Mette Louise Berg
- Published in print:
- 2014
- Published Online:
- May 2014
- ISBN:
- 9780813049106
- eISBN:
- 9780813046709
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University Press of Florida
- DOI:
- 10.5744/florida/9780813049106.003.0016
- Subject:
- Society and Culture, Latin American Studies
The relationship between Cuba and its post-1959 diaspora has been characterized by antagonism and mutual recrimination—especially between the Cuban government and the Miami-based exile community. ...
More
The relationship between Cuba and its post-1959 diaspora has been characterized by antagonism and mutual recrimination—especially between the Cuban government and the Miami-based exile community. Dissenting voices, experiences and trajectories, and discussions of gender, class, race, and generations within the diaspora have accordingly tended to be restricted to a relatively small network of US-focused scholars and intellectuals. Yet the Cuban diaspora is more complex than allowed by the dominant exile narrative, the official Cuban government narrative, or media representations. It is characterized by diversity in migration trajectory, legal status, and class position, as well as “race,” religion, and political identification and orientation. New studies have contributed toward a historically embedded and more geographically and socially representative understanding of contemporary Cuba and its diaspora. Cubans living in Spain provide an emergent and more nuanced picture of Cuban diasporic experiences over the past half-century.Less
The relationship between Cuba and its post-1959 diaspora has been characterized by antagonism and mutual recrimination—especially between the Cuban government and the Miami-based exile community. Dissenting voices, experiences and trajectories, and discussions of gender, class, race, and generations within the diaspora have accordingly tended to be restricted to a relatively small network of US-focused scholars and intellectuals. Yet the Cuban diaspora is more complex than allowed by the dominant exile narrative, the official Cuban government narrative, or media representations. It is characterized by diversity in migration trajectory, legal status, and class position, as well as “race,” religion, and political identification and orientation. New studies have contributed toward a historically embedded and more geographically and socially representative understanding of contemporary Cuba and its diaspora. Cubans living in Spain provide an emergent and more nuanced picture of Cuban diasporic experiences over the past half-century.
Susan Eckstein
- Published in print:
- 2014
- Published Online:
- May 2014
- ISBN:
- 9780813049106
- eISBN:
- 9780813046709
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University Press of Florida
- DOI:
- 10.5744/florida/9780813049106.003.0018
- Subject:
- Society and Culture, Latin American Studies
The Cuban experience demonstrates that immigrants do not necessarily enmesh their lives across borders. Studies typically point to certain characteristics of immigrants to explain variability in ...
More
The Cuban experience demonstrates that immigrants do not necessarily enmesh their lives across borders. Studies typically point to certain characteristics of immigrants to explain variability in homeland ties: motivation for migration, time laps since uprooting, family remaining in the home country, country-of-origin language retention, and income. Yet Cuban immigrants in the United States remitted little, even though they were, on average, the wealthiest Latin American immigrants. Cuba’s experience points to the import of institutional and cultural forces to transnational engagement at the macro as well as informal level. For three decades formal and informal barriers stood in the way of Cuban immigrant transnational engagement. It took the crisis that ensued in Cuba when Soviet aid and trade ended after 1990 to break down, first, people-to-people, then state, barriers to such ties. The impetus for the breakdown in barriers came initially from Cuba.Less
The Cuban experience demonstrates that immigrants do not necessarily enmesh their lives across borders. Studies typically point to certain characteristics of immigrants to explain variability in homeland ties: motivation for migration, time laps since uprooting, family remaining in the home country, country-of-origin language retention, and income. Yet Cuban immigrants in the United States remitted little, even though they were, on average, the wealthiest Latin American immigrants. Cuba’s experience points to the import of institutional and cultural forces to transnational engagement at the macro as well as informal level. For three decades formal and informal barriers stood in the way of Cuban immigrant transnational engagement. It took the crisis that ensued in Cuba when Soviet aid and trade ended after 1990 to break down, first, people-to-people, then state, barriers to such ties. The impetus for the breakdown in barriers came initially from Cuba.
