Images of émigrés

...A review of their experience in Miami, and in the U.S...

...On the other hand, in contrast to successes in health, at least one long-time Communist party official, with forty years experience in a high-placed industrial job, reported that administrative competence in such areas as sugar industry management and public utilities was hardly comparable to the skills of American and European managers...

...Finally, in 1979, a new wave of immigrants began with about 125,000 in all, bringing the total to 850,000...

...Then there are the political dissidents, those whom the regime wanted to lose...

...They figured they could do better in the United States than in Cuba...

...and, as might be expected, there is a mixed bag of reactions...

...The most dramatic indication of the prosperity Cubans have achieved over twenty years is the fact that there are now approximately two hundred millionaires within the Cuban community in Miami, the city with the largest Cuban population...

...The emphasis of most Cubans was expressed by Professor Sergio Aguirre of the History Department of the University of Havana, a longtime supporter of the regime, who referred to them as "the canaille" or "the dregs" of the population...

...Up to 1974, the United States had received 675,000 Cuban refugees...

...There seems little question that a considerable group of the current immigrants are social misfits, including petty thieves, anti-social "crimi: nals," psychoneurotics, and perhaps psychotics...

...andl am respected here in my chosen profession...

...No discussion of Cuba can omit the limited freedom of speech-a not inconsiderable reason for emigration...

...Today life expectancy in Cuba is 72 years, compared with 67 in Costa Rica and 72.8 in the U.S...

...The enormous emphasis on youth and adult education in Cuba serves to smooth out the differences between manual and professional workers, rural and urban people, and even old and young...

...How do the Cubans in Cuba view those who have left so far...

...and in large part through their efforts, Miami is now one of the more important cities of the country...

...He spoke English with a New York accent, picked up from an American admiral for whom he had been a houseman at the Guantanamo base...

...Many middle-aged Cubans who remained seemed wistful about hot being able to take advantage of life in the U.S...

...On the other hand, criticism of specific governmental policies, and even of the government policies in general, is not infrequently heard in private conversations...

...Young men and women were sent to Paris, Stockholm, Berlin, and Moscow to learn the best that modern medicine can teach, and apparently they learned well...

...Certainly freedom of radio, TV, or media discussion is not present...

...Related to this emphasis on education was the apparent desire of so many families, from those of the retired dock or railroad worker to those of the carpenter and shoemaker, to have their children grow up as professionals...

...Actually, of course, this World War I song has to be sharply modified for today's Cuba...

...One cab driver told me his wife was a professor of Spanish literature at the local college...

...Along with these are what is clearly still the majority-relatives of Cubans in the U. S. who see a future for themselves on the mainland and those many young people who want a chance for that kind of "high commodity" life they believe is available to anyone who will work hard in the U.S...

...The first wave of refugees were clearly upwardly mobile people, many of whom had relatives in the U.S...

...It was, therefore, not surprising that a Cuban official told me that the main objection to foreign newspapers and magazines, particularly American papers, was not any fear of foreign opinions, but rather a concern about the flamboyant advertisements with home appliances, fantastic gadgets, cars, staggering variety in furniture and clothing...

...It's easier on the mainland...

...J. S. FUERST (J.S...

...Clearly, for some, principally young, Cubans, the question remains, "How're you gonna keep 'em down on the farm after they've seen Paree...

...I visited some two dozen Cuban workers' families in their homes (on a randomly selected basis with no guides) and saw more books, more classics-Dostoievski, Tolstoi, Dickens, Washington Irving, Balzac, Dreiser, and, of course, Hemingway-not to mention mysteries by Agatha Christie and Erie Stanley Gardner, plus political tracts by Guevara, Marti, and Lenin, than I would ever expect to see in a corresponding number of middle-class American workers' homes...

...They went over eight months ago with the escoria [scum ]. One of these days I'll join them...

...Perhaps the preeminent impression that a visitor takes away from discussions with Cuban workers and their families is that most of them are waiting for the day when the U.S...

...a director in the Cuban telephone company or various medical specialists), earn not more than $8,000-9,000 a year and perhaps fringe benefits like the use of a car and the right to a better apartment...

...Yet the consumer goods level of the country is so abysmally low that a serious problem is how to spend what money they earn...

...Many supermarkets seem to have perhaps two- or three-hundred different items in a store, with no choice as to brand, size, or type...

...And while the ubiquitous bookstores are heavily stocked with classics, attesting to the literacy of the population, they certainly carry little, if any, political or economic literature antithetical to the current regime...

...By 1974, seventy percent of the Cubans in Miami owned their own homes, ninety percent possessed at least one automobile...

...Even though most of our Jewish friends have left, my parents are still here, and I feel most uncertain about my future in a country like the U.S., or even Colombia where I have well-to-do relatives...

...In the first place, thirty percent of the Cuban farms are still privately owned, and it is an admitted fact that the current group with the highest incomes in Cuba are some independent farmers who, in the face of a $1,000 per capita national income, earn $30,000 or more per year...

...The bulk of the people, and this includes such high officials as Communist party members in high administrative posts (e.g...

...But, they said,'' We are too old to begin life anew in the U. S." Or, as one young Jewish intellectual said, "I am a Cuban...

...Between 1973 and the end of 1978 another 50,000 came in...

...But clearly they are enormous exceptions in this egalitarian economy...

...and Cuba can once again be friends, when, despite our differences, we could have both cultural and economic exchanges...

...generally, by a Cuban-American sociologist, Juan Clark, indicates staggering accomplishments not dissimilar to those of the German refugees from 1933-1941...

...Presently mere is one doctor for every 614 people, about the same proportion that exists in the U.S...

...One means that Cuba is depending on to stem the emigration is the almost incredible emphasis on disciplined education...

...Fuerst, a previous contributor to Commonweal, is assistant director of urban studies at Loyola University in Chicago...

...Among, them, likewise, seem to be a good sprinkling of homosexuals, who have been subject to discrimination in Castro's Cuba...

...My nineteen-year-old daughter is already in Miami with her playboy boyfriend...

...What is amazing to a visitor from a society where housing projects are for the lower, if not the lowest, income group, was to hear a young doctor, resident of a model "development' ' where everyone pays ten percent of his income for rent, say that people of all incomes and all occupations live in this development with little or no friction...

...Along with absenteeism, and some ingrained habits, this may be responsible for the very low standard of living that is undoubtedly driving a number of young people to the U.S...

...THESE recent emigres are a mixed bag...

...iversity in Chicago...

...Leonidas, a fifty-year-old dark-yy skinned Cuban, was giving us his reaction to the recent emigration from his island...

...It is in fact this type of statistic which, when percolated back to Cuba, has been responsible for at least a part of the recent migration...

...A leading physician and a well-placed party official said that while the country had sorely missed the physicians and scientists who had left in the earlier immigration, it actually helped the regime because it had to develop new doctors and other professionals quickly-and the new breed would be supportive of the regime...

...I am, in asense, a Communist, though not a member of the party...

...Infant mortality is down to 15 per 1,000 live births which also compares favorably with world infant death rates...

...Both Catholic and Jewish clergymen and practitioners indicated the limits of religious freedom: religious observers encounter no problem about obtaining employment, but can expect limits to being promoted...

...One explanation of this is the very low housing level of so much of the population-hardly comparable with the health or education achievements of so much of the population...

...It's too tough to make a buck here...

...An unbelievable number of fathers and mothers, formerly residents of rural areas, t61d me proudly that their children were either doctors, chemists, physicists, school teachers, social workers, or psychologists...

...It was our first day of a week's visit to Cuba, and Leonidas had stopped us on the street in an effort to hustle us into exchanging American dollars for Cuban pesos at a special rate...