By Jesús Arboleya on Dec 14, 2022
It is not strange that one or another intellectual endeavor or artistic production provoke violent reactions among extremists of the Cuban-American community in Miami. In that city, works by renowned Cuban painters have been destroyed, books burned in piles, or musical performances canceled due to the threat of terrorist attacks — and from time to time a bulldozer crushes records in the street by an artist disowned for his political positions.
This time the uproar was caused by a book, where things are written that the Cuban-American right does not want to hear.
“Cuban Privilege: The Making of Immigrant Inequality in America,” written by Dr. Susan Eckstein, professor of sociology at Boston University, in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and currently president of the Latin American Studies Association (LASA). She is also a specialist on immigration issues. Dr. Eckstein has dedicated several of her works to studying Cuban immigration in the U.S. Her sin has been to demonstrate, based on a rigorous historical investigation, that the majority of Cuban immigrants are neither exiles nor refugees, but have been treated as such and subject to exceptional privileges due to the interests that have guided United States-Cuba policy.
This is not even a new debate. No serious study of the Cuban migratory phenomenon since the revolutionary triumph of 1959 has failed to recognize the weight of the political factor in the special treatment that these immigrants have received in the U.S. and the interested distortions that revolve around their characteristics. A fairly basic piece of information is enough to confirm the results of Eckstein’s investigations: the vast majority of these immigrants have traveled to the U.S. under agreements between the two countries; they have emigrated from Cuba legally and since 1979 can visit the country whenever they want.
The inquisitive operation against Eckstein was initiated by Kevin Marino Cabrera, a newly-elected, Trump-supporting county commissioner who worked as Florida State Director for Donald J. Trump for President and the Republican National Committee, who admitted to not having read the book. The local press joined the lynching and the “living forces,” as civil society was called in Cuba in times of the neo-colony, demanded that Florida International University (FIU) cancel the presentation of the book. The president of the institution did not give in to such a demand, but sought a formula for “democratic balance” that consisted of throwing the Bostonian educator to the lions.
Usually, for the presentation of a book an expert on the subject is chosen who talks about the virtues of the work. This was not the case. Jorge Duany, director of FIU’s Cuban Research Institute, which hosted the event, opened by saying that the presentation did not imply that the university agreed with the content of the book. And the invited ‘expert’ opposite Eckstein was Orlando Gutierrez-Boronat, one of the most notorious troglodytes of the Miami political fauna, a ‘Cuban patriot’ who has repeatedly spoken out in favor of a U.S. military invasion of the island. His task was to insult the author and convey the “anger of the community” because of her statements. The audience was made up of people who surely won’t read the book either, let alone buy it, and outside the venue, a representation of the ‘battle-forged Miami exile’ took care of scaring away any naive person in search of culture and information.
In the end Susan Eckstein did not decline the challenge of torture, and with her dignity intact knew how to defend what she considers a right of her citizenship. Because she, Susan Eckstein, is not a communist, but a liberal representative of the best of the North American academic tradition who believes in a democratic system that does not exist in Miami.
Source: Progreso Weekly