Cuba, a country with rich history, culture and art. A country that had been deeply involved in global politics in the 20th century as they played a vital role in the Cold War. A country that has seen a plethora of different leaderships, from Spanish colonial rule to a protectorate of the United States to a dictatorship under Fulgencio Batista and now, a communist state.
Following the revolution, which had overthrown the dictatorship, there had been mass migration from Cuba to the United States. People travelled by boats, by foot and by planes. Between the years of 1965 and 1973, an operation called ‘Freedom Flights’, which ran twice a day, five times a week and had a budget of around $12 million, transported 300,000 refugees from Cuba to America. This became so popular that there were 1 million Cubans on the waiting list and, according to a poll from a magazine, there was another additional 1 million Cubans who wanted to leave. This was the largest airborne refugee operation in American history.
In 2017, Netflix launched a comedy series named, ‘One day at a Time’, following the lives of a Cuban- American family living in Los Angeles. The grandmother escaped Cuba during the revolution and started her family in the United States and the show follows the individual lives of the family members. Whilst the show is a work of fiction, it touches on some very real topics and issues society faces, including immigration. In the USA, immigration has been an ongoing debate for ages and the policy regarding migrants from Cuba to America has actually changed quite a few times. Before the 1980s, all refugees were welcomed into the United States as political refugees, but after a revision of the Cuban Adjustment act of 1966, there was an introduction of a new policy called ‘Wet Foot, Dry Foot’. It stated that only immigrants who reached USA soil by land would be accepted into the country, and then they would be eligible to apply for residency a year later. However, in the case that immigrants were attempting to reach USA by water, they would not be accepted in and would either be returned home or sent to a different country. One of the driving reasons for the revision of the policy was the sheer volume of people seeking asylum. As of 2017, there are 1,311,803 Cubans living in the United States. One of the most heavily Cuban- populated cities in the United States is Miami. Because of the mass migration, modern Miami has been greatly influenced by Cuban culture, and the city has even been nicknamed ‘Cuban Miami’. Moreover, with its citizens practicing their cultural norms and religion, there is so much diversity to be found.
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