ABSTRACT
To the day of Fidel Castro's accession to power, then, the ideological geography of Cuban politics extended from the center to the left—with competing versions of populism crowding out all other dispensations. Cubans were accustomed to a large government role in economic and social matters, and they continue to feel comfortable with it in their American exile. While all the revolutions of modern history have produced sizable exile communities, in no other case has the diaspora been so proportionately large, so wealthy, so well organized, so geographically concentrated, and so physically proximate to its country of origin. The Cuban-American National Foundation tends to attract people who saw through Castro's democratic mask from the very start. The Cuban-Americans have also demonstrated that it is possible to sink deep roots in a new country without necessarily surrendering one's own identity, and in so doing have formed a remarkable bridge between the United States and Latin America.
