Political Disaffection in Cuba's Revolution and Exodus

Description

The Cuban exodus is estimated to consist of around 12 percent of the country's population. It harbors several distinct waves of migrants, alike only in their final rejection of Cuba. Silvia Pedraza links the revolution and exodus not only as cause and consequence but also as profoundly social and human processes that were not only political and economic but also cognitive and emotive. Ironically for a community that defined itself as being in exile, virtually no studies of its political attitudes exist, and certainly none that encompass the changing political attitudes over 47 years of the exodus. Through the use of two major research strategies - participant observation and in-depth, semi-structured interviews - Pedraza captures the processes of political disaffection and emphasizes the contrasts among the four major waves of the exodus not only in their social characteristics but also in their attitudes as members of different political generations.

Silvia Pedraza is Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of Michigan. She is the author of Political and Economic Migrants in America: Cubans and Mexicans (1985) and the co-editor of Origins and Destinies: Immigration, Race, and Ethnicity in America (1996, with Ruben G. Rumbaut). She has also published articles in such journals as Social Science History and the Annual Review of Sociology. A child of the Cuban refugee exodus, she lived through both a dictatorship and a revolution, which left an indelible mark on her research.

"Pedraza superbly traces how changes in Cuba under Castro generated new emigration waves with different backgrounds, concerns, and mentalities. Based on the Cuban experience, she calls for differentiating the refugee from the immigrant experience." Susan Eckstein, Boston University, and former President of the Latin American Studies Association "Pedraza captures the complex characteristics, and ideologies of Cuban migrants/refugees. Using a sensitive ethnography and her own migration experience, Pedraza moves beyond the simply one size fits all theoretical understanding of Cuban refugees and tells a story with nuance, methodological rigor and sensitivity of how changing interactions with Cuban state have driven waves of migration." Mark Sawyer, University of California, Los Angeles, and Author, Racial Politics in Post-Revolutionary Cuba "Silvia Pedraza has accomplished what few social scientists have: to seamlessly weave the macro and the micro, the structural and the personal, the conceptual and the empirical. The result is a textured portrait of the many faces of the Cuban diaspora over the last five decades." Damian Fernandez, Flordia International University "Drawing on in-depth interviews with 120 Cuban exiles and on ethnographic observations in exile communities in the U.S., Silvia Pedraza weaves together an illuminating account of not only the political and economic disaffection of those who exited but also how their motives and experiences varied across four waves of immigration from 1959 to 2004. In doing so, Pedraza has crafted a book that constitutes an important contribution to the still evolving literature on Cuba's revolution and its exiles and on immigration more generally." David Snow, University of California, Irvine