Cuban Diaspora - Waves of Exiles To The United States

Waves of Exiles To The United States

The majority of the nearly 1 million current Cuban exiles living in the United States live in and around the city of Miami. Other exiles have relocated to form substantial Cuban American communities in Union City and West New York, New Jersey (known as Havana on the Hudson); Raleigh, North Carolina; Los Angeles, California; and Palm Desert, California.

Most Cuban exiles in the United States are both legally and self-described political refugees. This status allows them different treatment under US Immigration statutes than immigrants who are not categorized as political refugees. The exiles came in numerous discernible waves.

The first wave occurred after the Cuban revolution of 1959 led by Fidel Castro. A lot of the refugees came with the idea that the new government would not last long, and their stay in the US was temporary. Homes, cars, and other properties in Cuba were left with family, friends, and relatives, who would take care of them until the Castro regime would fall, however, this was promptly stopped by the Castro government, with the forced confiscation of all properties belonging to anyone leaving the country.

Between November 1960 and October 1962, over 14,000 children, mostly Catholic although some were Jewish or Protestant, ages 6 to 17 were sent to the U.S. by their parents in Operation Peter Pan. These children were taken out under the care of the Catholic Church and placed in foster homes throughout the U.S until they could be reunited with their parents. Their parents sent them in the U.S in order to keep them from the alleged communist indoctrination and forced induction of boys into the Cuban armed forces and girls into the Alphabetization Campaign.

The second wave began in 1961 amid the nationalization of educational institutions, hospitals, private land, and industrial facilities. Additionally, the Castro government began a political crackdown on the opposition either incarcerating opponents or perceived opponents or executing the same. At this point, after the Bay of Pigs Invasion, Castro had gone from a self-proclaimed non-communist freedom fighter to a self-proclaimed Marxist-Leninist.

There was a smaller wave of refugees in 1965 from the Cuban port of Camarioca. Cuban exiles from Miami brought friends and relatives to Key West by using small leisure boats. No detailed history has ever been written on the Camarioca boatlift and no exact list of refugees is known to exist.

From December 1965 to early 1973, under the Johnson and Nixon administrations, the twice daily "Freedom Flights" (Vuelos de la Libertad) from Varadero Beach to Miami were the only way to escape out of Cuba. It became the longest airlift ever to take political refugees and transported 265,297 Cubans to the United States with the help of religious and volunteer agencies. Flights were limited to immediate relatives, with a waiting period anywhere from one to two years.

Between April 15 and October 31, 1980, during the Carter administration, probably one of the most significant wave of exiles occurred during what became known as the Mariel Boatlift. The mass boatlift occurred after a number of Cubans drove a bus through the gates of the Havana Peruvian Embassy and requested asylum. One embassy guard died as a result of friendly fire when another guard machine gunned the incoming bus and hit the first one accidentally. When the Peruvian ambassador refused to return the exiled citizens to the authorities, Castro removed the Cuban guards from the embassy, basically opening the door to the 4,000 plus asylum seekers that came into the embassy within the next few days. Reacting to this sudden exodus, Castro stated, "Anyone who wants to leave Cuba can do so" and declared that those who were leaving the country were the escoria (scum).

This resulted in an even bigger exodus through the port of Mariel, where an improvised flotilla of Cuban exiles from Miami in small pleasure boats and commercial shrimping vessels brought Cuban citizens who wished to leave the island. Within weeks, 125,000 Cubans reached the United States despite Coast Guard attempts to stem the movement. As the exodus became international news and an embarrassment for the Cuban government, Castro emptied his hospitals and had prison inmates rounded up as "social undesirables", and forced to take them among the political and economic refugees. The Cuban Communist Party staged meetings at the homes of those known to be leaving the country. People were intimidated by these "repudiation meetings" (mitines de repudio) where the participants screamed obscenities and defiled the facades of the homes, throwing eggs and garbage, for hours. Labeled as "traitors to the revolution" those who declared their wish to leave became the targeted victims of the attacks, their rationing cards was taken from them, their jobs were terminated or they were expelled from schools or university. Towards the end of the crisis, the repudiation meetings were ended. The scale of the exodus created political difficulties for the Cuban government, and an agreement was reached to end the boatlift after several months. Out of more than 125,000 refugees, from as low as 7,500 to as high as 40,000, were believed to possess criminal records in Cuba (although some had criminal background, most were imprisoned for being practicing Christians, political dissidents, refusing to serve in the military service or to work for the state, vagrancy, trying to escape from the country. or for buying rationed food items in the black market). In the end, only 1,774 of the refugees were classified as serious or violent criminals under U.S. law and denied citizenship on that basis. The majority of refugees were young adult males, 20 to 34 years of age, from the working class, skilled craftsman, semi skilled tradesmen and unskilled laborers who took advantage of the opportunity to leave Cuba without the hindrance of the Cuban regime. For the most part this represented the younger generation raised under the Cuban revolutionary society. However, this figure does not take into account all of those many unknown numbers of people who have perished trying to cross the Florida Straits or killed by Cuban gunboats as they attempted to leave the island.

The U.S. Department of State, in a website section entitled "Cuba: U.S.-Cuba Relations," last updated Jan. 20, 2001, explained: "In the 1980s... U.S.-Cuban relations shifted to include immigration... when a migration crisis unfolded. In 1980... the Cuban government allowed 125,000 Cubans to illegally depart for the United States from the port of Mariel, an incident known as the 'Mariel boatlift.' In 1984, the United States and Cuba negotiated an agreement to resume normal immigration, and to return to Cuba those persons who had arrived during the boatlift who were 'excludable' under U.S. law."

During the past years, exile waves have consisted of "balseros" (rafters), who brave the rough seas in homemade rafts. Janet Reno, LLD, U.S. Attorney General at the time, in an Aug. 18, 1994 press release titled "Attorney's General Statement on Cuban Influx," offered the following remarks: "To divert the Cuban people from seeking democratic change, the government of Cuba has resorted to an unconscionable tactic of letting people risk their lives by leaving in flimsy vessels through the treacherous waters of the Florida Straits. Many people have lost their lives in such crossings. We urge the people of Cuba to remain home and not to fall for this callous maneuver. I want to work with all concerned including the Cuban American community to make sure the message goes out to Cubans that putting a boat or raft to sea means putting life and limb at risk... To prevent this from happening again, the Coast Guard has mounted an aggressive public information campaign so people know that vessels... may be stopped and boarded and may be seized. Individuals who violate U.S. law will be prosecuted in appropriate circumstances."

President Clinton, trying to stem the flow of Cuban rafters, pressed a dozen Latin American governments to provide internment camps that officials hoped will prove less attractive to refugees than the U.S. Navy base at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba. Although the refugees at Guantanamo were held behind barbed wire, to many, the base was less forbidding than a foreign internment camp. As part of the U. S. A., Guantanamo had more food and more freedom in their jails than in Cuba and Castro could do nothing to them.

However, as a result of bilateral migration accords between the two governments, in September 1994 and May 1995, the status quo of U.S. policy toward Cuban migrants was altered significantly. The U.S. granted Cuba an annual minimum of 20,000 legal immigrant visas and, at the same time, determined that Cubans picked up at sea would be sent home just as any other group of “illegal” immigrants. President Clinton's agreement with Cuba resolved the dilemma of the approximately 33,000 Cubans then encamped at Guantanamo. This new agreement, had two new points. The United States agreed to take most of the Cubans detained at Guantanamo through the humanitarian parole provision. Cuba agreed to credit some of these admissions toward the minimum quota of 20,000 migrants from Cuba, with 5,000 charged annually over the years. Secondly, rather than placing Cubans intercepted at sea in a camp, the United States began sending them back to Cuba. Both governments promised to follow international agreements to ensure that no action would be taken against the people returned to Cuba.

As a result of these migration agreements and interdiction policy, a "wet foot/dry foot" practice toward Cuban immigrants has developed. For those who do not reach the shore (dry land), they are returned to Cuba unless they fear persecution there but only those who meet the definition of asylum refugee are accepted to eventually be resettled to a third country. Those Cuban rafters who do reach land are inspected by Department of Homeland Security and usually are allowed to stay in the United States. From May 1995 through July 2003, about 170 Cuban refugees were resettled in 11 different countries, including Spain, Venezuela, Australia, and Nicaragua. The State Department request to monitor the fate of the immigrants returned to Cuba to ensure that they were not subject to reprisals, has noted that since March 2003 it has been unable to monitor any of the returnees.

Carl McGill, MA, Professor of Criminal Justice at Phoenix University, in an Aug. 5, 2000 NoCastro.com interview entitled "Candidate Carl McGill Responds to Questions on Cuba," stated: "Clinton's policy to return 'rafters' to Cuba is like returning a slave in pre-Civil War America back to his enslaver. This would have condoned civil rights violations and slavery, as returning a 'rafter' to Cuba condones human rights violations and communism. Clinton's decision on this issue is wrong."