 | This article is missing information about experiences and communities of exiles.(January 2021) |
A Cuban exile is a person who emigrated from Cuba in the Cuban exodus. Exiles have various differing experiences as emigrants depending on when they migrated during the exodus. [1]
Cuban exiles would come from various economic backgrounds, usually reflecting the emigration wave they were a part of. Many of the Cubans who would emigrate early were from the middle and upper class, but often brought very little with them when leaving Cuba. Small Cuban communities were formed in Miami, the United States, Spain, Costa Rica, Uruguay, Italy, Canada, and Mexico. By the Freedom Flights, many emigrants were middle class or blue-collar workers, due to the Cuban government's restrictions on the emigration of skilled workers. Many exiled professionals were unlicensed outside Cuba and began to offer their services in the informal economy. Cuban exiles also used Spanish language skills to open import-export businesses tied to Latin America. By the 1980s many businesses owned by Cuban exiles would prosper and develop a thriving business community. The 1980 Mariel boatlift saw new emigrants from Cuba leaving the harsh prospects of the Cuban economy. [2]
Between 1965 and 1968, the Cuban government interned LGBTQ Cubans, along with others deemed deviant who would not or were not allowed to serve in military, into labor camps called the Military Units to Aid Production. Outside the labor camps, there would be prevalent discrimination and prejudiced ideation against LGBT members of Cuban society, and homosexuality would not be decriminalized until 1979. LGBTQ Cubans notably tried to escape the island either by enlisting in the Cuban military to be deployed abroad, or by emigrating in the Mariel boatlift where LGBTQ Cuban prisoners were specifically targeted by authorities to be given approval to emigrate. [3]
The male exiles of the Mariel boatlift were depicted by the Castro administration as effeminate and often pejoratively addressed with homophobia by leaders. Revolutionary masculinity ( machismo ) and an association of homosexuality with capitalism had fostered homophobic sentiments in Revolutionary Cuban culture. This atmosphere had driven many LGBTQ Cubans to flee when Castro announced he would allow the exodus. By 1980 homosexuality was no longer criminalized by Cuban law, but queer Cubans still faced systemic discrimination. There was a social phenomenon of straight men pretending to be gay to pass the interviews required of applicants for the exodus, because it was believed that homosexuals were more likely to pass the panel held to determine if a person could exit from Cuba. Communities of gay exiles formed in the processing centers that formed for those applying for entry to the United States. These centers kept their gender populations segregated. As a result, a majority of reports of LGBTQ Cuban Exile communities in these centers were focused on gay male exiles. However, secondhand reports suggested parallel lesbian communities had formed in the women's population. Though United States law technically barred emigration into the country on grounds of homosexuality, exceptions were made for the exiles to support them as anti-communists. Only LGBTQ people who clearly and explicitly told the US immigration panel that they identified as such were denied entry to the United States. [4]
Author Susana Pena has written about LGBTQ people in the Mariel boatlift and has speculated that their resettlement in Miami may have spurred on a revival of LGBTQ social life in Miami's South Beach. [5]
While fewer Afro-Cuban exiles arrived in the earlier waves of migration, Afro-Cuban presence was larger among the Mariel Boatlift and Balseros periods. Anywhere between 20% and 40% of Marielitos were identified as black. A substantial portion of Afro-Cuban exiles assimilated into the African American community, but some remain active in the Cuban-American community. [6]
A diaspora is a population that is scattered across regions which are separate from its geographic place of origin. The word is used in reference to people who identify with a specific geographic location, but currently reside elsewhere.
Operation Peter Pan was a clandestine exodus of over 14,000 unaccompanied Cuban minors ages 6 to 18 to the United States over a two-year span from 1960 to 1962. They were sent after parents feared that Fidel Castro and the Communist party were planning to terminate parental rights and place minors in alleged "communist indoctrination centers", commonly referred to as the Patria Potestad.
Human capital flight is the emigration or immigration of individuals who have received advanced training at home. The net benefits of human capital flight for the receiving country are sometimes referred to as a "brain gain" whereas the net costs for the sending country are sometimes referred to as a "brain drain". In occupations with a surplus of graduates, immigration of foreign-trained professionals can aggravate the underemployment of domestic graduates, whereas emigration from an area with a surplus of trained people leads to better opportunities for those remaining. But emigration may cause problems for the home country if the trained people are in short supply there.
The Mariel boatlift was a mass emigration of Cubans who traveled from Cuba's Mariel Harbor to the United States between April 15 and October 31, 1980. The term "Marielito" is used to refer to these refugees in both Spanish and English. While the exodus was triggered by a sharp downturn in the Cuban economy, it followed on the heels of generations of Cubans who had immigrated to the United States in the preceding decades.
Cuban Americans are Americans who immigrated from or are descended from immigrants from Cuba, regardless of racial or ethnic origin. As of 2023, Cuban Americans were the third largest Hispanic and Latino American group in the United States after Mexican Americans and Stateside Puerto Ricans.
The Cuban exodus is the mass emigration of Cubans from the island of Cuba after the Cuban Revolution of 1959. Throughout the exodus, millions of Cubans from diverse social positions within Cuban society emigrated within various emigration waves, due to political repression and disillusionment with life in Cuba.
Cuban immigration has greatly affected Miami-Dade County since 1959, creating what is known as "Cuban Miami." However, Miami reflects global trends as well, such as the growing trends of multiculturalism and multiracialism; this reflects the way in which international politics shape local communities.
The Zimbabwean diaspora refers to the diaspora of immigrants from the nation of Zimbabwe and their descendants who now reside in other countries. The number of Zimbabweans living outside Zimbabwe varies significantly from 4 to 7 million people, though it is generally accepted at over 5 million people, some 30 per cent of all Zimbabweans. Varying degrees of assimilation and a high degree of interethnic marriages in the Zimbabwean diaspora communities makes determining exact figures difficult. The diaspora population is extremely diverse and consists of Shona people, Ndebele, white Zimbabweans, mixed-race people, Asians, Jewish people and other minority groups. The diaspora traces their origin to several waves of emigration, starting with the exodus that followed the 1965, unilateral declaration of independence in Rhodesia, but significantly since the sociopolitical crisis that began in 2000.
Marielitos is the name given to the Cuban immigrants that left Cuba from the Port of Mariel in 1980. Approximately 135,000 people left the country to the United States from April to September in what became known as the Mariel boatlift.
Freedom Flights transported Cubans to Miami twice daily, five times per week from 1965 to 1973. Its budget was about $12 million and it brought an estimated 300,000 refugees, making it the "largest airborne refugee operation in American history." The Freedom Flights were an important and unusual chapter of cooperation in the history of Cuban-American foreign relations, which is otherwise characterized by mutual distrust. The program changed the ethnic makeup of Miami and fueled the growth of the Cuban-American enclave there.
Cuban immigration to the United States, for the most part, occurred in two periods: the first series of immigration of wealthy Cuban Americans to the United States resulted from Cubans establishing cigar factories in Tampa and from attempts to overthrow Spanish colonial rule by the movement led by José Martí, the second to escape from Communist rule under Fidel Castro following the Cuban Revolution. Massive Cuban migration to Miami during the second series led to major demographic and cultural changes in Miami. There was also economic emigration, particularly during the Great Depression in the 1930s. As of 2019, there were 1,359,990 Cubans in the United States.
The 1994 Cuban rafter crisis which is also known as the 1994 Cuban raft exodus or the Balsero crisis was the emigration of more than 35,069 Cubans to the United States via makeshift rafts. The exodus occurred over five weeks following rioting in Cuba; Fidel Castro announced in response that anyone who wished to leave the country could do so without any hindrance. Fearing a major exodus, the Clinton administration would mandate that all rafters captured at sea be detained at the Guantanamo Bay Naval Base.
"Refugees as weapons" is a term used to describe a hostile government organizing, or threatening to organize, a sudden influx of refugees into another country or political entity with the intent of causing political disturbances in that entity. The responsible country usually seeks to extract concessions from the targeted country and achieve some political, military, and/or economic objective.
The emigration of Cubans, from the 1959 Cuban Revolution to October of 1962, has been dubbed the Golden exile and the first emigration wave in the greater Cuban exile. The exodus was referred to as the "Golden exile" because of the mainly upper and middle class character of the emigrants. After the success of the revolution various Cubans who had allied themselves or worked with the overthrown Batista regime fled the country. Later as the Fidel Castro government began nationalizing industries many Cuban professionals would flee the island. This period of the Cuban exile is also referred to as the Historical exile, mainly by those who emigrated during this period.
The Cuban success story, sometimes referred to as the myth of the golden exile, is the idea that Cuban exiles that came to the United States after the 1959 Cuban Revolution were mostly or exclusively political exiles who were white, largely conservative, and financially successful. The idea garnered traction starting in the 1960s via rags-to-riches stories of Cuban exiles in the US news media, and became widely promoted within the Cuban American community. The idea has been criticized as an inaccurate depiction of Cuban Americans that ignores historical fact.
Cuban boat people mainly refers to refugees who flee Cuba by boat and ship to the United States.
On April 1, 1980, six Cuban citizens made their way into the Peruvian embassy in Havana, Cuba, instigating an international crisis over the diplomatic status of around 10,000 asylum-seeking Cubans who joined them over the following days. The Peruvian ambassador, Ernesto Pinto Bazurco Rittler, spearheaded the effort to protect Cubans, most of whom were disapproved of by Fidel Castro’s regime and were seeking protection at the embassy. This episode marked the start of the Cuban refugee crisis, which was followed by a series of diplomatic initiatives between various countries in both North and South America that tried to organize the fleeing of people from the island of Cuba to the United States and elsewhere. The embassy crisis culminated with the substantial exodus of 125,266 Cuban asylum-seekers during the Mariel Boatlift.
The idea of the Cuba de ayer is a mythologized idyllic view of Cuba before the overthrow of the Batista government in the Cuban Revolution. This idealized vision of pre-revolutionary Cuba typically reinforces the ideas that Cuba before 1959 was an elegant, sophisticated, and largely white country that was ruined by the government of Fidel Castro. The Cuban exiles who fled after 1959 are viewed as majorly white, and had no general desire to leave Cuba but did so to flee tyranny. Cuban exiles who uphold this image of the Cuba de ayer view their version of Cuban culture as more desirable than American culture, and that it is best to recreate their lost culture of the Cuba de ayer in the United States. Proponents of the image of the Cuba de ayer also view Cuba as a more worthy country to live in than the United States and hope to return Cuba to the Cuba de ayer after the hoped for fall of the government of Fidel Castro. Critics of the idea of the Cuba de ayer claim it is a nationalist myth created for white Cuban exiles that ignores the reality of Cuban life before 1959, and embraces an exotic vision of Cuba.
The 2021–2023 Cuban migration crisis refers to an ongoing event characterized by a significant surge of Cuban nationals leaving the country, mostly to the United States, due to a combination of factors, including economic hardships and political uncertainties in their homeland. The crisis has resulted in a notable increase in Cuban encounters at the United States' southern border, with many attempting to cross into the country through both regular border crossings and sea arrivals, particularly in South Florida. The mass exodus has posed humanitarian, social, and political challenges for both Cuba and the U.S., prompting discussions and negotiations between the two nations to address the crisis and manage the flow of migrants. It has been described as the largest mass emigration in Cuba's history. It is estimated that nearly 500,000 Cubans sought refuge into the United States between 2021-2023, accounting for nearly 5% of Cuba’s population. It is estimated that 60% of the new Cuban arrival between 2021-2023 (300,000), have settled in Miami-Dade County.