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This chapter turns to Miami and discusses the role of Cubans and Cuban popular culture in the city. It examines the social clubs Círculo Cubano and Juventud Cubana, and the nightclubs Tropicana and Barra Guys and Dolls, whose events and activities illustrate the early emergence of “Cuban Miami” in the context of the ideology and racialized practices of Pan-Americanism, and against the backdrop of the Cuban Revolution. Through the Spanish-language press, the Cuban groups in the city also demonstrated an early instance of pan-Lantino/a unity in the struggle for social justice. During their stay in Miami, many black Cuban artists found themselves in a Jim Crow city that was protective of its black-white model of racial classification but inconsistent in its treatment and categorization of Cubans and Latino/as of color.

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 considers the many myths and contradictions in common understandings of Operation Pedro Pan. Although people on the island often regard the exodus as a criminal act against the Cuban revolution, no children were prevented from leaving and no one was ever charged or imprisoned for organizing their departures. This chapter also discusses how the story of the “rescue” mission became an ideological foundation of the Cuban-American community in the United States and how, ironically, in the 1999–2000 international custody battle over the refugee child Elián González, a Cuban father’s right of patria potestad was temporarily overturned by the toxic exile politics of Miami’s Cuban community. The author also explains how some young Cuban-Americans, many of them former Pedro Pans, later took the initiative to establish the Antonio Maceo Brigade in order to reconnect with their Cuban roots, despite threats of physical attacks (and even murder, in the case of Carlos Muñiz) by anti-Castro terrorist groups, such as Omega 7.

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.

This introductory chapter explains how Afro-Cuban American literature and performance exemplify afrolatinidad: the Afro-Latino condition in the United States which includes, but is not limited to, those with origins in Puerto Rico, the Dominican Republic, Panama, Colombia, and Venezuela. Central to afrolatinidad is the social difference that blackness makes in the United States. If an Afro-Latino difference reveals how, for Afro-Cuban Americans, encounters with white Cuban Americans may lead to exclusion, then it is true that Afro-Cuban Americans may occupy with white Cuban Americans the space of an apparent multiracial inclusion through a shared cubanoamericanidad. This Cuban Americanness purports an understanding beyond race among Cubans in the United States. The chapter aims to challenge Cuban America's normate whiteness and to propose an Afro-Cuban America, one made visible in texts ranging from the Caribbean Latino modernist period to the founding of a Cuban Miami in the late twentieth century.