Since the flow of Cuban refugees had halted for many years, few expected the chaotic flotilla exodus in 1980. It began when six desperate young men drove a bus past the guards, straight into the Peruvian Embassy compound, asking for political asylum. A few days later, on April 4, 1980, Fidel Castro announced the unusual […]
Democratization and Migration: Cuba’s Exodus and the Development of Civil Society
Notes1 The collapse of communism in the Soviet Union and the Eastern European countries ushered in a new stage in Cuba, stage which Fidel Castro himself called “a special period.” In this period, we have witnessed the emergence of civil society—fragile but nonetheless real. At the same time, the 1990s and the present have also […]
The Last Wave: Cuba’s Contemporary Exodus: Political or Economic Immigrants?
Notes1 The Cuban exodus is now over 41 years old and has brought close to a million Cuban immigrants to American soil — about 12 percent of the Cuban population. That exodus harbors distinct waves of immigrants, alike only in their final rejection of Cuba. The focus of this paper is on the exodus of […]
The Impact of Pope John Paul II’s Visit to Cuba
More than any other Pope before him, John Paul II has traveled far and wide. Few of his visits, however, have captured the imagination as much as his visit to Cuba, a country that when he visited in January 1998 had been under the communist rule of Fidel Castro for 38 years. This international drama […]
Comments on “The Effect of Socialism on the Entrepreneurial Abilities of Cuban Americans” by Luis Locay and Jorge Sanguinetty
This paper has been a very interesting one for me to assess because it has brought together two of my intellectual interests and effectively married them. At present, I have two research projects on-going: one on the causes and consequences of self-employment in ethnic enterprises among various immigrant groups in the city of Chicago (Cubans, […]