Miami: iLos Cubanos Han Ganado!
Stepick, Alex
WHEN ILEANA ROS-LEHTINEN WON THE special election to replace Rep. Claude Pepper in 1989, she was celebrated as the first Republican ever to represent Dade County, the first Florida...
...383-397...
...Dade County Schools led the nation in bilingual education by introducing it for the first wave of Cuban refugees in 1960...
...Americas asserted that militantexiIc...
...Luis Botifoll, a leading Cuban-American banker, boasted that he and his compatriots had fashioned a "Great Change" in Miami, transforming it from being "merely provincial and tourist-oriented" into a "dynamic and multi-faceted Miami...[where] the level of progress has reached unanticipated heights, beyond the limits of anyone's imagination...
...has e undermined the emergence of pan-Latino or other minority coalitions...
...The formerly dominant positive image of exiled Cubans was replaced by one of a downtrodden and discriminated-against minority...
...Luis J. Botifoll, Introduccidn al Futuro de Miami, (Miami: Laurenty Publishing Inc., 1988), pp...
...The Miami-Cuban enclave economy provided more than a source of employment and economic development...
...The common circumstance of exile and the common experience of successive political defeats cemented a forceful solidarity...
...21...
...Mandela, do you know how many people your friend Castro has killed just for asking the right to speak as you do here...
...With perhaps as many as 12,000 Cubans in Miami on the its payroll at one point in the early 1960s, the CIA was one of the largest employers in the state of Florida...
...In spite of Miami Cu-bans' fierce anti-Communism, many are surprisingly liberal on domestic issues...
...The Miami they would create was to be no mere immigrant neighborhood, but an economic enclave and "moral community" simultaneously fulfilling its own economic needs and standing for the values of old Cuban society and against the new order imposed by Castroism.'5 T(HE MOST FUNDAMENTAL CONSOLIDATION)of the Miami-Cuban community took place following the arrival of the Mariel refugees in 1980...
...The referendum passed by a landslide in the November election with 71% of non-Latino voters supporting it...
...However, by the time of the 1988 state constitutional English-only amendment, blacks' support nearly equalled that of whites...
...Jews against Mandela paraded down the street...
...Everything you hear is the same, every day, all day...
...Politically, an anti-bilingual referendum on the No-vember 1980 ballot reflected this native white backlash.' (1)The referendum asked Dade County voters to repudiate the county's official bilingual status and to reaffirm the primacy of the English language and American culture in Dade County...
...A tall man waved a cardboard sign: "Anti-Communism is no excuse to support racism...
...158-173...
...When the Miami-Cuban merchant re-opened his store a few days later, Haitians spontaneously gathered to protest.(24)The merchant spoke peacefully with small groups of protesters a number of times...
...The Dade County Commission also designated the county officially bilingual in the mid-1970s...
...2)After Pepper' s death, Lee Atwater, then national chairman of the Republican Party, asserted that Pepper's vacant seat "belonged to a Cuban American...
...As one labor leader explained: They [the anti-Castro forces] control the media...
...Carlos Forment, "Political Practice and the Rise of an Ethnic Enclave...
...Yet behind the wall of anti-Castro unity imposed by the exile leadership, a good deal of diversity still exists...
...1 8)To fight back, they created such organizations as the Spanish American League Against Discrimination (SALAD) and the Cuban American National Foundation...
...Through the 1960s, the University of Miami had the largest CIA station in the world, outside of the organization's headquarters in Virginia...
...2)(3)In the ensuing fist fight, the Haitian later claimed the Cuban had thrown the first punch while the Cuban said the Haitian had...
...more people speak Spanish in the area than English...
...2 7)The 1992 elections and Hurricane Andrew will reinforce the Miami Cubans' political power...
...Even though neither the Miami Herald nor any major non-Latino business organization endorsed the ordinance, by the deadline for qualifying, they had assembled nearly 70,000 signatures, more than three times the number needed...
...The Heraldrepeatedly castigated Cuban Ameri-cans for their eagerness to rescue relatives from Cuba and in shrill headlines echoed Fidel's characterization of the new refugees...
...They gathered nearly 45,000 signatures in just over four weeks...
...the Dade County manager was also born in Cuba...
...Dutton, 1971...
...The University of Miami, among other educational institutions, trained, re-tooled and recertified thousands of Cuban physicians, nurses, lawyers, pharmacists, dentists, accountants, architects, engineers, veterinarians and teachers.'3 After the United States withdrew funding and tactical support for the exiles' counter-revolutionary efforts in the mid-1960s, Miami Cubans maintained their rhetoric of return, but the reality was one of consolidation...
...193-207...
...19 (Spring 1987), pp...
...The solution was an unprecedented and still unmatched direct and indirect assistance program...
...Cuban exiles spent millions of dollars to rescue their relatives, but most ended up ferrying a cargo of unknowns stigmatized by hostile local and national U.S...
...is by virtue of raising ethnic divisiveness by saying 'Stop the Cubans' in one fashion or another...
...history...
...432-47...
...Racist signs were carried by a few white supremacists, but the main attraction was the confrontation between Miami's two principal minorities, Miami-Cuban immigrants and African Americans...
...involvement in the events preceding the opening of the Mariel harbor, and then at having the inflow diverted elsewhere, preferably to other Latin American countries...
...For further details on the English-only movement in Florida, see Max Castro, "The Politics of Language" in Miami Now...
...Nelson Mande-la, in the midst of his triumphal tour of the United States in July 1990, was in town to tallAI;-r-irn u cns'uuvullrnh o-tcrr thb ul before the international convention of the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees (AFSCME...
...See Marvin Dunn and Alex Stepick, "Blacks in Miami" in Miami Now...
...Congress...
...Unlike most other Latino immigrant groups, Cubans are largely white, middle-class, relatively educated, and urban-essentially from the same backgrounds as native elites...
...He had already been to New York, Washington and Atlanta where he had been greeted and warmly welcomed by those cities and the nation's top elected officials and celebrities...
...The Mariel boatlift constituted high drama across the Strait of Florida between the two warring factions of Cuban society, the revolutionary supporters of Fidel Castro and the Miami-based anti-Castroists...
...Bruce Porter and Marvin Dunn, The Miami Riot of 1980: Crossing the Bounds (New York: D.C...
...politics and profits had become used h the 1970s.- Right-wing Cuban exiles not oniy invested Iocall , hut also ho\ cotted and harassed their more liberal Miami-Cuban economic and political oppollents...
...65 (January 1987), pp...
...Mohl, "Trouble in Paradise: Race and Housing in Miami during the New Deal Era," Prologue: JournaloftheNationalArchives, Vol...
...As a result, by 1990, Latinos held over 40 elective offices in Dade County, including seven mayoralties, and majorities on the city commissions of Hialeah, West Miami, Sweetwater and the City of Miami...
...But things were different in Miami...
...It branded the newspaper a propagandist for Fidel Castro...
...Claude Pepper in 1989, she was celebrated as the first Republican ever to represent Dade County, the first Florida Congresswoman in over 50 years, the first Latina Congresswoman, and above all, the first Cuban American in the U.S...
...Smith, chairman of the Miami Coalition for a Free South Africa, wrote to Miami's Cuban-born Mayor Xavier Suarez...
...8 Controversy even surrounded the inclusion of representatives of Poland and Yugoslavia in Miami's Miss Universe pag-eantin 1984...
...Despite considerable political diversity among Miami Cubans in the early I 960s...
...In July, 1990, at a Miami-Cuban clothing store in the heart of Little Haiti, a Haitian customer demanded an alteration of a pair of pants bought at the store...
...media...
...The referendum was a grassroots effort, begun by two working-class women who registered as a political action group towards the end of July, 1980, while the Mariel boatlift was still underway...
...House of Representatives-former state legislator Lincoln Diaz-Balart, running unopposed as a Republican...
...Both sides demonstrated for about five hours under a searing sun...
...David Rieff, Going To Miami (Boston: Little Brown, 1987), pp...
...Miami political leaders and e en Miami law -enforcement agencies...
...had intimidated moderate Miami Cubans...
...Theory and Society, Vol...
...city...
...The federal Cuban Refugee Program spent nearly $1 billion between 1965 and 1976, providing transportation costs from Cuba, financial assistance to needy refugees and to state and local agencies providing services for refugees, and employment and professional training courses for refugees.9 During the 1960s, the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) allowed Cu-bans to declare capital losses for properties in Cuba.' Cubans even seemed to benefit from programs not designed for them, as Latinos (almost all Cubans) received 46.9% of all Small Business Administration loans in Dade County between 1968 and 1980...
...The assertion launched an ethnically divisive campaign, matched in intensity only by the black-white election struggles of Chicago in the I 980s...
...More significantly, Anglo Americans uprooted by Hurricane Andrew are more likely to abandon Dade County rather than rebuild, thus accelerating the predominance and empowerment of Miami's Latinos...
...4 (1985), pp...
...thus creating a "repressive climate for freedom ol expression...
...cities to equally rousing, endorsing receptions...
...ing American National Foundation, and its outspoken hacker...
...The first demonstration was abetted by Creole radio stations urging a protest, but on the second day the Creole radio shows kept quiet and people assembled spontaneously...
...The following day a Haitian radio announcer related the Haitian' s story and summoned Haitians and "African Americans in Overtown, Liberty City and Opa-Locka" to protest the incident...
...Paul S. George, "Colored Town: Miami's Black Community, 18961930," Florida HistoricalQuarterly, No...
...Miami Cubans reconstructed their own and Miami's history...
...media called the refugees "scum" and "lumpen," reflexively adopting the labels affixed by the Cuban government...
...Soon after the rain ended in the early evening, 100 police, wearing riot gear, surrounded the remaining protesters and began closing in with their nightsticks flailing...
...49 (1989), pp...
...Mold, "The Origins of Miami's Liberty City," Florida Environmental and Urban Issues, Vol...
...At the height of the Cold War, Miami's elites were often sympathetic to these refugees from Communism, with whom they had so much in common...
...Miami Cubans reconstructed the country left behind...
...Dfaz-Balart will join Ros-Lehtinen as voices for a continued hard line against Fidel Castro...
...56 (April 1978), pp...
...18, 1989, pp...
...5, November 1974...
...14 Tacitly, almost unconsciously...
...The production totally flummoxed the U.S...
...Miami's native white elite viewed the new wave of exiles as a threat to be determinedly opposed...
...Some di...
...Miami gradually took on the hues of a "second Havana...
...Congress since the 1930s...
...For a minority long accustomed to public praise, the 1980 clashes abruptly awakened them to a new reality, one in which they felt compelled to engage in a ctll ne fnr li onith and pnnnpr- em ment.55U661VAs other bethnic lll VI.'V* Vb groups before them had done, the exiles responded to the prejudice by redefining their situation, their self-image, and their role in the larger community in order to challenge the negative images imposed on them...
...launched a campaign against the Miami Herald...
...The crowd reached about 100 but half fled during a late afternoon rainstorm...
...Redistricting will add another Miami Cuban to the U.S...
...government, which vacillated between welcoming the refugees and rejecting socialism's "rejects...
...Even more important was indirect assistance...
...About 300 anti-Communists, mostly Miami Cubans, were bunched at one end of the esplanade in front of the convention center...
...Members of these organizations self-consciously styled themselves as hyphenated Americans, not as Cubans loyal to and solely interested in their homeland...
...At the county level, in the late l970s and early 1980s, 53% of minority contracts for Dade County's rapid transit system went to Latino firms...
...In response, Republican primary victor Ros-Lehtinen abandoned attempts at bridge-building with Jews and blacks, and concentrated on mobilizing her Miami-Cuban support.4 She succeeded strikingly well, receiving 94% of the Miami-Cuban vote, while her Democratic adversary carried all the non-Cuban groups in the district-blacks, Jews and Anglos, including Republican Anglos...
...In four months, at least 13 national organizations, including the American Civil Liberties Union and the National Organization of Women, canceled Miami conventions...
...Age, sex, education, and choice of presidential candidate made little difference in how people voted on the ordinance...
...Also see Chapters 3 and 8 of City On the Edge...
...Voting rates among registered Latino voters are very high in Miami...
...The Miami Heraldspearheaded a campaign that aimed first at avoiding U.S...
...In 1991 and 1992...
...See Castro, "Politics of Language...
...In response, both the Interamerican Press Association and the human-rights group Americas Watch conducted unprecedented inquiries into attacks on free- of the press in a L'S...
...But despite his new-found conservatism, he was still an old-line establishment white in a district that had become increasingly Cuban-American...
...Planes continuously circled a few thousand feet above, alternately dragging pro- and anti-Mandela banners...
...Ethnicity became the fulcrum of local politics...
...Most subsequently demonstrated their right to remain in the United States, but seven Haitians were held to face deportation proceedings...
...In the l990s, Miami is certain to become the first metropolitan area in the United States of more than two million people with a Latino majority...
...By the time of his death in 1989, his politics had become considerably more conservative, in line with the militant anti-Communism of his Cuban-American constituency...
...He was to go on to other U.S...
...Heath, 1984), p. 169...
...Cynthia Jo Rich, "Pondering the Future: Miami's Cubans After 15 Years," Race Relations Reporter, Vol...
...He is co-author, with Guillermo Grenier, of Mi-ami Now...
...This section is drawn from Chapter 8 of City On the Edge...
...The Cubans have won...
...The outcome was a profound loyalty that led Miami Cubans, despite diverse class origins and views, to patronize other Miami Cuban-owned businesses and to prefer co-nationals as business associates...
...Mohl, 1990, p. 49...
...A few minutes later JewsforMandela followed them...
...A middle-aged black woman said, "I'm here because this [Nelson Mandela] is a great man...
...Mohl, "Shadows in the Sunshine: Race and Ethnicity in Miami," Tequesta: The Journal of the Historical Association of Southern Florida, Vol...
...9-12...
...Interestingly, only 44% of blacks supported the anti-bilingual referendum...
...26)Neither he nor the one African-American mem-berof the county commission publicly defended Mandela...
...They were no longer simply freedom fighters anticipating their triumphant return to Cuba...
...4 IAMI CUBANS' ANTI-CASTROISM AND IVI their relati...
...If we get together with the [Cuban] community to confront the problems here, you'll see the unions grow...And, the people who want to divide us will become quiet...
...Although the growing number of Cuban enterprises brought unwelcome competition for some smaller non-Latino businesses, many Anglo entrepreneurs, such as wholesalers, profited from the proliferation of small Cuban businesses...
...In 1982, the Miami City Commission asked the city's voters if city funds should be used for "any multinational commercial or cultural conference or convention where representatives of Communist-Marxist countries have either been scheduled to participate or invited to attend...
...The Democratic front-runner, State Senator Jack Gordon, well-liked by Miami's liberals, withdrew soon after Atwater's assertion, maintaining, "the only way that this election could be won by a Democrat...
...The Cubans have distinctly affected the local political agenda, promoting anti-Communism to one of the most important political issues in the area...
...In the wake of Mandela's visit, Smith, and the Black Lawyers Association that he helped found, organized African-American frustration and anger through a convention boycott of Miami...
...Andrew Greeley, Why Can't They Be Like Us...
...49, June 1984, pp...
...The expression was first used by Rieff, Going To Miami...
...Moreover, home to 80% of Cuban-born immigrants in the United States, Miami is second only to Havana in the size of its Cuban population...
...cited CIA funds for personal profit and some tcrrori,ed with threats and bombs those who deviated fromthe mostextreme versionsofanti-Castroism...
...This section is drawn primarily from Alex Stepick, "The Refugees Nobody Wants: Haitians in Miami," in Miami Now...
...7-21...
...His only defeat occurred in the 1950 Democratic primary when he was labeled "Red" Pepper for his earlier support of FDR's social programs...
...The second incident illustrates the ideological overlay of Miami's ethnic conflicts...
...The City of Miami pointedly refused to honor Mandela because Miami-Cuban politicians feared alienating right-wing Miami-Cuban radio talk show hosts by welcoming a supporter of Castro...
...Miami-Cuban involvement in the labor movement is discussed in Grenier, "The CubanAmerican Labor Movement...
...and demanded that its Miami-Cuban v ritcrs resign...
...while creating an extraordinaril unilIed community...
...Unfortunately, Mandela was late and the Commissioner had to leave before Mandela arrived in order to attend a city commission meeting...
...The Democratic primary, however, was won by a politically unknown Jewish businessman whose unofficial campaign theme became, "This is an American seat," (not a Cuban-American one...
...But the U.S.-Soviet arrangement that resolved the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis doomed the militant dreams of Cuban exile politics...
...Miami may go down in infamy as the only city in America that denounced, criticized, castigated and threw its 'welcome mat' in the face of Nelson Mandela," H.T...
...Eighty-five percent of the Latinos who voted rejected it and nearly half of those voting for the initiative did so in order to voice their "protest" and "frustration" with the county's Latinos, not because they thought the ordinance itself was a good idea.(17)The 1980 anti-bilingual initiative had little substantive impact on actual policy or services, but it, combined with the prejudice created by Mariel, mobilized Miami Cubans on local political issues...
...A middle-aged Miami-Cuban tile setter asserted, "I'm here because Mandela is a friend of Castro's and no friend of Castro's is welcome in Miami...
...At Ros-Lehtinen's election-night celebration, Celia Cruz, the renowned salsa singer, led the crowd in a chant, declaiming, "the people have spoken...
...While the Cubans' relations with Latino communities range from supportive to am-higuous see 'Puerto Rico Sc Respeta.'' page 41...
...As CIA Director Allen Dulles allegedly informed President Kennedy, "Don't forget that we have a disposal problem," referring to the Cuban refugees...
...and black communities, both Haitian and African-American, have been tense and troublesome...
...25)Opposing the anti-Communists some 50 yards away were 3,000 Nelson Mandela supporters, mostly African Americans, whose placards declared, "Mandela, Welcome to Miami, Home of Apartheid" and "Miami City Council=Pretoria...
...By the early 1990s Latinos constituted a majority of Dade County's population...
...Miami-Cuban "patriots" recast themselves as the creators of a new Miami, the solution to Miami's problems and the builders of its future...
...clv high social and economic standing...
...The African-American commissioner subsequently did go to the convention to greet Mandela...
...47-81...
...3 After Gordon's withdrawal, state Democrats scrambled desperately to find a Miami-Cuban Democrat to challenge Republican front-runner, Ros-Lehtinen...
...What we have to do is address local issues [not anti-Castro ones...
...S 12...
...Raymond A. Mohl, "Black Immigrants: Bahamians in Early Twentieth-Century Miami," Florida Historical Quarterly, No...
...Alejandro Portes, "The Rise of Ethnicity: Determinants of Ethnic Perceptions among Cuban Exiles in Miami," American Sociological Review, No...
...Equally important, Cubans provided a good labor force for many businesses, and became avid consumers as they sought to regain their previous economic status...
...I (N THE AFTERMATH OF THE 1959 CUBAN RE-)volution, everyone, exiles and old Miami residents alike, thought the Cuban impact on Miami would be brief-that it would last until Castro was ousted by a CIA-backed coup, which many considered imminent...
...The other two were San Antonio and El Paso...
...The boatlift transformed the image of Cubans-both recent and early arrivals-from model minorities into undesirable aliens...
...Expelled and despised by the government of their country, abandoned at the Bay of Pigs by a supposedly friendly government, bartered away during the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis, and ridiculed by Latin American intellectuals, the exiles had few to trust but each other...
...Welcome Nelson-Winnie Mandela...
...It also under rote the Miami Cubans' political empower- ment...
...Among those who are frustrated by the intolerance of the Miami-Cuban political leadership are members of the Cuban-American trade-union movement...
...Joan Didion,Miami...
...Cubans have become the most concentrated immigrant minority in the country.5 By 1980, the City of Miami, the largest of 27 municipalities in the Miami metropolitan area, was one of only three cities in the United States with a population of more than 250,000 with a Latino majority [see Table 6, this pagel...
...The American public, and especially every non-Latino in Miami, watched with astonishment...
...And while Hurricane Andrew displaced and disrupted the lives of Miami Cubans just as much as everybody else in Miami, and the slow response of the Bush Administration frustrated and angered them just as much as everybody else, they will still vote for Bush because of his more vehement anti-Communism...
...As the socioeconomic background of the migrants from Cuba broadened, the early arrivals incorporated the later ones into this ethnic enclave.6 Miami Cubans have appropriated political power more quickly and more thoroughly than any other first-generation immigrant group in U.S...
...271-297...
...By late evening 63 had been arrested, a dozen of whom were migration and Naturalization Service (INS) detained 34 of the arrested because they had no immediate proof of their immigration status...
...The Mariel refugees themselves encountered barricades at every turn...
...New York Times,, August 19, 1992...
...In the late afternoon a Haitian musical group entertained and the crowd began dancing...
...Freedom and Control in Modern Society (New York: Van Nostrand, 1954), pp...
...In its 1992 report...
...This quote was collected by Guillermo Grenier...
...America's White Ethnic Groups (New York: E.P...
...22)Two recent incidents cast some light on the racial politics of Miami, and on the extreme difficulty of building minority coalitions...
...Nathan Glazer, "Ethnic Groups in America: From National Culture to Ideology," in M. Berger, T. Abel and C. Page (eds...
...Most of these Latino elected officials are Cuban.7 The City of Miami has a Cuban-born mayor and a Cuban-born city manager...
...A few protesters broke through the police barricades, but were tackled,jabbed with nightsticks, and handcuffed...
...A national Gallup Poll shortly after Mariel ranked Cubans dead last in the public's view of contributions made by different ethnic groups to the national welfare...
...As Cruz left the stage, she indicated who she meant by "the people" when Alex Stepick is the directorof the Comparative Sociology Graduate Program at Florida International University in Miami...
...the extreme right...
...University of Florida Press, 1992) and, with Alejandro Portes, of City on the Edge: Miami and the Immigrants (University of California Press, 1993...
...With local television stations broadcasting the melee, police knocked protesters to the ground and continued to hit many of them while they were down...
...led by the Foundation...
...Even the one African-American member of the city commission had claimed thathe would not forgo the commission meeting to attend Mandela's speech...
...The Miami-Cuban state house legislators, all Republicans, voted in favor of 82% of labor issues, compared to only 80% for all the House's Democrats, during the 1987-89 legislative sessions...
...39-40...
...Carlos Forment, "Political Practice and the Rise Of an Ethnic Enclave: the Cuban-American Case, 1959-1979...
...The results confirmed the ethnic political solidarity of Miami Cubans, and represented the culmination of a decade of Latino political empowerment...
...The offices of the Cuban Revolutionary Council, the exile umbrella organization, became known as "the Ministry" since it employed so many who aspired to fill future government positions in a post-Communist Cuba.11 The CIA supported what was described as the third largest navy in the world and had over 50 front businesses: CIA boat shops, CIA gun shops, CIA travel agencies, CIA detective agencies, and CIA real-estate agencies, all staffed by Miami Cubans.'2 The federal government was not the only provider of benefits...
...Jorge Mas Canosa...
...But still, the constraints are powerful...
...Their placards proclaimed, "Arafat, Gadhafi and Castro are Terrorists," and "Mr...
...One thousand protesters surrounded the merchant's store and more than 140 police restrained the crowd during a lively and occasionally violent nine-hour confrontation...
...18...
...3 & 10...
...Miami Cubans also occupy ten of the 28 positions in the Dade delegation of the Florida legislature...
...1)The man Ros-Lehtinen replaced, Claude Pepper, had served continuously in the U.S...
...she shouted triumphantly into the microphone, "iLos Cubanos han ganado...
Vol. 26 • September 1992 • No. 2
