Cuban Americans And The Miami Media

This book makes a contribution to the debates on diasporic identities and transnational communication. It provides an analysis of the Cuban American community and its relationship to Miami-based English- and Spanish-language media. Based on extensive ethnographic data, the author demonstrates how different media have been used, produced and influenced by segments of the Cuban American community in Miami. After establishing the significance of Miami as a locale to receive a high number of migrants after the Cuban revolution in 1959, what follows is an exploration of the interplay of collective Cuban American identity and the evolution of an exile community on the one hand and media institutions and their output on the other. In doing so, Miami-based press, radio, network television and online media are examined. The author moreover shows how mediated memories of pre-revolutionary Cuba have been kept alive in Miami and over time became more inclusive through the use of new media technologies.

Praising Cuban-Americans' cultural distinctness, hard work, and entrepreneurship, the authors present a photographic account of the influence of Cuban migration on the city. The text also discusses the cuisine, music, religion, everyday life, and politics. Photographs, cartoons in bandw. Annotation copyrighted by Book News Inc., Portland, OR

In the years since Fidel Castro came to power, the migration of close to one million Cubans to the United States continues to remain one of the most fascinating, unusual, and controversial movements in American history. María Cristina García—a Cuban refugee raised in Miami—has experienced firsthand many of the developments she describes, and has written the most comprehensive and revealing account of the postrevolutionary Cuban migration to date. García deftly navigates the dichotomies and similarities between cultures and among generations. Her exploration of the complicated realm of Cuban American identity sets a new standard in social and cultural history.

This book makes a contribution to the debates on diasporic identities and transnational communication. It provides an analysis of the Cuban American community and its relationship to Miami-based English- and Spanish-language media. Based on extensive ethnographic data, the author demonstrates how different media have been used, produced and influenced by segments of the Cuban American community in Miami. After establishing the significance of Miami as a locale to receive a high number of migrants after the Cuban revolution in 1959, what follows is an exploration of the interplay of collective Cuban American identity and the evolution of an exile community on the one hand and media institutions and their output on the other. In doing so, Miami-based press, radio, network television and online media are examined. The author moreover shows how mediated memories of pre-revolutionary Cuba have been kept alive in Miami and over time became more inclusive through the use of new media technologies.

From America’s number one Cuba reporter, PEN award–winning investigative journalist Ann Louise Bardach, comes the big book on Cuba we’ve all been waiting for. An incisive and spirited portrait of the twentieth century’s wiliest political survivor and his fiefdom, Cuba Confidential is the gripping story of the shattered families and warring personalities that lie at the heart of the forty-three-year standoff between Miami and Havana. Famous to many Americans for her cover stories and media appearances, Ann Louise Bardach has been covering Cuba for a decade. She’s talked to the crooks, spooks and politicians who have made history, and to their hired assassins and confidants. Based on exclusive interviews with Fidel Castro, his sister Juanita, his former brother-in-law Rafael Díaz-Balart, the family of Elián González, the friends and family of the legendary American fugitive Robert Vesco, the intrepid terrorist Luis Posada Carriles, and the inner circles of Jeb Bush and the late exile leader Jorge Mas Canosa, Cuba Confidential exposes the hardball take-no-prisoners tactics of the Cuban exile leadership, and its manipulation and exploitation by ten American presidents. Bardach homes in on Fidel Castro and his cronies, taking us closer than we’ve ever been—and on the militant exiles who have devoted their lives, with CIA connivance, to trying to eliminate him. From Calle Ocho to Juan Miguel González’s kitchen table in Cárdenas, from Guantánamo Bay to Union City to Washington, D.C., Ann Louise Bardach serves up an unforgettable portrait of Cuba and its exiles.

For many Cubans, Fidel Castro's Revolution represented deliverance from a legacy of inequality and national disappointment. For others—especially those exiled in the United States—Cuba's turn to socialism made the prerevolutionary period look like paradise lost. Michael J. Bustamante unsettles this familiar schism by excavating Cubans' contested memories of the Revolution's roots and results over its first twenty years. Cubans' battles over the past, he argues, not only defied simple political divisions; they also helped shape the course of Cuban history itself. As the Revolution unfolded, the struggle over historical memory was triangulated among revolutionary leaders in Havana, expatriate organizations in Miami, and average Cuban citizens. All Cubans leveraged the past in individual ways, but personal memories also collided with the Cuban state's efforts to institutionalize a singular version of the Revolution's story. Drawing on troves of archival materials, including visual media, Bustamante tracks the process of what he calls retrospective politics across the Florida Straits. In doing so, he drives Cuban history beyond the polarized vision seemingly set in stone today and raises the prospect of a more inclusive national narrative.

"Illuminating and relevant. . . . benchmark data and, most importantly, interpretations and inferences from the data and literature on the roles of the mass media among Cubans."--Timothy P. Meyer, University of Wisconsin, Green Bay "Breaks new ground. . . . focuses on an important group within the general Hispanic community, highlighting how the social, political, and economic forces affect the mass media which serve it."--Rodolfo Cortina, Florida International University After 30 years of exile in south Florida, many Cubans have begun to accept the possibility that they will never return home. Their children and grandchildren have adapted to the American way of life and have begun the process of assimilation. Gonzalo Soruco looks at how these exiles--nearly half a million since 1959--and their offspring use the mass media in the greater Miami area. For the most part Cuban exiles are not like other Hispanic immigrants; they are older, more affluent, and better educated. They are part of a powerful conservative political machine and an extensive social network. And they are passionate about their anti-Castro cause. Almost inevitably in this climate, leaders of the Cuban community have taken issue with the Miami Herald's reportorial philosophy and its coverage of Cubans. As the Herald's traditional Anglo readers moved out of Dade County, the paper was shaken into action: it hired Spanish-speaking journalists, promoted Hispanic reporters into the paper's management, started a Spanish-language newspaper, and took a turn to the ideological right. Soruco analyzes these events and discovers that--contrary to accusations in the media--Cubans do not think that the English-language media are instruments of either right- or left-wing propaganda. He also discusses the Cuban relationship with radio and television. As public debate continues about the Americanization of Cubans, particularly with regard to bilingual education, this work will find a wide audience. It will be especially useful to television advertisers, market researchers, people in the print media in south Florida, and those enterprises interested in Cubans as a business bridge to Latin America. Gonzalo R. Soruco is associate professor of communication at the University of Miami, Coral Gables, Florida. He is the author of articles in Market Research, Marketing Review, Opinion, Encounter, and other journals.