Radio Free Cuba: From Détente to Re-escalation in Havana and Miami

• DOI: https://doi.org/10.13169/intejcubastud.13.1.0067
• Published date: 01 July 2021
• Date: 01 July 2021
• Pages: 67-85
• Author: Connor Harney
• Subject Matter: Cuban–US relations,Cold War,détente,hegemony,exile

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ACADEMIC ARTICLE

RADIO FREE CUBA: FROM DÉTENTE TO

RE-ESCALATION IN HAVANA AND MIAMI

Connor Harney

University of North Carolina at Greensboro, USA

Connor Harney is a PhD Candidate in History at the University of North Carolina of

Greensboro. The focus of his work is transnational political economic histories of the 20th

century, particularly those of the long 1970s. His research on Cuban–US relations examines

how the island’s pre-revolutionary ruling class has maintained hegemony within the exile

community in Miami and influenced US foreign policy toward their former homeland

Abstract

While the United States long represented a safe haven for Cuban political exiles, the

Cuban Revolution and its Cold War context accelerated the tendency of disaffected

Cubans to flee the island for Yankee shores. As the main destination of those that

left Cuba in the decades following the revolution, Miami and its émigré community

played an increasingly important role in exile politics, and later US national politics.

This article looks at how the first-wave of migrants to Miami established an outsized

influence there and continued to dominate politically and culturally, even as

subsequent waves representing more diverse perspectives on the Cuban Revolution

set down roots in Florida. It does so by considering the attempts by one segment of the

exile community to start a dialogue with the island during the Carter administration

and another section’s establishment of the propaganda station Radio Martí in Reagan

years. These examples highlight the fluidity between political violence and soft-

power subversion in maintaining the hegemony of an antagonistic position to the

Cuban Revolution.

Keywords: Cuban–US relations, Cold War, détente, hegemony, exile

68 ACADEMIC ARTICLE – CONNOR HARNEY

InternatIonal Journal of Cuban StudIeS 13.1 Summer 2021

Plastic Souls and Flesh-and-Blood Automobiles in New Old

Havana

In a brief moment of eased tensions between Cuba and the United States, the

radical exile journal Areíto (1978) felt emboldened enough to editorialise:

Miami now has the greatest concentration of Cubans in the world, Havana

excepted. The dreams of bringing down Fidel have faded, but walking down

Eighth Street one returns to the good old lost days. (Grupo Areíto 1978)

Further, as a simulacrum of pre-revolutionary Havana, they wrote that Miami

was a town run by “bankers and mafiosi” where “blacks still know their place;”

a city where “plastic souls and flesh-and-blood automobiles are manufactured”

– a place where, “in the supermarkets, things buy people” (Grupo Areíto 1978).

There is more than a kernel of truth to the idea that the Havana of old had been

transplanted onto Florida shores after 1959, one that speaks to a broader rela-

tionship between Cubans in the United States and their former homeland. As

María Cristina García (1998: 4) has written, the first wave of exiles biding their

time in Miami believed “their stay would be temporary”, since for the United

States “to tolerate a communist government so close to its shores” would be

counter to Cold War logic. Holding out hope, many became single-mindedly

focused on ousting Castro as the key to turning back the clock to when all

Cubans had been united, if only in their opposition to Batista.

To the cleanse the island of Castro’s influence was seen as a “panacea for

all ills” of Cuban society at home and abroad. Toppling him would free exiled

Cubans to return home to their rightful place in Cuban society, before the

revolution ruptured the previous social structure. In her article “Hardliners v.

‘Dialogueros’”, Cristina García (1998) presents this struggle for Cuba’s future

as roughly a generational one – with the first wave of Cubans representing

those most opposed to the new order being constructed on the island, while

younger Cubans, those that came of age in the United States or emigrated later,

became gradually more open to reconciliation with the Cuban government.

Groups that dissented from the hardline consensus of the Miami enclave were

part of the generation that had “left one revolutionary state to enter another”

(Cristina García 1998: 9). These Cubans went from a country in revolution to

an America where large segments of the nation’s youth had become animated

by the black freedom struggle and the fight against the Vietnam War. In a

world where the existing order seemed so uncertain on either side of the Straits

of Florida, it makes sense that this later generation was more willing to