Cuban enclave in Miami

The exile influx helped turn Miami from a seasonal resort into a major center of trade and banking linking the United States with Latin America and the Caribbean. The enclave developed a comprehensive set of institutions which met many of its members' needs from within, including jobs, schooling, worship and social services. A significant political force evolved which produced a Cuban American governing class in metropolitan Miami and gave it influence over United States policy toward Cuba beyond its numbers.

History

Before the 1959 revolution Miami was not the center of Cuban America: a Cuban presence had existed in the United States since the 19th century, but it was concentrated in Key West, Tampa, and New York, and only about 60,000 Cubans lived in the country. The enclave took shape in the exodus that followed. The first postrevolutionary wave, the Golden Exile of 1959 to 1962, brought some 248,000 people, drawn heavily from the urban, educated, and mostly white upper and middle classes, who settled largely in Miami with the professional skills, business experience, and capital from which the enclave economy grew.

Successive later waves enlarged and diversified the community: the United States funded Freedom Flights of 1965 to 1973, the 1980 Mariel boatlift of roughly 125,000 Cubans who were younger, more working-class, and far more often Black or mixed-race, the 1994 balsero crisis during the post-Soviet Special Period, and a renewed surge after 2020 that reached the largest level in Cuba's modern history. Because each cohort arrived with a different socioeconomic profile, the area's Cuban population grew large and internally divided by class, race, and generation. The 1966 Cuban Adjustment Act gave the community a secure legal footing, and throughout these decades metropolitan Miami remained its principal center.

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Enclave economy

The Cuban community of Miami became the central empirical case for the sociological concept of the immigrant enclave, or enclave economy. The sociologist Alejandro Portes defined such an enclave as an immigrant group that concentrates in a distinct location and runs enterprises serving its own ethnic market, the general population, or both. For one to function, the group must be economically varied enough that some members employ their co-ethnics, and spatially concentrated enough to operate as an internal labor market. Scholars have described the Miami enclave as comprehensive enough that newcomers could find work, schooling, worship, services, and housing within it, without depending on the wider American society. The concept was first developed by Kenneth Wilson and Portes from study of Cuban Miami, and their 1980 article is widely regarded as the founding study of the ethnic enclave literature, acknowledged even by scholars otherwise critical of the concept.

Portes traced the enclave's rise to four conditions within the group: a refugee flow whose members sought lasting mobility rather than treating wage labor as temporary; marked internal class differences that gave entrepreneurs access to co-ethnic labor and a captive market; arrival in successive waves that supplied owners with cheap, flexible labor; and a dense set of ethnic institutions, such as rotating credit associations and chambers of commerce, that channeled capital, markets, and information. One example was the network of Cuban clínicas, prepaid clinics transplanted from pre-revolutionary Cuba. The enclave also drew on federal support available to no other immigrant group, from the Cuban Refugee Program's cash aid, job training, and resettlement to jobs created by anti-Castro operations and later funding of Cuban-run social services, with total assistance since 1959 estimated at $2 billion to $4 billion. Many early exiles saw themselves as temporary residents awaiting return, an outlook that slowed assimilation until a second generation grew up in the United States, settling permanently while keeping a bicultural identity.

Business and economic impact

By the late 1980s the largest Cuban and Hispanic owned firms in Miami were concentrated in banking and the import-export trade. Although only about 5 percent of the country's Hispanic population lived in Miami, the area held close to half of the forty largest Hispanic owned firms in the United States. Miami's rise as the main United States trade gateway to Latin America, displacing New Orleans, was central to this growth, its advantage the large bilingual workforce created by the exodus.

By the turn of the 21st century, sales of Cuban owned businesses had risen roughly 37-fold in real terms between 1969 and 1997, and by 2000 the revenue of Cuban American firms approached Cuba's gross domestic product. Bilingualism became an economic asset in its own right, as multinational corporations placed their Latin American headquarters in Miami to draw on Cuban managerial and professional labor.

Debate over economic outcomes

Sociologists have long debated whether the enclave economy benefits its workers or mainly the owners of its firms, largely through the Miami case. Portes and his associates held that an ethnic enclave offers low-skilled immigrants a third path between the mainstream economy's advantaged and disadvantaged sectors, in which workers earn returns on their pre-migration human capital through ethnic solidarity, a claim that became known as the enclave thesis. Kenneth Wilson and W. Allen Martin, comparing the enclave with Miami's less integrated Black economy, argued from input-output analysis that its firms were interdependent enough to function like the economy's integrated center rather than the competitive periphery of typical immigrant business, a difference they attributed to situational factors rather than any inherent group trait.

The thesis drew challenges. Jimy Sanders and Victor Nee argued that owners and workers have opposing interests and that ethnic solidarity mainly serves to keep a compliant, low-wage workforce. Later studies reached mixed and often negative results on enclave earnings. Yu Xie and Margaret Gough found little support for the thesis and, for some groups, lower earnings, while noting that the resource-rich Miami Cuban enclave may differ from others. Roger Waldinger argued that the debate had been distorted by defining the enclave spatially, since the co-ethnic networks behind an ethnic economy can operate even where firms are dispersed.

Geography and demographics

Little Havana, the corridor running southwest from downtown Miami along Southwest Eighth Street (Calle Ocho), became the symbolic heart of the community, with Spanish-language signage and Cuban cafeterias. By the 1980s most of its residents had moved on, the middle and upper classes to suburbs such as Westchester and Kendall and much of the working class to Hialeah. Many Cubans reached Miami by secondary migration, having first been resettled elsewhere in the United States, drawn by an enclave that offered social support, security, and job and business networks. White Mariel refugees moved there at high rates, while the pull was weaker for nonwhite Mariels.

Population and race

The Cuban population grew increasingly concentrated in metropolitan Miami, the share of all Cuban Americans in Miami-Dade County rising from about 24 percent in 1960 to 54 percent in 1990. The concentration persisted: in 2017 to 2021 about 52 percent of all Cuban immigrants lived in Miami-Dade County alone, part of a national diaspora of about 2.7 million people of Cuban birth or ancestry by 2021. The enclave has historically been disproportionately white, which Skop attributed to the racial order of pre-revolutionary Cuba that the exiles reproduced and to a settlement history in which nonwhite Cubans had migrated mainly to northern cities and federal policy steered refugees without local ties away from South Florida. Analyzing 1990 census data, she found white Mariel Cubans reporting higher incomes, lower poverty, and more professional jobs than nonwhite Mariels, gaps she linked partly to the credit the mostly white enclave extended more readily to its own.

Culture and politics

The enclave also became a source of cultural export: a Cuban-American musical idiom from the Miami exile community reached a wide American and international audience over the generations of Celia Cruz, Gloria Estefan, and Pitbull, by the last of whom it had blended with hip-hop and pan-Latin pop rather than remaining strictly Cuban.

Religion

Religious life reinforced the enclave's cohesion. Cuban exiles formed a distinct religious community within South Florida's Catholic Church, with a Cuban Catholicism rooted in personal and cultural identification rather than the parish and carried in its early years by lay movements (movimientos), so that the enclave could provide worship from within. They built the National Shrine of Our Lady of Charity (La Ermita de la Caridad) on Biscayne Bay, honoring the patroness of Cuba. Opened in 1973, it draws thousands of pilgrims a year, who gather for her feast each September 8.

Politics

Anti-Castro and anti-communist politics have been a defining feature of the Miami enclave. In the late 1970s and 1980s these symbolic issues, alongside the defense of official bilingualism, drew the community into local politics and began turning a population of exiles into a mobilized ethnic group. The community's concentration translated into political power beyond its numbers: Cuban Americans naturalized and voted at high rates, and by the early 2000s they had become Greater Miami's governing class, holding a large share of top county offices and sending Cuban American mayors, legislators, and members of Congress to office. The Cuban American National Foundation, founded in 1981 under Jorge Mas Canosa, moved the community from its early militancy toward mainstream lobbying and became one of the country's most effective political organizations, with the United States embargo on Cuba as its central cause. Its ties to the Reagan administration were close enough that one study described the foundation as functioning at times as a near co-executor of United States policy toward Cuba, an unusual degree of influence for an immigrant interest group.

The bloc's politics have nonetheless shifted across the successive waves of arrivals. More recent arrivals, with closer ties to family on the island, have proved more pragmatic and less wedded to the hard-line embargo politics of the first exiles. A study found, however, that this softening, evident among both newer immigrants and the American-born, had not reached the ballot box, where the community kept voting Republican at high rates as the political incorporation of recent immigrants proceeded slowly.