Only a Few Blocks to Cuba: Cold War Refugee Policy, the Cuban Diaspora, and the Transformations of Miami(Politics and Culture in Modern America)

About the Book

In Only a Few Blocks to Cuba, Mauricio Castro shows how the U.S. government came to view Cuban migration to Miami as a strategic asset during the Cold War, in the process investing heavily in the city's development and shaping its future as a global metropolis.

When Cuban refugees fleeing Communist revolution began to arrive in Miami in 1959, the city was faced with a humanitarian crisis it was ill-equipped to handle and sought to have the federal government solve what local politicians clearly viewed as a Cold War geopolitical problem. In response, the Eisenhower and Kennedy administrations, and their successors, provided an unprecedented level of federal largesse and freedom of transit to these refugees. The changes to the city this investment wrought were as impactful and permanent as they were unintended. What was meant to be a short-term geopolitical stratagem instead became a new reality in South Florida. A growing and increasingly powerful Cuban community contested their place in Miami and navigated challenges like bilingualism, internal political disputes, socioeconomic polarization, and ongoing struggles and negotiations with Washington and Havana in the decades that followed. This contested process, argues Mauricio Castro, not only transformed South Florida, but American foreign policy and the calculus of national politics.

Castro uses extensive archival research in local and national sources to demonstrate that the Cuban diaspora and Cold War refugee policy made South Florida a key space to understanding the shifting landscape of the late twentieth century. In this way, Miami serves as an example of both the lived effects of defense spending in urban spaces and of how local communities can shape national politics and international relations. American politics, foreign relations, immigration policy, and urban development all intersected on the streets of Miami.

Table of Contents:

A Note on Terms
Introduction. "The Seventh Province of Cuba"
Chapter 1. "Our Unnoticed Neighbors": Cuban Refugees, Community Action, and the Push for a Federal Response
Chapter 2. "The Score": Federal Funding, Refugee Management, and the Changing Economic Landscape of South Florida
Chapter 3. "A Potentially Explosive Mix": Race, Citizenship, and the Politics of Exile at the National and Local Levels
Chapter 4. "At Home, but Homesick": Bilingualism, Local Politics, and the Divided Politics of Cuban Miami
Chapter 5. "Will the Last American to Leave Miami Please Bring the Flag?": The Mariel Boatlift, Backlash, and the Politics of Image in Miami
Chapter 6. "A Crisis in Clout": The Maturation of Cuban American Politics, the Cuban Lobby, and the Limits of Influence
Epilogue. "We'll Be Back in Cuba in Six Months"
Archives, Collections, and Oral History Sources
Notes
Index
Acknowledgments

About the Author :
Mauricio Castro is Assistant Professor of History at Centre College.

Review :
"Only a Few Blocks to Cuba offers a compelling new history of Miami, emphasizing context and contingency in a story we thought we knew. Mauricio Castro reveals the complex maneuvering among Cuban émigrés, South Florida officials, and Washington cold warriors that transformed a seasonal tourist destination into a global city and a national electoral powerhouse. In the process, he masterfully interprets the interplay between metropolitan governance and geopolitics to portray Miami not as an outlier, but as an exemplar of broader currents in American urban and political history." - A. K. Sandoval-Strausz, author of Barrio America: How Latino Immigrants Saved the American City

"Only a Few Blocks to Cuba is a timely and important book. Mauricio Castro has written a nuanced history of how Cubans in Miami came to wield such influence in the city and beyond, critically linking Cold War foreign policy with local politics and economics. He traces how Cubans in Miami became a powerful voting bloc, especially for the Republican Party, a story that is often oversimplified or viewed as a foregone conclusion. Read this book to better understand American politics today." - Julio Capó Jr., author of Welcome to Fairyland: Queer Miami Before 1940