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"Cuban-Jewish Journeys: Searching for Identity, Home, and History in Miami" by Caroline Bettinger-Lopez, "The Cuban Exile Movement: Dissidents or Mercenaries?" by Hernando Calvo and Katlijn Declerq and "Cuban Miami in Havana USA: Cuban Exiles and Cuban Americans in South Florida, 1959-1994" by Maria Cristina Garcia are reviewed.
CUBAN-JEWISH JOURNEYS: SEARCHING FOR IDENTITY, HOME, AND HISTORY IN MIAMI. By Caroline Bettinger-Lopez, with a foreword by Ruth Behar. (Knoxville: The University of Tennessee Press, 2000. Pp. 277. $40.00 cloth, $15.00 paper.)
THE CUBAN EXILE MOVEMENT. DISSIDENTS OR MERCENARIES? By Hernando Calvo and Katlijn Declercq. (Melbourne and New York: Ocean Press, 2000. Pp. 183. $16.95 paper.)
CUBAN MIAMI IN HAVANA USA: CUBAN EXILES AND CUBAN AMERICANS IN SOUTH FLORIDA, 1959-1994. By Maria Cristina Garcia. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996. Pp. 290. $48.00 cloth, $18.95 paper.)
CUBAN MIAMI. By Robert M. Levine and Moises Asis. (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 2000. Pp. 148. $32.00 cloth.)
SECRET MISSIONS TO CUBA: FIDEL CASTRO, BERNARDO BENES, AND CUBAN MIAMI. By Robert M. Levine. (New York: Palgrave, 2001. Pp. 323. $29.95 cloth, $19.95 paper.)
IN THE LAND OF MIRRORS: CUBAN EXILE POLITICS IN THE UNITED STATES. By Maria de los Angeles Torres. (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1999. Pp. 233. $45.00 cloth, $18.95 paper.)
BAY OF PIGS: AN ORAL HISTORY OF BRIGADE 2506. By Victor Andres Triay (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2001. Pp. 200. $24.95 cloth.)
The adaptation of post-1959 Cuban migrants in the United States has been a uniquely public affair. From this migration stream's earliest days with the failure of the Bay of Pigs operation to the more recent controversy over the immigration status of Elian Gonzalez, the nation has watched, and analyzed, the adaptation of Cuban emigres more closely than it has that of other recent migration streams. Central to this emerging Cuban American identity is the concentration of the majority Cuban origin and ancestry peoples in the United States in and around one cityMiami-built anew by the presence of Cuban migrants.
Although the specifics of Cuban migrant adaptation are often assumed rather than analyzed, it is fair to say that they have achieved political and economic success more rapidly than other contemporary migrant populations. One piece of evidence to support this assertion of a rapid adaptation of Cuban emigres is the sizable scholarship on the Cuban American experience that has appeared relatively quickly after the beginnings of large-scale Cuban migration in the 1960s. The books under review here represent a second generation of this scholarship, following in the footsteps of comparative social scientific studies of post1959 Cuban migration such as those conducted by Alejandro Portes and colleagues (Portes and Bach 1985; Portes and Rumbaut 2001), studies of Miami that focus on inter-group relations (Grenier and Stepik 1992; Portes and Stepik 1993), fictional accounts of the social and cultural adaptation of Cuban immigrants in the United States (Garcia 1993; Obejas 1996), and cultural studies of Cuban American identity (Perez Firmat 1994).
The seven books under review here fall into two broad categories. The first are of narrow academic interest and are valuable only for those with a very specific and detailed interest in the Cuban Revolution and the experiences of post-1959 exiles from the Revolution. These include Victor Andres Triay's oral history of the Cuban exile Bay of Pigs combatants, Hernando Calvo and Katlijn Declercq's interviews with leaders of Miami's anti-Castro organizations and their international supporters (as well as a few advocates of an improved relationship between the United States and Cuba), and Robert M. Levine and Moises Asis's brief narrative and photographic history of Cuban migration to the United States and, particularly, to Miami. The scholarly value of the first two of these books is limited by their explicit ideological agendas. The politicized nature of the Cuban migration forces all of the authors under review to be relatively explicit about their attitudes toward the Revolution and toward the anti-Castro leanings of the Cuban American community, but these two studies seem to offer no sense of balance or objectivity.
The second group of books under review sets broader objectives for themselves and seek to examine comparative aspects of the Cuban migration and identity formation. As such, they should speak to scholars with a range of interests including migration, transnational politics, race relations in the United States, religion and migration, Latino politics, and urban studies. These include Caroline Bettinger-Lopez's study of the migration experiences of Cuban Jews and their dual search for inclusion among American Jews and in Miami's (non-Jewish) Cuban community, Robert Levine's biography of one of these Jewish migrants-Bernardo Benes-and the personal and professional costs within Miami's Cuban American community of advocating dialogue with the Cuban regime, Maria Cristina Garcia's history of Cuban exile and ethnic identity in South Florida, and Maria de los Angeles Torres' political analysis of the dynamics of exile organizational politics in the Cuban American community The broader questions asked in these four studies speak to each other in a way that the first three books do not.
In Bay of Pigs: An Oral History of Brigade 2506, Victor Andres Triay reports lightly edited interviews with members of Brigade 2506, the U.S.-trained Cuban exile volunteer force that invaded Cuba in April 1961 at the Bay of Pigs. The book is divided into seven sections, each with a brief historical narrative to contextualize the participants' reminiscences. The sections each speak to a different stage in the operation from growing dissatisfaction among some Cubans to the Castro Revolution ("A Call to Arms"), through the operation itself ("The Battle" and "Retreat and Capture") to the post-Bay of Pigs careers of the brigadistas who survived the operation ("The Aftermath"). Triay provides a brief biography for each of his respondents prior to their first quote as well as a number of photographs from the early 1960s and of the respondents in the 1990s. There is no discussion of how Triay selected the respondents, though it should be noted that most have gone on to successful careers in the United States and have remained involved, to varying degrees, in the anti-Castro cause.
Undeniably the brigadistas provide critical insights into the structure, operations, and ultimate failure of the Bay of Pigs operation. Yet, theirs is only part of the story, particularly in this case where the collapse of the policy is the focus of the analysis. Since the focus of Triay's analysis is the structure of the policy, U.S. and Cuban policymakers could have added valuable insights. Triay does include one CIA agent among his interviewees, but the agent's regret at the outcome of the invasion and bitterness against U.S. policymakers cloud the value of his observations. Interviews with Cuban policymakers as well as militia members who fought Brigade 2506 (many of whom may have subsequently migrated to the United States) would have added significantly to the depth of the analysis.
Triay accepts his respondents observations uncritically. Since objectivity is not necessarily the goal of Bay of Pigs, this may seem a tepid criticism. But it raises a larger question of memory in the Cuban emigre community. The memories of the brigadistas are filtered through forty years of U.S.-Cuban relations and the emergence of the Cuban American enclave. As several of the books under review demonstrate, these forty years have not encouraged moderation in Cuban American views toward the Revolution and probably make more stark the veterans' memories of the Bay of Pigs.
Bay of Pigs does raise some interesting questions that merit further analysis. Many of the brigadistas perceived that the United States consciously sought to divide them and factionalize their Cuban (emigre) leadership. If true, this may have had long-term consequences that deserve some comment. Each of the other books under review speaks to the continuing difficulty of achieving organizational unity (despite shared objectives) among Cuban Americans. The origins of the factionalization are largely unanalyzed, but assumed to be divisions within pre-Revolutionary Cuba. Triay suggests a possible alternative. Second, Triay reports that Brigade 2506 included members of various class and racial groups from pre-Revolutionary Cuba. He should have explored this theme more deeply, because it would have made Brigade 2506 unique in the history of Cuba that preceded the Bay of Pigs invasion or Cuban American history that followed.
If Victor Andres Triay looks uncritically at the objectives of Brigade 2506, Hernando Calvo and Katlijn Declercq are equally ideologically blinded, though from a position critical of the exile leadership, in The Cuban Exile Movement: Dissidents or Mercenaries?. Like Brigade 2506, The Cuban Exile Movement is built around a series of interviews (several brigadistas in the former appear as organizational leaders in the latter). Calvo and Declercq report on seventeen interviews. Eight of these are with senior officials of major Cuban exile organizations. The remaining nine include representatives of human rights organizations, press associations, the Catholic Church, the Spanish government and the U.S. government, some supportive of the exile agenda and others critical.
The interviews include extensive editorial commentary by the authors. Each interview is preceded by a narrative on the difficulty of scheduling the interview and the physical setting in which it takes place, with the implication usually that the interviewers were at risk for asking their questions. The questions to the Cuban-American organization representatives are somewhere between provocative and inflammatory. That the interview subjects are willing to answer them and continue with the interviews (one doesn't) is a story in itself about the confidence of the Cuban emigre leadership in Miami and the nature of political conversation in Miami. Most of the interviewees are just as provocative and inflammatory as their questioners.
The authors present the Cuban emigre leadership as heavily factionalized. The core division they find relates to the status of Cuba after the fall of Fidel Castro, although it should be noted that both factions assume that emigres will play a central role in Cuba's political and economic rebuilding. The Cuban American National Foundation (CANE), the largest of the exile organizations, is portrayed by its opponents as seeking to annex Cuba to the United States (or, in the modern sense, to the U.S. economy). These CANF opponents link these annexationist impulses to the century of U.S.-Cuban relations that preceded the Revolution. This annexationist approach leads CANF's opponents to believe that a CANE-led transition would never receive support from the people of Cuba. CANE and its advocates, on the other hand, speak of their organizational efforts in nation-building terms. The organization's roots are traced to 1978 and precede the Reagan administration, which is often credited with providing the impetus to start the organization. CANF, the authors report, has engaged in a active foreign policy and has elaborate plans for humanitarian assistance after Castro's fall. Interestingly, neither faction offers any evidence of the degree of support by Cuban Americans for any of the Cuban exile organizations.
The insular nature of this debate is reinforced in the discussion of outside observers (human rights organizations, press associations, the Catholic Church, the Spanish government, and the U.S. government). Although these observers have widely diverse views, they seek to bring in the voice of Cubans into determining Cuba's future. As Calvo and Declercq present the exile leadership, these leaders have little sense of an independent Cuban citizenry that may distance itself from Cuban Americans even after Fidel Castro leaves office.
The non-Cuban exile views highlight a question raised by The Cuban Exile Movement that should be addressed more explicitly, but is not. That is, why do the most conservative elements of the Cuban American community drive its political culture? Viewing the community's political leadership as mercenaries positioning themselves for a post-Fidel future, as Calvo and Declercq propose, is not a sufficient explanation.
Robert Levine and Moises Asis' Cuban Miami does not live up to its title, at least in the text. It is primarily a history of Cuban emigration to and settlement in the United States (which, as the authors note, occurred mostly in Miami). The book's photos, on the other hand, offer a visual history of the emergence of modern Miami and the Cuban role in that growth. Of the seven books under review here, it is the one most targeted to a non-academic or non-policy-making community, and perhaps should be judged with a different metric. The photos are very well chosen and quite engaging. They are not as well linked to the text as they could be, but tell a story in their own right and visually demonstrate the ways in which the Cuban presence in Miami have shaped the city's look.
Unfortunately, Cuban Miami may be too targeted to its primary audience, Cuban migrants and their children. For example, it accepts uncritically the claim that the remarkable accomplishments of the Cuban American community in the forty years since the Cuban Revolution were a consequence of the skills and drive of Cuban migrants themselves (a theme taken up by Maria Cristina Garcia). It does not hesitate to criticize contemporary Cuba, though it offers no substantiation for these assertions (a more general criticism is that this volume is very selectively footnoted). Finally, it asserts that the children of Cuban migrants are less likely to assimilate than are the children of immigrants from other countries. This is a fascinating subject, and one that definitely merits further study, but the evidence offered-the low likelihood of the second generation being given "American" names-is not totally convincing. The strength of Cuban Miami is its photos. The authors have collected a rich visual archive both of Cuban migration to Miami and of the impact of the Cuban migration on the appearance of the city In addition, the collection includes a number of cartoons, which tend to focus on the social and political adaptation of Cuban migrants in Miami.
The remaining four books under review present more comprehensive theories about the creation of Cuban American identity and how this identity shapes emigre politics and society. The first two-Caroline Bettinger-L6pez's Cuban-Jewish Journeys: Searching for Identity, Home, and History in Miami and Robert M. Levine's Secret Missions to Cuba: Fidel Castro, Bernardo Benes, and Cuban Miami-focus on a little studied component of Miami's Cuban population, Cuban Jews.
Cuban-Jewish Journeys is an ethnographic study of post-1959 CubanJewish migrants who resided in Miami in the 1990s and remained connected to its Cuban synagogues. Bettinger-Lopez analyzes their "double Diaspora" as Jews and as Cubans. Each of these diasporas is made all the more difficult by their tentative acceptance, first by American Jews and secondly by non-Jewish Cubans. To overcome their rejection by non-Cuban Jews, she finds that the Jewbans (the self-identity chosen by many) created parallel institutions and turned inward. Cuban-Jewish energies were focused on building a "Cuba of memory" that respects their multiple origins, but places Cuba at the center of their identity. In this placement of Cuba, Cuban-Jews are little different than the non-Cuban Jews of the other books under review, except that their identity is more frequently challenged. Because of these challenges, however, Bettinger-Lopez finds that Miami's Cuban-Jews, and particularly their U.S.-born children, are acculturating in a way that the other authors under review do not see among non-Jewish Cubans.
The distance from non-Jewish Cuban emigres had to be continually renegotiated. Initially, Bettinger-Lopez reports, non-Jewish Cubans transferred anti-Semitism from Cuba and excluded the Jewbans. Over time, these biases were reinforced by a perception that the Cuban-Jewish emigres were not sufficiently hard-line in their opposition to Castro. The emigration of Cuban Jews since the Revolution, however, belies this perception of moderation toward Castro's Cuba. Jews in Cuba showed their opposition to the Castro regime with their feet; by the 1990s, there were few Jews left to migrate, so this perception of disloyalty to the anti-Castro cause should be seen, in part, as a modern form of anti-Semitism.
One Cuban-Jewish leader, Bernardo Benes (the subject of Robert Levine's biography), did lead the 1978 effort to open a dialogue with the Castro regime. Many outside the Jewban community perceived Benes' "treachery" as speaking to the loyalty of all of Miami's Cuban Jews. One of the major Cuban-Jewish synagogues was vandalized and BettingerLopez reports that many Jewbans perceived the perpetrators to be nonJewish Cubans. Cuban-Jews responded to this animosity by moving farther away from exile politics. This finding of a malleable Cuban-American identity makes Cuban-Jewish Journeys unique among the books under review. This evolving identity challenges a static view of Cuban-exile identity that appears in varying forms in several of these books.
Bettinger-Lopez's informants also see a growing distance both from Cubans in Cuba and between migrants and their children. This distance from Cubans in Cuba grows from class differences, geography, the inability of Cuban-Jews in Cuba to practice their religion, and ideology. The Jewbans perceive the Cuban citizenry's attachment to communism to be genuine. This distance also results from a growing recognition, beginning in the 1990s, that most Jewbans would not return to Cuba given the opportunity. They also see their children's bond with Cuba dissolving. Although the children participate in their parents' ritual celebration of the Cuban-Jewish identity, the parents recognize that their U.S.-born children are moving into American society and American Jewish culture in a way that the parents have not.
Bettinger-Lopez's analysis offers an interesting model for the evolution of Cuban American identity that incorporates both a shifting identity among emigres and an acculturation of their U.S.-born children. That said, the study has two weaknesses that somewhat limit its generalizability. First, is the small sample size (approximately fifty interviews). A more complete discussion of sample demographics of the respondents and Miami's Cuban Jewish population would have provided some context for the findings. Second, the analysis would have been richer if Bettinger-L6pez had interviewed non-Jewish Cuban leaders and non-Cuban Jewish leaders to provide a sense of the connections perceived by these communities to the Jewbans. The author offers evidence that the distance between Cuban and non-Cuban Jews were breaking down in the 1990s, but asserts a continuing exclusion.
A leader of Miami's Cuban-Jewish community-Bernardo Benesis the subject of Robert Levine's Secret Missions to Cuba: Fidel Castro, Bernardo Benes, and Cuban Miami. Benes, who left Cuba soon after the Revolution, followed a somewhat different path than most other leaders that emerged from the early post-Revolutionary migration. Initially, his opposition to the Revolution matched that of other early community leaders. Tapping personal connections and training received in Cuba, Benes quickly achieved professional success and served as a bridge between U.S.-owned banks and the newly arriving Cuban emigre population. Yet his professional responsibilities were never solely financial. By the mid-1970s, he saw a need for improved relations between the United States and Cuba. With support and encouragement from the Carter Administration and the U.S. Department of State, Benes entered into conversations and, eventually, negotiations with senior Cuban officials (who were, in some cases, friends and colleagues from before the Revolution) as well as Fidel Castro.
The consequences of these negotiations were four-fold. Most importantly, the negotiations resulted in the release of 3,600 political prisoners, including many of the remaining Bay of Pigs combatants held in Cuban prisons. Second, Benes' entrees served as the starting point for renewed migration between the United States and Cuba that continues today, and which appears to be permanent despite the sour nature of U.S.-Cuban relations in the past twenty years. This migration, it should be noted, includes large numbers of Cubans moving to the United States (slightly more than 180,000 migrated to permanent residence in the 1990s), but also Cuban emigres and their children returning to Cuba for visits. Third, the apparent opening to Benes, and the fear that this might be the first step in a more amicable relationship between the United States and Cuba, mobilized new organized opposition in Miami to oppose Castro and dialogue. Finally, Benes himself was ostracized in Miami despite his success in negotiating the release of so many prisoners. Just as the Benes negotiations began a twenty-plus year period of increasing the flow of people between Cuba and the United States, the apparent willingness of both the U.S. and Cuban governments to negotiate the bilateral relationship began a period in which Cuban exile organizations reached their apogee of U.S. political influence. As Maria de los Angeles Torres shows, both the U.S. and Cuban governments quickly moved away from this tentative openness. Cuba initially cracked down on domestic dissent and then used the Mariel exodus to exclude political dissenters and criminals. The Carter administration was unprepared for Mariel, and the Reagan administration reached out to the most hard line elements of the exile community for both ideological and partisan reasons.
Levine provides a sympathetic portrait of Bernardo Benes. This is very much his story, and the larger Cuban American and Miami Cuban story is secondary. Levine makes a convincing argument that Benes is an important figure who is both representative of the larger Cuban American experience-economic success, political resources unheard of for most immigrants, tension over identity in both the sending and receiving societies-and a leader who sought to guide the community toward greater moderation. His negotiations allowed the release of 3,000 political prisoners, but also engendered a renewed anti-Castro sentiment in the Miami Cuban community that limited the likelihood of further dialogue for at least twenty-five years.
Benes continued to be involved in community activities after the late 1970s and began another set of negotiations in the 1990s, but his community leadership role steadily declined. Secret Missions to Cuba offers a brief history of Cuban Miami, including elements of Cuban Miami in which Benes plays little or no role, in the 1980s and 1990s. Perhaps most notable in this history is the final chapter, entitled "Elian Elects a President." Levine looks at the Elian affair through the eyes of the community's response to the Benes negotiations. He finds that the same hard-line response that undercut the opening created by Bernardo Benes in 1978 reappeared when the U.S. government (and the Clinton administration) sought to reunite Elian Gonzalez with his father in 1999-2000. Levine argues that the Miami Cuban community's anger about the Democrats' treatment of Elian drove Cuban Americans even more solidly than usual into the Republican camp and elected George Bush in a close national and Florida election. Although failures in the sampling frame for the Voter News Service Florida exit polls (which became evident in the faulty calls for the state early on election night) make an accurate measure of the size of the Cuban majority for Bush impossible, the larger point is well made. Elian reinvigorated the primordial tie among many Miami Cubans that Benes had ignited twenty years before. This drove the mass of the Miami Cuban population back into the hands of the more intransigent exile leadership from whom they had been distancing themselves in the 1990s as U.S. domestic issues dominated the community agenda. While provocative, this community history, in which Benes plays less of a role, is less satisfying than the parts of the book in which Benes is the central actor.
Maria Cristina Garcia profiles the hybrid borderland of Cuban Miami in Havana USA: Cuban Exiles and Cuban Americans in South Florida, 19591994. She analyses how Cuban emigres have repeatedly over the past forty years been able to tap their Cuban identity and translated Cuban institutions to both assert a "true" Cuban identity in Miami and to adapt to U.S. society and politics. The most important of these institutions was Cuba's pre-Revolutionary elite, who dominated the initial wave of migration, and who brought with them higher levels of human capital than are customary in U.S. migration streams. Garcia notes, for example, that by 1961, two-thirds of the pre-Revolutionary faculty of the University of Havana resided in Miami. These early migrants built businesses than would employ subsequent waves of migrants. In addition to this human capital, Cuban migrants brought modes of communityorganizing. Cuban municipios ensured a focus for community-organizing and demand-making. Finally, the Cuban migration brought a sense of Cubanidad defined around the notion of exile and martyrdom to the political cause. Each of these resources allowed rapid community mobilization to meet both the day-to-day needs of migrant adaptation and quick responses when it faced external challenges, but also the broader political objectives of the community.
Garcia is to be credited for assessing the role to which U.S. government financial support reinforced this process of Cuban American community-building. Early in the post-Revolution Cuban migration, U.S. economic assistance was direct. The Cuba Relief Program provided cash assistance for refugees, job training, employment opportunities, the distribution of surplus food, and indirect aid to the state of Florida and Miami-Dade County. The CIA-sponsored effort to overthrow the Revolution provided employment and business creation opportunities for recent migrants that were simply unavailable to other migrants. More recently, Cuban community organizations have been able to tap the federal purse to support social-service delivery. Garcia does not provide an estimate of the total dollar amount of federal assistance to Cuban migrants in the period since 1959, but others have placed the figure at between $2 and $4 billion.
A second particular strength of Maria Cristina Garcia's analysis is her typology of the political leanings of the Cuban exile community. She finds three coherent positions: a conservative wing that supports a return to the authoritarianism of the 1950s Batista regime; a more moderate wing who seeks a return to the democratic institutions guaranteed under Cuba's 1940 Constitution; and the most progressive element made up of exiles who had been members of the revolutionary July 261 movement, but who had become disillusioned with the Revolution. This typology disaggregates the Cuban American community in a way that other authors reviewed here do not. The general tendency in this literature is to paint the Miami Cuban population with a single brush and to assume uncritically that the major exile organizations speak for the entire Miami Cuban community.
Garcia finds that these divisions dissolved with the Mariel exodus, though I think that it would have been useful to see if they reappeared in the early 1990s (at the end of her period of study). Garcia does note that CANF's hard-line position on flights to Cuba, remittances, and the right of exiles to send medicine to family members was beginning to alienate it from the mass of the community and she presents polling data from this same period showing that just 14 to 29 percent of Cuban heads of households in the Miami area report that they would return to Cuba if Castro were to fall (208). In this pre-Elian period, it would seem that Garcia's typology could have again proved useful in understanding Cuban American identity formation.
The role of the U.S. and Cuban governments in shaping Cuban American identity and the tenor of Cuban American politics is the subject of Maria de los Angeles Torres' In the Land of Mirrors: Cuban Exile Politics in the United States. Torres argues that the United States and Cuba worked together, if unintentionally, to empower the most intransigent anti-Castro voices in the community (what Maria Cristina Garcia identified as the advocates of the return to the authoritarian Cuba of the 1950s). While this should come as little surprise to analysts of U.S. policy, Torres quite successfully demonstrates that the Cuban regime's repeated pattern of tentative openings to the emigre community followed quickly by a hard-line response that alienates those who had advocated dialogue. Torres also thoughtfully engages a discussion of why Cuban Americans should have a voice in Cuban affairs. That they should is assumed, remarkably uncritically, by the other authors under review.
The period between the beginning of the Bernardo Benes conversations with the Cuban government and the opening of the port of Mariel for Cubans seeking to emigrate to the United States offers a case study of the pattern documented by Maria de los Angeles Torres. As domestic tensions in Cuba increased, Cuba sought an emigration-driven outlet for dissent. It also sought to divide the emigre community so that it could reward its supporters and demonize all others. Simultaneously, the Carter administration was hoping to improve relations with Cuba and to win Cuban American support through the release of Cuban political prisoners. These moderate sentiments allowed for a period of bilateral negotiations and the opportunity for small-scale emigration from Cuba. Quickly, however, more intransigent elements in the Cuban government sought to undercut this moderation. This closing off of discussions and the tactical use of the Mariel exodus to empty Cuban prisons empowered hard-line elements in the Cuban American community. On the U.S. side, the Republicans saw tactical opportunity and ideological advantage in siding with the most intransigent elements of the exile community. Despite a bias toward openness, the Carter administration found itself unable to maintain political support for its policy initiative after it appeared unable to control the Mariel exodus. Once in power, the Republican administration directly and indirectly funded CANF and other anti-Castro organizations.
Of the books under review, Torres speaks most directly to the question of why Cuban Americans should have a voice in Cuban domestic affairs. She argues that the Cuban experience-which includes institutionalized exile (both before and after the 1959 Revolution) and state meddling in the construction of identity (both by the United States and Cuba)-gives emigres as much as Cubans resident in Cuba a voice in the future of the nation. This issue of emigre involvement is certainly not unique to the Cuban experience. The modal pattern through U.S. immigration history is a steady decline in interest in home-country affairs as the migration matures and the U.S.-born come to speak for the ethnic (rather than immigrant) group. Torres' argument would indicate that Cuban Americans are not going to follow this modal pattern, at least for the foreseeable future. Instead, for Torres, the near absolute divide between supporters of the Revolution and opponents enforced by both the Cuban and U.S. governments ensures that Cubans resident in the United States can make as much of a claim for voice as can those who have stayed behind.
Each of these books under review seeks to describe, analyze, or predict the nature of Cuban emigre identity. It is this question of identity that defines this second-generation of scholarship on Cuban Miami. Of these authors, Maria de los Angeles Torres and Maria Cristina Garcia present the most richly developed understandings of community identity. They start from a common point but end up characterizing Cuban Miami in starkly different terms. Each sees Miami as a border town. For Torres, Miami is on the border but is as far from Cuba as one can get (158). For Garcia, on the other hand, it is a border town that is connected to two mainlands (5-6), but separate from each. In these competing understandings can be found two visions of the future of the Cuban American community and Cuban Miami. Each understands the Cuban American experience in terms of hybridity and the ongoing connection of Cuban Americans to Cuba. The destination of this community, and the identity that shapes it, takes different forms. Garcia's free floating borderland will take the best of both worlds and create an identity built on each society. Torres, on the other hand, defines the Cuban American experience in terms of state-structured constraints.
In these competing understandings appears the foundations for a third generation of scholarship on Miami's Cuban community. What is most needed in all seven of these books is a sense of the dynamics of change. With the exception of Cuban-Jewish Journeys, each presents the Miami Cuban community, and its relationship to both the United States and Cuba, in static terms (just as most present the ideology of the community as homogeneous). What could most benefit the next generation of scholarship is a more explicitly comparative focus so as to understand the dynamics of change in the emigre/immigrant/ethnic community. Certainly much in the Cuban migration is unique and, with the fall of communism, is unlikely to reappear. The adaptation patterns of Cuban migrants in the United States, however, share a great deal with those of other migrants. The setting of the majority of the Cuban migration-Miami-also has its unique features, but probably many more commonalities with other immigrant-receiving U.S. cities. Thus, what has been analyzed most rigorously, the composition of Cuban emigre identity, is just one explanatory characteristic of this population. To get a more complete sense of this community's trajectory what is also needed is a sense of how this identity shapes relations with other groups in the United States and with U.S. political and social institutions.
REFERENCES
GARCIA, CHRISTINA
1993 Dreaming in Cuban. New York: Ballantine Books. GRENIER, GUILLERMO, AND ALEX STEPIK III, EDS.
1992 Miami Now! Immigration, Ethnicity, and Social Change. Gainesville: University Press of Florida.
OBEJAS, ACHY
1996 Memory Mambo. San Francisco: Cleis Press. PEREZ FIRMAT, GUSTAVO
1994 Life on the Hyphen: The Cuban-American Way. Austin: University of Texas Press. PORTES, ALEJANDRO, AND ROBERT BACH
1985 Latin Journey: Cuban and Mexican Immigrants in the United States. Berkeley: University of California Press.
PORTES, ALEJANDRO, AND RUBIN G. RUMBAUT
2001 Legacies: The Story of the Immigrant Second Generation. Berkeley and New York: University of California Press and Russell Sage Foundation.
PORTES, ALEJANDRO, AND ALEX STEPIK DI
1993 City on the Edge: The Transformation of Miami. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Louis DeSipio University of California; Irvine
Copyright University of Texas at Austin (University of Texas Press) 2003