Why Cuban exiles don’t take America’s freedom for granted

Posted on Friday, 03.23.12

CUBAN EXILES

Why Cuban exiles don’t take America’s freedom for granted
BY LOUISE OBRIEN
louiseobrien@yahoo.com

Without the Cuban diaspora, Miami would be a very different city.

Before Castro’s revolution, Cubans represented just 2 percent of Miami-Dade County’s population. By 2010, they’d grown to 34 percent —numbering only slightly fewer than the entire county population in 1960.

Cuban exiles have dramatically changed the culture, economy, language and history of South Florida over the past 50 years. When the first wave fled the island after Castro took over, they believed their sojourn here would be temporary — making them exiles rather than immigrants. Cubans and many Americans at the time were convinced the U.S. would never tolerate a communist regime 90 miles south of its shores. Despite the failure of the 1961 Bay of Pigs invasion, some Cuban exiles continue to hope for a triumphant return to their island.

It’s been a long wait.

From the Bay of Pigs to Elián, exile stories have grabbed headlines across our country, becoming part of American as well as Miami history. No chapter was more dramatic than the Mariel boatlift, which brought 125,000 refugees to our shores in a few short months during 1980. Its size and suddenness placed an enormous burden on the community, bringing tensions already simmering to the boiling point.

As a student of international affairs in 1980, I came here to observe firsthand the largest refugee influx in America’s history, and its effects upon a metropolitan community. Mariel became the subject of my senior thesis for Princeton University, and launched a lifelong fascination with Cuban Miami. Thirty years later, I accepted an invitation to help edit Cubans: An Epic Journey. This group project, involving over 30 contributors, was initiated by Facts About Cuban Exiles (FACE), an organization formed after Mariel to combat prejudice against Cubans.

Before Mariel, Cuban exiles believed they’d been fully accepted by their Miami neighbors. “Mariel ripped that pretty picture to shreds,” recalls Sergio Pereira, aide to the Dade County manager and special consultant to the White House at the time. Due to a small but highly visible criminal element among the Mariel refugees, the Miami community now had license to vent decades of pent-up frustrations and bigotry. Pereira says, “Cuban Americans who had spent so many years flourishing in what they truly believed to be the ‘land of equal opportunity’ were crushed, emotionally and spiritually.”

In joining the mostly Cuban team on this book project, I hoped to learn more about the entire Cuban exile experience, and how it helped mold the culture of the city I now call home. What I hadn’t anticipated was how much this project would deepen my appreciation for what it means to be an American.

Like all Americans, I’m descended from immigrants. My Irish Catholic ancestors faced prejudice long before their descendants were fully accepted as part of the American melting pot. Notwithstanding their early struggles here, my great-grandparents never doubted they were better off in the United States than they’d been before. It’s easy for subsequent generations to take that for granted.

With Castro’s Cuba as a living comparison, the exiles have never taken America for granted.

This is really the key to understanding the Cuban-exile community — the part that sometimes their neighbors don’t get. Their vehement feelings about Cuba and Castro 50 years after the revolution stem as much from commitment to the American way of life as from resistance to the current regime in Cuba. In fact, to an exile, these are two sides of the same coin.

The exile community’s position on the repatriation of Elián González in 2000 was an example of this. Cuban Americans know firsthand the differences in economic opportunity and personal freedom that children face in the United States vs. Cuba. Their passionate protests sprang not from the insularity of a narrow ethnic community, but from a broad and deep patriotism toward their adopted country.

This is why the story of the Cuban exiles is important for all of us.

Louise OBrien is a former business executive and editor of the Harvard Business Review. A current resident of South Florida, she wrote her thesis for Princeton University’s Woodrow Wilson School on the Mariel boatlift.

http://www.miamiherald.com/2012/03/23/2710478/why-cuban-exiles-dont-take-americas.html