{"id":235222,"date":"2021-02-25T11:46:54","date_gmt":"2021-02-25T16:46:54","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/oncubanews.com\/en\/?p=235222"},"modified":"2021-04-26T15:01:38","modified_gmt":"2021-04-26T19:01:38","slug":"cuban-americans-need-a-new-story-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/oncubanews.com\/en\/cuba-usa\/cuban-americans-need-a-new-story-2\/","title":{"rendered":"Cuban Americans Need a New Story"},"content":{"rendered":"

On December 29, 1962, President John F. Kennedy stood on a stage at the Miami Orange Bowl. A member of the Brigada 2506 handed him a folded Cuban flag. From the stands watched an at-capacity crowd of Cubans, including survivors of the Bay of Pigs debacle and their friends and families. He started the 14-minute speech welcoming the\u00a0<\/span>brigadistas<\/span><\/i>\u00a0on behalf of \u201chis government and his country\u201d and assuring them that the flag just received \u201cwill be returned to this Brigade in a free Havana.\u201d\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

This was, of course, a fiction. There would be no other serious attempt to overthrow the Cuban Revolutionary government, and diplomatic options were curtailed by the severing of relations in 1961 and the establishment of the full embargo in February of 1962. The fate of the exile\u2019s Cuba was, like the flag, in the hands of the American government.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

In 1966, the exile reality received another blow. That year, with irrevocable institutional authority, the passage of the Cuban Adjustment Act created the existence of the category of Cuban-Americans as immigrants, not exiles. The government that Kennedy represented in his short gig as president became our government.\u00a0<\/span>Su casa es mi casa<\/span><\/i>.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

The Kennedy ritual in 1962 initiated the exile story, which still rules as the ambient ideology among Cuban Americans in Miami. The story relies on the belief that the U.S. government, through sanctions and sanctimoniousness, will lead the charge for regime change on the island. This is a fiction, yet the power of this fiction this year motivated some Cuban Americans into the streets banging pans in support of the reelection of Donald Trump, a president of whom the kindest thing that can be said is that he\u2019s a narcissist completely disinterested in the fate of Cuba, the Cuban people, or Cuban Americans, beyond the votes that the latter might bring him<\/a>.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

The exile story, of victimization at the hands of a communist dictatorship, has had a good run. It allowed the early Cubans to establish an alliance with the State in their new land, which resulted in beneficial treatment of fellow runners from the Cuban Revolution. (See: the Cuban Refugee Program of 1961, the Cuban Adjustment Act of 1966, the expansion of Supplemental Security Income eligibility in 1975, and many other mostly Democratic initiatives to assist Cuban integration.)<\/span><\/p>\n

In its heyday, the story had a purpose: to establish an episteme of return to the homeland for those fleeing the Cuban Revolution. In its original telling, the Cubans in exile would spearhead a violent overthrow of the revolutionary government.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

This plot line effectively dissolved in the Orange Bowl during the ritualistic handing of the flag to Kennedy in 1962. But the story continued with the protagonists shifting from the Cuban exiles as a group to \u201cthe men of action\u201d who commandeered clandestine terrorist attacks against the island or planted bombs against dissidents within the community of exiles, who subscribe to another story about how to be Cuban Americans. When violence failed, the strategy shifted to influencing the U.S. government in its foreign dealings with the island by joining President Ronald Reagan\u2019s wars against the \u201cevil empire\u201d and its surrogates.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

The geopolitical importance of Cubans beyond the 305 served to incorporate the community into the Republican Party<\/a> and the political process of the United States.\u00a0 But when the Soviet surrogates triumphed or retreated while Cuba remained unchanged, the only arrow in the exile quiver was support for the Republican Party, its isolationist policies, and its embargo. It\u2019s been nearly 60 years. We have long forgotten that we can whittle a new arrow. Apparently, we never forget, but we never learn.<\/span><\/p>\n

The recent Trumpazo gave the exile story a boost, thanks to the easily reproducible meme of \u201csocialism\u201d injected into the body politic of South Florida, a geography flush with immigrants claiming victimization at the hands of one authoritarian regime or another. But in general, the idea that Cuban Americans are an exile minority obsessed with the homeland is a myth<\/span>\u00a0<\/b>kept alive by the tellers of the old story, some of whom cling to it for the security offered by fundamentalist beliefs and others\u00a0<\/span>los que viven de eso<\/span><\/i>\u00a0as opportunist, selling the story as a commodity, like an audiobook from Barnes and Noble.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

The most recent empirical evidence for this comes from the\u00a0<\/span>FIU Cuba Poll<\/span><\/a>,\u00a0<\/span>which I have\u00a0directed\u00a0since 1991. Cubans arriving since the signing of the reigning\u00a0<\/span>immigration accord in 1995<\/span><\/a> are not exiles in any sense of the word, but economic immigrants: over 60 percent report coming to the U.S. for financial or family reasons.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Cuban-Americans and the 2020 Presidential Election: Evidence and Hypotheses from the 2020 Cuba Poll (I)<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n