Hating Cubans
Mexican American Resentment at Cuban American Success
I
On July 11, 2021, spontaneous protests erupted throughout Cuba. These demonstrations were prompted by a shortage of food and medicines — two categories exempt from the U.S. trade embargo — as Cubans throughout the island nation took to the streets. The last time such a popular uprising occurred was in 1994. In Miami, Cubans and Cuban Americans, in a show of solidarity, also took to the streets.
Was this it? Was this the beginning of the end of the Communist dictatorship? Was this the uprising that would evolve into a political movement — or would it be quickly repressed as others had been in the past?
No one knew.
What was clear, however, was that Cuba — and the multitudes of Cuban discontents and dissidents — were in the news. Thus, in an American news cycle where everything in the world revolves around the United States, Washington’s foreign policy toward Cuba came under scrutiny.
This was no surprise. What was unexpected, however, was that two Mexican American reporters, Jean Guerrero and Paola Ramos, took to Twitter to denounce Miami’s Cuban American community. Cuban Americans were white. Cuban Americans were professionally successful. Cuban American lived lives of caloric surpluses. Cuban Americans, disproportionately to other members of the Hispanic diaspora in the United States, supported Republicans.
Cuban Americans, in other words, had no right to exercise their civil rights to voice political opinions, peacefully assemble or petition the government with a grievance.
If Jean Guerrero, as stated in her tweet, objected to white, well-fed Cuban American elites influencing U.S. foreign policy, then who should influence U.S. foreign policy? Black, malnourished people from, say, war-torn Sudan? If Paola Ramos reminded her Twitter followers that Cuban Americans supported Republicans, then should an American citizen’s ballot become public information in order to determine if he or she has the right speak up in the public square of civic life?
What accounted for these Chicanas’ vitriol against Cuban Americans? Why did these two Mexican Americans paint Cuban Americans as racists? Why the hate?
II
Consider how Guerrero, not unlike most racists, distorted the truth. In “Biden Shouldn’t Let Right-Wing Cuban Americans Drown Out Cuban Voices,” published on August 5, 2021 in the Los Angeles Times, she wrote: “About 86% of Cuban Americans identify as white, but two-thirds of Cubans in Cuba are Afro or mixed — a consequence of the fact that the first Cuban émigrés to the U.S. were mostly affluent whites.”
There are two lies in that one sentence.
First, the majority of Cubans in Cuba are white. This is according to the Cuban government. Cuban census figures indicate that Cuba is a white-majority country where only 35% or the population is Black or mixed race. Cuban government figures provide this breakdown: 7.2 million Whites, 1.03 million Blacks, and 2.97 million Mulatto/Mestizo inhabitants.[1] Guerrero asserted the reverse by referencing a news report from Al Jazeera, the Middle Eastern news agency based in Doha, Qatar. That story, to its credit, disclosed that the reporter, Julia Cooke, didn’t believe government census figures, so she made up her own.[2]
The second lie is that the majority of Cuban refugees were affluent whites. All the “émigrés,” with few exceptions, arrived in Miami as destitute political refugees. They were frightened people from all walks of life seeking temporary refuge once Castro, in a televised speech on December 2, 1961, declared the Revolution to be Marxist-Leninist.[3] Any Cuban leaving after that date could not take money, jewelry or negotiable instruments out of the country.
John F. Kennedy had already authorized the Cuban Refugee Program in February 1961. Miami Mayor Robert King High had established the Miami Cuban Refugee Emergency Center at the Freedom Tower, located at 600 Biscayne Boulevard, in downtown Miami. Cuban refugees were bused from the airport or seaport to the Freedom Tower. It became the center for refugee registration, assistance, relief, and resettlement. The numbers of refugees swelled. A trickle became a surge and then a flood. By 1962, between 1,500 and 2,000 Cubans were arriving every week. They overwhelmed federal, state, and local agencies.
Federal funding was increased on an emergency basis to provide financial assistance to individuals, educational loans, healthcare, English language classes, continuing adult education, vocational re-training, resettlement, and for the care of unaccompanied children. To accomplish this, federal, state, and local officials coordinated assistance with the American Red Cross, Catholic Charities, and the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society.
Most Cuban exiles were working class people with a high school education. They were relegated to living in ramshackle apartment buildings by the Miami River. These were cramped and substandard housing best described as tropical tenements. The neighborhood, in time, became “Little Havana.” It’s clear Guerrero has never driven around Little Havana to see just how marginalized a community it remains to this day.
“It was something to behold,” Sarah Luddle told me. “I was a volunteer at the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society. I’d speak to families to learn their story of escape as part of the interview process. They could have been a factory worker at a rum distillery or they could have been the head of an architectural firm. It made no difference. All they had were the clothes they were wearing and one piece of carry-on luggage. That was it. That was all they had in the world. After their medical checkups, we handed them two bags of groceries. And as far as money was concerned, they were penniless. Our Society was able to give $5 for a family of four per week! If they had more than two children, we could give them $6!”
Five dollars in 1962 approximates $45 in 2022. This stands in contrast to Guerrero’s characterization of destitute refugees as “émigrés,” an affected word first used to describe wealthy French nobles and merchants fleeing the excesses of the French Revolution of 1789.
Over the decades that followed, many Cubans who arrived with professional degrees did prosper and moved to wealthier neighborhoods, such as Coral Gables. Most, however, remained in the working and lower middle class. They moved to Hialeah, a city of modest homes, where 94% of the 223,000 residents are Hispanic, almost all Cuban exiles or their adult Cuban American children.[4] These are the Cuban Americans that took to the streets to demonstrate in solidarity with their compatriots in Cuba. These were the demonstrators that drove around Little Havana and downtown Miami waving Cuban flags from their cars.
Guerrero described Cuban Americans as “comfortable,” but the Census Bureau disputes such a characterization. The median household income in Hialeah is $38,471.[5] The national median income stands at $67,521.[6] The residents of Hialeah are closer to the household poverty threshold — $31,661 — the Census Bureau established, than they are to middle class security. They are families of immigrants grateful that they are no longer living in the squalor of Little Havana, but they are not living “comfortable” lives of “affluent whites.” [7] Cuban Americans, not unlike many other Americans, live paycheck-to-paycheck.
III
Now, consider the question of race and why so few Black Cubans live in Miami.
“I suppose, as a Jew, I was sensitive to the need for an exodus from the untenable situation for Black Cubans,” Sarah Luddle explained. “I accompanied Black Cuban families — especially if they had young children — to the bus station to send them on their way.”
She remembered one such trip. “It was a young woman, she had been a nurse in Havana, and her husband was a math teacher, Mr. and Mrs. Bonilla,” Sarah Luddle explained. “They had two girls, five and seven, back in 1965 or 1966. I told the mother that she had an obligation to give her daughters the best chance in life they could — and that meant leaving Miami for New York. They were hesitant, but, in my best Spanish, I told her, ‘Sus hijas son tan preciosas y se merecen vivir lejos de un lugar como Miami, tan hostil a la gente de color.’”
For the sake of their daughters, Sarah Luddle explained to them, they had to leave the climate of hostility directed at Blacks in Miami at the time.
Sarah Luddle lived at 2121 N. Bayshore Drive, north of downtown Miami, then a new high rise building on Biscayne Bay. One of her neighbors was Claude Pepper, the congressman remembered for championing the rights of the elderly. “He was such a dear, very gentle, a homebody when he was not in the nation’s capital,” she remembered. “But he was really oblivious to the plight of Black Cubans until I explained what was happening.”
What was happening was that, as they arrived in Miami, Cuban exiles were subject to segregation by race. A white Cuban was granted all the privileges of the dominant White American society while a Black Cuban was treated like any other U.S.-born African American.
“It’s terrible to remember how Miami was back then,” she said. “The city was booming and to keep it going, we had to be linked to the rest of the country by the Eisenhower Highway System. That meant that Black neighborhoods were expendable because they were right where Interstate-95 was going to be built.”
She shook her head, and then pointed west. “Here I was, living right on Biscayne Bay, and off on the horizon, I saw how the Black neighborhoods were being upended and bulldozed to make way for the interstate. Robert High King was the mayor and his position was that highway construction would give the city the chance to get rid of so-called slums. The press went along. In the late 1950s, the newspapers repeated City Hall’s position and told the public that highway construction was ‘slum clearance’ project. We Jews, however, knew that slums where ghettos and clearing out ghettos is how the elimination of Jews began in Germany. I’m not comparing gentrification with the horrors of World War II, of course, but just as the Cubans began to arrive in Miami, Blacks were seen as an obstacle to progress. The press presented it as killing two birds with one stone: highway construction and slum clearance.”
Luddle offered a bigger picture of the politics at the time: “Miami’s WASP [White Anglo-Saxon Protestant] elite wanted Cubans, who were white, to replace Blacks, and who were expendable. ‘Little Havana’ — where the Cuban refugees ended up living — was southwest of downtown Miami and the interstate was constructed northwest of downtown Miami. It was deliberate and it was awful.”[8]
White Miami, in other words, leveraged the Cuban exodus to replace low-wage African American workers with destitute white Cuban refugees. Miami city government used eminent domain to condemn Black neighborhoods hoping to coerce Blacks into joining the Great Migration north. At the same time, zoning regulations encouraged the flourishing of exile enclaves along the contours of the Miami River. Miami city government, in short, sought to rid itself of its Black residents by destroying Overtown and Liberty City while it welcomed white Cubans into the fold of Miami’s economic development scheme.
Overtown, the predominantly African American and West Indian community, was known as the “Harlem of the South,” a hub of Black culture. Performers such as Billie Holliday, Sam Cooke, Louis Armstrong, and Ella Fitzgerald frequented the clubs, restaurants, and hotels after they performed at the ritzy supper clubs on Miami Beach. (Black entertainers could perform at swank nightclubs and dinner clubs on Miami Beach, but they were not allowed overnight accommodations on the resort island.) Overtown was destroyed when on ramps, off ramps, and highway overpasses were built.
Often times, histories are recounted as disparate events: Miami prospered in the 1960s and 1970s after I-95 linked south Florida to the rest of the Eastern Seaboard; Miami experienced a compelling influx of Cuban refugees who transformed the city’s economy and culture; and African Americans left Miami as part of the Great Migration. These, however, are the same story: Federal funding for I-95 offered Miami’s white ruling class the opportunity to replace Blacks with Cubans in order to change the demographics of its working class.
IV
The Cubans, however, were not happy about being in the United States. They were refugees fleeing oppression, not immigrants seeking opportunities. The last thing Cubans wanted to do was remain in the United States. They wanted Castro out of power in order to return to Cuba and resume their interrupted lives. They were Hispanophones who didn’t want to live their lives speaking English. They were Catholics who didn’t want to adopt Protestant norms. They were proud to be Cuban and resisted becoming estadounidenses, meaning, “Americans.” The Cubans, in short, were prepared to acculturate but not assimilate into the mainstream of American society — which they found to be a nightmare of racialized oppression.
“The only good thing I can say was that it gave me faith in human decency when I saw how embarrassed white Cubans were at the state of affairs for Blacks,” Sarah Luddle said. “The indignity of sitting at the back of the bus, not being able to order a milkshake at the Woolworth counter, separate toilets in public places, and so forth was a source of consternation among the exiles of all races. I had to explain to them that that’s the way things were in the United States and there was nothing they could do about it — for the time being. But they were enraged at the treatment of their Black compatriots. To humiliate one Cuban was to humiliate all Cubans.”
Thus, the Anglophone Protestant white majority overwhelmed Hispanophone Catholic Cuban exiles throughout the 1960s. The Cubans were the out-group expected to integrate into the linguistic and cultural norms of the in-group: learn English — and adopt American values.
The message, in other words, was clear: go along to get along. Going along to get along included adopting anti-Black attitudes. This meant remaining silent as Blacks sat at the back of the bus, used separate public restrooms, and weren’t served milkshakes at department store cafeteria counters.
In whispered conversations over dinner, however, Cubans, white and Black alike, were mortified over race relations in the U.S. Destitute exiles struggling to learn English and pick up the pieces of their professional lives, however, were incapable of righting these wrongs. As Luddle explained, they knew they had no political power to effect changes. So white Cubans did what they could: they joined American Jews in encouraging Black Cubans to leave Miami. White Cubans only had agency to focus on their own needs: learning English, earning a living, and passing all the certifications required to practice their professions.
Race was therefore the first splintering of the Cuban exile community: White Cubans would prosper in Miami and Black Cubans would move primarily to the greater New York area. Black Cubans thus became refugees twice. First, they fled Communist persecution. Second, they fled the humiliation of Jim Crow. Once they arrived in New York, Black Cubans, however, they were further divided, this time by language. You do remember that prior to 1910 Black British Antilleans migrants and immigrants to Cuba, numbering in the tens of thousands, came from Jamaica, Guyana, and the Leeward and Windward islands?
It was not uncommon for a Black Cuban in Cuba to speak English at home. Cuba, in fact, was home to so many Black British Antilleans that on May 10, 1943, David Nathan organized the first conference to declare a pan-Caribbean “Dominion Government” in Camagüey, Cuba — in English and Spanish. Black Cubans, as everyone in Cuba knows, have never been a monolithic community, either culturally or linguistically.
The second splintering of Black Cubans in New York resulted in Spanish-dominant Black Cubans gravitating to Union City, New Jersey while English-dominant Black Cubans moved to Brooklyn. English-dominant Black Cubans found it easier to rebuild their lives among other English-speaking immigrants from the West Indies; English-speaking Black Cubans found linguistic, cultural, and historical bonds to immigrants from Jamaica, Belize, Barbados, Grenada, Saint Lucia, Guyana, the Bahamas, and so forth.
As a result, while Spanish-dominant Black Cubans in the greater New York area maintained their Hispanic culture and heritage, English-dominant Black Cubans in Brooklyn, on the other hand, returned to their Black British Antillean roots, melting into the cultural mosaic that constitutes the Black British Antillean component of West Indian culture in Brooklyn. This explains both the racial makeup of Cuban exile Miami and the disparate communities of Black Cubans in the Northeast.
Not all Black Cubans went north, of course. Some chose to soldier on in Miami. “In my experience, the ones who remained in Miami did so for one of two reasons,” Sarah Luddle recalled. “They either believed it was only a matter of months before Castro was out and they could return to Cuba — or they were mortified by the idea of living through cold winters.”
Then she and her husband, Al, settled on a way to engage Congressman Pepper’s interest in the plight of Black Cubans who were caught up in the racial turmoil of the 1960s and 1970s. “I told Claude, ‘Imagine being an elderly Cuban exile, arriving here, not speaking the language and not knowing the ins and outs of the United States. Now, imagine being an elderly and Black Cuban exile.’ That got his attention, especially since the next two Miami mayors, Clark and Kennedy, also had it out for African Americans.”[9]
Sarah Luddle was a character, both in how she saw the world and the flair with which she moved through it.
“I’d take the elevator to see Claude,” she said. “Then I’d knock on the door.”
“Go away,” he would say. “I’m not seeing anyone.”
“It’s Sarah, Claude,” I’d say. “I have matzoth ball soup.”
“I’m not Jewish,” he’d reply.
“You don’t have to be Jewish to enjoy my cooking,” I’d answer, knocking on the door again.
“Go away, I said,” he’d reply. “I want to be alone!”
“You and Greta Garbo!” I’d laugh. “Please come to the door.”
She said there would be a pause. Then she would hear the click of the congressman unlocking the door.
“Are you happy now?” Claude Pepper would ask.
“I’m happy,” she replied. “But those Cuban refugees, now, they’re not happy. I can’t do anything more than I already am doing, but you’re a member of Congress!”
“Where’s the soup?” he’d ask.
Then he stepped aside so she could enter, she explained.
“What? Do you think I’m a Jewish Julia Child?” she said. “We can order in.”
Pepper supported bringing Cuban exiles under the umbrella of the Social Security Administration to ensure that elderly exiles received benefits. The Cuban Adjustment Act of 1966, furthermore, provided broad sanctuary to all Cubans, regardless of race, who arrived in the United States, something that encountered resistance from Dixie Democrats who were chagrined at extending benefits to Black Cubans. Pepper didn’t care. He realized that his congressional district, once comprised primarily of Jewish and Catholic retirees, was becoming Cuban as the 1960s became the 1970s.
“Thanks to Claude, Black Cubans had more benefits under Social Security than African Americans,” Sarah Luddle explained. “That’s because they received Social Security benefits as part of their being granted political asylum. This was crucial to help get them out of Miami. They could now use their federal government benefits and move north! If Jews were delivered out of Egypt, it seemed only fair that Jews help deliver Black Cubans out of the Jim Crow South.”
A Cuban refugee, regardless of race, received full Social Security retirement benefits despite never having contributed one cent into the system.
When asked how many Black Cuban families she escorted to the bus station over the years, her eyes came alive. “I saved more Black Cubans than Schindler saved Jews,” she replied, smiling. Oskar Schindler is credited with saving more than a thousand Ashkenazi Polish Jews during the Holocaust by employing them in his factories during World War II. “I personally took hundreds and hundreds of families to the bus station with one-way tickets to Philadelphia, New York or Newark.”
V
The United States was convulsed by racial turmoil as the 1950s gave way to the 1960s. Cuban refugees arrived in a country characterized by racial tensions, engulfed in a disastrous war in Vietnam, and shaken by a series of astonishing political assassinations.
What was it like for Cuban refugees arriving on this scene? Consider the experiences of two refugees, one Black and the other white.
Celia Cruz, the legendary performer who won three Grammy Awards, arrived in Miami, but didn’t stay there.[10] When I interviewed her about her experience in Miami and why she left, she was pragmatic in her philosophical view of the world. She was not bitter about having to leave her exiled compatriots for New York. She simply could not countenance life in Miami.
“El racismo y la discriminación son cosas muy diferentes,” she told me. “Si me odias porque soy negra, eso es racismo y eso es tu problema. Pero si, como gerente de un hotel, me niegas una habitación porque soy negra, eso es discriminación y eso no lo aguanto.”
If you hated her because she was Black, that was racism and that was your problem. If, on the other hand, you were a manager at a hotel and denied her a room because she was Black, then that was discrimination and that she would not abide.
“El problema en Miami es que habían tantas restricciones para los negros — y yo quería cenar donde quería, entrar a Burdines y probarme los vestidos, y no tener que estar pendiente de la hora del atardecer para andar por las calles,” she explained.
The problem with Miami was that there were so many restrictions in place for Blacks. She wanted to dine where she wanted, use the dressing rooms at Burdines, and be out and about without having to be mindful of the time the sun set.
Her experience is consistent with Isabel Wilkerson’s description of life in Florida. In The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America’s Great Migration, Wilkerson wrote, “Colored people had to be off the streets and out of the city limits by 8 P.M. in Palm Beach and Miami Beach. Throughout the South, the conventional rules of the road did not apply when a colored motorist was behind the wheel.”[11]
Indeed, the Sunshine State was a dark place for African Americans: “Florida continued to live up to its position as the southernmost state with among the most heinous acts of terrorism committed anywhere in the South,” Wilkerson explained. “Violence had become such an accepted fact of life that, in 1950, the Florida governor’s special investigator, Jefferson Elliot, observed that there had been so many mob executions in one county that it ‘never had a negro live long enough to go to trial.’”[12]
“En fin, por todo esto, ‘Goodbye, Miami,’ y “Hello, New York,’” she said. No translation required.
Black Cubans thus followed the path that “Negroes” had pioneered two decades before. Writing of George Swanson Starling, a Black American who left Florida on April 4, 1945, for instance, Wilkerson explained: “He didn’t know what he would do once he got to New York or what his life would be. He didn’t know how long it would take before he could send for his Inez[, his wife]. … He turned his face to the North and sat with his back to Florida. Leaving as he did, he figured he would never set foot in Eustis again for as long as he lived. And as he settled in for a twenty-three-hour train ride up the coast of the Atlantic, he had no desire to have anything to do with the town he grew up in, the state of Florida, or the South as a whole, for that matter.”[13]
What of white Cubans who remained in Miami? What did they make of segregation?
Consider Hilario Anido, a physician who, at the time he was forced to leave Cuba, was recognized as one of the elite heart surgeons in the world. In the 1950s, open-heart surgery was an experimental procedure. It was practiced only in the United States, France, and Sweden. Cuba joined this select group of nations in 1956 when Dr. Antonio Rodríguez Díaz and Dr. Hilario Anido Fraguedo founded the Instituto de Cirugía Cardiovascular y Torácica de Cuba, or the Institute of Cardiovascular and Thoracic Surgery. They were able to do this when they acquired a Lillehei-De Wall pump, an ECC machine that made open-heart surgery possible. The Institute performed more than 600 open-heart operations before the communist government denounced the surgeons as “decadent bourgeois” and “enemies of the proletariat.”
Anido, his wife Eduviges Vasconcelos de Anido, and their daughter, Robin, found themselves in Miami soon after the Institute was seized. Anido had been to the United States many times, mostly to attend medical conferences or work in hospitals. These trips, however, did not prepare him for daily life in the United States under segregation.
“I had seen water fountains at train stations that said ‘Whites’ and ‘Colored,’ but never gave it much thought,” he told me. “When I attended conferences in Chicago or Washington there wasn’t time to leave the hotel, conference center or hospital. These signs were just something I barely registered, probably because I didn’t understand why that signage was there at all. I had no time to examine how Americans lived. I only realized how important Thanksgiving is when I moved permanently to this country.”
Like most Cubans at that time, once he found himself exiled, he embarked on a process of acculturation and assimilation. That the point when an immigrant embarks on assimilation is a multidimensional process was central to the insights sociologist Milton Gordon described in his book, Assimilation in American Life. This work remains a classic study in the field of sociology. Gordon proposed seven assimilation stages. These are acculturation, structural assimilation, marital assimilation, identificational assimilation, attitude receptional assimilation, behavior receptional assimilation, and civic assimilation.
Assimilation, in essence, is a lifelong process.
“Los cubanos tuvimos que adoptar valores anglosajones para salir adelante — y eso incluyó dar la espaldas a las injusticias que sufrían los negros en este país,” he said of how white Cubans responded to their realization that American segregation affected Black Cubans. “Es un hecho que no fue honoroso en ese entonces y que sigue siendo vergonzoso décadas después. Lo único que se podía hacer era aconsejar — y ayudar — a los cubanos negros escapar y salir hacia Nueva York.”
“We Cubans had to adopt Anglo-Saxon values to get ahead — and that included turning our backs on the injustices suffered by Blacks in this country,” Anido said. “It is a deed that was not honorable then and that continues to be shameful decades later. The only thing that could be done was to advise — and help — Black Cubans escape and leave for New York.”
He spoke of Miami in the 1960s. He spoke of how Miami’s Cuban exile community aligned itself with the WASP power structure in order to prosper economically, rise socially, and, in time, take their place on the political stage. Anido spoke without any hesitation with me because we were related by marriage. He was my step-granduncle. Whenever I was at his home on Navarre Avenue in Coral Gables, we would sit in his study, have coffee or a drink, and talk. His library was filled with medical books, diplomas, and awards. He had more commendations from the American Medical Association than wall space.
He was a gallego, somber in character and self-effacing. (“Gallegos” refers to white Cubans whose parents or grandparents emigrated from Galicia or Asturias.) In the course of his career he saved thousands of lives. He doted on his daughter and regretted that he was unable to enjoy the beach with her; he was prone to sunburn. He played golf occasionally with colleagues, surgeons and hospital administrators talking shop as they took in a few rounds. “The world is always changing,” he said philosophically. “When I started my career in this country, I had two beepers. And now I have two cell phones.”
When I was writing an early book on Hispanics in the U.S. he introduced me to Celia Cruz; he had offered opinions on her husband’s health. “Te ofrezco mi punto de vista, pero es importante que hables con los cubanos que sufrieron la discriminación de la política racial de la segregación,” he told me. He offered his own point of view, but he wanted me to know it was important to speak to the Black Cubans who endured discrimination under segregation.
“But as far as the majority of Cubans — los gallegos — it was very hard to remain silent,” Anido said.
Then he explained the path to success in the United States. “When I arrived, I couldn’t write a prescription for an aspirin,” he said. “I knew English, which put me far ahead of so many other Cubans, but I still had to become accredited and certified to practice medicine. It took me several years to get all my board certifications and secure hospital privileges.”
What’s lost when Chicana racists decry Cuban American success is the hardship Cubans endured to become Cuban Americans. The only “wealth” exiles arrived with was the knowledge in their heads. Their educational attainment level as an immigrant group notwithstanding, whether one was an accountant or hairdresser, architect or mechanical engineer, none of it meant anything without the proper licenses and certifications required to practice one’s profession in the United States. “Architect friends of mine had to go through everything all over again to become certified — and that took years,” Anido said.[14] “The ones who had it the hardest were Cuban lawyers who wanted to remain in the legal field.”[15]
That was the life of the Cuban refugee: bags of groceries from the American Red Cross, spending money from the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society, and housing assistance orchestrated under the auspices of the Archdiocese of Miami. They worked menial jobs stocking shelves, driving trucks, cleaning offices late at night, washing dishes in restaurant kitchens, manning factory conveyor belts, and so forth. Then they would rush home to eat before attending their continuing education courses to master the requirements to practice their professions. Finally, exhausted, they would practice their English language lessons, some of which were broadcast late at night on Spanish-language radio.
Radio, in fact, proved instrumental in forming an exile community. Archival audio recordings offer insights into the nature of the refugee experience. Every afternoon the Spanish-language radio station broadcasted a program from the Freedom Tower. It facilitated family reunification. If a Cuban had been declared an enemy of the Revolución or if a Cuban had decided to flee, there was a specific window of time to get out before he or she was subject to arrest. It’s no surprise, then, to learn that flights into Havana were almost empty, but all flights out of Havana were sold out. As persecution intensified, people flocked to the airport willing to take any flight that had an available seat.
Latin American countries gave Cubans tourist visas upon arrival, usually good for 90 days. A Cuban, for instance, that wanted to join family in Mexico, but could only find a flight to Panama City, would take that flight and, once in Panama, figure out how to get to Mexico.
Most Cubans, no surprise, had family or friends arriving in Miami haphazardly but, absent cell phones, text messaging or the Internet, communication was difficult. Cuban refugees throughout Little Havana tuned in to hear the live radio broadcast from the Freedom Tower each afternoon. It updated news from Cuba, discussed matters that affected the exiles — and it included that must-hear reunification segment. By early afternoon, buses of refugees had arrived at the Freedom Tower. Those with no one to meet them in Miami were invited to address the radio audience. A typical supplicant’s address was something like this: “Good afternoon. My name is Marta Sánchez. I left Havana three days ago on a flight to Bogotá. Only today I managed to find a seat on a flight to Miami. I don’t know anyone in Miami, but I was a teacher at the Escuela Primaria Rafael María de Mendive. If there’s anyone listening to me now who was one of my students or the parents of one of my students, I’m here alone. If any of my friends are listening to me, I am here.”
Then the announcer would repeat, “That was Marta Sánchez, who arrived today from Bogotá. She was a teacher at the Escuela Primaria Rafael María de Mendive. If any friend, colleague, student, or acquaintance is listening, she’s here at the Freedom Tower, safe, but waiting for a familiar face.”
Word would spread throughout Little Havana and, almost invariably, someone would show up to take the person to his or her home. They would share a meal and catch up on news from their homeland. Guerrero wants you to believe Cubans snapped their fingers to summon their chauffeurs to drive them to the airport where they took private jets to Miami and then were whisked away to their luxury condos on Brickell Avenue with sweeping views of Biscayne Bay. This is the image conjured with description that “the first Cuban émigrés to the U.S. were mostly affluent whites.” The truth is that Catholic Charities ran the soup kitchen at the Freedom Tower to provide the first warm meals for refugees as they waited for family and friends.
None of this information is secret. The Freedom Tower today houses the Cuban American Museum. The University of Miami is home to the Cuban Heritage Collection. Florida International University holds the Cuban Exile Archives and History Project. Written, photographic, film, and audio documentation is available to the public, including Latinas masquerading as journalists.
VI
Now, consider Miami three decades after the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.
“All at once, he [Joel Ruiz] had to learn how a person with dark skin should behave in this country: if an officer is following your car, do not turn your head; the police don’t like it. Do not stare at other drivers, especially if they are young and white and loud. He has even learned how to walk: fast in stores, to avoid security guards; slower in the streets, so as not to attract the attention of the police. On the street, he avoids any confrontation,” Mirta Ojito explained of life in the United States for a Black Cuban refugee in Miami a generation after the Civil Rights Act of 1964. “He often finds himself caught between two worlds. [American] Whites see him simply as black. African-Americans dismiss him as Cuban.”[16]
“America changes all the time without ever changing at all,” James Baldwin wrote. The experience of Black Cubans in Miami proves his point. Yet, Guerrero wanted readers to believe Miami Cubans brought their racism from Cuba and transplanted it in Miami. The truth is that Cubans, white and Black alike, were a subjugated out-group forced to accept and conform to the status quo imposed by the in-group.
All one has to do is read Joan Didion’s Miami to see the Anglophone American bigotry that informed perceptions of Cuban Americans. “Havana vanities come to dust in Miami,” is the first sentence in her book, which is impossible to reconcile with Guerrero’s description of the entitled Cuban “émigrés” landing in Miami.
Ojito wrote about the experiences of two Cuban refugees — one white (Achmed Valdés) and the other Black (Joel Ruiz). They were best friends in Cuba, but they found U.S. racism an insurmountable obstacle. “In ways that are obvious to the black man but far less so to the white one, they have grown apart in the United States because of race,” she reported in the New York Times in 2000. “For the first time, they inhabit a place where the color of their skin defines the outlines of their lives — where they live, the friends they make, how they speak, what they wear, even what they eat.”[17]
Race does define the outlines of the refugees’ lives, back in the 1960s, and decades later. “It is not that, growing up in Cuba’s mix of black and white, they were unaware of their difference in color,” Ojito wrote. “Fidel Castro may have decreed an end to racism in Cuba, but that does not mean racism has simply gone away. Still, color was not what defined them. Nationality, they had been taught, meant far more than race. They felt, above all, Cuban.”[18]
Race in the United States, however, is impossible to escape. In their tweets, Guerrero and Ramos imply that racist white Cubans imposed their racial hegemony on unsuspecting non-Hispanic Americans and had a malevolent political agenda. Ramos, for instance, denounced their political support for Republicans, their skepticism of racial equity policies, and their advocacy for an orderly immigration process. Ramos was chagrined that other Hispanics who have political opinions different from her own are afforded freedom of speech. Ramos, furthermore, lied when she made the claim that Cuban Americans have “turned their backs on asylum seekers.” This is preposterous because the Cuban Adjustment Act of 1966 designated all Cubans as entitled to and beneficiaries of political asylum. Cubans have, under the 1966 law, been asylum seekers, every single one.
VII
Guerrero and Ramos thus used Twitter to denigrate the dignity of the Cuban American experience. Indeed, the women’s tweets were more than microaggressions; they were hate speech.[19]
Guerrero and Ramos, in fact, sought to bury the painful history the entire Cuban community suffered, when, thrust among Anglophone strangers, they were segregated by race. Guerrero and Ramos erased the anger white Cubans felt when they were forced to bear witness at the humiliation of their Black Cuban compatriots, itself as traumatic as the pain Ukrainians feel as they flee their ravaged homeland. Guerrero and Ramos sought to erase the role Miami Jews played in helping Black Cubans flee Jim Crow. This, itself, is a form of anti-Semitism. Guerrero and Ramos, undeniably, are bigots denying the complicated nuances by which Cubans became Cuban Americans.
Moreover, they falsified history. It’s no surprise the backlash against these women’s anti-Cuban bigotry was harsh, especially on social media. Hispanic Americans were outraged to see Mexican Americans espouse vitriol against Cuban Americans. One, Ramos, for example, decided to travel to Cuba, with melodramatic flair, to continue exploiting the Cuban people’s thwarted fight for freedom.[20] The result was absurdity. Ramos went to Havana with an entourage from Vice. Her trip produced a short article, written with Maeva Bambuck, and a four-and-a-half minute video.
In her story for Vice, “Cuba is Strip-Searching Protesters, Jailing Artists, and Stifling Dissent,” Ramos mentioned five Cubans: Yunior García Aguilera, Carolina Barrero, Claudia Genlui, Luis Manuel Otero Alcántara, and Gabriela Zequeira Hernández. Three are white and two are Black, consistent with the racial breakdown the Cuban census provided — but that Guerrero rejected. Then, in a video posted on YouTube, Ramos recorded her encounters with four Cubans: Carolina Barrero, Alfredo Martínez, a police officer, and a man in a park. Three are white and one is Black, again confirming the Cuban government’s contention that Cuba is a white-majority nation.
The video itself was hilarious in its pathos. It showed Ramos, frightened as a church mouse, being shooed away from the malecón, the broad esplanade that was, at the time of her visit, closed to the public. This Chicana clown, in her ahistorical ramblings, didn’t understand that the malecón, rather than being emblematic of “Cuba,” is the most audacious symbol of the attempt by the United States to forge Cuba into its own image. The esplanade was constructed, beginning in 1901, under the auspices of the United States Military Government in Cuba (Gobierno militar estadounidense en Cuba). The malecón, as such, remains a symbol of Washington’s imperialist ambitions for the island nation.[21]
The video also documented her failed attempt to interview Carolina Barrero. Ramos, however, explained that she and her companions were “playing” tourist to throw off the scrutiny by the police. The authorities, however, soon realized that these were working reporters, not tourists. At one point, the police asked for their passports and prohibited them from visiting a dissident under house arrest. Ramos was shaken by this encounter. She looked anxious as curfew neared and they were still out on the streets. Her palpable fear at the possibility of violating the curfew was surprising considering the packer persona she cultivates.[22] Then, just in time, her ride arrived to take them back to their tourist-class hotel.
I contacted a Cuban diplomat accredited to Mexico to ask about Ramos. When he got back to me, he said that she and her entourage arrived in Cuba and were admitted on tourist visas. They were authorized only to be on holiday and sightsee. “They were not authorized to work,” the diplomat explained. “They were not registered as foreign journalists.” Then he added, “Es tan idiota como su padre.” She was as much of an idiot as her father, Jorge Ramos, the Univision reporter — and drama queen — who has been banned from the island for flaunting the rules. “Good luck, Ramos fille, being allowed back,” he told me. That Vice, in fact, posted such an embarrassing video demonstrated an appalling lack of self-awareness. “Se parece como una comemierda,” a Cuban American journalist at a cable entertainment news network told me after watching the video three times, laughing each time. “She comes across like a moron.”
These anti-Cuban bigots ignore journalistic ethics in order to vilify Cuban Americans. Guerrero wrote an article about Miami Cubans and the first thing that ran through her mind was, I’m going to lie about Cuba’s demographics to paint Cuban Americans as racists. Ramos arrived in Cuba and thought, I’m going to lie about the purpose of my trip to Havana because journalistic ethics don’t apply to me.
The only thing Ramos accomplished in her trip was to contradict Guerrero’s claims about the racial demographics in Cuba.[23]
VIII
What accounted for these women’s contempt for Cuban Americans? Was it motivated by resentment that Cuban Americans are more successful than Mexican Americans? Was it anger that the Cuban demonstrations in the summer of 2021 eclipsed the cable news coverage of the immigration crisis at the U.S.-Mexico border? Was it acrimony that a Cuban American (Jew) Alejandro Mayorkas, secretary of the Department of Homeland Security, had implemented immigration enforcement policies at odds with calls for amnesty by the American Left?
Who knows?
Each woman, however, was adamant in her denigration of Cuban Americans. Consider Guerrero’s relentless duplicity. “The voices of comfortable Cuban Americans who oppose remittances because they loathe Cuba’s Communist leaders should not drown out the cries for food and medicine from Cubans,” she wrote in the Los Angeles Times.
Once again, Guerrero wrote one sentence with two lies.[24] First, no one in the Cuban American community, as she implied, called for a ban in the sale of food and medicine to Cuba. The U.S. trade embargo exempts the sale of food and medicine to Cuba. In 2020, for instance, only the European Union and Brazil sold more food to Cuba than the U.S. — and the U.S. sold almost twice as much as did Mexico and almost three times as much as did Canada. [25]
Second, as far as pharmaceuticals are concerned, the State Department is clear about the matter: “As stipulated in Section 1705 of the Cuban Democracy Act of 1992, the U.S. Government routinely issues licenses for the sale of medicine and medical supplies to Cuba. The only requirement for obtaining a license is to arrange for end-use monitoring to ensure that there is no reasonable likelihood that these items could be diverted to the Cuban military, used in acts of torture or other human rights abuses, or re-exported or used in the production of biotechnological products.”[26] Cuba buys tens of millions of dollars of pharmaceuticals from the U.S. each year.
Guerrero can be written off as a hatemongering Chicana intent on slandering the Cuban American community. It’s clear to the most casual observer that, unable to do anything against Cuban American Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas, she directs her fury at Miami’s Cuban American community. Her animus, a form of transference in psychological terms, is the product, I submit, of an unhinged mind, toxic and poisoned.[27]
What excuse does Ramos have?
She was born in Miami, but is oblivious to the history of her hometown. [28] She ignores, for instance, that more than fifteen years after the Civil Rights Act of 1964, Miami experienced race riots — and precisely in Overtown and Liberty City.
The 1980 Miami riots began after an all-white jury acquitted five police officers in the death of Arthur McDuffie the previous year. McDuffie was a Black insurance agent and former U.S. Marine Corps lance corporal. He was killed after a routine traffic stop on December 21, 1979. This was before cell phones were widely available and social media didn’t exist. The riots began soon after the verdict was announced on May 17, 1980. They were not quelled until two days later. Eighteen people died. These were the deadliest race riots in the U.S. since the 1960s. Not until the 1992 Los Angeles riots, in response to the beating of Rodney King, would the U.S. be shaken by a similar event.
The importance of the 1980 Miami riots is that it completes the circle of how Cuban Americans ascended in south Florida. Two of the acquitted officers, Alex Marrero and Ubaldo Del Toro, were Cuban.[29] Sarah Luddle, had a sweeping view of the riots from her balcony and saw the fires near the Omni Hotel, which had been inaugurated by President Jimmy Carter four years earlier as part of Miami’s Bicentennial celebrations. She explained the meaning of the Miami riots this way: “That’s how Cuban Americans became white — when two Cuban cops got away with murdering a Black man.”
IX
The Cuban Adjustment Act of 1966 was an extraordinary piece of legislation.
Castro’s declaration in 1961 that his revolution was Marxist-Leninist changed everything. The following year, the Cuban Missile Crisis brought the United States and the Soviet Union to the brink of nuclear war. The exodus of Cubans then began in earnest. It became clear that it was improbable that these refugees would return home soon. Washington then seized on this as an opportunity to showcase to the world the superiority of capitalism over communism. This Act conferred on Cuban refugees benefits designed to help them prosper. Washington wanted Miami Cubans to ascend and become successful while Havana Cubans descended into lives of deprivation. In the same way that, by design, West Berlin flourished while East Berlin withered, it was the policy of the U.S. government to ensure that Miami Cubans rose to the top.
In consequence, Cubans have been able to transcend many of the obstacles immigrants from other Latin American countries encounter.[30] Here again, one narrative is presented as three stories: Mexican American resentment at Cuban American success; Cuban American ascendance in American society; and intergenerational Mexican American poverty. These are not three separate events, but stories that demonstrate the federal government’s ability to select winners and losers. In the same way the federal government, through the Cuban Adjustment Act of 1966, empowered Cuban American success, it condemned Mexican Americans to more than a century of marginalization when it decided to violate Article VIII of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, signed in 1848, that ended the Mexican-American War.
Despite the competitive advantage the federal government conferred on them, however, Cubans and Cuban Americans, out of charity, have striven to advance the interest of other groups in the Hispanic diaspora in the United States. While almost no Mexican American has worked to bolster the interests of the Cuban American community, it is Cuban Americans who have worked — and continue to work — to elevate the profile of Mexican Americans in substantial ways.
This is a legacy of the affection Cubans have for Mexico that originated with José Martí’s sojourns throughout the 19th century. The Cuban poet and independence leader visited Mexico’s Yucatán in 1875, 1876, and 1877. There he marveled and lamented at the tasks that Spanish American countries had traveled and what they had yet to achieve to form societies that were equitable for all their peoples. “Está es una oportunidad para reflexionar sobre la construcción de la América tan nuestra,” Martí wrote, inspired after visiting the Maya ceremonial center at Chichén Itzá, not far from the present-day resort of Cancún. “La posibilidad del desarrollo americano tiene que ser a través de la incorporación del indígena a la vida nacional respetando la diversidad de los pueblos latinoamericanos.”[31]
The Cuban poet and liberator, referring to “America” as the entire continent, wrote, “This is an opportunity to reflect on the construction of the America that is so ours. The possibility of American development has to be through the incorporation of indigenous people into national life, respecting the diversity of Latin American peoples.”
Since then, Cubans have been Mexicophiles. The ties and goodwill that bind Mexico and Cuba are so strong, in fact, that Cubans celebrate La Jornada de la cultura mexicana en Cuba, or Mexican Culture in Cuba each September 11–16. Mexicans, in turn, celebrate the Día de la cultura cubana en México, or Day of Cuban Culture in Mexico, on October 20. This makes Guerrero and Ramos’s slings and arrows against the dignity of Cubans and Cuban Americans the more bewildering.
Now consider three examples of Cuban Americans that work to defend the interests of Mexican Americans, returning Chicana insults with gallego benevolence. One is from politics, another is in journalism, and the final one was at an institutional level. United States Senator Bob Menéndez, Univision journalist and author Teresa Rodríguez, and the Smithsonian’s Miguel Américo Bretos each has championed the dignity of the Mexican American experience throughout their extraordinary careers.
Bob Menéndez
Senator Bob Menéndez is the son of Mario Menéndez, a carpenter, and Evangelina Menéndez, a seamstress. They emigrated from Cuba to Union City, New Jersey in 1953. A Cuban American, he has done more to advance the interest of undocumented Mexicans and U.S.-born Mexican Americans than any other senator — including the two Mexican Americans in the Senate today, Alex Padilla and Mitt Romney.[32]
“The story of DACA is a story I have come to tell with a great sense of pride and patriotism,” he wrote in “Immigrants — and DACA — Make America Great. And I Urge the Supreme Court to Agree,” an opinion piece for NBC News published November 11, 2019. “After years of fearless advocacy by the Dreamers, the government asked them for their trust and faith. Nearly 700,000 Dreamers — including almost 17,000 in New Jersey — came out of the shadows, passed criminal background checks and paid fees. Despite the risks, these young people voluntarily handed over personal information about themselves and their families to some of the very same authorities they had been forced to hide from for most of their lives.”[33]
The Dreamers are the beneficiaries of the Deferred Action on Childhood Arrivals (DACA). These are minors brought to the U.S. without visas by their parents or guardians. President Barack Obama announced DACA on June 15, 2012. It allowed a minor whose presence in the U.S. is unlawful to receive a renewable two-year period of deferred action. This protected him or her from deportation and allowed each beneficiary to get a work permit. DACA didn’t provide a pathway to citizenship. The Development, Relief, and Education for Alien Minors Act, or DREAM Act, on the other hand, would provide permanent residency with a pathway to citizenship.
Republican objections to the DREAM Act are largely based on the fact that Congress already passed a comprehensive — and “one time” — relief for individuals residing in the U.S. unlawfully. That was in 1986 when President Ronald Reagan signed into law the Immigration Reform and Control Act (IRCA) also known as the Simpson–Mazzoli Act. Almost three million individuals have been legalized under IRCA’s provisions.[34]
In 2021, President Joe Biden proposed another round of comprehensive immigration reform to provide residency and a pathway to citizenship to an estimated 11 million undocumented persons residing in the U.S.[35] Republicans continue to resist the characterization that these individuals need U.S. citizenship, the implication being that these individuals are “stateless” persons. The use, they argue, of “pathway to citizenship” is disingenuous because it implies that these individuals have no citizenship, which can be construed as being stateless. This would put the United States in violation of the United Nations 1954 Convention on stateless persons. This is not the case: each person seeking a pathway to U.S. citizenship is already a citizen — of the country that issued his or her birth certificate. Republicans object to conferring dual citizenship to an unlawful resident of the U.S. as a reward for breaking the nation’s immigration laws. The DREAM Act, as such, remains in limbo in Congress.
That debate notwithstanding, it is to his credit that this Cuban American United States Senator continues to champion policies that would benefit disproportionately Mexican American nationals in this country, considering that the Cuban Adjustment Act of 1966 already protects Senator Menéndez’s most direct community: Cuban Americans.[36]
Teresa Rodríguez
Teresa Rodríguez, the acclaimed journalist, television reporter, and author, has worked decades to advance the interests of all Hispanics. As a co-host with Univision’s “Aquí y Ahora” program, segments have focused on scores of stories that highlight the plight of Mexicans, Mexican Americans, and Chicanos. Her reporting, now at “Univisionarios,” continues to cover issues that impact the lives of Hispanics on both sides of the U.S.-Mexico border. Perhaps the most compelling example of her dedication was the publication of her book, an investigative exposé into the unsolved slayings of young women working at factories across the border from El Paso, Texas in the Mexican city of Ciudad Juárez.
“Many of the victims had disappeared on their way to or from work, often in broad daylight; their lifeless remains were found weeks, sometimes months later, in the vast scrublands that rim the industrialized border city,” Teresa Rodríguez wrote in her book, The Daughters of Juárez: A True Story of Serial Murder South of the Border. “What the newspapers hadn’t reported would have frightened her even more. The victims bodies exhibited signs of rape, mutilation, and torture. Some had been bound with their own shoelaces. Others were savagely disfigured. One young girl endured such cruelty that an autopsy revealed she had suffered multiple strokes before her assailant finally choked the life from her. The victims were young, pretty, and petite, with flowing dark hair and full lips. All had been snatched from the downtown area, while waiting for a bus or shopping in stores. An alarming number were abducted en route to their jobs at the assembly plants, known locally as maquiladoras, that made parts and appliances for export.”
Where are the concerned Mexican, Mexican American, Chicano, and Latino journalists taking the lead on this topic? Why does the non-Hispanic American public have to learn about these crimes against Mexican, Mexican American, and Chicana women from a Cuban American journalist? There are more than 42 million Mexican Americans and Chicanos in the U.S. and it took a Cuban American to bring attention to this dismal situation that affects Latinas on both sides of the U.S.-Mexico border. Why are Guerrero and Ramons on MSNBC discussing the urgency in degendering the Spanish language on vacuous MSNBC when Latinas are being dismembered along the border? Indeed, Chicana indifference requires the conscience of a Cuban American to bring attention to a humanitarian crisis along the U.S.-Mexico border.
Miguel Américo Bretos
Miguel Américo Bretos has done more to elevate the dignity of the Mexican American experience in this country than any other person. Yet, I’d wager dinner at César Ramírez’s restaurant, Chef’s Table at Brooklyn Fare, the only restaurant in New York by a Mexican chef that has been awarded three Michelin stars, that neither Guerrero nor Ramos has ever heard of Bretos. If César Ramírez, therefore, represents the best that Mexico offers the United States, then Miguel Bretos embodies the best of Cuba in this country.
In 1994, I. Michael Heyman, a law professor who had served as chancellor of the University of California at Berkeley (1980–1990), became Secretary of the Smithsonian. Upon taking office, he held meetings with senior officials. There were plans for the first-ever traveling exhibition to commemorate the Smithsonian’s 150th anniversary in 1996, the institution’s website was in the works, ground was to be broken for the National Museum of the American Indian, and there was program to triple philanthropic donations.[37]
Born in New York City, the decade Heyman spent at the helm of the University of California at Berkeley made him aware of the role Hispanics — the Spanish, then Californios and Mexicans, and now U.S. Latinos — played in the nation’s life. He wanted to know why the Smithsonian failed to tell the story of Hispanics. The simple answer was that the Smithsonian was at a loss about how to tell the story of the nation’s Hispanic legacy.
After a nationwide search, Heyman settled on a Cuban American to offer the Smithsonian guidance. He appointed Dr. Miguel Américo Bretos as Counselor for Community Affairs and Special Projects. The choice of a Cuban exile was surprising, considering that Cuban Americans comprised less than 4% of all U.S. Latinos. Few Hispanics in the U.S., however, had his singular qualifications as this Cuban American scholar possessed.
Which were?
Bretos was born in Cuba. He sought refuge in the United States after the Cuban Revolution. Unlike most Cuban exiles, however, Bretos remained in good standing with Cuban officials in Havana. He managed this by staying above the political fray, dedicating himself to scholarship. His investigations and research into the colonial history of the early Spanish experience in the Caribbean and New Spain led him to study how the Spanish aligned themselves with the Tutul Xiu Maya of the Yucatán to fight competing Maya kingdoms, the Cocom Maya principally. This alliance resulted in the Spanish being allowed to settle in the northwest quadrant of the peninsula.[38] Was it, therefore, a “conquest” by the Spanish or opportune political and military alliances with the Tutul Xiu Maya? It was a complicated story to unravel and understand. One result of the nuances of his work and understanding resulted in a book, Iglesias de Yucatán, or Churches of Yuctán. This book became a landmark that established him as an eminent scholar of Colonial Mexico, offering more than an incremental understanding of Maya-Spanish relations.
By the time his name was mentioned to Heyman, the Cuban American’s academic résumé was as impressive as his curiosity. With a doctorate from Vanderbilt University, Bretos had taught at Oberlin, the University of South Wales (Australia), the Universidad Autónoma de Yucatán (Mérida, Mexico), and Florida International University.
Here was a scholar that was respected in Mexico, welcomed in Cuba, and who had, at the Florida International University, founded the Cuban Exile Archives and History Project. Here was an academic capable of guiding the Smithsonian as it laid the foundation for the proper and complete study of the Hispanic Americans in the United States. Bretos, Heyman believed, was also a talented manager with the skill set necessary to guide the institution’s culture as the Smithsonian’s sensibilities evolved to reflect societal changes. “The first thing Miguel did was explain to me how Protestant Revolution propaganda of the 16th century still informed how English-speakers saw — and treated — peoples from the Spanish-speaking world,” Heyman said after he retired and moved back to California. “It was a revelation.”
“It was paramount to discuss the Leyenda negra española, or the Spanish Black Legend, and how American views are shaped by centuries-old biases,” Bretos told me. “This was necessary if the Smithsonian was going to adopt a different set of sensibilities, one that would allow the institution’s staff to look at history, and the present, from a more generous perspective.”
Once the task of explaining the Anglophone bias against Hispanphones, the Smithsonian embarked on transcending how historic cultural bigotry had erased so much of Hispanic history in the United States. “The next step was to overcome perceptions about the demographics — and the very cultural DNA — of the Hispanic diaspora in the United States,” Bretos explained.
The 1990s was a time when political, corporate, and cultural power was still concentrated along the Washington-New York-Boston corridor. Non-Hispanic Americans in positions of authority in politics, business, and culture, for instance, presumed that the Hispanics they saw in their everyday lives represented Latinos across the country. That was not the case. From Miami to Boston, Caribbean Hispanics — Puerto Ricans, Cubans, and Dominicans — comprised the majority of U.S. Latinos. “But as you moved west, it is Mexican Americans that dominate U.S. society,” Bretos explained.
The Smithsonian had to understand that Caribbean Hispanics comprised less than 20% of Hispanic Americans. Mesoamerican Hispanics, comprised of Mexican Americans, Salvadoran Americans, Guatemalan Americans, and Honduran Americans, were more than 80% of the totality of Hispanic Americans. “Mexican Americans, including Mexicans living in the U.S. and Chicanos, alone were almost four out of five U.S. Latinos,” Bretos explained. “The story of Hispanics in the United States is largely a Mexican American story, and the Smithsonian has to reflect that.”
A point of clarification is in order. “Hispanic” means Spanish; Hispanophone is a Spanish speaker. The Romans coined “Hispania” when they arrived at the Iberian Peninsula around 200 BCE. The word is derived from Ispania, the name the Carthaginians had given the peninsula a century before the Romans arrived. The Carthaginians had named the peninsula after the abundant sphan, or rabbits, indigenous to the place. Hispania, the Romans knew, was the land of rabbits.[39] “Hispanic” entered the English language at the end of the 16th century, around the time of the defeat of the Spanish Armada.
“Latino,” in reference to the inhabitants of the Americas, is a new term. It entered the vernacular three centuries later, thanks to Napoleon III. Michel Chevalier, a French statesman and engineer, invented the term “Latin America.” Chevalier postulated the idea that Europeans could be divided into two groups. He believed that Europeans who spoke the principal Romance languages — French, Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, and Romanian — were one race, the “Roman” race. They were distinct from “German” race, which, he believed, included the Anglo-Saxons. By 1860, Napoleon III had settled on an imperialist scheme to secure French leadership on a global scale. He endorsed Chevalier’s ideas. He planned to invade Spanish America, acquire Brazil, and incorporate both with French possessions in the Caribbean to create Amérique latine, or Latin America, or Latinoamérica, to be led by France.[40]
The man, to his credit, did have an astonishing vision — and he tried to make it real. Napoleon III invaded Spanish America and installed Emperor Maximilian I on the throne of Mexico. The French Imperialist comeback was a bust, however, when the Mexicans rose up and executed Maximilian. But the word “Latino” — and the French Imperialist terms “Latinoamérica” and “Latin America” — has stuck to this day.
A simple way to remember the difference is this: while every Latino is Hispanic, not every Hispanic is Latino.[41]
Do you see the nuances in the task Bretos tackled?
It was clear to Heyman that there was more than met the eye. He agreed to create a division to document the nation’s Hispanic legacy. To make it clear, however, that this was an “Americanist” pursuit, the word “Latino,” short for “Latinoaméricano” or “Latin American,” was used. The Smithsonian thus established the Center for Latino Affairs. This expanded into the Smithsonian Latino Center, with Eduardo Díaz, a Mexican American, as Interim Director.
Bretos understood that, while he laid the foundation for Hispanic studies at the Smithsonian, it was better for a Mexican American to bring his or her sensibilities to the Herculean task of assembling curatorial materials for an eventual museum. It was quite an undertaking and Díaz was ideal for the challenge. Bretos moved to other positions at the Smithsonian, serving as the Interim Director of the Postal Museum and as Senior Scholar National Portrait Gallery.
The last time I saw him at the Smithsonian he was a Senior Scholar at the National Portrait Gallery. He invited me to come over and see the renovations taking place. I was staying at the Kimpton Hotel Monaco, across the street, and after a tour, we walked over to Zaytinya for lunch. It was one of his favorite Greek restaurants in Washington. He had the scallops in dill yogurt, apple, radish, and sesame-rose spice. I had the octopus Santorini with marinated onions, capers, and yellow split pea purée.
“They’re not the wild capers from Santorini,” he said. “But they’re great.”
He remembered my grandmother had three passions: Greek mythology, Japanese kabuki theater, and Persian architecture. He knew this restaurant would remind me of those summer days when, as a boy, I gathered the capers that grew wild on Santorini.
“Yes,” I said. “And I remember that, on the boat rides back to Athens, she would tell me that this — the Aegean Sea — is where it all happened. I would look out and imagine Poseidon — one of the Twelve Olympians — rising out of the waters, trident in hand, to protect us, seafarers riding across the cerulean waters.”
He smiled as we talked about this and that.
Bretos was an intellectual in the Spanish tradition, soft-spoken and concise in his observations. When I saw him in Mexico, where he owned a house built in the 1760s, he wore elegant guayaberas. In Miami, he favored a casuall professorial look. It was in Washington, however, that dressed the part of a Smithsonian scholar. He wore navy blue or plaid blazers, always with a crisp white or blue shirt. He remained old school, wearing silk bowties. This made it easy to buy him presents for Christmas. With a visit to Brooks Brothers or Britches of Georgetown, an elegant bowtie was the thing.
“Few people know that Hemingway was inspired by the waters of the Aegean Sea when he started his novella, The Old Man and the Sea,” Bretos told me. “Santiago hails from Spain and he longs for the nostalgia of his homeland, the waters of the Mediterranean are the flows and currents of memory.”
Wouldn’t you want to have lunch with Bretos?
It took years, but his ultimate dream was realized when the 116th Congress (2019–2020) passed H.R.2420 establishing the Smithsonian National Museum of the American Latino. “We have overcome tremendous obstacles and unbelievable hurdles to get to this historic moment, but as I’ve said before, Latinos are used to overcoming obstacles,” Senator Bob Menéndez said at that time. President Donald Trump, the man who vilified Mexicans as rapists, signed the bill into law.[42] Fate, indeed, has a wicked sense of humor.
A nationwide search then began for a director. After a protracted process, the Smithsonian tapped the Executive Director of the HistoryMiami Museum, a Smithsonian affiliate. Is it necessary to point out that Jorge Zamanillo, who took the helm on May 2, 2022, is a Cuban American?[43]
“The Latino experience is American history, and I want to make sure our story will be preserved for future generations,” Zamanillo said upon his appointment. “This museum will celebrate Latino accomplishments and resiliency through powerful stories that capture the adversity faced over centuries by Latinos in the U.S. and their perseverance to move forward and create a legacy.”
These are the two Cuban Americans who, as Fate would have it, have elevated the dignity of the Mexican American at the Smithsonian.
There will come a time when the Smithsonian Institution opens a museum dedicated to the Hispanic presence in the part of North America that today comprises the United States of America. It will tell how, centuries before the English arrived, it was the Spanish who explored, named, and settled much of what comprises the United States. Then it will tell how a vast stretch of New Spain became Mexico, first an empire, then a republic. In this story of this metamorphosis over generations, a national identity defined as “Mexican” emerged. This stood in opposition to English America. In Mexico, Spanish was the lingua franca that united all the disparate peoples that comprise Mexico; Catholic sensibilities informed beliefs; the Napoleonic Code shaped the law and civil institutions; and miscegenation was accepted from the moment the Gonzalo Guerrero, a Spaniard, married a Maya woman in the 1510s and Sebastián Toral, an African, married a Maya woman in the 1540s. Mexico, centuries before Walt Whitman was born, fulfilled the American poet and essayist’s dream: “Of every hue and caste am I.”
What will the opening of that museum be like?
When the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture opened in September 2016, one photograph caused a commotion: Michelle Obama warmly embracing George W. Bush. Many assumed that Bush and Obama, presidents from opposing political parties, had little in common. Michelle’s warm embrace of Bush surprised many. There’s a profound reason, however, for her affection for President Bush: on December 16, 2003, President Bush signed H.R. 3491, the National Museum of African American History and Culture Act that authorized the creation of a Smithsonian Institution museum dedicated to the legacy of African Americans in the United States.
In the same way that a Republican president made this Smithsonian museum on African Americans possible, when the Smithsonian inaugurates its museum honoring Hispanic heritage in the United States, it will be because Cuban American Miguel Bretos was its spiritual father. “I think it would be lovely if, at some point, a mariachi band played ‘Guantanamera’ at the opening reception,” he said, smiling. “I’m confident it will happen and that it will be a bold affirmation of the place Hispanic Americans hold in the life of this great country.”
Who, I wonder, will, spurning Trump, symbolically embrace Bretos?
X
Senator Bob Menéndez could be described as a white, well-fed Cuban American elite. Teresa Rodríguez could be described as a white, well-fed Cuban American elite. Dr. Miguel Américo Bretos could be described as a white, well-fed Cuban American elite. [44] It is therefore not without irony that two other “white, well-fed Cuban American elites” — Bretos and Zamanillo — will tell the story of Mexican Americans.
These are the same Cuban Americans that Guerrero and Ramos want to prohibit from shaping U.S. foreign policy toward Cuba, highlighting the ridiculous nature of their complaints. Indeed, to entertain these Chicanas’ vitriol is to be reminded of Don Quixote. In it, Cervantes has his hero describe his task: “Hemos de matar en los gigantes a la soberbia; a la envidia, en la generosidad y buen pecho; a la ira, en el reposado continente y quietud del ánimo; a la gula y al sueño, en el poco comer que comemos y en el mucho velar que velamos; a la lujuria y lascivia, en la lealtad que guardamos a las que hemos hecho señoras de nuestros pensamientos; a la pereza, con andar por todas las partes del mundo, buscando las ocasiones que nos puedan hacer y hagan, sobre cristianos, famosos caballeros.”[45]
Don Quixote thus implores all of us to fight against the animus of miscreants like Jean Guerrero and Paola Ramos.
Epilogue
There will come a time when, thanks to Cuban American Miguel Bretos, who laid the institutional foundation at the Smithsonian, and Cuban American Jorge Zamanillo, the Smithsonian director charged with selecting the histories told, the narratives of Mexican Americans and their rightful place in the saga that is U.S. history will be elevated, affirming the dignity of the Hispanic American experience in their entirety, the grotesque assaults on Cuban Americans, and their place in American society, from anti-Cuban bigots like Guerrero and Ramos notwithstanding.
*
This essay is for Edsel White, who was born in Camagüey Province in Cuba, but lived his life in the Borough of Brooklyn in New York.
NOTES:
[1] For a complete breakdown of Cuban inhabitants by race, see: https://web.archive.org/web/20140603230454/http://www.one.cu/publicaciones/cepde/cpv2012/20140428informenacional/46_tabla_II_4.pdf
[2] “Official Cuban census figures say black and mixed-heritage people are about 35 percent of the island’s population, but a quick stroll around any Cuban town will provide visual confirmation of just how many Cubans of color deem themselves ‘white’ when the government is asking,” she wrote in “Amid sweeping Changes in US Relations, Cuba’s Race Problem Persists,” on August 13, 2015. If Julia Cooke went for a stroll in the Centro Habana and Habana Vieja districts, it’s not surprising she came to an erroneous conclusion at odds with the Cuban census.
[3] “On 2 December [Castro] explained to a somewhat surprised nation in a television speech that he had been for many years an apprentice Marxist-Leninist at least, even at the university, that he and his comrades had in the 1950s consciously disguised their radical views in order to gain power, and that, having become progressively more experienced, he had become a better Marxist and would be so until the day of his death.” Hugh Thomas Cuba: The Pursuit of Freedom (New York: Harper & Row, 1971), p.1373.
[4] https://www.census.gov/quickfacts/hialeahcityflorida.
[5] https://www.census.gov/quickfacts/hialeahcityflorida.
[6] https://www.census.gov/library/publications/2021/demo/p60-273.html.
[7] Little Havana, in turn, now houses more recent waves of destitute immigrants: Salvadoran, Guatemalan, Nicaraguan, Colombian, and Venezuelan flags fly at bodegas and diners, far outnumbering the few Cuban flags that remain.
[8] N. D. B. Connolly’s A World More Concrete: Real Estate and the Remaking of Jim Crow South Florida, offers an account of how Black neighborhoods were destroyed to make way for highways.
[9] Stephen Clark and David Kennedy, both Democrats, followed Robert King High, also a Democrat, in office. The three men implemented urban planning policies designed to eradicate the African American neighborhoods in greater Miami — and welcomed white Cubans who benefited from the Cuban Adjustment Act of 1966.
[10] Celia Cruz won a Grammy in 1989 for “Ritmo en el Corazón” and another in 2003 for “Regalo del Alma.” She won a Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award in 2016. In addition, she won four Latin Grammy Awards in 2000, 2001, 2002, and 2004.
[11] The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America’s Great Migration, pg. 44.
[12] The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America’s Great Migration, pg. 62.
[13] The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America’s Great Migration, pg. 6.
[14] The current Certification Guidelines the National Council of Architectural Registration Boards for a foreign architect to become licensed in the United States, for instance, runs 20 pages.
[15] Why? Because the legal systems throughout Hispanoamerica are based on the Napoleonic Code, but the U.S. legal system derives from English common law. A Cuban attorney arriving in the 1960s had to start all over and enroll in law school.
[16] https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/library/national/race/060500ojito-cuba.html
[17] “Best of Friends, Worlds Apart,” Mirta Ojito, New York Times, June 5, 2000.
[18] “Best of Friends, Worlds Apart,” Mirta Ojito, New York Times, June 5, 2000.
[19] Guerrero and Ramos vilified Cuban Americans and called for their political disenfranchisement.
[20] The other, Guerrero, went on a furious rampage on Twitter “blocking” critics, under the delusion that what happens on Twitter is real life.
[21] The seawall, designed by Harrison & Abramovitz, was intended to protect Havana from flooding, common during winter storms and summer hurricanes. It also arced Havana from its past (Old Havana) to its present (Centro Habana) to the future: the Vedado and beyond. The U.S. Military envisioned a four-part program of modernization. In addition to the malecón, indoor plumbing was introduced. If people in New York had brand new toilets to flush, so would the residents of Havana. The third campaign was to bring electricity to every city on the island. If everything were up to date in Kansas City, so would they be in every Cuban urban center. The final modernization campaign was to bring pharmaceuticals to the population: every Cuban community would have at least one pharmacy.
[22] It’s clear who wields, or not, the strap-on in that bedroom.
[23] The other possibility is monumental in its implication of racial terror: Did Ramos seek to silence the voices of Cuba’s alleged Black majority by seeking to interview white-minority dissidents? Would this make Ramos an instrument of White Supremacy?
[24] Allowing Jean Guerrero to publish lies is how the Los Angeles Times deceives its readers.
[25] In 2020, for instance, the U.S sold $157 million in agricultural products to Cuba, down from a peak of $684 million in 2008. The decline is a result of Cuba’s ability to pay. The top five agricultural exports from the U.S. to Cuba are poultry meat, soybeans, corn, planting seeds, and beer. See: https://crsreports.congress.gov/product/pdf/R/R46791.
[26] See: https://1997-2001.state.gov/briefings/statements/970514.html.
[27] Transference is understood as the displacement of affect from one person or idea to another, usually a projection of feelings or thoughts. In my opinion, Guerrero, unable to do anything about her contempt for Mayorkas, transfer her hatred to his community in general, Cuban Americans.
[28] Her grandfather, Carlos Alberto Montaner, is the exiled Cuban author who has lived in Spain since 1970. Ramos’s self-loathing is evident in her derogatory characterization of Cuban Americans when she, herself, through her maternal family, is a Mexican American of Cuban ancestry.
[29] Of the eight officers involved, three received immunity for their testimony. These were William Hanlon, Mark Meier, and Charles Verketa. Five officers went on trial: Ira Diggs (manslaughter, aggravated battery, tampering with evidence, being an accessory after the fact), Herbert Evans (tampering with evidence and being an accessory after the fact), Alex Marrero (second-degree murder and aggravated battery), Ubaldo Del Toro (tampering with evidence and being an accessory after the fact), and Michael Watts (manslaughter and aggravated battery).
[30] “Latin America” consists of Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, Cuba, Dominican Republic, Ecuador, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, Mexico, Nicaragua, Panama, Paraguay, Peru, Puerto Rico, Uruguay, and Venezuela, where Spanish and Portuguese are spoken, and includes the Francophone nation of Haiti and the French overseas departments of French Guiana, Guadeloupe, and Martinique along with the French collectivities of Saint Martin and Saint Barthélemy.
[31] See: https://meridaenlahistoria.com.mx/2017/02/jose-marti-en-yucatan/
[32] Alejandro “Alex” Padilla’s parents, Santos and Lupe, were born in Mexico and emigrated to California. Mitt Romney’s father, George W. Romney, was born in Mexico and emigrated to Michigan. His mother, Lenore, was born in Utah.
[33] See: https://www.nbcnews.com/think/opinion/immigrants-daca-make-america-great-i-urge-supreme-court-agree-ncna1079996.
[34] See: Nancy Rytina, IRCA Legalization Effects: Lawful Permanent Residence and Naturalization through 2001, Office of Policy and Planning, Statistics Division, U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service. p. 3.
[35] See: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/27/us/biden-undocumented-immigrants-citizenship.html.
[36] The two other Cuban American U.S. Senators — Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio — have shown far less empathy for the plight of undocumented aliens.
[37] Under his tenure, donations jumped from $52 million in fiscal year 1995 to $146 million in fiscal year 1999.
[38] A strong case can be made that the Tutul Xiu used the Spanish to defeat the Cocom Maya, their rivals. This means that the Spanish took credit for a military achievement of their Indigenous allies.
[39] The Greeks, who arrived around 600 BCE, called the peninsula Hesperia, meaning the land of the setting sun. The Romans were more impressed with the rabbits and settled on the Carthaginian name.
[40] “No longer will they be called hispanos, but latinos,” Chevalier confided to Andrés Manuel del Río, a Spanish-Mexican engineer and business partner. “The idea of América Latina — L’Amérique latine — was perfect,” Del Río wrote, thrilled by the possibility of a Paris-Madrid-Lisbon alliance to take control of the entire hemisphere. “The adoption of Latinoamérica allows for a sweeping unity across Spanish America, Brazil, and the French Caribbean that, together, could stand up to the behemoth of the Anglo-Saxon aggression from Washington, D.C.” the Spanish-born Mexican declared. Napoleon III was thrilled with the good news and declared that hispanos were now latinos and hispanas were now latinas.
[41] Why? There are Hispanics in Europe, Africa, and Asia as well.
[42] Donald Trump also signed legislation authorizing the Smithsonian’s Women’s History Museum. Trump, who called Mexican “rapists” and boasted that as a celebrity he could get away by grabbing women by their genitals is the president the Fates punished by having him establish two cultural institutions to affirm the dignity of those he denigrated.
[43] Under his tenure, donations to the HitoryMiami Museum jumped from $52 million in fiscal year 1995 to $146 million in fiscal year 1999. Eduardo Díaz, who had done an impressive job as Interim Director, was passed for the position, in all likelihood, that he did not have a track record at raising funds for the required endowment to make the museum successful.
[44] It should be noted that Guerrero’s use of “well-fed” is code for caloric surplus, or fat. Guerrero is body shaming Cuban Americans for not being undernourished, as are their compatriots who, from lack of food, took to the streets in protest in July 2021. Guerrero’s bigotry, in addition to being an insult to the Cuban American community, is an affront to the body positivity movement.
[45] “We have to slay pride in giants, envy by generosity and nobleness of heart, anger by calmness of demeanor and equanimity, gluttony and sloth by the sparseness of our diet and the length of our vigils, lust and lewdness by the loyalty we preserve to those whom we have made the mistresses of our thoughts, indolence by traversing the world in all directions seeking opportunities of making ourselves, besides Christians, famous knights.”
