Cuban Privilege

document two sides of a disputed coin.Both U.S. sociologists (though Dore, until her untimely death this year, was long resident in the United Kingdom), they meticulously craft their work from very different angles, aptly summed up in their two titles: Eckstein's Cuban Privilege and Dore's How Things Fall Apart.Building on her earlier work on Cuba and Cubans in the United States, Eckstein draws on archival, interview, and survey data to chart how, from the outset of Cuba's 1959 Revolution, U.S. policy privileged Cuban immigrants for political ends.Dore, known for her work on Nicaragua and Cuba, gleans from 124 longitudinal in-depth interviews conducted in Cuba over 2004-18, allowing seven Cubans to narrate their life stories on the island-though two end up doing so from Miami.Eckstein documents the multiple ways in which the United States has granted Cubans unique entitlements.Where other immigrants faced detention, deportation, and no legal rights, Cubans entered the country without authorization and with access to work, welfare, and citizenship.Cold War policies designed to undermine the Revolution continuously extended entitlements to Cubans, creating a prosperous domestic enclave and bolstering a politically powerful force, in turn influencing policy.She recounts how integration and social mobility came easily to Cubans in an interplay of foreign policy and an unequal immigration system, embedded with political and racial biases.She opens with two instances: the U.S. Coast Guard in 1991, under George H.W. Bush's presidency, stopping a Haitian fishing boat carrying 161 Haitians and two Cubans that the Haitians had picked up at sea, and two years later, under Clinton, a boat carrying seven Cubans and ten Haitians landing in Florida.The Cubans were admitted, while the Haitians were sent to detention facilities and almost all repatriated.Fast-forward to 2016, under Obama: 56,000 Cubans entered the United States without authorization, when lawful immigration from any single country was capped at 20,000 a year and nearly half a million from other countries were deported.The reasons for privileging Cuban migrants changed over time, though not, ever since the early years of Eisenhower and Kennedy, in the overarching aimin keeping with the 1960 U.S. embargo on Cuba that is in place to this day-to bring the Cuban economy and regime to the brink of collapse.A marked turning point was in 2017 when Obama, after visiting Cuba, and in his last week

Citizenship · Deportation · Immigration · Political science · Politics · Racism · Sociology · Cuban History and Society · Law