The devil’s cauldron
There was a time when Florida was governed from Havana, but indigenous resistance, pirate attacks, and the harsh environment made its management almost impossible. Although it is said that the first Spanish exploration of the peninsula, organized by Juan Ponce de León in 1513, was hoping to find the Fountain of Eternal Youth, what was actually discovered was “the devil’s cauldron,” a place that has been a challenge to civility.
The first Spanish settlements were established on the northeast coast of the state. The town of St. Augustine, for many years just a hamlet with a wooden fortress, was founded in 1565, with the purpose of contributing to the defense of the Spanish fleet, loaded on its return to Spain with treasures stolen from the Americas. However, it was frequently attacked by the British and pirates, who several times burned down the town and killed the fortune seekers who lived there. In 1763, after a year of English occupation in Havana, Spain and England exchanged cities: Florida passed into British hands. It seemed like a bad deal, but the English could not hold the square surrounded by enemies and were interested in preventing the Florida territory from serving as a refuge for black slaves who had escaped from southern plantations. The peninsula was recovered by the Spanish in 1783, to become what John Quincy Adams called “a desert open to occupation by any enemy, civilized or savage, of the United States.” Until Spain decided to get rid of the problem and sold the enormous territory for only five million dollars.
Although it was not until March 1845, when Florida became the 27th state of the Union, in 1821 it was declared an “organized territory of the United States,” its current geographic boundaries were set, and the capital was established in Tallahassee. Thus “the last frontier” was established towards the southeast of the U.S. territory. Many who had failed elsewhere made their way to Florida.
Since southern Florida was nothing more than a vast swamp, only indigenous people displaced from their territories, or runaway slaves originally settled in the area. However, on these muddy lands, which some scientists consider ecologically unsustainable, one of the most famous places for luxury and pleasure in the world was built: the city of Miami.
Miami takes its name from the Mayaimi Indians and means “sweet water”, perhaps due to the river that runs through it and its location on the coast, between the immense wetlands of the Everglades and the Atlantic Ocean. Although the existence of aboriginal communities in the region has been recorded for thousands of years, the founding of the city had to wait until 1896, with the arrival of the railroad to the area. It was finally designated as the capital of Dade County -now Miami-Dade- founded in 1836, in honor of Major Francis L. Dade, victim of a “massacre” carried out by the Seminole Indians a year earlier.
The arrival of very diverse people, including investors, scoundrels, soldiers, retirees, sailors, farmers, formerly enslaved, and Bahamian blacks… was shaping the “Sunshine State,” as some like to Florida. In the 1920s, driven by financial speculation, urban development had a remarkable development. These were the times when Miami wanted to look like Havana and the wood of colonial houses, demolished to make way for Cuban ‘modernity,’ was used for the construction of lavish Miami mansions, inhabited by millionaires and celebrities. Even Al Capone, the boss of bosses, decided to buy a home and left his bones in the city.
In 1926, a hurricane, which also caused enormous damage in Cuba, killed 200 people, left 25,000 homeless, and presaged the general crisis of capitalism by three years, which generated an economic depression from which Miami did not recover until the beginning of the Second World War, when it was considered a strategic point for tracking German submarines.
Since 1915, Miami and Havana were linked by a ferry service, which became one of the main connections between Cuba and the United States. Seeking protection and opportunities, Miami was a frequent destination for well- and ill-gotten Cuban capital, students and workers looking for work, disgraced politicians and revolutionaries on the run, and even for Cuban middle-class tourism, which flocked to Miami’s beaches in the summer, seeking the “cold” of the first air conditioners. It is no coincidence that the remains of several former Cuban presidents rest in one of the city’s cemeteries. The mafia of both countries also participated in the exchange, either to introduce Cuban rums during the years of Prohibition in the United States or, later, in drug trafficking, the promotion of gambling and prostitution, which reached levels of “official association” with the Cuban government, before the revolutionary triumph in 1959. When in 1950 a commission created to combat organized crime, chaired by Senator Estes Kefauver, announced the cities where the link between crime, business and politics dominated local life, Miami occupied a prominent place on the list, and the mobsters on trial were the same ones that had dominated Cuban life for two decades.
The triumph of the Cuban Revolution added new tensions to the daily life of the Florida seaside resort. Almost all of the Cuban ‘aristocracy’ decided to spend the revolutionary turmoil resting in Miami, where they had funds and investments. They arrived accompanied by their closest periphery, a good part of the upper middle class, educated, decent and hard-working people, who at first did not have a good time, but still counted on the fact that “the Yankees would soon fix the problem.” The so-called “historical exile” also carried a significant quota of criminals from all eras, front men and henchmen of the Batista regime, who landed in the city, seeking to do what they knew how to do and what was done in Miami.
When Kennedy approved the Bay of Pigs invasion, he also did so to prevent that mass of men armed and trained by the CIA from being left adrift in American territory. But he could not prevent it and — violating American laws — he created in Miami the largest CIA station in the world, whose exclusive purpose was to control the created monster and put it to work in the war against Cuba. Among its tasks was to establish ties with the American mafia, to assassinate Fidel Castro. In Miami, the social and operational base that the counterrevolution had not been able to develop in Cuban territory was built, and the city became the capital of the Latin American extreme right. With the contribution of the Cubans, it developed into one of the main tourist centers in the world, an international financial emporium and the center of commercial relations between the United States and Latin America, but the original source of this development was the extraordinary assistance that Cuban immigrants received from the U.S. government, the money from the CIA for the war against Cuba, and the role that Miami began to play in international drug trafficking, starting in the 1970s.
It was not long before some of these people, with the advantages offered by their links with the CIA and other agencies of the American establishment, became integrated into the economic and political life of the city, until they became the ‘dominant class’ of the Cuban community. Others would lend themselves to other tasks and gave shape to one of the largest terrorist networks in the world, with its main sanctuary in Miami.
The Cuban community itself has been targeted by these groups and Miami has become a “war zone” when the right wing’s dominance has been threatened. Many Cuban-Americans, today ‘respectable’ figures in American political life, have grown up – and to a large extent depend on – this machinery of terror and corruption that governs Miami. U.S. politicians know this and have sold their souls to the devil that inhabits the cauldron.
Miami is the preferred destination for people who emigrate from Cuba and many remain in the city, giving rise to the “Cuban-American enclave.” There they find the support of an ethnic structure that offers them employment opportunities and social integration that are not common elsewhere. Their goal is to improve their living conditions and they are distinguished by being hard-working and honest, they are interested in their relatives in Cuba and, in the majority, they support policies that facilitate these contacts. However, once in Miami, it is difficult to avoid ‘being cooked in this diabolical cauldron,’ which tends to turn them into something else.
In the history of Cuba, conservative political tendencies have had little popular support. Before independence, conservatism was associated with Spanish colonialism and even the non-revolutionary Creole sectors identified themselves mostly with the liberal ideals of the time. In the republican period, before 1959, the sectors that served neocolonialism liked to call themselves “revolutionaries,” to conform to popular thought. Even the dictator Fulgencio Batista created a party that called itself socialist, although it was far from being it. Many emigrants were formed under the influence of a progressive thought that far predates the Cuban Revolution.
Where does the extreme conservatism that distinguishes the majority of the Cuban-American community come from?
Without a doubt, it has to do with the composition of the first emigrants, representatives of the classes displaced from power in Cuba, subjects of a very widespread popular rejection, allergic to everything that gives off ‘leftist odors’ and depositaries of very hostile feelings towards the Cuban government, partly as a result of the circumstances in which the migration occurred and the treatment received before emigrating. In addition, it was mostly the emigration of entire families, who left few emotional contacts in the country. It also has to do with the formation of the counterrevolutionary leadership, whose proposals were so reactionary that they frightened the Kennedy-style technocrats, who were busy designing an “alliance for progress” to stop the Latin American revolutionary movement. Against the grain of the CIA, which did not believe in “Fidelistas without Fidel,” they tried unsuccessfully to change the face of the counterrevolutionary movement, but an extreme right prevailed, taking over the leadership of the Cuban community and imposing its ideological patterns on the new immigrants.
However, more than anything, it is a conservatism acquired in existential contact with American society, particularly in Miami, geographically at the bottom of the deep south, where the most conservative attitudes of American society are incubated. Only this explains the preponderance of an extreme right-wing fanaticism alien to Cuban traditions, the support for policies that harm the very relatives they claim to love, and even the levels of racism and xenophobia, foreign to his or her life experiences in Cuba.
A friend told me how his grandson, raised in one of the multiracial neighborhoods of Havana, had learned to hate everything that was not white during his life in Miami. It could be argued, not without reason, that these are also prejudices that have been latent in Cuban society, as a result of the racism inherited from slavery, but the ideal environment for these ideas to reappear with renewed vigor and for them to be expressed with absolute shamelessness has been part of a Miami society, where they have become the dominant culture.
Ultraconservative attitudes find fertile ground in the new Cuban immigrants as a result of the existential conflict that every migratory act implies, no matter the cause, and the scenario of political confrontation that exists between Cuba and the United States. It is not easy for people whose main goal is to ‘be accepted’ in their new social environment to evade the pressures that, by good and bad means, seek to turn them into “exiles,” even if they have left the country with a valid passport and permission to return whenever they wish.
Regardless of their disagreement with the Cuban revolutionary process, it is not easy to leave their homeland to live in “the land of the historic enemy of the Cuban nation,” as they were taught in school, without rationalizing this decision with the conviction that “they have escaped from the Cuban socialist hell,” which they paradoxically remember with nostalgia and want to visit at the first opportunity.
It is worth saying that the process described is not always followed. According to various investigations, around a third of immigrants and their descendants have managed to overcome these influences and adopt positions that, both in aspects of domestic policy and in the field of relations with Cuba, distance themselves from the most reactionary attitudes.
Although Miami is moving to the right with considerable enthusiasm… A trend as dangerous for the inhabitants of the city as soil erosion, the pollution of canals, storm surges and rising sea levels, which — some geographers believe — will end up sinking it in its own waters.
