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

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.