Political Disaffection in Cuba's Revolution and Exodus

The Cuban exodus is estimated to consist of around 12 percent of the country’s population. It harbors several distinct waves of migrants, alike only in their final rejection of Cuba. Silvia Pedraza links the revolution and exodus not only as cause and consequence but also as profoundly social and human processes that were not only political and economic but also cognitive and emotive. Ironically for a community that defined itself as being in exile, virtually no studies of its political attitudes exist, and certainly none that encompass the changing political attitudes over 47 years of the exodus. Through the use of two major research strategies – participant observation and in-depth, semi-structured interviews – Pedraza captures the processes of political disaffection and emphasizes the contrasts among the four major waves of the exodus not only in their social characteristics but also in their attitudes as members of different political generations.

Author Biography

Silvia Pedraza is Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of Michigan. She is the author of Political and Economic Migrants in America: Cubans and Mexicans (1985) and the co-editor of Origins and Destinies: Immigration, Race, and Ethnicity in America (1996, with Ruben G. Rumbaut). She has also published articles in such journals as Social Science History and the Annual Review of Sociology. A child of the Cuban refugee exodus, she lived through both a dictatorship and a revolution, which left an indelible mark on her research.