Silvia Pedraza, one of the foremost experts on Cuban migration to the United States, has written this new book based on 120 in-depth interviews with exiles who left the island in different time periods across the 50 years since Fidel Castro came to power in 1959. Her aim is to “capture the process of political disaffection—the disappointment and sense of betrayal” that produced four waves of migrants totaling more than a million people (p. 1). She refers to these waves as different “vintages” of migrant because they came from different socioeconomic backgrounds and age cohorts, had different life experiences under the revolution, and went through different processes of disaffection (p. 3). This differentiation has ongoing implications, because we know from polls conducted by Florida International University's Institute for Public Opinion Research that migrants who came later have much different attitudes toward their homeland and U.S. policy than those who came earlier.

Most studies of Cuban immigrants focus either on how well they have done economically or on the political power that the Cuban-American community developed in the 1980s and 1990s and its consequent sway over U.S. policy toward the island. Pedraza's book is one of the few studies that looks at the complex motives that led Cubans to abandon their homeland for the United States. For anyone interested in politics in Cuba or in Miami, it is essential reading.

The first wave of immigrants came largely from Cuba's upper and upper-middle class. Some had been supporters of the old regime, others backed the insurrection, but all opposed the revolution's socialist trajectory between 1959 and 1962, and many were directly harmed by the nationalization of the economy. As one of Pedraza's respondent's put it, his disaffection resulted from “their taking everything that was mine” (p. 71). As a group, these exiles were better educated, more urban, more Catholic, wealthier, and whiter than the Cuban population. The second wave began with a migration crisis in 1965 and evolved into an air bridge—“Freedom Flights”—that lasted until 1974. Pedraza calls this group Cuba's petite bourgeoisie because it was made up of disproportionately small business owners, service workers, and skilled blue collar workers. Their motives for leaving appear somewhat more economic than the first wave's. They departed during tough economic times, and many were owners of the 55,000 small businesses that the government nationalized in 1968.

The third wave landed in 1980 during the Mariel boat-lift, brought to the United States illegally in a flotilla of Cuban-American small boats. As Pedraza notes, these exiles were markedly different from their predecessors: they represented more of a socioeconomic cross-section of the island, a larger proportion were Afro-Cubans, and they were predominantly young people who had come of age since 1959. Most analysts regarded their motives as principally economic since the migration was preceded by a sharp downturn in the Cuban economy and by a sense of economic envy fostered by the return to the island of Cuban-American visitors bearing gifts in 1978–79.

The fourth wave commenced in 1994 with the balsero (rafters) crisis, when tens of thousands of Cubans climbed on flimsy homemade rafts to attempt the perilous journey across the Florida Strait. This wave is ongoing, since the migration crisis was resolved by a migration agreement between Cuba and the United States that provides for 20,000 Cubans annually to emigrate legally. The balseros, like the Marielitos before them, looked more like the Cuban population as a whole, and their motives are usually described as principally economic.

After providing the broad demographics of these waves, Pedraza turns to her main task: exploring in depth the “disconfirmation experiences” (p. 17) that led her subjects—some of whom had been avid supporters of the revolution—to lose faith and leave. She weaves together the personal stories of her subjects with a narrative history of the revolution's development, a strategy that is essential for understanding the context in which the disaffection of her subjects develops but at the same time carries risks. Readers unfamiliar with Cuban politics may have a difficult time distinguishing between the history of the period as seen through the objective lens Pedraza tries to provide and its history as seen through the eyes of her disaffected subjects. Although she spoke informally with many Cubans still on the island, they were not interviewed formally and their experience is not the focus of the book, and so their voice, which might have balanced the voice of the disaffected, is muted.

Pedraza's subjects do not have perfect memories, and as a result some factual errors creep into the narrative through their accounts. One relates how he was horrified by the “massive killings Castro ordered in a stadium,” creating the bloodlust of a Roman circus (p. 10). In actuality, among the trials of Fulgencio Batista's henchman conducted in the early months of 1959, only one was held in the stadium, and while the defendants were condemned to death, they were executed in private at the prison. A political prisoner released in 1996 calls on people not to forget the “thousands” of remaining political prisoners, when in fact, by the late 1990s, the number of political prisoners was in the hundreds, not thousands (p. 138).

Pedraza's central point, emphasized repeatedly, is that the categorization of different exile waves as either politically motivated or economically motivated is too simple. For all of them, politics and economics were “deeply intertwined” (p. 185). The political motives of the early waves intersected with the fact that the revolution attacked their economic interests by redistributing income from rich to poor and expropriating private enterprise. The economic motives of the later waves correlated with political disaffection because the state's management of the economy was ultimately responsible for their hardship. This may go a bit too far in blurring the differences. Pedraza is no doubt right that multiple and complex motives characterized each wave, but nevertheless, it does seem that the relative weight of political and economic motives changed significantly over time.

An early study of why exiles left the island (Richard R. Fagen, Ricahrd A. Brody, and Thomas J. O'Leary, Cubans in Exile: Disaffection and the Revolution, 1968) looked just at the first wave and found that the overwhelming majority (77%) left for explicitly political reasons, whereas only 7% left for economic ones (p. 90). A study by Susan Eckstein and Lorena Barberia (“Grounding Immigrant Generations in History: Cuban Americans and Their Transnational Ties,” International Migration Review (Vol. 3, Fall 2002): 799–837) found a shift in motives among later immigrants. Their description of the class character of the different waves mirrors Pedraza's, and they echo her argument that each wave had different life experiences on the island. But they conclude, also based on interviews, that while motives across all the waves were complex, political motives clearly predominated in the early years and economic ones predominated later. Cubans themselves refer to some later migrants as pancistas—literally, “followers of bread”—whose reason for leaving was little different from that of Mexican or Dominican migrants. The fact that more recent Cuban migrants maintain family ties on the island and hold less hardline attitudes about U.S. policy than their predecessors also suggests that their political animosity is less intense.

Pedraza concludes with a chapter on the triangular relationship among Cuba, the exile community, and the United States. The community's political might prevents the United States from developing a more constructive relationship with the Cuban government, a point that has been evident since the rise of the Cuban American National Foundation in the 1980s. Less well understood is how this triangle of conflict makes it difficult for the Cuban-American community to be fully integrated into the political culture of the United States. Early arrivals rejected integration because they expected to return triumphant to Cuba in short order. Over time, they created a culture of exile (rather than of immigration), maintaining their separateness and initiating new arrivals into it (however imperfectly). Pedraza ends on a sad note, seeing little prospect of significant change in Cuba, little chance for a significant shift in U.S. policy, and hence little hope that Cuban Americans will become truly “at home” in their new home anytime soon.