Cuban Privilege

Abstract

For over half a century the US granted Cubans, one of the largest immigrant groups in the country, unique entitlements. While other unauthorized immigrants faced detention, deportation, and no legal rights, Cuban immigrants were able to enter the country without authorization, and have access to welfare benefits and citizenship status. This book is the first to reveal the full range of entitlements granted to Cubans. Initially privileged to undermine the Castro-led revolution in the throes of the Cold War, one US President after another extended new entitlements, even in the post-Cold War era. Drawing on unseen archives, interviews, and survey data, Cuban Privilege highlights how Washington, in the process of privileging Cubans, transformed them from agents of US Cold War foreign policy into a politically powerful force influencing national policy. Comparing the exclusionary treatment of neighboring Haitians, the book discloses the racial and political biases embedded within US immigration policy.

State Categories, Bureaucracies of Displacement, and Possibilities from the Margins

“…On the flip side are people fleeing conditions the United States condemns in the interest of foreign policy; Cubans and some other exiles are emblematic cases (Eckstein 2022; Menjívar 2000). Today, Central Americans are being denied even the right to apply for asylum as they are forced to remain in Mexico (Garrett 2020), creating the spectacle of a “border out of control” for an already fearful U.S. public.…”

Trumpism, Cuban Americans, and the Fetishism of Politics

“…Another example is the controversy triggered by the presentation of the book Cuban Privilege: The Making of Immigrant Inequality in America by its author Boston University sociologist Susan E. Eckstein (2022) at Florida International University (FIU) in December 2022. The book's central theme is the US preferential treatment toward Cuban immigrants since 1959.…”