Free Cuban Immigration And American Culture Thesis Example

INTRODUCTION

Cuban dictator Fidel Castro, who rose to power during the 1950s, once referred to émigrés as gusanos, which meant “worms,” and scoria, which translates to “trash.” In recent speeches, Castro referred to these individuals as “the Miami Mafia.” Indeed, the greatest impact of the 1959 Cuban Revolution was the profound impact in had on Cuban migration to America. They emigrated in droves as millions of them flocked to the United States. The majority of these émigrés settled in Miami, Florida. Although the majority of Cuban immigrants migrated within the latter half of the twentieth century, the presence of Cubans in America indeed has quite a storied history that predates the Castro Revolution. Cuban communities had been established in Tampa Bay, Key West, and New York during the nineteenth century. The history of Cuban immigration to the United States starkly contrasts from the migration patterns and experiences of all other immigrant groups who travelled to the United States in search for a better life and/or to escape political or religious persecution. Many of these more recent immigrants have established successful and wealthy businesses, which have fomented quite an influential and politically active immigrant community in the United States. For many of these migrants, leaving Cuba for the United States offered the, a great opportunity to reconstruct their lives after enduring the traumatic experiences wrought by the Cuban revolution. Moreover, they reinterpreted and renegotiated Cuban culture in America, their new homeland. As a result, the presence of Cuban immigrants in Miami profoundly transformed the city and its culture into one demarked by a Latin American flavor and feeling. Indeed, the Latin essence washed up onto American shores once other Latin American immigrants combined with Latinos born in the U.S. flocked to the city and made a new homeland for exiled and traumatized Latin Americans from around the world. Cuban immigration has historically impacted a wide range of aspects of American culture, specifically after Fidel Castro’s rise to power.

BACKGROUND INFORMATION: FIDEL CASTRO AND THE CUBAN REVOLUTION

Fidel Castro has emerged as one of the most controversial figures in world history, so it is often difficult for observers and scholars alike to discuss him and his legacy in a purely objective fashion. Indeed, he was both hated and loved by many people, and the immense use of propaganda in association with him further renders it difficult to tease out his true character. A large corpus of literature on the Cuban Revolution that took place at the dawn of 1959 has proliferated from a variety of scholarly and theoretical perspectives. It is indisputable that the Cuban Revolution avoided Cuban denizens from enduring the violence witnessed in other modern socialist revolutions such as those that took place in China, Mexico, and Russia because the hegemonic groups in Cuba that were disgruntled were given the freedom to emigrate in order to consolidate and solidify support for the new regime established by Castro. All socioeconomic levels of the Cuban population supported this mass migration. Many scholars have reached a general consensus that there has never been such an overall agreement across social classes than the support of Cuban society for Cuban Revolution. Background information on Castro's personal life, the antecedents of the Revolution, and why such a strong consensus existed is necessary in order to understand the germination of Cuban community along the east coast of the United States. Cuban dictator Fidel Castro is credited with establishing the first communist nation in the Western Hemisphere after he successfully ousted the regime of the military dictator Fulgencio Batista in 1959. He effectively ruled over Cuba for the following fifty years, only surrendering his position and power to Raul, his younger brother, in 2008 when he fell ill.
Castro was born on August 13, 1926 as an illegitimate child to Angel Castro y Argiz and Lina Ruz Gonzales. Very little is known about Castro's relationship with his family because he was a very private individual. However, it is public knowledge that Fidel did not enjoy a good relationship with his father while he remained quite close and affectionate with his mother. Although his parents did not want him to get an education, Fidel demanded that he be sent to school in Santiago. In 1945, Castro entered the university in Havana where he became an active law student and involved himself both in student politics in the university as well as in Cuban politics. Fidel has rarely discussed his experiences at Havana University and reportedly performed quite well in the classroom despite the fact that he has publically stated that he did not enjoy studying law very much. He was a member of the university's Communist Party, which earned him the spot as Vice President of Havana University's student body. Once he was elected, however, Fidel ran a purportedly violent campaign against his former Communist supporters. AS a result, they labeled him a villainous traitor. When the president of the student body resigned, Fidel assumed the role as acting president. During his time at the university, it was reported that Fidel carried a gun in order to protect himself from his perceived enemies, which was not unusual for students to do. He was forced to go into hiding on a couple of occasions because he had been involved in political arguments on campus and was trying to evade being gunned down by rival political factions on campus whom he had previously clashed with. Fidel's adversaries claim that he was responsible for killing two people during his years at the university. However, neither the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) nor the enemies of Castro have submitted convincing evidence to prove these alleged crimes.
In 1947, Fidel left school in order to join the military on a force that had planned to invade the nearby Dominican Republican and help overthrow Generalissimo Rafael Leonidas Trujillo, the dictator who was in power there at the time. However, the leader of Cuba at the time, president Ramon Gray San Martin of Cuba, halted the mission. Fidel escaped capture by jumping from the plane and swimming safely to shore. He soon returned to the university to resume his studies and immerse himself in student politics. He finally graduated from the university in 1950, after which he joined a local law firm where he mainly worked pro-bono for the poor and working classes. During this time period he also got married and became a father. Unfortunately, his marriage failed because his wife Mirtha Diaz Balart was involved with the militaristic Batista. Fidel had participated in the controversial "Bogotazo," or riots that took place on April 4, 1948 in Columbia led by communists who sought to break up a Pan-American Conference that was slotted to take place. Riots broke out once Jorge Elecier Gaitan, a leader of the Liberal Party, was assassinated. As a result, the Communist Party assumed power over the Governor's Palace. All of the Cuban students involved in the incident were labeled communists, thereby endangering Castro's life, although he managed to escape without injury despite his rebel status.
In 1952, the military general Batista gained power over the Cuban armed forces and devised a coup so that he could gain power over Cuban national politics. Castro had been a political candidate for the Ortodoxo Party in Cuba's congress. A critic of Batista, Castro penned a letter to the new leader that warned him that a coup would ultimately result in diffuse corruption adn torture for many Cuban citizens which would result in the eventual abdication of Batista. Castro tried to go through the courts in order to discount Batista's claims to power, but the courts shut him down and declared that Batista would not be sent to prison because "revolution is the source of law." As such, Batista did not violate Cuba's constitution. Indeed, this decision provided the impetus for Castro to plot his own revolution and overthrow of the corrupt Batista regime. Fidel began planning a revolution by meeting with young zealots who supported his plan to wage a military revolution that had the chance of catalyzing a nation-wide insurrection against Batista's military regime. Nationalists such as Eduardo Chivas preached about the potency of nationalism in terms that younger generations would appeal to. Chibas asserted that bettering the position and situation of the common man was necessary, and that Castro and his cohorts proffered a political program that would engender necessary reforms in order to advocate for the masses. Castro first waged an unsuccessful attack against the Batista regime in 1953 during which the group sought to usurp the airwaves in order to broadcast the incendiary speeches by Chibas. This effort failed, resulting in Fidel's incarceration. Even while incarcerated, however, Fidel was able to influence Cuban politics. A movement known as "Castroisim" developed in a series of stages throughout this epoch leading up to the revolution. In 1955, Castroism officially bean in Mexico, which resulted in the diffusion of ideas regarding a social revolution that would occur in the name of the Cuban people. The revolution was finally successful by 1959 when Castro turned thirty three years old. Castro indeed accomplished much in a very short span of time and at a very young age, but his background and experiences at Havana University underscore how his immersion in revolutionary activities beginning at such a young age played a crucial role.
During his reign, Castro contributed to the reduction of illiteracy that was ubiquitous in Cuban society while also making strides towards eradicating racism. Moreover, Castro passed a litany of reforms and measures that helped improve public health. Despite these benefits, many Cubs decried his efforts to strip Cuban denizens of their economic and political autonomy and agency. Throughout his reign, Cuba sustained a highly antagonistic relationship with the United States, which the Bay of Pigs invasion in 1961 and Cuban Missile Crisis underscore. As a result, the U.S. has not established any formal diplomatic relations with Cuba and has strictly enforced a trade embargo there since 1960 in reaction to Cuba nationalizing American-owned businesses without compensation. Such diplomatic antagonism has nonetheless not deterred from Cubans in American wielding their cultural influences in the thriving Cuban enclaves both in Florida and in New York.

CUBAN EXILIC COMMUNITY IN MIAMI: FOUR WAVES

At the epicenter of the Cuban exile community has been the thriving business of Cuban Coffee, Cuban business, and manufacturing of exquisitely Cuban Rum, and Cuban food, which began at “Calle Ocho” in Little Havana. The exile community was nonetheless primarily constructed upon politics and the fervent desire of the Cuban émigrés to recapture the “lost paradise” they had loved so much prior to Fidel Castro’s rise to power. Scholar and Latin American expert denoted that the Cuban immigrants simply had “the dream of return, the dream of revenge, the dream of settling scores and turning back the clock has held a significant proportion of the diaspora in its thrall for nearly five decades. The impact of these sentiments has been felt in U.S. politics and policy—logically during the Cold War, but also for more than a decade since its conclusion.” Since Fidel Castro’s revolution was successful in 1959, Cubans have been migrating to the United States in various different waves: the first wave occurred between 1959 and 19962; the second wave took place between 1965 and 1974; the third wave occurred in 1980; and the final wave took place between 1993 and 1995. This steady influx of Cuban immigrants into the U.S. has resulted in a wide range of Cubans establishing enclaves on the east coast ranging from the very wealth who migrated during the 1960s to the denizens from the squalid and destitute inner cities of Havana who emigrated in the 1990s.
The traumatic experiences of the Cuban Revolution resulted in many political sympathizers of the previous regime constitute the first Cuban exiles. The first wave of immigrants who settled in Miami in 1959 indeed had been staunch supporters of the ousted Batista regime. Wealthy Cubans soon accompanied the political exiles in large numbers because the Cuban government had arbitrarily confiscated their property. Well-established professionals such as lawyers and well as executives of American companies were amongst this group of professionals. This group of wealthy professionals and entrepreneurs only expected their migrant experience to be transitory because they were convinced that Cuba would be liberated. They blindly placed all of their hopes on the failed Bay of Pigs incident launched by American President John F. Kennedy in April 1961, which was a huge stain on JFK’s presidential reputation as it merely fueled Cold War tensions rather than alleviate them. Once that effort failed, they then believed that—within the context of the Cold War and the strong anti-communist sentiment that permeated American political circles and international affairs officials—that the U.S. would never allow a Communist government located only ninety miles off American shores to consolidate. Regardless, those who migrated during this first wave had to start their lives completely over because they brought nothing with them. Women who had been practicing professionals in Cuba took up jobs as domestic or service workers in the United States, and former owners of sugar mills became janitors and gas attendants in Miami. Fortunately, the Republican Bank led by Luis Botifoll, a Cuban banker, many Cubans were given business loans in order to start small businesses in Miami. Because they had cultivated a business sense as well as entrepreneurial skills in Cuba, many Cuban exiles were able to weave together a successful and triumphant story amidst grim political circumstances.
The second wave of Cuban immigrants was motivated by a swell of discontent that wracked Cuba during the mid to late 1960s. Economic hardships combined with the erosion of political liberties and freedoms undergirded such diffuse discontent. Castro forces over 55,000 small businesses to arbitrarily shit down in 1968 in order to eliminate and all traces of private property. This move enraged many Cubans and fueled “freedom flights” to the United States during this turbulent decade. As a result, skilled laborers and members of the working and middle classes sought to migrate to the United States in search of better economic opportunities that would allow them to prosper. Increased pressure forced Castro to open up the port of Camarioca in order for the first-generation migrants to come and get relatives they left behind in Cuba. Within the span of a few short weeks, U.S. president Lyndon B. Johnson officially inaugurated these “freedom flights.” Almost a quarter million Cubans arrived in the United States by 1974, and only a very small portion of that immigrant wave entered the U.S. indirectly through ulterior countries such as Spain or Mexico.
The third wave of Cuban immigration transpired between April 1980 and September 1980 during which approximately 125,000 Cubans came from the port of El Mariel and landed in Florida. This took place in dramatic fashion because of a "dramatic boatlift that had longstanding repercussions for the United States and for Castro's image." This event commenced when a bus crashed in Havana at the Peruvian Embassy. Two guards were injured because they shot at one another. Angered and disgruntled, Fidel Castro gutted the security post at the entrance of the embassy. Castro's decision resulted in a massive influx of Cubans into the embassy, which prompted the humiliated Cuban government to term the Cuban refugees escoria, or "trash." Castro then opened up the port of El Mariel and allowed anyone to leave Cuba without interference. In response, Cuban Americans assembled on a flotilla from Miami and landed in the port of El Mariel. Droves of Cuban exiles arrived in Florida, and many American and Cuban American observers noted the shifting demographics in this third wave of refugees. The majority of the third-wave refugees were blue collar workers. Indeed, ethnographers estimate that seventy one percent of these Cubans were working class, which was ironic because the Castro Revolution had taken place in the name of this particular economic sector in Cuba. Moreover, Castro forced criminal and mentally-ill Cubans to migrate to the United States in this wave of immigration.
The Cuban-American population in Miami had at the time emerged as a significant political and economic force both at the local and state level. However, the influx of criminal and mentally-handicapped immigrants forced the Cuban community to reconcile its new image. Indeed, illiterate, uneducated, non-white, and criminals had joined the community and alienated some Cuban industries from white society at-large. Nonetheless, Fidel Castro had been the most embarrassed by these events. Cuban Professor Jorge Dominguez noted that "Mariel was a shame because not only Cuba's upper class immigrated, but ordinary workers immigrated. Many young people who had grown up under the revolution had immigrated as wellMariel was also a shame because the [Castro] regime showed its ugly side to the international community when it deported common criminals to the United States, committing an act of aggression not only against the 'imperialist U.S. government,' but [also] against the American people."
The fourth wave of Cuban immigration occurred after the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991 because of how hard hit the Cuban economy was in the aftermath. Within only three years after the collapse, Cuba's economy had shrunk by forty percent. Riots erupted in Havana for the first time in a century. In order to alleviate the tensions and population pressure, Castro again promulgated that anyone who wanted to get out of Cuba could do so. These migrants were termed balseros, or "rafters" because they washed up on along the Florida coast and settled in the littoral communities there. These migrants came on a variety of different mechanisms including wooden rafts, truck tires, and a litany of other floating items. Indeed, the arrival of these migrants in such an untraditional manner provided a spectacle for those who lived and worked on the littoral of the gulf coast.
Since the 1990s, the United States has made a conscious effort to regulate Cuban migration by implementing a quota of 20,000 Cuban immigrants allowed entry for year. In exchange, Fidel Castro has promised not to openly encourage Cubans to emigrate in any irregular patterns as was witnessed a few times since Castro ascended to power in 1959. It remains unknown whether these agreements will be sustained once the Cuban regime under Castro collapses or if radical changes take place within the Cuban government takes place once Castro dies. As such, many American diplomats and government officials remain quite concerned about how Cuba will transition in a post-Castro society. Many have conveyed their fears that "another Mariel" will take place.

COMBATING CASTRO'S REGIME IN EXILE

Although this narrative is ultimately one underscored by perseverance and triumph, there was also a darker flip side that must also be addressed. Cuban exiles continued to resist and fight against the repressive regime implemented by Fidel Castro while they were living in exile. Indeed, many Cubans in America engaged in acts of terrorisms, including assassinations, bomb plots, and illegal incursions into Cuba. Some of these acts of terror even involved the American government. Retired General Maxwell Taylor had written in a report that “there can be no long term living with Castro” in order to keep pressure on JFK to continue to fight to remove Castro from power. In Operation Mongoose was a covert operation devised under the auspices of Robert Kennedy, the brother of the president who became the “point-man on the Cuba problem.” This covert operation was shaky from the start because it was small in scope and covert in nature rather than a large-scale military intervention. U.S. foreign policy turned to the Mafia in order to carry out this mission, which would have profound effects on U.S. foreign policy in the aftermath of this event. Unfortunately, similar to the Bay of Pigs, Operation Mongoose too was a disaster in its own way because it was pricey, yet Castro remained both alive and in power. During the 1970s, the infamous Watergate Scandal which forced President Nixon to retire was perpetrated by Cuban Americans. Cuban Americans also claimed responsibility for killing Chile’s U.S. ambassador Orlando Letelier. The most outrageous act of terror committed by a Cuban American, however, took place in 1976. Luis Carriles Posada and Orlando Bosch bombed a Cuban airliner that carried hundreds of civilians. This bombing killed dozens of innocent victims, including Chilean athletes who were returning from athletic competitions abroad.

CONCLUSION

Miami and New York City have been the most impacted by the influx of Cuban immigrants to the United States beginning shortly after Fidel Castro ousted the Batista regime and established a communist government that eschewed the notion of private property. The exodus of Cubans to the United States profoundly impacted not only the local economy but also cultural forms. Migrants often send their relatives back home in Cuba necessities and other essential goods such as canned food and toiletries because of the inability of Cuban citizens to procure resources that are necessary to subsist. This reality is a natural outgrowth of Cuban migration and the notion of trans-culturalism. Although they sought political refuge in the United States, Cubans wanted to preserve their distinct culture while wielding some cultural influence and agency within the American cities that they settled in.

Bibliography

Arias, Elizabeth. “Change in Nuptiality Patterns Among Cuban Americans: Evidence of Cultural and Structural Assimilation?” International Migration Review, 35.2(2001): 525-556.
"Cuban Exiles in America." PBS. December 21, 2014. Accessed February 18, 2015. http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/amex/castro/peopleev
"Cuban-Americans: Politics, Culture and Shifting Demographics." Journalists Resource RSS. December 18, 2014. Accessed February 19, 2015. http://journalistsresource.org/studies/government/immigration/cuban-americans-politics- culture-demographics#.
Draper, Theodore. Castro's Revolution: Myths and Realities. New York: Frederick A. Praeger, 1962.
"Fidel Castro." History.com. Accessed February 19, 2015. http://www.history.com/topics/cold- war/fidel-castro.
Fradd, Sandra. "Cubans to Cuban Americans: Assimilation in the United States." Migration Today, 6.4/5(1983): 34-42.
Girard, Chris, Guillermo, J., and Hugh Gladwin. "Exile Politics and Republican Party Affiliation: The Case of Cuban Americans in Miami." Social Science Quarterly, 93.1(2011): 42-57.
Halperin, Maurice. The Rise and Decline of Fidel Castro: An Essay in Contemporary History. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1972.
Lisenby, Kristin Nicole. “El Choteo en Cien botellas en una pared y Raining Backwards: El Gracioso Disfraz de las Circunstancias Tragicas durante la REvolucion Cubana y el Periodo Especial.”Cal Poly Pomona. Retrieved February 19, 2015 from http://digitalcommons.calpoly.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1018&context=mllsp
Matthews, Herbert L. Fidel Castro. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1962.
"Operation Mongoose: The Covert Operation to Remove Castro From Power." PBS. July 1, 2004. Accessed February 18, 2015. http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/amex/rfk/peopleevents
Perez, Lisandro. “Cubans in the United States.” Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science. 487(1986): 126-137.
Suchlichi, James. Ed. Cuba, Castro, and Revolution. Coral Gables: University of Miami Press, 1972.