In January 2017, in one of his last acts in office, President Barack Obama brought to an end a series of measures granting Cuban migrants privileged status relative to other would-be entrants to the United States. Free from needing the votes of Cuban Americans and committed to a wider effort to shake up US policy toward Cuba, Obama's reform to immigration policy altered the American government's decades-long treatment of Cuban migrants. In this book, Susan Eva Eckstein provides a timely and authoritative look at Cubans’ privileged place in US immigration policy.
Author of the earlier The Immigrant Divide: How Cuban Americans Changed the US and Their Homeland (New York: Routledge, 2009), Eckstein draws on archival records, interviews, government reports, and survey data and deftly moves between both international relations and domestic matters and between high-level policymaking and the experiences of individual migrants. The result is a holistic treatment of her topic. And it is an important topic: for decades, Cubans were accorded special status over other immigrants (particularly those from Latin America and the Caribbean), becoming among the largest diasporic groups in the United States, with considerable political pull in Florida, a key battleground state in US presidential politics.
As Eckstein shows, Cubans have often been privileged at the expense of other immigrants by being overrepresented in the taking up of slots accorded for entry into the United States. Cubans have even been privileged over native-born US Americans because of special university funding, job training programs, and job placement services. Indeed, she contrasts the treatment of Cuban migrants with those from Haiti, pointing to racial differences as a reason for differing responses on the part of US officials (though, here, one wishes she had given more attention to Afro-Cuban migration into the United States).
Yet, US Americans’ favorable response to Cuban migration is rooted not only in racial attitudes, but also in the wider clash between the United States and the revolutionary government that came to power in 1959. In response to Fidel Castro's many social and economic reforms and increasing alignment with the Soviet Union, tens of thousands of Cubans (primarily, at first, from the upper and middle classes) voted with their feet and headed north. The administrations of Dwight Eisenhower and John F. Kennedy welcomed these émigrés in the hopes of, first, undermining the revolutionary government via a brain drain, and, second, showcasing the United States as a land accepting of refugees fleeing communism. Moreover, these administrations used Cuban exiles in covert operations targeting Cuba, most famously the Bay of Pigs (or Playa Girón) invasion in April 1961. The broader issue, as Eckstein stresses, is that the Eisenhower and Kennedy administrations accorded Cubans a privileged immigration status, one that their successors largely continued to enjoy, in what she labels a “chain of privileging” (xx). As she shows, once the Cold War and the anticommunist motivations behind this policy had largely ended, the policy continued only because of domestic politics, namely the power of Cuban American voters.
With a transnational focus, Eckstein makes the important point that US policy-makers and legislators were not acting in a vacuum. Rather, they were often forced to respond to actions of individual Cubans—acting collectively through a sheer force of numbers or via diasporic ties—as well as the revolutionary government, which used outmigration as a pressure valve and was often able to force the United States to accept migrants. Overall, this volume is an important addition to the study of US-Cuba relations.
