for the most part without undesirable consequences, Alejandra’s father won’t admit to being Jewish, while in his dark basement, in tallis and tefillin, he davens, weeping. Alejandra, who could live a comfortable American life, is increasingly drawn toward Cuba with its increasing poverty and hopelessness, where, in the face of her friends’ anger towards those who flee or who are free to come and go, she must continually justify herself. Obejas’s linkage of being Jewish with being Cuban is intriguing. As an escapee from Cuba, Alejandra is also an exile, just as Jews are eternal exiles in the countries in which they reside, since their original exile from the Land of Israel. The equivalence is borne out in language as well, Miami Cubans referred to as the “Jews of the Caribbean.” Likewise Spanish and Hebrew lack words for certain aspects of the divine. “I like to think that our inability to express heaven is simply a measure of our respect for a higher power; that, like certain Orthodox Jews who insist on never pronouncing or writing the word for god, we have a deeper understanding. . . .” A gift to the reader, this perception of likenesses. If there is a weakness in the book, it is that it seems more interested, in the end, in ideas than story. Characters momentarily fascinate only to disappear entirely for such long stretches we have to thumb back to recall who they are. Some of the most beguiling events aren’t even referred to let alone woven into the book’s causal fabric. Said one annoyed Amazon customer reviewer: “There did not seem to be any continuity, it was hard to get a feel for the characters because they were mentioned so infrequently.” It isn’t hard to find the source of this reader’s complaint. The book makes use of characters, events, and ideas, but there is little fusion, the ongoing transmutation of idea into scene that one expects of even an unconventional novel. Interesting, though, is what happens to reading when expectations are altered. Let’s say the book is not a “novel,” despite the word emblazoned on the jacket, but a [End Page 124] meditation, Alejandra’s earnest, impassioned quest for an identity so complex that it’s quasi-impossible to dramatize. As an imaginary memoir Days of Awe offers insights that, like all true mitzvot, repair the torn fabric of the universe. Sharon Solwitz Department of English Purdue University Copyright © 2003 Purdue University

Enclaves and Entrepreneurs: Assessing the Payoff for Immigrants and Minorities

Self-employment and work in sectors with high concentrations of owners and workers of the same ethnicity have been identified as potential routes of economic success for immigrants. This study uses 1990 census data to assess the effects of self-employment, ethnic employment, and their interaction on the odds of being at work, on number of hours worked, and on earnings of individual members of several representative groups. These groups include Cubans in Miami; African Americans, Puerto Ricans, Koreans, Chinese and Dominicans in New York; and African Americans, Koreans, Chinese, Mexicans and Salvadorans in Los Angeles. Work in ethnic sectors of the economy has no consistent effects, although work in their niche in the public sector offers greater rewards than any other type of employment for African Americans and Puerto Ricans. Findings are mixed for self-employment, and its estimated effect on earnings depends on model specification. We conclude that the self-employed work longer hours but in many cases at lower hourly rates. The effects of self-employment are the same in ethnic sectors as in the mainstream economy.

Cuba and the Missile Crisis, and: Secret Missions to Cuba: fidel Castro, Bernardo Benes, and Cuban Miami (review)

Cuba and the Missile Crisis, and: Secret Missions to Cuba: fidel Castro, Bernardo Benes, and Cuban Miami (review)

An Interview with Beatriz Rivera

The increased presence of Latino/a writers of Cuban descent continues to reshape radically the landscape of contemporary American letters. Ruth Behar, Sandra Castillo, Rafael Campos, Cristina Garcia, Oscar Hijuelos, Gustavo Perez-Firmat, Virgil Suarez, Jose Yglesias, to name a few, have variously penned novels, short stories, poetry, and essays that map territories of identity and experience in the US. Novelist and short story writer Beatriz Rivera is one such Cuban American author who breathes life into the manifold everyday struggles of the Cuban emigre and exile living in a xenophobic and sexist US. As with many one-and-a-half generation Cuban writers (Rivera was born in Cuba but grew up in Miami where her family settled in the early 1960s), Rivera's fiction gravitates around Cuban-identified characters who grew up in either Miami or New York. As a response to their condition of political and/or self-imposed exile, however, Rivera's characters learn to survive not through isolation from the mainstream (the weaving of myths of a return to a prelapsarian homeland as with first generation Cuban American writers), but in creating a complex hybrid space where Cuban and American cultures, histories, and aesthetic practices fluidly mix to express new Latino/a experiences and in-flux identities. In Rivera's debut collection of short stories, African Passions (1995), she plunged her readers into the deep end of contemporary Cuban Miami with its dynamic syncretic fusions of mainstream Anglo, Spanish, African, Chinese, and Taino cultures. When Rivera published her first novel, Midnight Sandwiches at the Mariposa Express (1997), she invented Cuban American characters who resisted assimilationist pressures by recycling, translating, and transforming their everyday US Cuban/Caribbean cultures to respond to their sense of an in-between identity. In her novel Playing with Light (2000), Rivera invents a world where the lines between national histories, collective myths, and individual memories blur, foregrounding the dynamic interplay of time and geopolitical space as experienced by old and new generation Cuban American women. Rivera's women characters look to Cuba's past--when novels were read to tobacco factory workers in the nineteenth century--to form a Latina-based tertulia (get-together) for reading counter-resistant histories and stories. Under the stress of living in a patriarchal US mainstream and a macho Cuban culture, the characters learn to look to the past to assert their presence as Latinas in the present with the power to shape their own lives. Beatriz Rivera's work speaks to the Cuban American experience--especially those of the one-and-a-half generation who seek to inhabit those vital spaces where histories, myths, languages, and experiences rub together and make room for new hybrid Latina/o identities. I interviewed Beatriz Rivera in Houston on December 1, 2000, during her book tour for Playing with Light. FLA: You were born in Havana, grew up in Miami, and lived in Europe. Tell me a little about your life in these different places. BR: Well, I was mostly lost all over the world. 1 finished high school in Switzerland, and then I wanted to stay in Europe forever, so I went to Paris where I studied philosophy. I got a Master's degree in Paris [at the Sorbonne], and then I hung out in Paris for another ten years. I got married there, taught English and Spanish, and wrote novels. FLA: How was it living in Paris in the 1970s? BR: Oh, it was great. They were my years of youth. It was fantastic. I was writing, but I wasn't publishing anything. I didn't have much of an identity, though. I wasn't an American in Paris. I didn't have that identity. I wasn't a Cuban in Paris either, like there were. FLA: There were Cubans in Paris? BR: Well, like Severo Sarduy and Eduardo Manetti, who were really Cubans--not that I'm not really Cuban--but who were totally culturally Cuban. …

Secret Missions to Cuba: Fidel Castro, Bernardo Benes, and Cuban Miami

Preface, Acknowledgments, and a Statement on Corroboration List of Photographs and sources Beginnings Cuban Miami Mission to Havana: The Carter Years Mission to Havana: The Reagan Years Revolutionary Justice Only in Miami Bibliographic Notes

Secret missions to Cuba: Fidel Castro, Bernardo Benes, and Cuban Miami

Secret missions to Cuba: Fidel Castro, Bernardo Benes, and Cuban Miami

Cuban Miami

Cuban Miami

Cuban Miami

Cuban Miami

From Exiles to Immigrants

Every diaspora judges itself, whether secretly or ostentatiously, to be both unique and uniquely sinned against. In this, the three quarters of a million Cuban-Americans of South Florida are any thing but exceptional. But like the Jews, the Armenians, and the White Russians before them, the Miami Cubans have tended to see themselves, both in their qualities and in their historical grievances, as sui generis. The common currency of exile is memory, above all the memory of wounds. But what may be necessary for group sur vival within the context of an exile group inevitably will appear to many outsiders, who share neither the memories nor the wounds, as touchy, clannish self-absorption. This has been the case with the Cuban exile community in South Florida in its relations with non Cuban Miami, and, more broadly, with U.S. public opinion at large ever since Cuban refugees first started arriving in Miami after the victory of Fidel Castro in 1959. It should be remembered that the first Cuban exiles to arrive after

Support for radio Marti among Miami's Cubans and Non-Cubans

Support for radio Marti among Miami's Cubans and Non-Cubans

Support for Radio Marti among Miami's cubans and non-cubans

This study reports a cross-cultural test of people's willingness to publicly express their opinions about controversial issues. A telephone survey was used to measure public support for Radio Marti in the Miami metropolitan area. The study was grounded in the “spiral-of-silence” theory, which asserts that public expression of opinion is a function of perceived majority opinion. The theory maintains that the news media shape public perceptions of majority opinion. By using a combination of factor analysis and regression, it was found that among all respondents, regardless of ethnicity, the best predictor of willingness to publicly express one's opinion was personal opinion and perceptions of other people in the community and nation. News media support for Radio Marti did not influence respondents' willingness to express their opinions. Media usage was a significant predictor when it was treated as an interaction effect with ethnicity.

The Ethnic Economy: Cubans and Chinese Reconsidered

Using 1980 PUMS data for Miami Cuban and Bay Area Chinese immigrant males, this study operationalizes and tests three theories about the earnings of employees in ethnic economies. The results consistently show that the allocation of financial rewards in the ethnic economy closely resembles that found elsewhere. Although this finding merits more extensive confirmation in primary data, it implies that ethnic economy theories contribute little to the understanding of contemporary ethnic inequality within the working class.

Changes in mortality among Cubans in the United States following an episode of unscreened migration.

This paper discusses the effect of the Mariel migration, a massive boatlift from Cuba to the United States in 1980, on mortality among Cuban Americans. Estimates of the Cuban-born population in the US were made for 1979 and 1981, the years prior to and following the boatlift. A comparison of age-adjusted rates showed that while general mortality did not change greatly (an increase of only about 5%), there was a 151% increase in homicide mortality. The increase in the homicide rate among Cubans in metropolitan Miami (Dade County), the major area of concentration, was 109%; it was still greater among Cubans elsewhere (240%). The demographic differences between the Mariel migrants who settled in Dade and those who were settled elsewhere are discussed.

The golden cage--Cubans in Miami.

The experience of Cuban immigrants in Florida is examined. The authors suggest that the reported success of this immigrant community has been greatly exaggerated. The social and other problems they face are described, and an assessment is made of their needs. (SUMMARY IN FRE AND SPA)

3: One Field, Many Views: Competing Theories of International Migration

3: One Field, Many Views: Competing Theories of International Migration

The American Experience with Alcohol: Contrasting Cultural Perspectives.

I Theoretical and Historical Framework.- 1 Alcohol Belief Systems in a Culturally Pluralistic Society: An Introduction.- 2 Illness or Disease?.- 3 American Beliefs about Historical Perspectives on the Medical-Moral Controversy.- 4 Getting on the Program: A Biocultural Analysis of Alcoholics Anonymous.- II Case Studies: Americans of European Heritage.- 5 Acculturated Italian-American Drinking Behavior.- 6 Polish-American Drinking: Continuity and Change.- 7 Jewish Americans and Alcohol: Processes of Avoidance and Definition.- 8 Historical Meanings of Irish-American Drinking.- 9 Appalachia: The Effects of Cultural Values on the Production and Consumption of Alcohol.- III Case Studies: Black Americans.- 10 Ambiguity in Black Drinking Norms: An Ethnohistorical Interpretation.- 11 Alcohol: Cultural Conceptions and Social Behavior among Urban Blacks.- IV Case Studies: American Indians.- 12 Indians, Ethnicity, and Alcohol: Contrasting Perceptions of the Ethnic Self and Alcohol Use.- 13 Navajo Alcoholism: Drinking, Alcohol Abuse, and Treatment in a Changing Cultural Environment.- V Case Studies: Spanish-Speaking Populations.- 14 Mexican-Americans in California: Intracultural Variation in Attitudes and Behavior Related to Alcohol.- 15 Mexican-American Experience with Alcohol: South Texas Examples.- 16 Alcohol and Hispanics in the Northeast: A Study of Cultural Variability and Adaptation in Alcohol Use.- 17 Alcohol and Adaptation to Exile in Miami's Cuban Population.- VI Case Studies: Asian Groups.- 18 Japanese-American Drinking Patterns.- 19 Alcohol Consumption among Chinese in the United States.- 20 Hmong Drinking Practices in the United States: The Influence of Migration.- VII Case Studies: Religion and Family.- 21 Irish-American Catholics in a West Coast Metropolitan Area.- 22 Alcohol Writ Accountable: The Episcopal Diocese of Washington, D.C.- 23 Middle-Class Protestants: Alcohol and the Family.- VIII Synthesis and Application.- 24 American Experiences with Alcohol: Commonalities and Contrasts.

Minority Mobilization in an International City: Rivalry and Conflict in Miami

On March 20, 1986 many South Florida Hispanics were disappointed yet politically emboldened by the result of a close U.S. House vote on President Reagan's Nicaraguan Contra aid bill. Although the proposal was defeated in a 222–210 vote, the outcome was viewed locally as a Latin victory because Miami's moderately liberal Democratic delegation broke ranks with House leadership by voting three to one in support of the President's proposal. It is apparent that pressure felt from Miami's Cuban and Nicaraguan exile communities, as well as from the Florida Commission on Hispanic Affairs and the Cuban-American National Foundation, was decisive in compelling locally elected Democratic House members to support the President over their party.Two days after the vote, 200 protestors gathered in downtown Miami in a demonstration against Contra aid. Alpha 66, a militant anti-Castro organization, called a counter-demonstration attended by about 2,000 angry Hispanics who threw eggs, rocks, and insults at the smaller group of protestors. Miami riot police escorted the anti-Contra demonstrators away from the scene in buses in order to prevent their injury. The fractious counter-demonstration was broadcast live by a Spanish language radio station and was attended by several local and state officials, including the three Cuban-Americans who constitute a majority on the five-member Miami City Commission. These events underscore an increasingly visible phenomenon in Miami's volatile politics.

Minority Mobilization in an International City: Rivalry and Conflict in Miami

On March 20, 1986 many South Florida Hispanics were disappointed yet politically emboldened by the result of a close U.S. House vote on President Reagan's Nicaraguan Contra aid bill. Although the proposal was defeated in a 222–210 vote, the outcome was viewed locally as a Latin victory because Miami's moderately liberal Democratic delegation broke ranks with House leadership by voting three to one in support of the President's proposal. It is apparent that pressure felt from Miami's Cuban and Nicaraguan exile communities, as well as from the Florida Commission on Hispanic Affairs and the Cuban-American National Foundation, was decisive in compelling locally elected Democratic House members to support the President over their party.Two days after the vote, 200 protestors gathered in downtown Miami in a demonstration against Contra aid. Alpha 66, a militant anti-Castro organization, called a counter-demonstration attended by about 2,000 angry Hispanics who threw eggs, rocks, and insults at the smaller group of protestors. Miami riot police escorted the anti-Contra demonstrators away from the scene in buses in order to prevent their injury. The fractious counter-demonstration was broadcast live by a Spanish language radio station and was attended by several local and state officials, including the three Cuban-Americans who constitute a majority on the five-member Miami City Commission. These events underscore an increasingly visible phenomenon in Miami's volatile politics.