‘Privileged’ Cuban migrants are not refugees nor exiles, book to be presented at FIU claims
For Professor Susan Eckstein, a Boston University sociologist, the more than a million Cubans who have fled communism for the United States over six decades are neither genuine refugees nor political exiles. Instead, she says, U.S. presidents “imagined” them as refugees to grant them unique privileges at taxpayers’ expense to use them against Fidel Castro and the spread of communism — and later turn them into Republican voters.
In her new book “Cuban Privilege: The Making of Immigrant Inequality in America,” Eckstein argues that most Cubans could not legitimately claim to be refugees because even in the early years of Castro’s revolution, when hundreds of opponents were killed or imprisoned, most were not really facing persecution but left the island “to preserve a lifestyle that the revolution threatened.” On the rare occasions she refers to Cuban immigrants as exiles, it is as “deference to their self-identity,” she explains in a footnote.
Friday evening, Eckstein will present her book at Florida International University in Miami — home to the largest Cuban community in the U.S. — an event that has stirred up fierce controversy over academic freedom, the erasure of the Cuban exile experience and political biases in U.S. academia.
While the book is framed as a critique of unequal immigration policies and calls for providing a path to legal status for other immigrants, Eckstein also advocates for the end of immigration benefits for Cubans, like the 1966 Cuban Adjustment Act, a federal law still on the books that provides a path for Cuban migrants to become permanent residents and U.S. citizens.
“No immigrant group should have unique open-ended entitlements embedded in legislation,” she writes. “There is no justification for the continued extension of unique rights of Cubans to welfare and to lawful permanent residency when entering the United States without authorization.”
Ultimately, the professor also questions the reasons for providing “the most generous benefits ever” to Cuban immigrants: “In disrespecting Cuba’s right to self-determination, the U.S. rationale for privileging Cubans was never noble.”
The book has been labeled anti-Cuban rhetoric by Miami-Dade County Commissioner Kevin Marino Cabrera, and state Rep. Alina García called Friday’s event at FIU “an incitement to hate.” Cuban American radio host Ninoska Pérez Castellón called Eckstein “a bigot.”
FIU, which originally planned to have Eckstein speak at Books & Books in Coral Gables, decided to change venues and add another presenter, longtime human rights activist and author Orlando Gutierrez-Boronat, to accommodate the concerns of members of the community. Protests against the presentation are scheduled for Friday outside the event at FIU’s Wertheim Performing Arts Center. And the organizers have received threatening phone messages that FIU police are investigating, instilling fears of the return of a more intolerant era when dissenting views were met with violence.
Eckstein told the Miami Herald her book is “meant to be a serious analysis of the benefits that Cubans have gotten, and of which Cubans should be very thankful. It’s not a criticism. It is not a critique of Cuban Americans.”
But she admits she did not interview any Cuban immigrants about their experiences for her book and says it was not important to her main topic.
“This is a book on U.S.-Cuba immigration policy,” she said. “Another book can focus on issues about the experiences of Cubans, but that’s not what this book is about.”
The event organizers at FIU’s Cuban Research Institute said they are committed to academic freedom and the free debate of ideas, even if they sometimes don’t agree with the content of the books they regularly present.
“That a person comes to speak does not mean that I agree with them or that the university is endorsing them,” said Professor Jorge Duany, an immigration expert and the institute’s director.
He admitted Eckstein could have shown more “sympathy” and talked directly to the group she was researching about. He also disagrees with her reluctance to treat Cuban immigrants and victims of communism as exiles. But he defended using FIU as a forum to discuss the book.
The Cuban Research Institute prioritizes academic books from prestigious universities, but Duany says it also provides a space for activists and dissidents.
The institute’s decision to include Gutierrez–Boronat, who has authored several books and holds a Ph.D. in international studies from FIU, was criticized by Lisandro Perez, now a professor at City University in New York, who founded the Cuban Research Institute. He told the Herald he believes the Cuban-American community “should not have a veto over what a university presents or does not present, especially if it’s a valid academic work by a recognized authority on the subject.”
But Duany defended the decision to include Gutierrez-Boronat, also a regular columnist for the Miami Herald and el Nuevo Herald, to “accommodate two just claims. One is academic freedom, professors’ right to carry out their research and express their points of view without fear of reprisals. And on the other hand, the constitutional right to free expression in the First Amendment.”
Gutierrez-Boronat told the Herald Eckstein’s book “is not an objective study,” but declined to provide more details before the Friday event.
Embedded racism?
The presentation of a book portraying Cubans as immigrants who have undeservedly received unique benefits comes at a critical time. The Biden administration struck a deal with the Cuban government to resume limited deportation flights to the island, as Cubans once again have begun migrating en masse to the United States, fleeing from increased government repression and a decrepit socialist economy imposed by the island’s Communist Party.
That Cubans have benefited from immigration policies available to few other groups is not questioned by immigration experts. Not only were they allowed into the U.S. without question for most of the early decades of the Cuban Revolution, they were — and continue to be — eligible for benefits such as food stamps and supplemental Social Security income.
But those benefits have eroded over the past 30 years. And although the Cuban Adjustment Act stands, fewer Cuban migrants have been able to immediately benefit from it to obtain green cards because of the end of the parole policy at the U.S.-Mexico border.
Eckstein argues that racism is embedded in U.S. immigration laws and practices, comparing the favorable treatment of Cubans to the routine expulsion of Haitian migrants.
But critics say her use of the word “privileged” to refer to people who fled communism, many of them with just the clothes on their backs, and her reluctance to address the hardship Cuban exiles endured, is an attempt to rewrite history, to erase the experiences of victims of communism because it denies they were forced to leave the island by a socialist dictatorship.
“It is shocking that FIU’s Cuban Research Institute would welcome such hate-filled, inflammatory, anti-Cuban rhetoric to Miami-Dade County, home to the largest Cuban diaspora and the global capital of Cuban-American exiles,” said Miami-Dade County Commissioner Kevin Marino Cabrera in a statement.
Eckstein takes a narrow legal definition of what the United Nations established as a refugee. In her book, Cubans are “imagined refugees,” or “persons who successive administrations defined as refugees” so they could qualify “for more benefits even than ‘real refugees,’ that is, persons who had fled persecution or likely persecution, the near universally agreed definition of refugees.”
Cubans are not the only ones fleeing communism who have been welcomed at other times in the U.S. as refugees, such as Vietnamese and Hungarians. Policies designed to help Hungarian immigrants in the 1950s later served as a model for a Cuban refugee program, Duany notes. But Eckstein argues that successive American presidents have erred in treating Cubans as refugees, some even bending the rules or even allowing Cubans to come with expired visas, which she claims is immigration fraud.
Eckstein says Haitian migrants are more deserving of the title.
“Had U.S. immigration policy been premised on fairness, then Haitians would have been better treated. They sought refuge from worse poverty, worse violence, and, in the main, worse persecution than Cubans, although there certainly were Cubans who suffered persecution.”
In a scathing critique of Eckstein’s argument, Cuban writer Nestor Díaz de Villegas recounted some of the hardships endured by the Cuban people he says she overlooks.
“We have had to spend years captive and hungry, without tasting cow’s milk or beef, visiting our prisoners in prisons that have lasted for six decades, beaten by neighbors and abused by relatives and friends in vile acts of repudiation, dying at sea and in the jungle, decimated in wars of conquest and internationalist missions, and deprived of the most elementary rights, so that we have been granted the alms of the Cuban Adjustment Act,” he wrote.
In response to such criticism, Eckstein said she does not deny that “Cubans have suffered. Of course, they’ve suffered. They’re also not the only people who have suffered,” she added, again pointing to the experience of Haitians.
There is no mention in her book of the human tragedies behind migration events such as the Mariel boatlift and the balsero crisis, and she repeatedly calls those risking their lives at sea “unauthorized Cuban boat people.”
Amalia Z. Daché, an Afro-Cuban associate professor at the University of Pennsylvania, herself a 1980s Mariel boatlift refugee, called such treatment “offensive to Cuban refugees and immigrants that have risked their lives in the ocean. That takes bravery,” she said.
“In 2021, we had the largest political movement against the regime coming from the Cuban people,” she said, referring to island-wide anti-government protests. “To publish this work, minimizing and trivializing Cuban refugees, Cuban exiles, and the Cuban people’s struggle to end communism right at this moment is tone deaf.”
Daché, who herself identifies as left-leaning, says Eckstein’s work is part of a long-term trend of “U.S. academic and historical work that fails to have a critique of the revolution and communism” because of its alignment with a Marxist tradition and a view of Cuba as an alternative to capitalism. More critical authors are rarely cited or taught at the universities, she said.
While universities are the right spaces to have civic discussions and exercise freedom of expression, she added, they also have a choice of the works they highlight.
Still, the FIU organizers believe Eckstein’s ideas are worthy of a free and respectful debate.
“I do deeply believe in freedom, and that comes from my experience in Cuba, where I had to face again and again the Castro mob that would not let me speak, that was not interested in what I was going to say, that simply wanted to cancel me,” said Sebastian Arcos, a former political prisoner who is an adviser at the FIU institute.
“At the event, we are going to have a serious conversation and create the space for people to find out what is being said on the subject,” he said. “We are going to do what we cannot do in Havana.”
To attend the book presentation on Friday at 7 p.m. at FIU’s Wertheim Performing Arts Center, 10910 SW 17th St., email name and emails of those attending to cri@fiu.edu.
