Arturo Lopez-Levy: Not Your Father's Cuban-Americans
[Arturo Lopez-Levy is a lecturer at the Colorado School of Mines and a Ph.D. candidate at the Josef Korbel School of the University of Denver.]
...The 838,000 exiles in the Miami area -- less than five percent of Florida's population -- have been a pillar of Republican support in presidential elections since 1980, and over the subsequent years have sent two Cuban-American Republican senators and four Republican congressmen to Washington....
Over recent decades, however, a funny thing has happened: The Cuban exile community, in Miami and elsewhere in the United States, has grown apart from the politicians who represent its interests in Washington. Miami's Cubans may keep voting for Ros-Lehtinen and Rubio, but they no longer agree with them....
If Cuban-Americans' views on U.S.-Cuba relations are changing, it's largely because the makeup of the Cuban-American community itself is changing. The founding generation of Cuban émigrés -- exiles like Ros-Lehtinen and her parents -- arrived in Miami traumatized, their lives uprooted and their homes and possessions confiscated. They rarely if ever returned to the island, and in their long absence constructed a nostalgic image of Cuba that bore little resemblance to reality. They looked at the American policy toward Cuba as a means of catharsis and compensation; with their support, the embargo went from being a means of achieving a policy -- the strategic containment of communism -- to a policy goal unto itself.
But today's Cuban immigrants are increasingly far removed from these sensibilities. More than half of them arrived from Cuba in the last 20 years, and they are separated from the 1959 generation's experience by more than time alone. The defining event in the lifetime of the younger generation wasn't the revolution -- it was the Special Period, the era of deprivation ushered in by the collapse of Cuba's largest trading partner, the Soviet Union, in 1991. Overnight, Cuba lost 75 percent of its exports and imports, and more than a third of its gross domestic product vanished. Over the next few years, things went from bad to worse. Those of us who remained on the island often went to bed after eating poorly or not eating at all. Transportation almost collapsed for lack of Soviet oil imports and subsidies. In the summer, electricity was rationed: eight hours on and eight hours off. By 1994, the situation had worsened to the point where Castro, in the face of public protests, told the Cuban people that the government wouldn't stand in their way if they wanted to immigrate. More than 35,000 balseros set sail on boats and makeshift rafts, most of them for Florida....
Read entire article at Foreign Policy
...The 838,000 exiles in the Miami area -- less than five percent of Florida's population -- have been a pillar of Republican support in presidential elections since 1980, and over the subsequent years have sent two Cuban-American Republican senators and four Republican congressmen to Washington....
Over recent decades, however, a funny thing has happened: The Cuban exile community, in Miami and elsewhere in the United States, has grown apart from the politicians who represent its interests in Washington. Miami's Cubans may keep voting for Ros-Lehtinen and Rubio, but they no longer agree with them....
If Cuban-Americans' views on U.S.-Cuba relations are changing, it's largely because the makeup of the Cuban-American community itself is changing. The founding generation of Cuban émigrés -- exiles like Ros-Lehtinen and her parents -- arrived in Miami traumatized, their lives uprooted and their homes and possessions confiscated. They rarely if ever returned to the island, and in their long absence constructed a nostalgic image of Cuba that bore little resemblance to reality. They looked at the American policy toward Cuba as a means of catharsis and compensation; with their support, the embargo went from being a means of achieving a policy -- the strategic containment of communism -- to a policy goal unto itself.
But today's Cuban immigrants are increasingly far removed from these sensibilities. More than half of them arrived from Cuba in the last 20 years, and they are separated from the 1959 generation's experience by more than time alone. The defining event in the lifetime of the younger generation wasn't the revolution -- it was the Special Period, the era of deprivation ushered in by the collapse of Cuba's largest trading partner, the Soviet Union, in 1991. Overnight, Cuba lost 75 percent of its exports and imports, and more than a third of its gross domestic product vanished. Over the next few years, things went from bad to worse. Those of us who remained on the island often went to bed after eating poorly or not eating at all. Transportation almost collapsed for lack of Soviet oil imports and subsidies. In the summer, electricity was rationed: eight hours on and eight hours off. By 1994, the situation had worsened to the point where Castro, in the face of public protests, told the Cuban people that the government wouldn't stand in their way if they wanted to immigrate. More than 35,000 balseros set sail on boats and makeshift rafts, most of them for Florida....