Table of Contents

1. Political disaffection: Cuba's revolution and exodus; Part I. For and Against the Republic, For and Against the Revolution: the Cuban Exodus of 1959–1962 and 1965–1974: 2. The revolution defines itself: democracy; humanism; 3. The revolution deepens: nationalism, church vs. state; 4. The revolution redefines itself: socialism, Marxism-Leninism; 5. The revolution consolidated: old vs. new communists; political prisoners; the dialogue; Part II. The Children of Communism: the Cuban Exodus of 1980 and 1985–2004: 6. Los Marielitos of 1980: race, class, gender, and sexuality; 7. After the Soviet collapse: the Balsero crisis; 8. The last wave: political or economic immigrants?; Part III. Civil Society Returns: 9. The church and the rebirth of civil society; 10. Democratization and migration: the exodus and the development of civil society; 11. The impossible triangle: Cuba, the United States, and the exiles.

Promotional Information

This book explains the political disaffection of Cuban refugees.

About the Author

Silvia Pedraza is Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of Michigan. She is the author of Political and Economic Migrants in America: Cubans and Mexicans (1985) and the co-editor of Origins and Destinies: Immigration, Race, and Ethnicity in America (1996, with Ruben G. Rumbaut). She has also published articles in such journals as Social Science History and the Annual Review of Sociology. A child of the Cuban refugee exodus, she lived through both a dictatorship and a revolution, which left an indelible mark on her research.

Reviews

"Pedraza superbly traces how changes in Cuba under Castro generated new emigration waves with different backgrounds, concerns, and mentalities. Based on the Cuban experience, she calls for differentiating the refugee from the immigrant experience." Susan Eckstein, Boston University, and former President of the Latin American Studies Association "Pedraza captures the complex characteristics, and ideologies of Cuban migrants/refugees. Using a sensitive ethnography and her own migration experience, Pedraza moves beyond the simply one size fits all theoretical understanding of Cuban refugees and tells a story with nuance, methodological rigor and sensitivity of how changing interactions with Cuban state have driven waves of migration." Mark Sawyer, University of California, Los Angeles, and Author, Racial Politics in Post-Revolutionary Cuba "Silvia Pedraza has accomplished what few social scientists have: to seamlessly weave the macro and the micro, the structural and the personal, the conceptual and the empirical. The result is a textured portrait of the many faces of the Cuban diaspora over the last five decades." Damian Fernandez, Flordia International University "Drawing on in-depth interviews with 120 Cuban exiles and on ethnographic observations in exile communities in the U.S., Silvia Pedraza weaves together an illuminating account of not only the political and economic disaffection of those who exited but also how their motives and experiences varied across four waves of immigration from 1959 to 2004. In doing so, Pedraza has crafted a book that constitutes an important contribution to the still evolving literature on Cuba's revolution and its exiles and on immigration more generally." David Snow, University of California, Irvine