by Ray Suarez
The Peter Pans were no longer simply children; they were also symbols of the Cold War conflict between Cuba and the United States. Father Salvador De Cistierna, a Roman Catholic priest who ran the largest shelter, was featured in a film made by the U.S. government, talking to the Peter Pan children in south Florida. His talk makes it clear that the children were understood as more than just kids who needed a place to live. “You are a constant reminder that there is something very wrong in the world. I would like you to be boys and girls with a great sense of responsibility, because the new society, a new world, is waiting for you to rebuild your homeland. Cuba is waiting for you.”
The generous hosts. The crusading middlemen. The precious children rescued. The accumulated weight of the triumphal narrative made it harder for children, even when grown, to talk openly and honestly about what was hard and painful for thousands of kids who left everything and everyone they knew to head for America. Calling Operation Peter Pan anything less than a success smacked of ingratitude. Nena Torres went on to become a history professor, and wrote a book about the Peter Pans. “The stories tell of a heroic flight from repression to freedom, a pain-free rescue mission sponsored by brave humanitarians. But there was a wrenching trauma of separation.”
The unique forces that spurred Cuban emigration, and the peculiar hothouse of Cold War politics created a very different impression of these Latino migrants. The very fact that so many Cubans were not poor people seeking a better life made them more sympathetic. Gustavo Pérez Firmat’s family operated a warehouse in Cuba. “My father was a food wholesaler. In October of 1960, the warehouse was confiscated by Fidel Castro and ten days later, my parents decided we were leaving. By then almost a hundred thousand Cubans had come—mostly professionals, entrepreneurs, and white-collar workers who had lost their jobs or possessions.”
During the early days of the revolution, Cuban refugees in the United States and their American supporters thought that the state of affairs could not continue. Pérez Firmat remembers, “We believed that the Americans would never let a communist regime go on, so we were counting on them to get rid of Castro. We figured it would be any day now. And in fact, they did recruit Cubans to go in and fight—everybody in Miami knew the end was near and soon we would go home.”
Fidel was in power less than two years when an invasion force of fourteen hundred Cuban exiles, trained by the United States, attempted to land in the Bay of Pigs on the island’s south coast. In a stunning blow to American prestige, and a practical and propaganda victory for the Castro regime, the invasion was a disaster. The hope of heading home for thousands of Cubans in America burned for forty-eight hours and was dashed.
As sociologist Alejandro Portes notes, many of the exiles now understood they would be in the United States for a long time, but they had a lot of support as they made their transition. “Because of the Cold War, Cuban immigration was not just an event; it was a cause. Magazines like Time, Life, Newsweek, and Fortune celebrated the refugees’ courage, their love of freedom, their entrepreneurial spirit.
“Soon laws were bent to facilitate their entrance into the country, and once here they got a series of benefits that other immigrants didn’t get . . . with food stamps, free English courses, scholarships, cash—whatever they needed to get a head start.”
The door to the United States was now slammed shut for many divided families waiting in Florida for relatives to join them from Cuba. As sad as that was for adults, it was potentially devastating for the young Peter Pans. “What this meant was that a lot of the children who had come to Florida in Operation Pedro Pan would not reunite with their parents anytime soon,” Nena Torres remembers. “I was one of the lucky ones; first my mother and then my father had already managed to get to Florida. For them Florida became Neverland.”
Many people made up their minds to leave. It was not as simple as strolling over to a ticket office and getting on a plane. Luis Capo remembered the day he climbed into a boat with his brother Carlos and his father, Manuel, in 1966. “We sailed from Pinar del Río in western Cuba, escaped the island, literally, because leaving then was illegal. You could get shot. Your boat could be sunk. You could go to prison if they caught you.
“It was my father, and myself and another brother. Another one of my brothers was a political prisoner at the time. My mother and four of the younger siblings stayed behind as well. We arrived in Cozumel, then Mérida, then Mexico City; we were headed to the United States.”
By 1966, the United States and the Soviet Union squared off in the Cuban Missile Crisis, Fidel Castro had proclaimed Cuba a communist state, and the United States had been implementing an economic embargo for four years. Cuban society bumped along, bolstered by subsidies from the Soviet Union. When his boat made landfall in Texas, Capo learned Cubans were very different from other immigrants. “We jumped an eight-foot-tall fence. We got on a bus that took us to Louisiana, and there we were stopped by the authorities. They grilled us so hard, at one point my father nearly cried. But once they figured out that we were Cuban and not Mexican, they said to us, ‘Welcome to America.’”
The Capos were not thrown out because a very different legal structure had grown up around Cubans trying to get to the United States. It removed people escaping from the island from the maze of limits, restrictions, waiting periods, and visa requirements faced by others. Cubans did not have to use a regular port of entry. The possibility of becoming a public charge was not an impediment to entering the United States. Once in the country, Cubans could get legal residency and U.S. citizenship faster than citizens of other countries.
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AS THE 1960S wore on, some of the bloom came off the “heroic Cuban refugees” narrative that accompanied the first wave to south Florida. Frustration was well distributed. Men and women who had been doctors, accountants, and dentists back home could not get their Cuban or European credentials past state licensing boards in the United States and practice in their new hometowns. They did whatever jobs they could find, and their reduced status translated into reduced standards of living for their families. They worked as waiters, cabdrivers, stock clerks, and laborers.
By the end of the 1960s there were three hundred thousand Cubans living in Miami. In October 1965, Jack Kofoed, a columnist for the Miami Herald, wrote a column headlined “Miami Already Has Too Many Refugees.” “We’re up to our armpits with Cuban refugees,” he wrote. “Many have become good, solid members of the community, but others have become a drag, and a number have added to the criminal problem. As a whole, they impose burdens, financial and otherwise.” And it was about to get worse, Kofoed said. Castro had announced that anyone dissatisfied with the revolution could leave, and Kofoed wrote that that meant Castro was about to unload the old and infirm, and thousands of political prisoners, with the door to the United States held open by President Lyndon Johnson. Kofoed asked, “What’s to be done with them? How can they be absorbed? They will add to the unemployment and welfare problems.”
In a column a month later, Kofoed’s complaints went beyond the economic and political, echoing observations made by old-timers about generations of immigrants to the United States: “The average Miamian is not really concerned with the amount of tax money spent on refugees. He is about actions which seem quite normal to Cubans. These include playing TVs and radios at the highest possible pitch at all hours of the night, the tendency to gather in groups in the middle of sidewalks, talking loudly and refusing to move for passersby . . . bad driving and disregard of traffic signs and signals . . . crowding of three and four families in a one-family house, which in the long run is certain to turn any neighborhood into a slum.”
Kofoed reminds Cubans they came as guests of the American people, and were given money, food, and jobs. “As guests, you should try to adapt yourself to our way, not expect us to change to yours.” If Kofoed’s views were too far out of step with white Miami, there was little evidence of it in the Herald, whic
h ran his column for thirty-five years.
The expanding Cuban population was also upsetting the binary, black-white notions of race that had long prevailed in Florida, once a breakaway Confederate state with racially segregated public space. African-American residents seethed as dark-skinned Cubans attended white schools traditionally closed to them. One minister concluded, “The American Negro could solve the school integration problem by teaching his children to speak only Spanish.”
Pérez Firmat recalled that many Miami Cubans were unaware of the resentments swirling around them, or behaved as if they were. “We were in our own world. We didn’t really see how others think of us. We were too preoccupied with being Cuban and building in Miami our replica of the Havana we’d left behind.
“So much seemed unchanged—we ate the same foods; the same people that visited us in Cuba came to visit our house in Miami. But things were different—I didn’t have my own room; there were five of us in the Florida room.”
Anti-Castro organizing and plots did not end with the failure of the Bay of Pigs invasion. Miami remained awash in intrigue, in rumors of plots and dreams of plots to overthrow Castro so that the exiles could go home. The anti-Castro militant organization Alpha 66 was founded in Puerto Rico in 1961 for the express purpose of overthrowing the Castro regime. It was widely believed in exile circles that the Cuban government would not last.
When Carlos Capo arrived in Florida, his “welcome” from earlier refugees consisted of confident assurances that his boat journey to Texas had been a wasted effort. “They told us we should have stayed in Cuba—didn’t we know? Castro’s days were numbered; everyone ‘knew’ that Alpha 66 was about to overthrow Castro—and Cuban exiles would go home. So why bother coming here now? But we had made this journey and arrived safely and now we had to just go for it.”
The Capos made furniture before the Cuban Revolution. First, they went to work in a furniture factory. Then, says Luis Capo, they opened one of their own when they came to the United States. “We worked eight hours a day at the factory and then worked another eight- to ten-hour shift at our small furniture shop. Sometimes we slept no more than two or four hours a day. And everything in English, because that was 1966. Miami was not then what it is today.”
The Capos opened their first place with a small loan solicited through contacts. Carlos Capo noted that government help was a big turning point, in the form of a ten-thousand-dollar loan from the U.S. Small Business Administration. They named their store El Dorado, after the sailboat that carried them out of Cuba.
With the dreams of quickly overthrowing Castro fading, many professionals took the long road to American qualifications and got their licenses, often a lengthy process that involved not only English-language classes but heading back to colleges and grad schools to bridge Cuban credentials to American requirements.
Manuel Capo stands next to the delivery truck for the family furniture business in Havana. He would later sail to Mexico and make his way to the United States to start all over again. CREDIT: CAPO FAMILY
The Capo brothers named their Miami furniture store after El Dorado, the boat that brought them out of Cuba. CREDIT: CAPO FAMILY
In the national economic growth of the 1960s, and even during the slowdown and recessions of the 1970s, Cuban economic and political power in Florida grew. Like the Capos, other Cubans built their own enterprises, and rose in the corporate world to run enormous publicly traded enterprises, like Roberto Goizueta, who became chairman and CEO of the Coca-Cola Corporation in 1980, and Carlos Gutierrez, appointed CEO of the Kellogg Company in 1999 and later George W. Bush’s secretary of commerce.
Historian María Cristina García says the United States had never seen anything like it. “No immigrant community in U.S. history had gained so much economic and political power in the short time Cubans had. And all these gains were attained by not assimilating into the existing culture. In fact it is arguable that by remaining Cubans, and remaining focused on maintaining their heritage in the expectation of returning home, Cubans were able to succeed as they did.”
Pérez Firmat echoes that idea: “Cuban children, like me, grew up immensely proud of who we were, believing that our experience was special. Discrimination against us never changed that feeling.” Once the chance to return to Cuba was taken off the table, it can be argued that Cubans began to act less like refugees, and more like immigrants.
However, during these decades of success, a strong narrative of loss ran like an undercurrent to the Cuban story. It may be one of the most important differences between Cubans and other Latinos who came to the United States in the twentieth century. While family lore about coming to America from Puerto Rico or Mexico might begin with privation and the chance of something better in America, the Cuban family story begins with comfort, followed by privation in the new home. Significantly featured, especially in the stories told by older people, is a place that was better for them, one that was taken away.
The United States was impotent in getting it back for them, Pérez Firmat pointed out. “Each new president promised and didn’t deliver.” Over the years, the aging of the exile generation could be seen in Miami. “At some point, it became a very sad city. People kept dying—before going home. My father died in Miami, with his dream unfulfilled. Miami is not the city it is because of the people who live here—but because of the people who died here—because of the dreams that came to rest here.”
The disappointment could take the form of dark humor. An old joke featured in Ana Menéndez’s collection of stories is rooted in Cuban south Florida. A mutt on a Miami street ogles an elegant white poodle as she comes past. He tells her how beautiful she is, and tells her of the fancy dinners he would like to buy her, and the puppies he would like to have with her.
The poodle responds sniffily, “Do you have any idea who you’re talking to? I am a refined breed of considerable class and you are nothing but a short, insignificant mutt.”
“Pardon me, Your Highness,” Juanito the mangy dog says. “Here in America, I may be a short, insignificant mutt, but in Cuba I was a German shepherd.”
Looking at the Cuban experience, Alejandro Portes concludes that the accident of geography also played a role in Cuban success. “The Cuban experience in Miami is singular—unique among the immigrant experience of the twentieth century. Had Cubans gone to New York City, it would have been a very different story. New York was a much harsher environment. While it is considered the epitome of the melting pot—it is the toughest place for newcomers to survive, not to mention thrive.”
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AS CUBANS MADE fateful decisions to stay or go as the Castro regime hardened its grip on their island home, another Caribbean nation was in turmoil. The Dominican Republic, once dreamed of as a part of a Caribbean confederation with Cuba and Puerto Rico, had taken a very different path from its Spanish-speaking regional peers.
The Dominican Republic grew out of the first and oldest Spanish colony in the New World. Christopher Columbus established Spanish government on the island of Hispaniola in 1493, during his second voyage to the Caribbean.
Unlike other colonies in the region, with single administrations and a single national identity, Hispaniola was marked by the odd hybrid history created on the island. Spain and France fought for dominance as a profitable sugar plantation system was established, worked by slave labor. By the end of the eighteenth century, France established its hold on the western third of the island, and Spain on the eastern two-thirds.
What followed was a century of near-constant conflict pitting two empires and two colonies against each other on one small island. The Haitian Revolution created the first black republic in the world in the former French sector, and eventually Haiti made war on the Spanish-speaking sector, creating a country that briefly called itself the Republic of Spanish Haiti, uniting the island under a French-speaking government. Under Haitian law, whites could not own land, a
nd Spanish plantation families sought refuge in Cuba and Puerto Rico.
Spanish secessionists helped overthrow the Haitian dictator Jean-Pierre Boyer, then wrested back the eastern sector of the island and in 1844 created a Spanish-speaking republic. Haiti did not concede without more fighting, mounting repeated invasions of the new Dominican Republic. The Haitians were rebuffed, but rivalries within the Spanish-speaking political and military elite destabilized the country so much that it began shopping itself around to other powers for annexation. The United States was distracted by its own nervous breakdown, the American Civil War, the French were not interested, but in 1861 Spain returned for a third shot at colonial administration, only to be fought off once more. Rebels pushed Spain out again, and the modern Dominican Republic was established for good, in its final form, by 1865.
This unusual history set the table for some of the motifs of Dominican life for the next century and a half: a series of fragile and corrupt governments, a high degree of racial mixing, a high degree of racial consciousness, and a resentment of Haitians that bordered on paranoia.
The Dominican Republic of the mid-twentieth century saw the full realization of these traits. From 1930 to 1961, one man’s will shaped Dominican life, that of Rafael Leónidas Trujillo, who as a military man, politician, and unelected strongman typified the worst excesses of Latin American misrule.