In 2000 the case of six-year-old Elian Gonzalez galvanized issues and passions in American relations with Castro’s Cuba and the voices of Cuban Americans within US society and politics. Gonzalez, whose mother had died as they fled Cuba, was claimed by Miami, FL relatives as a refugee from a totalitarian regime. The US Justice Department, however, favored reuniting him with his father in Cuba. Taking Elian to Disneyworld and showering him with gifts, Cuban Americans also rallied in Miami and sought judicial and congressional recourse to keep the boy in the US, including a bill to grant him citizenship. Meanwhile, in Havana, others marched to claim the rights of a “kidnapped angel.” The Justice Department’s dawn raid on the home of Elian’s Miami relatives to return him to his father in Washington galvanized further Cuban American response, and even calls for an investigation of such “brutal action.” Yet the lack of movement after this raid challenged Cuban American political clout. Even as Elian’s fate dragged on in American courts for months, politicians began to speak of normalizing relations with Cuba (although not with the alacrity that was granted to China).

Such divisive feelings reflect the deep connections of people, places and interests that unite and separate the US and Cuba, especially since the revolution of 1959. These passions have been kindled by a long history of US intervention on the island, as well as by recent fears of its strategic role as a nearby foothold for communist organization and propaganda throughout Latin America. Yet, even more, these feelings reflect the special situation of first and second generation immigrants from Cuba, more than a million people (the third-largest Hispanic group), awaiting changes in the regime that will, in turn, change their lives. This suspended transnationalism becomes more complicated with decades of exile.

American relations with Cuba and the lives of Cubans in the United States have a long, complicated history In the nineteenth century Southern planters coveted Cuba as an enduring slave society The island became a battleground for American expansion in the Spanish-American war. Since American occupation of Cuba during and after this war, the US has frequently intervened (under provisions of the 1901 Platt Amendment) in direct governance and indirect control of the island. It supported regimes like that of Fulgencio Batista, while investors created an American image of Cuba as a tropical escape—casinos and recreation rather than economic and social development. The US still maintains a naval base in Cuba—Guantanamo—after decades of a hostile regime.

Some Cubans found alternative meanings to this proximity through emigration to the US, establishing the cigar industry in Tampa, Florida’s Ybor City and Key West, as well as New York City in the nineteenth century Jose Martí also found refuge in the US to work for Cuban independence. Nonetheless, this population remained relatively small (under 50,000) until 1959, when Fidel Castro and his guerrillas claimed control of the island. As Castro’s reforms and expropriations were seen to run against American interests, the US became embroiled in covert operations against the regime, including the ill-fated Bay of Pigs expedition. The 1962 Cuban missile crisis also pitted the Kennedy regime against the Soviet Union over the placement of strategic weapons in Cuba. The US came to impose sanctions, diplomatic isolation and embargo from the early 1960s onward. Castro found allies instead in the Soviet Union, and developed a Marxist regime that emphasized a new equality in economics, education and healthcare, while exporting revolution to the rest of the world—Che Guevara in Bolivia or more tragic interventions in Angola. The US remained obdurate despite gradually diminishing support from allies and human costs of the embargo in areas like medicine and family communication.

International relations, however bitter, were further complicated by Cuban refugees who fled the Castro regime. Over 150,000 refugees arrived in the early years of tense relations between the nascent Castro regime and the US. A highly urbane population, many settled in south Florida, where Miami’s Calle Ocho/Little Havana emerged as a new Cuban metropolis. Arguing their case in fiercely anti-communist terms, Cubans gained rights to facilitated residence and citizenship, converting them eventually into a major voice in conservative politics.

This community grew later by special policies that permitted the airlift of Cuban nationals to the US between 1965 and 1973 (accounting for some 260,000 more people).

The Mariel boatlifts in 1980 brought 125,000 new refugees to the US, including criminals released by Castro whose presence demanded complex investigations and incarcerations in camps across the US. Sponsorship of these refugees by churches and civic organizations spread Cubans—and the message of opposition to Castro—across the US and fortified the South Florida community.

In the years of Cuban economic crisis following the collapse of Soviet support and other problems, depiction of isolated rafts and dramatic escapes reminded the nation that Cuba was a place which people sought to flee from as well as return to. Here, however, the US government distinguished economic and political refugees and sought generally to return those escapees intercepted on the high seas. In the end, Cubans were allocated 20,000 entry visas annually as well as other markers of special treatment in their immigration status, which set them apart. Meanwhile, President Clinton’s endorsement of the 1996 Helms-Burton Act strengthened the embargo and penalties for those who violate it, raising questions and opposition worldwide.

Yet Castro’s regime did not fall, despite blockades and the economic collapse of its major ally. After four decades, then, the Cuban American community has faced new divisions as the second generation reaches maturity without any experience of the island itself. While many Cuban Americans have prospered in business, politics, culture and other sectors of the US economy Cuban Americans are also divided by class and race.

New generations have become Americanized as well: they do not see Spanish as their only formative language, nor do they feel the same intense Catholicism or nostalgia that binds together many in exile. Hence, responses to the Elian Gonzalez case become rituals of identity and community as well as demands for change and, ultimately for return.

Among notable Cuban Americans are South Florida politicians, business people and cultural figures. Cuban Americans have made a mark in literature (Cristina García, Oscar Hijuelos), entertainment (Gloria Estefan), arts, dance and sports, especially baseball.