ABSTRACT
There has been a significant migration of Cubans to the United States since the nineteenth century but the numbers of Cuban nationals arriving in the United States increased significantly after the 1959 revolution. In contrast to migrants coming from other neighboring Latin American countries, the flow of Cuban migrants arriving in the United States has not been steady across the last five decades. Instead, concentrated flows of émigrés have arrived in specific periods on U.S. soil and mainly settled in the State of Florida. Following the end of the Cold War and the onset of a profound economic crisis in Cuba, the numbers of Cubans arriving in the United States began to increase significantly starting in 1994. This wave of Cuban migration, which is ongoing and has transpired for more than a decade and a half, represents the longest and largest in magnitude of the four waves of migration that has taken place since Cubans began leaving the Island in the early 1960s. Indeed, the United States remains the top destination for Cuban nationals leaving the country and the last U.S. Census revealed that nearly one-fifth of the Cuban-born population in the United States had arrived between 1994 and 2000.1
The different explanations that have been offered for the variation in migration policies toward Cuba adopted by the United States have concurred that international factors drove policy responses in the early decades of the Cuban revolution.2 In adopting migrant-accepting policies, Presidents Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson and Nixon embraced Cuban émigrés as part of traditional U.S. anticommunist immigration ideology. Strategically, the U.S. government also recognized that exiled Cubans would be an opposition force that would contribute to its strategy to isolate Cuba. Starting in the 1980s, scholars also concur that there was a major turning point in U.S. migration policy towards Cuba. The United States began to adopt restrictive
policies in the 1980s as its strategic interests shifted and it sought to weaken Cuba’s unilateral power to set U.S. immigration policy.3
