The “Cuban takeover” of Miami’s mind

By Max J. Castro

I used to get upset when Anglos spoke about “how the Cubans have taken over Miami.” Not today.

Let me explain. Twenty or 30 years ago, the thesis of a “Cuban takeover” almost always had a racist under text, and a good dose of bitterness as well. It was embedded in a narrative which assumed that the natural and right order of things was for White Anglos-Saxons Protestants (WASPs) to always and forever dominate society as a whole and every field of endeavor within it, from academics and business to government and politics to undertaking and zoology.

And especially in language, which – along with the mass immigration of a supposedly new and even more threatening type of Cubans (the Marielitos) became the crucible for a whole spectrum of Anglo frustrations and resentments. It was the time of the overwhelming approval of an “English-only” law in what was then Dade County, today Miami-Dade County, of the late radio provocateur Neil Rogers’s SOS, Save our South Florida [from the Cubans] campaign, and the bumper stickers that read “will the last American to leave please take the flag.

Foreigners, especially “the Latin race,” for centuries had been seen, through the lens of a significant strand of Anglo-American ethnocentric ideology, as being – to appropriate the title and the idea behind Lars Schoultz’s magnificent history of two-hundred years of U.S. policy toward Latin America – “beneath the United States.” From the defeat of the Spanish Armada and the rise of “the empire on which the sun never set” to Manifest Destiny (a “lite,” avant la lettre[1] North American version of Hitler’s Lebensraum[2]) and the theft of half of Mexico, the people “south of the border” (or south of the Pyrenees) were often looked upon as the benighted children of a lesser god.

Accordingly, their brethren who crossed the border as immigrants were saddled with pejoratives, such as “greaser” and “spic,” but more importantly they were relegated to the lowest jobs in the social scale, from farm worker to dishwasher. It did not turn out exactly this way in Miami. That has caused considerable heartburn to many Anglos, to my undying satisfaction.

To be sure, Cubans were never subjected to the level of discrimination suffered by Mexicans and Puerto Ricans. Over the years, the U.S. government offered Cubans – our Cold War allies after all and still our allies in the last incredibly long Cold War – many benefits that it did not provide most other immigrants, a policy represented today, among other things, by the wet/feet-dry feet policy.

Yet the welcome mat of the American state, down to the level of the local school system which created the nation’s first bilingual school in Miami in order to accommodate Cuban children and teachers, was not complemented by a great popular love for the Cubans or appreciation for their culture, a fact that can be easily ascertained by attending the yearly Calle Ocho festival, a massive twenty-blocks-long party thought up by Cuban yuppies in the Kiwanis Club, in the naïve belief that it could serve as a showcase for Anglos, who would thereby realize and appreciate Cuban achievements and culture. Today, you need sharp eyes indeed to spot an Anglo face among the hundreds of thousands of Latinos, mostly young, non-Cuban Latinos. Anglo (and to a lesser degree Black) prejudice toward and alienation from Cubans has never gone away, although many of the most prejudiced did move away.

Yet for many years my take on the question of the “Cuban takeover” has been evolving.” The product of that evolution can be gleaned from a book I co-authored a few years ago with Alex Stepick, Guillermo Grenier, and Marvin Dunn – “This Land Is our Land: Immigrants and Power in Miami” – as well as in numerous other writings.

The bottom line is that I think that now we can properly speak of a Cuban takeover – although for reasons wholly alien to the mindset of the xenophobic crowd. More than a wholesale Cuban takeover, it is a takeover mainly by one social sector of the Cuban diaspora – the 1960s-vintage Cuban exiles (el exilio histórico) and their loyal offspring – and especially of a mentality, the hard-line, exile mentality, that has remained virtually unchanged for five decades. It is a takeover that has sunk deep roots in key “Anglo” institutions, such as the media and academia, which shape the community’s view of the world.

What has brought this reality to mind lately is the way our local flagship newspaper(s), have covered the 50th anniversary of the Bay of Pigs Invasion. The first item I noticed appeared in the Miami Herald’s “Around South Florida” section under the title “Newspapers honor Bay of Pigs veterans.” My impish vein made me immediately wonder, did French newspapers ever honor Waterloo veterans? Did French men and women pause to remember their country’s greatest military disaster?

Along with the announcement of a special section of the obituary section set aside for all Bay of Pig veterans who have died since 1961 [even if they died after being struck by a truck driven by a Cuban driver in Hialeah], the brief article adds that the paper(s) will “unveil” a three-day [front page] series of articles on the weekend.

On April 15 [print edition], the first day of the series, under the byline of Juan O. Tamayo, a respectable and fair journalist, an article appeared misleadingly entitled “How a Group of Cuban exiles set out to topple Fidel Castro.”

One can say that José Martí set out from the Dominican Republic to join other fighters struggling to topple the Spanish colonial government, and that he died trying. That is not, in any sense, the story of the Bay of Pigs.

The plot to topple Fidel Castro began with a memo signed by President Dwight W. Eisenhower in March 1960 ordering a program to change the Cuban government through means that would conceal or obscure U.S. involvement as much as possible.

This ruse was necessary, among other reasons, because an American attack on Cuba would have been a war of aggression, a serious war crime under the rules established at Nuremberg. It was a fatal ruse because, the generalized myth that “air cover” would have secured an exile victory notwithstanding, toppling Fidel Castro in 1961 would have required a full-scale attack by the United States Armed Forces, including ground troops.

Considerations of space, the translator’s endurance, and the readers’ patience prevent me from enumerating the many other distortions contained in this series. Let me then leave you with just one of the most pervasive, not only in the Herald(s) account but throughout the U.S. media: calling the invasion a “CIA-backed operation.”

The fact is that the invasion was not just “backed by the CIA.” It was conceived, financed, organized, planned, armed, and trained by the U.S. government, which also pressured Central American leaders to provide training and operational sanctuaries and handpicked Brigade 2506 military and civilian leaders, the latter “leaders” being detained against their will incommunicado by the CIA while the invasion was taking place.

Let the CIA take its lumps; it deserves them. But the CIA’s role was not that of a rogue agency. It came into play only because, in 1961 and to a significant extent today, it is the agency tasked with carrying out those operations of the U.S. government which are not only clandestine but also illegal, such as the Bay of Pigs invasion and water boarding.

[1] Avant la lettre, from the French, before the letter, in effect before a given name, entity, or concept existed.

[2] Lebensraum, from the German, literally living space, the Nazis considered it the territory necessary for national existence and self sufficiency; Aryans being the supreme race, Germans were naturally entitled to take the territory they needed from lesser races, like the Slavs or the French.