Fidel Castro became an unwitting father of modern Miami: Here’s how he did it
Hear Raúl speak to Cubans about the death of Fidel Castro.
The Gateway to the Americas: That’s how Miami’s business and civic leaders would grandly if sporadically label the city in the middle of the last century. In reality, the slogan was wishful thinking, little more than the stuff of promotional brochures.
Contrary to the historic image as a sleepy tourist town that seems to hold sway today, Miami was at the time already a dynamic city, having grown dramatically after World War II. But it looked steadfastly north as it absorbed waves of New Yorkers, Midwesterners and Southerners, both white and Black, who were drawn to settle in Miami by — what else? — climate and opportunity.
Then came the Cuban Revolution.
Fidel Castro’s march to Havana at the head of an army of bearded revolutionaries in the early days of 1959 would turn out to be the single most consequential event in Miami’s short history. Over the next five decades, Castro’s increasingly repressive and eventually economically bankrupt regime would send successive new waves of enterprising Cuban refugees to Miami, transforming the fledgling metropolis into a true international city that looks both south and north, though likely in ways those civic leaders of the 1940s and ’50s never imagined.
It’s one of the ironies of history that the late Castro, the Cuban revolutionary hero-cum-tyrant who died at age 90 five years ago this week, was the unintending father of today’s Miami — a cosmopolitan, polyglot, multicultural global city that serves as an uber-capitalistic nexus of finance, trade and culture between the United States and
Latin America and the Caribbean.
It all goes back to the enclave centered on Little Havana and Calle Ocho that the first waves of Cuban exiles established in the 1960s, historians and sociologists who have studied the exodus say.
Mostly educated members of Cuba’s elite and middle classes, these largely disenfranchised exiles — with a substantial assist from a U.S. government eager to showcase the American system’s advantages over Cuba’s Communist regime — used their skills and experience to build local businesses, providing readymade employment for each group of new arrivals, before branching out into larger enterprises and banking and international trade. From that base, Cuban exiles would accomplish something almost unheard of, rising to a dominant political and economic power and reshaping a big U.S. city within a single generation.
It helped that the early exiles were what Florida International University sociologist Guillermo Grenier, himself a Cuban exile, calls “the right kind of immigrants” — overwhelmingly white and educated, many already familiar with Miami and the United States and its business mores — who arrived in massive numbers at a propitious time.
Immigration was opening up for non-Europeans, refugees from the Cold War were welcome, and starting in 1966 the Cuban Adjustment Act, an extensive refugee assistance program and generous federal small-business loans gave exiles a privileged immigration status and a marked economic leg up. The U.S. population and economy, meanwhile, were beginning a historic shift to the Sunbelt, and civil rights legislation barred discrimination against minorities, Grenier notes.
Miami, a developing city primed for growth and without a deeply entrenched elite, was fertile ground for a determined group of newcomers, he
said.
“Cubans didn’t so much make Miami as Miami was ready to be made,” Grenier said in an interview at the time of Castro’s death. “You had a perfect cauldron with this environment where immigrants with the characteristics of Cubans would have to mess up big time not to thrive. And we did thrive.”
By dint of sheer numbers, mostly controlled by Fidel Castro’s decision to open or shut the tap for Cubans looking to leave the island, the exiles were sure to change what was then known as Dade County, which had a population of just under one million. About 135,000 Cubans came just in the first two years after the Revolution, followed between 1965 and 1973 by 340,000 more on the twice-daily Freedom Flights, most of them members of Cuba’s middle and working classes.
The 1980 boatlift launched when Castro opened the port of Mariel to anyone wanting out of Cuba would later bring 125,000 others — for the first time including many Cubans who had grown up in Communist Cuba — in a matter of months. In the summer of 1994, after
Castro allowed 32,000 people to flee on rafts, a bilateral migration accord that ended the crisis reopened a steady flow until this day, with the U.S. government agreeing to grant a minimum of 20,000 visas to Cubans every year.
About 550,000 Cubans have received visas under the program since 1996, Grenier said. (That legal flow has been substantially slowed in recent years as the U.S. State Department pulled personnel from its Cuban embassy following a series of mysterious ailments whose cause has yet to be determined.)
Most of those refugees ended up in Miami, including many who initially settled in Puerto Rico, New Jersey or the numerous other accidental shores around the world where Cubans landed after exile.
“No matter how hard the U.S. government has tried to resettle Cubans elsewhere, they gravitate back to Miami,” said Silvia Pedraza, a Cuban-American sociologist at the University of Michigan who has written extensively about the Cuban exodus.
Today more than a third
of Miami-Dade’s population of around 2.7 million is either Cuban-born or of Cuban descent, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. Over the decades, Cubans have been joined in Miami by other political refugees and immigrants from around Latin America and the Caribbean, including Nicaraguans and Colombians, who found the Spanish-speaking culture hospitable and have also contributed significantly to the city’s internationalization.
But it was Cuban exiles who first established extensive business ties with the rest of the hemisphere, looking to diversify and expand their enterprises through trade and finance, Pedraza and other experts say. U.S. companies, too, recruited Cuban exiles with business experience — sometimes garnered while working for Americans in Cuba — to staff, run or expand operations in other Latin American countries.
The experience of Pedraza’s father is illustrative. Alfredo Pedraza, who had studied at MIT, worked for tire-maker B.F. Goodrich in Cuba, and after leaving the island