Cuban Americans Need a New Story

On December 29, 1962, President John F. Kennedy stood on a stage at the Miami Orange Bowl. A member of the Brigada 2506 handed him a folded Cuban flag. From the stands watched a capacity crowd of Cubans, including survivors of the Bay of Pigs debacle and their friends and families. He began the 14-minute speech by welcoming the brigadistas on behalf of “his government and his country” and assuring them that the flag just received “will be returned to this Brigade in a free Havana.”

This was, of course, a fiction. There would be no other serious attempt to overthrow the Cuban Revolutionary government, and diplomatic options were curtailed by the severing of relations in 1961 and the establishment of the full embargo in February of 1962. The fate of the exiles’ Cuba was, like the flag, in the hands of the American government.

In 1966, the exile reality received another blow. That year, with irrevocable institutional authority, the passage of the Cuban Adjustment Act created the existence of the category of Cuban-Americans as immigrants, not exiles. The government Kennedy represented in his short gig as president became our government. Su casa es mi casa.

The Kennedy ritual in 1962 initiated the exile story, which still rules as the ambient ideology among Cuban Americans in Miami. The story relies on the belief that the U.S. government, through sanctions and sanctimoniousness, will lead the charge for regime change on the island. This is a fiction, yet the power of that fiction this year motivated some…