Cuban-African American relations

SIGNIFICANCE: The tension that arose between African Americans and post-1959 Cuban refugees in the Miami area of Florida (Dade County) represents an illuminating case study of the effects of immigration on urban racial and ethnic relations in the late twentieth century.

In the late twentieth century, the attitude of African Americans and their organizations to immigration was one of ambivalence. As a minority group, African Americans could not consistently oppose immigration as a threat to some imagined American cultural or ethnic purity. Yet, many African Americans, struggling against discrimination and disadvantage, feared immigrants as competitors for scarce jobs and public services. In Dade County, Florida, unrestricted immigration from Cuba after Fidel Castro took power in 1959 fed Miami Black individuals’ anxieties about economic displacement and political disempowerment. The Black riots that erupted in Miami in 1980, 1982, and 1989, although ostensibly sparked by police brutality, were widely ascribed by contemporary commentators to resentment against Cuban refugees.

Racial Identity of Cuban Refugees

Tensions between African Americans and Black immigrants from Jamaica and Haiti have been mitigated somewhat by a shared African heritage; with the refugee flow from Cuba, however, this factor did not come into play as much. When Castro took power in Cuba in 1959, people of full or partial African descent constituted nearly 40 percent of the total population of Cuba; yet 90 percent or more of the Cuban refugees of the 1960s and early 1970s were White. It was not until the Mariel boatlift of May to September 1980, that the proportion of Afro-Cubans in the refugee flow came to approximate that of the island’s population.

The Federal Government and Cuban Refugees

By the beginning of 1980, many Cuban refugees of the 1960s and early 1970s, who had arrived nearly penniless, had grown prosperous. Such success was due to the relatively high proportion of professionals and entrepreneurs among the earliest refugees, the refugees’ hard work, and the generous assistance (about $2.6 billion between 1972 and 1976) that the refugees, as defectors from a communist regime, received from the federal government to help defray the costs of vocational training and retraining, transportation, and resettlement. African Americans complained that the refugees received more assistance than either other immigrants or low-income native-born Americans did. The Mariel boatlift refugees of May to September 1980 and refugees who arrived after that year did not receive as much government help as the earlier waves of immigrants.

African Americans also complained about the way refugees benefited from federal programs not specifically targeted at refugees. When affirmative action policies were implemented in the late 1960s to provide set-asides for minority businesses, Hispanics were considered a minority and Cubans were Hispanics; hence, refugee-owned businesses were judged to qualify as minority-owned businesses. Local Black individuals resented what they saw as poaching by White newcomers on an entitlement originally intended for African Americans.

Cubans’ Immigration Status as Bone of Contention

From 1959 to 1980, hardly any Cuban reaching US shores was deported. The Cuban Adjustment Act of 1966 enabled all Cuban refugees to change their status to that of permanent resident after one year of living in the United States; other immigrants did not enjoy this privilege. After 1972, more and more Haitians, like Cubans, tried to reach the United States. Cubans fleeing by boat were always welcomed. In contrast, Haitians fleeing by boat were unceremoniously sent back to Haiti if intercepted at sea, detained in prison if they reached Florida, and often deported. Although the official justification for the disparity in treatment was ideological (Cuba was communist; Haiti was not), many Miami Black activists perceived racism. Many Cuban escapees were White; almost all Haitian escapees were Black. In May 1995, US President Bill Clinton officially ended the privileged status of Cuban refugees. When the first Cuban escapees were sent back to Cuba, on May 10, Miami Cubans staged a four-day action of civil disobedience; Miami’s native-born Black individuals stayed away from the protest.

Anti-Cuban Animosity and Urban Rioting

Between 1968 and 1989, there were several episodes of rioting by Black Miamians, the bloodiest of which took place in 1980. The riots of 1980, 1982, and 1989 were widely attributed by journalists and scholars to the resentment of Miami Black Americans against Cuban refugees, although this was only one reason. All the riots stemmed from responses to alleged police misuse of force. In 1982 and 1989, the officers who used force were Hispanic, and Cubans tended to rally around Hispanic police officers accused of brutality. Yet, the conflict between Black Americans and police officers had existed even before the mass arrival of Cuban refugees. Although one victim of Black violence in the 1980 riot was a Cuban refugee, other victims were non-Hispanic White individuals: The mob was as much anti-White as anti-Cuban. Nor were native-born Black Americans the only ones to complain about police brutality. In 1992, an incident of police violence against a Haitian in a Cuban-owned store aroused protest, and in 1990, Miami’s Puerto Ricans also rioted against an alleged police abuse of force.

Job Displacement

Whether Cuban refugees gained occupationally at the expense of Miami’s Black population is a controversial issue, although local Black leaders lodged complaints about such displacement as early as the early 1960s. Allegations that Cubans ousted Black Americans from service jobs in hotels and restaurants were met by counterallegations that Black individuals were themselves leaving such jobs voluntarily and that the percentage of Black Miami residents in white-collar jobs had increased by 1980. By founding many new businesses, Cuban refugees created jobs; many such jobs, however, went to fellow refugees rather than to African Americans. As the Hispanic population grew and trade links with Latin America expanded, native-born Black Americans were hurt by the job requirement of fluency in Spanish. Although the economy in the Miami area grew during the 1960s and 1970s, scholars concede that Black individuals benefited minimally. Compared to pre-1980 Cuban refugees, they also experienced greater poverty and unemployment and had a lower rate of entrepreneurship.

Black-Cuban Conflict in Local Politics

From 1960 to 1990, the Hispanic percentage of Dade County’s population (most, but not all of it, Cuban) rose from barely 10 percent to 49 percent; the Black percentage of the county’s population never rose above 20 percent. By the late 1970s, more and more Cuban refugees were becoming naturalized US citizens, gaining both the right to vote and a decisive weight in local politics. In 1983, the Puerto Rican-born mayor dismissed the Black city manager, replacing him with a Cuban. Cuban American candidates defeated African American candidates for the posts of mayor of Miami in 1985, Dade County Schools superintendent in 1990, Dade County district attorney in 1993, and mayor of Dade County in 1996. The Cuban influx into elective politics prevented a Black takeover of city hall (as had taken place in Atlanta, Georgia, and Detroit, Michigan), thereby reducing the chances for Black businesspeople to benefit from municipal contracts. Yet African Americans’ powerlessness was relative: they could still vote and affect the outcome of elections.

The Nelson Mandela Affair and the Miami Boycott

In the spring of 1990, Mayor Xavier Suar persuaded the Miami city government to withdraw its official welcome to Nelson Mandela, the leader of the Black liberation struggle in South Africa, who was then touring the United States. Mandela, in a television interview, had praised Castro. Partly in response to this slap at Mandela, H. T. Smith, a Miami Black civil rights leader, called for a nationwide boycott by Black organizations of Miami-area hotels; this boycott was remarkably effective. It ended in 1993 with an agreement promising greater efforts to employ Black individuals in Miami’s hospitality industry.

Complexities of Miami-area Interethnic Relations

Dade County’s politics were not simply a Cuban–African American struggle. Sometimes, Black individuals saw non-Hispanic White individuals as allies against the Cubans: in his losing bid for Congress against a Cuban American in 1989, the non-Hispanic White candidate won most of the Black votes. Sometimes, Black individuals saw both Cubans and non-Hispanic White individuals as oppressors of Black Americans. In a lawsuit that met with success in 1992, Black and Cuban Americans cooperated in an effort to make the Dade County Commission more representative of ethnic minorities. Black Americans did not always form a united front against the Cubans: In a 1980 referendum ending the provision of Spanish-language documents and services by the Dade County government, Black voters split, 44 percent for the proposition and 56 percent against. (Bilingualism was restored in 1993.) Haitians and native-born Black Americans did not agree on all issues; among non-Hispanic White individuals, White ethnic migrants from the North did not always agree with White Anglo-Saxon Protestants of southern background; and some of Miami’s non-Cuban Hispanics resented Cuban predominance.

Comparison with Overall Black-Hispanic Relations

In other major US cities, Cubans were, if present at all, a smaller part of the larger Hispanic group. Only in Miami did Hispanic people build a powerful political presence; hence, Black resentment of Hispanic political power played little role in race relations elsewhere. The police brutality issue also operated differently: in Compton, California, Washington, DC, and Detroit, Michigan, for example, there were complaints in the early 1990s about alleged brutality by Black police officers against Hispanic individuals.

Bibliography

Lohmeier, Christine. Cuban Americans and the Miami Media. McFarland, 2014.

López, Antonio. Unbecoming Blackness: The Diaspora Cultures of Afro-Cuban America. New York UP, 2012.

Rose, Chanelle N. The Struggle for Black Freedom in Miami: Civil Rights and America's Tourist Paradise, 1896–1968. Louisiana State UP, 2015.

Sawyer, Mark Q. "Racial Politics in Miami: Ninety Miles and a World Away." Racial Politics in Post-Revolutionary Cuba. Cambridge UP, 2006, pp. 154–74.

Shell, Christopher. "African Americans, Anti-Racism, and Cuba." Picturing Black History, picturingblackhistory.org/african-americans-anti-racism-and-cuba. Accessed 20 Jan. 2025.