Political practice and the rise of an ethnic enclave

Summary

The Cuban American community shares many of the structural features commonly associated with other types of immigrant enclaves. But its specific mode of political incorporation into the United States distinguishes it from other enclaves, making it a unique sociopolitical formation: “authoritarian enclave.” The Cuban American enclave arose out of Caribbean geopolitics as an unintentional byproduct of four state-sponsored movements. These movements interlocked in an uneven manner, sometime via the civil, other times via the military, and still other times based on a combination of both. The internally divided Batistianist movement interlocked via its military wing with Trujillo's relatively unified Dominican state. In contrast, the highly unified Conservative movement interlocked with the military wing of the internally divided U.S. state. The Liberal movement, like the previous movement, was internally unified but, unlike them, its contacts were with the civil, not military, wing of the U.S. state. Preliminary research on the Terrorist movement, a community-generated movement that responds to changing geopolitical situations, suggests that its civil and military wing are discreetly and flexibly linked to each other. These movements had the cumulative and unintentional effect of creating a new organizational space within the Caribbean geopolitical system from which the Cuban American community was later to emerge. The Cuban American enclave rooted in Miami is today an important actor in the Caribbean Basin.

The four movements under review left an indelible imprint on the material and ideational contours of the enclave. The Batistianists, Conservatives, and Terrorists contributed to the formation of an emigre moral economy where politics and profit were fused. The Batistianists, by investing their smuggled capital in the Miami area, by relying on the civil wing of their movement to rejuvenate old allegiances and networks, and by boycotting and harassing politically heterodox merchants, established a type of political monopoly over the local economy. The Conservatives, by misappropriating C.I.A. funds and reselling weapons, learned the art of buying and selling, developed sympathetic sources of credit from politically like-minded militants, and gathered enough investment capital to establish small enterprises in the Miami area. The Terrorists, by bombing Liberal merchants, prevented their discourse from gaining a local material base of power. The militant Liberals, through their inactivity in the community, facilitated, unintentionally, the rise of the enclave.

The community's collective identity and sources of normative integration remain partly rooted in its militant past. Batistianism, Conservatism, and Terrorism, with its characteristic concerns for custom, patriotism, anti-communism, order, and community, concerns which have always been lacking in Liberal thought, a current of thought that in any case never circulated widely in the community, contributed, ironically enough, to the enclave's subsequent success. If the enclave entrepreneur can today invoke collective claims in order to legitimize his patriarchal system of capital-labor relations and contribute to group cohesion, it is because the militants and terrorists had earlier inculcated the community with these very same notions. In the next few years the Cuban American entrepreneurs, the community's leading strata, will need to generate a new set of ideal interests similar to the ones they inherited from their predecessors.

The extreme conservatism of the Cuban Americans is in direct opposition to the political practices of all other immigrant groups, enclave or otherwise. Immigrant groups tend to support politically liberal causes and, among recent arrivees, this tendency is even more pronounced.¹ But the Cuban American enclave, itself a relatively recent group, defies this pattern. But the mid-1970s the Cuban Americans had established themselves as the single most conservative minority group in the United States.² Cuban American exceptionalism is not, as some neo-Marxists scholars have claimed, the product of their privileged background in Cuba nor their relative economic success in the United States.³ Political practices, after all, cannot be deduced from simple market locations. Cuban American conservatism was constructed during the early years of community formation as the result of the interaction of discourse and power.

The community's shift toward extreme conservatism runs counter to the early composition of the exiles. Recall that in demographic-political terms the base of the community shifted in 1962 from the Batistianists and Conservatives, to the Liberals. The political practices of the community, however, travelled a reverse path: from Liberal, to Conservative and Batistianist. Political practice, in other words, had defied the very same organizational and demographic determinants that until now had served to structure its existence. Emigre politics had become unhinged from its “base” and was flowing downwards and shaping the material and ideal interests of the community at a time when it was undergoing a transition from exile to ethnic minority. The discursive practices and power maneuvers of the Batistianists and Conservatives infused the community's collective identity, economic life, and group cohesiveness with their own moral-political preferences. The Liberals, due to their insurrectionary strategy, failed to do so. During deactivation, the Liberals who advocated normalizing relations with Cuba successfully disorganized Conservative thought, but the Terrorists prevented them from circulating their views or gaining local power. Thus, emigre politics preceded the rise of ethnic markets and the availability of federal aid, and influenced Cuban American group and identity formation.

The Cuban American community, to summarize my argument, is an expression of exploitation and domination along with representation. In typological terms, the community ought to be characterized as an “authoritarian enclave,” a type of formation that fuses economic entrepreneurship, social communalism, and authoritarian politics.⁴ Those unacquainted with the Cuban American community sometimes view it as a sociological aberration, an idiosyncratic enclave when compared to other ones in the United States, yet its trajectory reconfirms two of history's oldest lessons: the boundaries of nations and states rarely coincide; and, words and silences matter... as does power.