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Chapter 1 provides the necessary historical background to migration and return. It offers a summary of postrevolutionary migration waves, concise information on the Operation Pedro Pan, the policies that have eased or hindered travel in Cuba and the United States, and the range of attitudes toward return in the Cuban-American community and elsewhere. Additionally, it explores reports on the initial trips to Cuba undertaken by the Antonio Maceo Brigade and Grupo Areíto in the late 1970s as well as others more individually focused that followed.

Jorge Duany examines the shifting cultural ties between Cuba and the United States since 1959, and how they have reframed relations between Cubans on and off the island. Duany argues that the cultural politics of Miami’s Cuban community have changed substantially because of demographic and generational transitions over the last three decades. Until the 1980s, Cuban artists and other intellectuals in the United States had limited contact with their island counterparts. However, it is now customary for U.S. museums and galleries to collect and exhibit artworks produced in post-1959 Cuba without much protest or opposition from Cuban Americans. Although some exile artists and critics still believe that U.S. cultural institutions should not display such artworks, the fault lines between Cubans residing on the island and abroad seem more porous than in the past. The author concludes that the visual arts may serve as cultural bridges across the Florida Straits.

This chapter explains that though Cubans needed North American-made goods, they did not yearn for the U.S. influence that came with them. According to British Foreign Office diplomats, Cuba “lies almost entirely within the United States zone of influence.” Cubans held conflicting opinions of the United States—torn “between trust and suspicion, between esteem and scorn, between a desire to emulate and a need to repudiate.” There was the U.S. Information Service (USIS) in Cuba that became the primary source of information. This USIS worked to counter negative Cuban opinion about the sordid side of North American culture and to build Cuban respect for free enterprise. In the end, the USIS failed to sustain a positive Cuban endorsement of U.S. institutions and preferences, which was meant to support the Batista regime.

This chapter examines the Cuban/Cuban-American identity from historical and contemporary perspectives. It analyses certain aspects of Cuban history and culture, particularly race and religion, and describes the Cuban-American community and its particular contours. It explores Afro-Cuban religiosity during the colonial and modern eras, the twentieth century, and the present-day period. It suggests that it is hard to understand Cuba without understanding Africa.

This chapter discusses and addresses the sometimes uneasy fit that Cuban Americans have historically had with the imagined “Latino” collective. It looks at the ways in which various Cuban American writers—including Cristina Garcia, Achy Obejas, Margarita Engle, and Alisa Valdes-Rodriguez—have explicitly attempted or, as in Engle's case, more implicitly attempted, to address and negotiate a relationship between Cuban Americans and a panethnic Latino whole.

This chapter examines Cuban-American anthropology, focusing on literature, poetry, and essays as a window into the Cuban and Cuban-American contexts. It explores literature and narrative as sources for a contextual theology and analyses the function of race and religiosity in Cuban and Cuban-American literature, poetry, and narratives. It concludes that a Cuban-American anthropology emerges from specific aesthetic contexts, yet its insights serve the Christian community as a whole.

This essay documents how Cuban Americans became politically influential in Miami, and leveraged local for national political influence. Their influence peaked in years of presidential elections, when candidates for the highest office of the land promoted policies to curry Cuban American votes in Florida, the largest “swing state.” However, with the arrival of ever more Cubans in the post-Soviet era with lived experiences, and views and values in turn, very different from those of the first who fled the revolution, Cuban-American political influence has been on the decline. Cuban Americans no longer vote as a political bloc and the Cuban American leadership has become more divided in its policy preferences as well as partisan affiliations. Meanwhile, Cuban American politicians have continued to prioritize their “narrow” ethnic interests over interests of the broader Hispanic community that has rapidly expanded in their midst.

This chapter explores President George W. Bush’s policy toward Cuba and Latin America in general. Against the backdrop of the war in Iraq and U.S. military operations in the name of freedom, “regime change” remained the unwavering objective of U.S. policy during Bush’s presidency. Convinced that stepped-up economic pressure and aid to Cuban dissidents would collapse the regime despite fifty years of experience to the contrary, Bush’s foreign policy team had no interest in dialogue with a government they were confident they could eliminate. The task of sustaining engagement with the island over the next eight years would thus fall to others. Bush’s uncompromising policy was rooted not only in the messianic Wilsonianism of his foreign policy but also in his close ties to Miami’s most conservative Cuban Americans.

This chapter investigates El Nuevo Herald and Miami Times coverage of the 1994 Balsero crisis. In response to the crisis, the Clinton administration began closing the open-door welcome to Cuban refugees. The Herald conveyed Cuban-American anger and sense of betrayal, as they rallied to the Balseros’ cause. The chapter argues that the Herald capitalized on the white mainstream belief that immigrants can become “good immigrants” by demonstrating willingness to suffer for privileges rather than expect handouts. In the Times, African-Americans continued to critique the differential treatment of black Haitians and “white” Cubans, and voiced frustration that after more than a century as suffering “Americans,” blacks were still deemed unworthy citizens by white elites. Taken together, the chapter offer a critique to an unspoken rule of U.S. citizenship which requires suffering from racialized groups, and contends that interethnic conflict emerges as groups are coerced to compete over who has suffered most.

The Cuba lobby is an excellent example of a special interest that continues to influence American foreign policy. Although Cuba poses little threat to American interests and policies, especially after the collapse of the Soviet Union, the US continues to put pressure on the Castro regime in line with the interests of the Cuban American National Foundation, which was founded by Jorge Mas Canosa, who has an abiding hatred for Fidel Castro. With a considerable Cuban American community as its base, the CANF is able to push Congress to make uncompromising demands for action against Cuba, including the imposition of a trade embargo, the suspension of aid to Cuba as a condition to Soviet assistance, and the Helms-Burton Act, which sought to increase Cuba's economic isolation. By catering to the interest of the Cuba lobby, almost all other national interest-related foreign policy goals have been rendered irrelevant.

This chapter offers a review of the main developments in U.S.–Cuba relations from 1959 to 2009, with a focus on the history of U.S. economic sanctions with respect to Cuba that were first enacted in the early 1960s and then intensified during the 1990s with the Torricelli law and the Helms-Burton law. A major contention is that the strengthening of the embargo was linked to self-interested groups in the Cuban-American community seeking to serve their parochial interests and able to influence U.S. policymakers. The origin of the U.S. embargo against Cuba and various efforts at normalization are also discussed. The U.S. policy of Cuba under various presidents is examined.

Chapter Four explores the origins of the Antonio Maceo Brigade, an organization composed of Cuban American students and intellectuals who broke with the anticommunism of their parent’s generation to seek reconciliation with the Cuban government, the reunification of the Cuban diaspora, and the normalization of U.S.-Cuba relations. Shaped by experiences in the Civil Rights and anti–Vietnam War movements, these émigré youth rejected the anti-Castro rhetoric of Cuban exile communities, provoking a campaign of intimidation and terrorism by rightwing Cuban American hardliners. Members of the Brigade traveled to Cuba to reunite with family, learn about the Cuban Revolution’s social achievements, and perform volunteer labor. In the brief warming of diplomatic relations encouraged by the Jimmy Carter administration, visits to Cuba by progressive Cuban Americans helped catalyze a shift in the Cuban government’s relations with the Cuban diaspora, initiating an unprecedented space for Cuban American leftwing politics.

Art historian Lynette M. F. Bosch concentrates on the first generation of postrevolutionary exile artists, which she calls the “Cuban-American Exile Vanguardia,” who arrived in the United States between 1959 and 1980. Bosch emphasizes that many members of this diasporic generation explore “identity, hybridity, transnationalism, and the emotional and experiential territory of exile.” She also argues that these artists recast traditional notions of lo cubano (Cubanness) as lo cubanoamericano (Cuban-Americanness) through visual representations of “life on the hyphen,” that is, the blending of Cuban and American cultural practices. Examples of these hybrid exile artists include Humberto Calzada, Jake Fernandez, and Arturo Rodríguez.

This chapter deals with Cuban American whiteness. The autobiographical narratives of a voyage back to Cuba during the post-Soviet 1990s by white, middle-class, Cuban American academics lead to a return to the family house left behind, now lived in by island Afro-Cubans. This trope of the “Afro-Cuban-occupied house” conveys another representation of Afro-Cubans in the white Cuban American text. It exposes Cuban American whiteness and its basis, textured by the complexities of the autobiographical plot, in social and economic privilege. The video Cuban Roots/Bronx Stories, a counternarrative of an Afro-Cuban American return to the island, further frays the edges of going back in the Cuban American imaginary.

This chapter examines the history of and devotion to La Caridad del Cobre in Cuba. It analyses her story to explore Cuban/Cuban-American identity and to construct a Cuban/Cuban-American Mariology describes La Caridad's appearance in the early seventeenth century. It investigates how the image and narrative of La Caridad have functioned throughout Cuban history and explains how La Caridad grew to become a national symbol and devotion in Cuba.

This chapter narrates how the U.S. and Cuba nearly went to war after the Cuban missile incident of October 1992 escalated hostilities between the U.S., the Soviet Union, and Cuba. This chapter explains how the U.S-Cuban cooperation overrode the possibility of having a hot war. The chapter begins with a summary of the U.S. anti-Castro movements from 1959 up until the fall of the Soviet Union. Although no invasion plots were brewed by the U.S. government after 1961, the U.S. nevertheless did not stop at destabilizing the Cuban government either. The chapter also discusses Cuba's internationalist foreign policy towards the nations of the Third World wherein Cuba's revolutionary vision always posed hostility to the U.S. government. Included in the chapter as well is a close look at the decade of the 1990s wherein U.S.-Cuban cooperation on reducing risks of accidental war faced a rollercoaster situation. The chapter concludes with a discussion on the hostility and disagreement hurled by the Cuban Americans on migration policies and issues agreed upon by the United States and Cuba.

This book examines the intersection of Afro-Cuban and Latino/a culture and religiosity through the study of a particular group, the Cuban-American community. It proposes a theological analysis of the everyday faith of Cuban-Americans, informed by the political, cultural, and economic markers that characterize this community and explains that the underlying thesis of this study is that Afro-Cuban culture saturates Cuban culture. It examines the notion of identity within Afro-Cuban and Latino/a theologies, explores Cuban-American theology and discusses Cuban and Cuban-American identities, both historical and contemporary.

Volume editor Jorge Duany briefly reviews the intellectual history of Cuban thought on national identity since the late eighteenth century. Several generations of Cuban writers and artists on the island and abroad have drawn the contours of their “moveable nation,” according to different historical junctures, geographic locations, and ideological perspectives. Duany notes that the search for and affirmation of Cuba’s national identity strongly shaped the history of the visual arts, as well as literature, music, and other cultural expressions. The author then explains the origins of the current volume in an interdisciplinary 2017 conference on Cuban and Cuban-American art held at the Frost Art Museum of Florida International University in Miami. The second part of the introduction summarizes the contents of the volume, highlighting the significance of Cuban and Cuban-American art for the construction of national and diasporic identities.