Portes and Stepick Feel 1980

¶ … Portes and Stepick feel 1980 was such a critical turning point for the city of Miami?

An exodus of one Cuban community leads to another community's self-examination: a book overview:

Portes, Alejandro and Alex Stepick. (1994) City on the Edge: The Transformation of Miami. California: University of California Press.

Alejandro Portes and Alex Stepick call the Miami of 1980 a City on the Edge, racially and socially. The city's formerly secure Cuban community, secure in its sense of American identity, underwent a profound disruption with the influx of new Cuban immigrants to its shores. The community underwent a demographic composition comparable to the exodus experienced by the city of Miami in the late 1950's and early 1960's, when the first influx of Cuban immigrants came to Floridian shores. Many of the later, 1980's immigrants, however, rather than coming from the aristocratic and middle class of Cuba, like the largely light-skinned aficionados of the Baptista regime, were of lower classes, and/or mulattos, or Blacks. This upset the Cuban sense f self-identity as a people in Miami, confronting them with the uncomfortable truth of the racial and social diversity of the Cuban people and nation.

Why did the Castro regime change its policy so suddenly on immigration in the first place? Answering this question helps provide clues as to why the next wave of immigration was so diverse. The reasoning begins, oddly enough, to an incident when a Havana bus driver drove through the Peruvian embassy and publicly embarrassed Castro. The driver demanded political asylum. This set off an international crisis. In 1980, the world was at the height of the second wave of the 'cold war,' in a state of international tension unprecedented since the Cuban Missile crisis. Castro sensed this and within days of the highly publicized incident, he allowed thousands of Cubans to leave his nation, as more and more disenchanted Cuban citizens stormed the Cuban embassy to claim refuge.

Thus, the embarrassed Castro regime opened the port of Mariel to all Cubans who wished to leave Cuba. Naturally, most went to the largest Cuban community in the most prosperous nation of the world, that of Miami. Many of these Cuban exiles had Floridian relatives. According to the authors, before long, the so-called Freedom Flotilla first ferried 125,000 Cubans to Florida, a huge number of individuals for a relatively small community to assimilate at one time. But because many of these individuals were relations, with the Latin spirit of hospitality and communality, the anti-Castro, anti-communist Miami Cubans felt compelled to respond with open arms.

Yet before long, the reaction of the community was not entirely pleased. According to a Cuban-American official quoted in Portes, the Mariel boatlift "destroyed the image of Cubans in the United States and, in passing, destroyed the image of Miami itself for tourism."(21) at first quietly, and then not so quietly, the Cuban longtime residents of Miami stated that Castro, in fact, used the Mariel boatlift as an wonderful opportunity to rid Cuba of criminals and vagabonds. Indeed, over half of the boatlift population had criminal backgrounds. To further support this characterization of the boatlift, Castro himself is quoted as saying that the departing citizens leaving from Mariel are the scum of the country and were surely welcome to leave Cuba for he thought no other country would have them, even America. He openly denounced the population leaving by way of boat at a 1980 May Day celebration during the height of the Mariel migration.

But the figures about criminality do not alone tell the tale of the character of the migrants. Many criminals in Cuba have been imprisoned for political activities such as freedom of speech that would not be considered criminal in America. Also, homosexuality is illegal in Cuba. Many of the boatlift population had engaged in homosexual relations, which are outlawed in Cuba. The conservative Cuban population of America, however, was by and large no more amicable to alternative sexualities than the Castro regime.

But more to the point, the hostility to the new immigrants may have been racial. The Cuban population who denounced the marielitos as causing a decline in tourism in Miami, noted that the recent boatlift was made up of Cubans who were mostly Blacks and mulattoes of a color that I never saw or believed existed in Cuba." (21) All new immigrant populations present a new face to older and more established members of the community, but in this case, the new face was very literally a distinctive racial shift in the image of Cubans.