By Rosa Miriam Elizalde on April 11, 2024
photo: Bill Hackwell
Contrary to the inertia of the news that tells of Cubans leaving, they have not left their family homes or their land; they resisted the promise of no more queues or blackouts and the exodus to any other shore of the Atlantic.
You have to live in a neighborhood on the island to discover that some houses are for sale, that others are for rent and that the daughter and grandchildren of the neighbor “crossed the pond” and left the elderly at the mercy of remittances. Almost 425 thousand Cuban migrants arrived in the United States in fiscal years 2022 and 2023, most of them young and with university studies, encouraged by the salaries and the hiring of highly qualified labor that is scarce in that country due to the high costs of private education.
Privatization of the education system, pedagogical Darwinism and the predation of other people’s talent are not exclusive to the US. Two recent examples: The United Kingdom has established an aggressive policy to attract graduates and health professionals in Spain; less than a week ago, the government of Nayib Bukele offered 5 thousand passports and multiple migratory advantages to foreign professionals who decide to settle in El Salvador.
The number of Cuban emigrants should be explored even beyond these current trends, the fact that it is not the country of origin par excellence to the United States -let’s look at Mexico’s data, for example- and circumstances that have a historical foundation. The degree of traction of the empire of the North is enormous and comes from afar, because it is a multiethnic nation to a superlative degree -it received more than 35 million emigrants from all over the world between 1825 and 1920-, “although its history has denied its settlers the bond of a common paternity, clearly reflected in the white, English and Protestant founding fathers”, as the American researcher Arthur Mann has warned.
In the case of Cuba, it is necessary to consider, before all of the above, that in the last 65 years emigration has been a main political spring of the encirclement and annihilation strategy of the 1959 revolution. Miami is only the tail of the monster. It was and continues to be the White House and not Florida that has facilitated privileges for an immigration group that is not even recognized as “Latino” because it effectively has another status, and which has a federal aid program and a special legal treatment, the Cuban Adjustment Act of 1966. And even so, when economic conditions on the island have been more propitious to mitigate the devastating effects of the greatest blockade applied against a people in the history of mankind, emigration has remained at a minimum.
Someday specialists will have to address, in the field of the sociology of emigration, the so-called Cuban diaspora and its social cost, not only for the inhabitants of the Caribbean island. It will be necessary to add the political perversity and its impact on other emigrant communities to the tensions caused by any departure, when one leaves behind home, friends, work, affective spheres and memory to plunge suddenly into other customs, another environment, another climate, another language.
It will also be necessary to study how much the political culture of intransigence established for decades and sustained through institutions and relations with operators of Cuban origin in South Florida, which in recent years has assumed as its own the ultra-right ideology of the most unpresentable sector of the Republican Party, affects the U.S. nation. For this group, culture is subversion. Hence, their project includes cultural genocide and dreams of a “Palestinian solution” for those who remain on the island, ideas that are happily championed and normalized on social platforms.
But Cuba continues to live in their family homes and in their land, as it has strong emotional ties with their children, siblings and friends spread on other shores of the Atlantic. And those people who did not leave, millions who suffer the consequences of that choice and who know the taste of uprooting, made a decision, as Cuban poet Carilda Oliver Labra did in her day: “When my grandmother came / she brought a bit of Spanish land, / when my mother left / she brought a bit of Cuban land. / I will not keep with me any bit of homeland: / I want it all / on my grave.”
Source: La Jornada, translation Resumen Latinoamericano – English