Cuban post-revolution exodus
The Cuban post-revolution exodus is the decades long continuous emigration of Cubans from the island of Cuba that has occurred since the conclusion of the Cuban Revolution in 1959. Throughout the exodus, it is estimated that more than 1 million Cubans emigrated within various emigration waves, due to political repression and disillusionment with life in Cuba.
The first wave of emigration occurred directly after the revolution, followed by the Freedom Flights from 1965 to 1973. This was followed by the 1980 Mariel boatlift and after 1994 the flight of balseros emigrating by raft. During the Cuban exile many refugees were granted special legal status by the US government, but these privileges began to be slowly removed in the 2010s by then-president Barack Obama.
The emigrants in the exodus known as "Cuban exiles" have come from various backgrounds in Cuban society, often reflected in the wave of emigration they participated in. Exiles have constructed Cuban communities that continue to preserve Cuban culture abroad, as well as garnering political influence outside Cuba. As of 2022, the majority of the 1,312,510 Cuban exiles living in the United States live in Florida, mainly in Miami-Dade County, where more than a third of the population is Cuban or of Cuban descent. Other exiles have relocated to form substantial Cuban communities in Texas, New Jersey, Nevada, California, New York , and Kentucky.
History
Golden exile and Bay of Pigs Invasion
Before the post-revolution exile around 50,000 Cuban Americans already resided in the United States. Immediately after the 1959 Cuban Revolution around 200,000 Cubans came to South Florida. Of these immigrants the initial wave were mostly collaborators in the recently toppled Batista regime, of the middle or upper class, and of European descent; subsequent waves were formed from Cubans of many different political opinions and backgrounds who opposed the increasingly authoritarian nature of Fidel Castro's rule. Many immigrants believed their exile was temporary since Castro would soon be toppled. Travel between the United States and Cuba was not heavily restricted even in the wake of the recent revolution. In 1960 Dwight D. Eisenhower established the Cuban Refugee Emergency Center which offered public services to Cuban emigrants. Many immigration restrictions were specifically waived for Cubans entering the United States.A few of these original Cuban exiles were involved in the 1961 Bay of Pigs Invasion which failed to topple Castro. After the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962 the Cuban government would restrict air traffic to the island, ending the first major wave of emigration.
Operation Peter Pan
To destabilize the communist government, the CIA and Cuban dissidents began warning of a project by the Castroist government to remove the parents' custody of their children to indoctrinate them. Between November 1960 and October 1962, over 14,000 children were sent to the U.S. by their parents in Operation Peter Pan. These children were taken under the care of the Catholic Church and placed in foster homes throughout the U.S. until they could be reunited with their parents. Their parents sent them into the U.S. in order to keep them from communist indoctrination, with many boys being sent to avoid getting drafted into the Cuban armed forces, and girls being put into the greatly politized Alphabetization Campaign.Camarioca boatlift
On 28 September 1965, Fidel Castro announced that Cubans wishing to emigrate could do so beginning 10 October from the Cuban port of Camarioca. The administration of U.S. President Johnson tried to control the numbers it would admit to the U.S. and set some parameters for their qualifications, preferring those claiming political persecution and those with family members in the U.S. In negotiations with the Cuban government it set a target of 3,000 to 4,000 people to be transported by air. Despite those diplomatic discussions, Cuban Americans brought small leisure boats from the United States to Camarioca. In the resulting Camarioca boatlift, about 160 boats transported about 5,000 refugees to Key West for immigration processing by U.S. officials. The Johnson administration made only modest efforts to enforce restrictions on this boat traffic. Castro closed the port with little notice on 15 November, stranding thousands. On 6 November, the Cuban and U.S. governments agreed on the details on an emigration airlift based on family reunification and without reference to those the U.S. characterized as political prisoners and whom the Cubans termed counter-revolutionaries. To deal with the crowds at Camarioca, the U.S. added a maritime component to the airborne evacuation. Both forms of transport started operating on 1 December.Freedom Flights
From December 1965 to early 1973, under the Johnson and Nixon administrations, twice daily "Freedom Flights" transported émigrés from Varadero Beach to Miami. The longest airlift of political refugees, it transported 265,297 Cubans to the United States with the help of religious and volunteer agencies. Flights were limited to immediate relatives and Cubans already in the United States with a waiting period anywhere from one to two years.Many who came through Camarioca and the Freedom Flights were much more racially diverse, of lower economic standing, and of more women compared to earlier emigration waves. This is mainly due to Castro's restriction not allowing skilled laborers to leave the country.
Rapprochement with Cuba
During the Carter administration various actions were taken to better relations between the United States and Cuba. In 1978 the first commercial flight in sixteen years would fly from Miami to Havana. The Cuban government would also allow the visit the Antonio Maceo Brigade, the first visit of Cuban exiles to the island. Many Cuban exile organizations would protest the warming of relations with Cuba while some other organizations supported increased diplomacy.Discreet discussions between the United States and Cuba resulted in an agreement to release thousands of political prisoners in August 1978. At the time of the release Jimmy Carter did not want to publicly acknowledge his role in the negotiations. The Cuban government decided to open negotiations with Cuban exiles to better public relations. Originally many Cuban exiles debated the dialogue's usefulness some were satisfied with the invitation while others doubted the sincerity of the negotiations believing it to be a publicity stunt. The Cuban government would eventually state that no prisoners would be released until negotiations took place. Eventually the Comite de los 75 would be formed of prominent Cuban exiles and led by Bernardo Benes, they would be the official negotiators with the Cuban government.
Mariel boatlift
Between 26 April and 1 October 1980, during the Carter administration, probably one of the most significant waves of exiles occurred during what became known as the Mariel Boatlift. The mass boatlift occurred after a number of Cubans drove a bus through the gates of the Havana Peruvian Embassy and requested asylum. One embassy guard died as a result of friendly fire when another guard machine gunned the incoming bus and hit the first one accidentally. When the Peruvian ambassador refused to return the exiled citizens to the authorities, Castro removed the Cuban guards from the embassy, basically opening the door to the 4,000 plus asylum seekers that came into the embassy within the next few days. Reacting to this sudden exodus, Castro stated, "Anyone who wants to leave Cuba can do so" and declared that those who were leaving the country were "escoria".This resulted in an even larger exodus through the port of Mariel, where an improvised flotilla of Cuban exiles from Miami in small pleasure boats and commercial shrimping vessels brought Cuban citizens who wished to leave the island. Within weeks, 125,000 Cubans reached the United States despite Coast Guard attempts to prevent boats from leaving U.S. waters for Cuba. As the exodus became international news and an embarrassment for the Cuban government, Castro emptied his hospitals and had prison inmates rounded up as "social undesirables", and included them among the other refugees. The Cuban Communist Party staged meetings at the homes of those known to be leaving the country. People were intimidated by these "repudiation meetings", where the participants screamed obscenities and defiled the facades of the homes, throwing eggs and garbage, for hours. Labeled as "traitors to the revolution", those who declared their wish to leave became the targeted victims of the attacks, their rationing cards were taken from them, their jobs were terminated, or they were expelled from schools or universities. Towards the end of the crisis, the repudiation meetings were ended. The scale of the exodus created political difficulties for the Cuban government, and an agreement was reached to end the boatlift after several months. Out of more than 125,000 refugees, a number from as low as 7,500 to as high as 40,000 were believed to have criminal records in Cuba, though many of their crimes would not qualify as crimes under U.S. law. Some 1,774 of the refugees were classified as serious or violent criminals under U.S. law and denied citizenship on that basis. The majority of refugees were young adult males, 20 to 34 years of age, from the working class: skilled craftsmen, semi-skilled tradesmen, and unskilled laborers.
In response the aftermath of the Mariel Boatlift, the City of Miami formed the East Little Havana Task Force in 1983. Task Force members were appointed by the Miami City Commission and it was chaired by urban planner and Cuban community leader Jesús Permuy. It was tasked with studying the social and economic effects of the boatlift, particularly in Little Havana, which was an epicenter of the migration. The Task Force adjourned a year later and submitted its findings and official recommendations, called The East Little Havana Redevelopment Plan, to the Miami City Commission and Mayor's Office in 1984. Also in 1984, the United States and Cuba negotiated an agreement to resume normal immigration and to return to Cuba those persons who had arrived during the boatlift who were "excludable" under U.S. law.
Many members of the Mariel boatlift were met with suspicion by the Cuban American community already living in the United States. One reason for this was the LGBTQ associations with the exile movement were met with hostility by the portion of the American public that was anti-LGBTQ and they worried that it would worsen their position in the United States. Along similar reasoning, there was concern about the alleged criminal nature of the so-called Marielitos, because of Cuba's dispersion of social undesirables into the exile population.