Elizabeth Campisi’ s Escape to Miami. An Oral History of the Cuban Rafter Crisis (Oxford University Press 2016) is one book written with passion.
Elizabeth Campisi worked at the Guantánamo Naval Base when the Cuban rafters were brought there. She got to know them and interact with them, as well as with their superior officers. The experience was life changing. At her return to the mainland, she decided to get a PhD in anthropology. Not surprisingly, the testimonies she obtained are filtered by her ethnographic presence. That is to say, although the oral histories that make the basis for the book’s narrative were collected years later, she shared the memory with her subjects. She was their witness. That empathy is patent throughout, and makes the reading at times riveting, and at times emotional. Yes: I did shed a few tears. There are, however, some bumps in the reading, and they should be attributed to an academic press that is increasingly notorious for cutting corners and that no longer wishes to invest in good editors and proofreaders. Nonetheless, this book is a must-read for anyone interested in Cuban and Caribbean migrations, Miami politics, and, more broadly, historical memory.
Campisi goes over the historical developments that led to the 1994 Balsero Crisis in the context of U.S.-Cuba relations, and does it well: even for a reader like me, who knows that chronology inside out, she makes it interesting all over again. She then takes us on the Cuban rafters’ journey, starting with Havana and other locations they leave behind, the experiences at sea and with the U.S. Coast Guards, and concluding with the camps at Guantánamo, and finally in Miami. Weaving her own observations at the time with the narratives gathered in retrospect, she paints a deep and nuanced history of the camps’ everyday life, including the struggles, hopes, and fears of their Cuban dwellers – mostly men. Some of the characters, she follows throughout, like Sylvia, the psychologist, whose reflections on both her own experience and the workings of trauma dot the volume.
After a contentious summer of 1994, when tens of thousands of rafters made it to Florida shores, President Clinton announced his dry foot/wet foot policy, whereby only those setting foot on shore would be admitted onto American soil. Gone was the special consideration to every exile from Communism. As a result, this migrant cohort would forever be stigmatized as not guided by ideals, like their exile predecessors, but by material need. Thereafter, the U.S. Coast Guard picked up everyone at sea, and took them to an offshore site: the Guantánamo Naval Base in Eastern Cuba, which Clinton had turned into a processing facility for the U.S Immigration and Naturalization Service. Guantánamo was a military base, established at the time of Cuba’s independence from Spain, and as a result of the U.S. winning the Spanish-American war. For Cuba, it was an outpost of American imperialism. The newly arrived rafters had to reconcile that view with their hope for a better life, which they codified, according to Campisi, as freedom – a freedom that could only be realized in the United States.
Life in Guantánamo was not easy. Rafters were initially distributed in several camps, and treated harshly. Yet, the tens of thousands of men and women confined there made the best of it. They built gardens and public art. They organized politically and created civic groups, developing a distinct camp culture, and a sense of collectivity and solidarity. They also learned about the United States and, for the most part, never wavered in their determination to immigrate there.
Slowly, all rafters make it to Miami, and Campisi is there to receive the very last flight carrying them when it lands in Homestead. This is a particularly poignant moment in the book, where the emotion is transmitted on to the reader. The author was there, as the ethnographer who supports their life histories, placing them in their proper context – a context that it is not just historical, but one of memory. Because this book is one of memory, not just from the Cuban immigrants, but from the author as well. She was also part of this journey; even if hers was not one that led to “freedom” – the trope that sustained the balseros’ determination – but to political consciousness. The experience leads the author to the awareness that Guantánamo’s history might have been infused with hope for freedom for some; while for us, Americans, it is one of international intervention and human rights violations that we should denounce.
For the Cuban immigrants, in turn, Guantánamo would forever define them, both individually and as a group. As one put it, using a language that was typical of Cuba’s revolutionary leaders, Guantánamo was “the sacrifice” that was required of them in order to reach a higher state. It was an intense and traumatic experience, as studies of some of the children have shown. Guantánamo was a generational rite of passage and their social marker in the United States.
This is not a book of historical theory or comparative analysis. It is the story of the Cubans who ended up in Guantánamo, in some cases for over a year. It is an exercise in storytelling, and it contains great passages. The material is so compelling that it would have greatly benefited from an editor, a service that university presses increasingly fail to provide. Nonetheless, anyone with an interest in this topic, or seeking to understand either Cuba or Miami today, should read this book.
Author: Elizabeth Campisi
Title: Escape to Miami. An Oral History of the Cuban Rafter Crisis
Press: Oxford University Press
Year: 2016
ISBN: 978-0-19-994687-7
Hardback, 214 pages
FEATURED IMAGE: “Liberty.” By Marcelo Muñoz. Drawing made at the camp. (From Elizabeth Campisi’s personal collection)
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