Miami. Jan Nijman

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      CHAPTER 3

      Extreme Makeover

      A Time magazine article in 1958 reported that “gaudy, gritty Greater Miami” had become “the revolutionary headquarters of the Americas.”¹ The area was referred to as a “plotters’ playground” for Dominicans, Haitians, and especially Cubans who were aiming at the demise of the governments in their home countries. South Florida was the ideal location because it was close by, it had various big and small airports and seaports, and its coastline was like a maze with innumerable winding waterways. In addition, the city’s transient atmosphere and crime networks made it relatively easy to engage in subversive activities.

      It was not the first time that Cubans had used South Florida as a backstage for their political struggles. Ever since the beginnings of armed resistance against Spain in the 1860s, they would at times seek refuge in Key West. From the 1920s onward, Miami was the haven of choice. Since the establishment of the Republic of Cuba in 1902, politics had been erratic and unstable. The island witnessed several irregular transfers of power and occasionally politics turned violent.

      When President Gerardo Machado’s rule took a dictatorial turn in the late 1920s, it caused a flow of refugees to Miami. In 1933, the president was pushed aside in a military coup: his opponents returned home and celebrated while disillusioned machadistas took their place in Miami. Machado himself fled to the Bahamas before settling in Miami. It was a pattern to be repeated several times. Almost two decades later, in 1952, the democratically elected president, Carlos Prio, was unseated in a coup d’état led by General Batista, resulting in the largest number of refugees yet to arrive in South Florida, Prio himself among them. There were about twenty thousand Cubans in South Florida then. For some upper-class Cubans, Miami was familiar terrain as it had been a popular vacation and shopping destination since the 1940s.

      Batista’s government in the 1950s was characterized by corruption and nepotism. Poverty was widespread and the gap between rich and poor was enormous. Havana, with its casinos and famous nightlife, was an important place in American organized crime networks and the Mafia provided political support for Batista. So did the U.S. government, best illustrated by the infamous remark of a State Department official in 1956 that “Batista is considered by many a son of a bitch … but at least he is our son of a bitch.”² It was a reference to Batista’s warm treatment of U.S. multinationals and his fervent anti-communist rhetoric.

      Prio dedicated himself to the overthrow of Batista and provided financial support to various militant groups. Fidel Castro stopped by in Miami in 1955 to accept a hefty financial contribution and went on to Mexico to organize and train his military forces. In December 1956, Castro’s troops invaded Cuba and for the next three years fought the Batista regime from their base in the Sierra Maestra Mountains. Batista fled to Brazil on December 31, 1959 and later settled in Coral Gables. Castro’s triumph, or at least Batista’s downfall, was a cause for celebration among the large majority of exiles. “The familiar changing of the guard took place, with exultant fidelistas leaving, to be replaced by defeated batistianos. Scuffles broke out in the Miami airport between passengers arriving from and departing for Havana, causing local police reinforcements to be sent in.”³

      It took another two years for Castro to proclaim his communist sympathies openly and for the United States to break off diplomatic relations. During 1959 and 1960, many Cubans saw the clouds gather and turned away from the revolution in disillusionment.⁴ At first, the return of exiles to Cuba exceeded the arrival of new refugees in Miami—the Cuban population in South Florida most likely dropped around this time. But as Castro’s revolution revealed its true colors, a growing number of Cubans packed their bags. On December 26, 1960, operation Pedro Pan commenced, in which desperate Cuban parents sent more than fourteen thousand children on their own to the United States, to be cared for by relatives, friends, and foster parents.

      Between 1959 and 1961, about 50,000 exiles reached Miami.⁵ The first waves of refugees contained a large number of wealthy business people who had been able to hang on to their possessions and get out in time to bring their wealth to Miami. They were soon followed by other elite Cubans who had waited too long and had seen their properties confiscated. They, in turn, were succeeded by smaller business owners and professionals from the middle classes. The exodus accelerated in 1962. Between June and August, an estimated 1,800 Cubans arrived in Miami every week and by October of that year there were a total of 155,000 registered refugees. Leaving Cuba became harder after the failed Bay of Pigs invasion of April 1961, and even more difficult after the missile crisis of 1962.⁶ Still, by 1965 the number of exiles had climbed to 210,000.

      In the national news in the United States, most attention was on Cuba, not South Florida. The CBS evening news on December 1, 1966 reported that “to a great extent these people represent the professional and business class of Cuba; the able, the educated, the successful…. Cuba has been gutted. This exodus is the biggest brain drain the Western Hemisphere has known.”⁷ The federal government’s preoccupation with Cuba was expressed in the immense resources dedicated to gathering intelligence on Castro’s government, Cuban politics, and counter-revolutionary movements in Miami. During the 1960s, there were three hundred to four hundred CIA agents in South Florida, making it the largest CIA “station” after Langley headquarters in Virginia.

      The majority of refugees remained in Miami. They stayed with relatives and acquaintances, rented property, or received shelter from the authorities. Initially, local, public, and volunteer agencies banded together in Miami to assist the refugees.⁸ But as the numbers escalated, unease grew among the local population. And when, at the end of the missile crisis, it became clear that the Cubans were not likely to go home any time soon, politicians in South Florida took action. They requested emergency help with the “refugee crisis” from the federal government. In response, the Kennedy administration organized a large-scale program to resettle Cubans throughout the United States. It seemed to work, at first. By 1966 about 135,000 people were resettled all over the United States, with the largest concentrations in New York and California.

      But in 1965 Castro agreed to the departure of large numbers of “traitors to the revolution.” The “freedom flights,” as they were called by the Cubans in Miami, continued until 1973 and by that time another 340,000 refugees had entered the United States, most choosing to stay in Miami. And that was not the only issue. Miami’s appeal to the exiled Cubans was simply irresistible, and the resettlement scheme was a losing proposition:

       All the time that the freedom flights were coming into Miami, resettlement flights were leaving it in an attempt to distribute more evenly the burden of refugee resettlement. By 1978, 469,435 Cubans had been settled away from Miami. To federal and local bureaucrats, this was ample evidence that the “problem” of refugee concentration in South Florida had been resolved. In the late 1960s, however, a discreet countertrend started that saw resettled Cuban families trek back to Miami on their own. In 1973, a survey estimated that 27 percent of the Cubans residing in the Miami metropolitan area had returned there from other US locations. A survey conducted by the Miami Herald in 1978 raised that valuation to about forty percent. As a consequence of this accelerating СКАЧАТЬ