Miami: No Place Like It

To most refugees from Fidel Castro’s Cuba, Miami seems like a home away from home—at least the way home used to be. In addition to its sunny climate and palm trees, an abundance of Havana-style restaurants and Spanish-speaking radio stations, Miami boasts the largest concentration of Cubans outside Castroland. About 180,000 refugees—two-thirds of the total—have settled there since 1959 and have quickly adapted to Yanqui ways. They are generally law-abiding and hardworking. The city’s unemployment rate is down from a high of 12% in 1962 to 4.7%, and only 13,000 Cubans remain on the welfare rolls.

For their part, most Miamians welcomed the newcomers—but that does not mean Miami wants still more Cubans. While Havana and Washington negotiated the arrangements concluded last week for a new exodus from Cuba, a wave of apprehension and resentment swept the city. The evacuation by U.S. chartered planes will begin by Dec. 1 and bring in between 3,000 and 4,000 refugees a month.

Newspapers and broadcasting stations received hundreds of letters and phone calls objecting to the new influx of immigrants. Said Miami Mayor Robert King High: “No one community can assimilate any great number of people who come here with limitations of speech and no money.” Governor Haydon Burns warned of possible “economic chaos.” Dade County School Superintendent Joe Hall ordered that all newly arrived Cuban children be excluded from classrooms until the Federal Government provides more funds for their education.

“They’re Hurting Us.” N.A.A.C.P. and Urban League leaders, who argue that Cubans now hold 30,000 jobs in the Miami area that otherwise would be available to Negroes, expressed fears that the Negro unemployment rate—already much higher than the general average —would rise still further. Miami, they point out, is as potent a magnet for Negroes in other parts of the South as it is for Cubans. Though as yet there has been no racial trouble between the two groups, the threat is there. As Charles Bowder, an unemployed Negro laborer, put it: “I don’t know the Cubans well enough to hate them. But they’re hurting us.”

After conferring with Florida officials in Miami and in Washington, Health, Education and Welfare Secretary John Gardner agreed last week that the refugee problem was “the responsibility of the entire nation.” Gardner pledged in principle to raise the federal education subsidy from the present 60% of cost for each Cuban child to 100%.

The U.S. will also give additional help for school construction and increase federal aid to county hospitals that treat Cubans.

“UnAmerican Statements.” Gardner’s most welcome pledge was that as many Cubans as possible will be encouraged to settle elsewhere. Priority for departure from Cuba will be given to refugees whose relatives live outside Miami, on the theory that the newcomers will follow their kin. Even so, the Federal Government cannot force them to live in any particular place. Of the 2,800 Cubans who arrived by boat before Castro closed Camarioca last week, 2,200 have registered with the Refugee Emergency Center; only 1,450 have agreed to settle outside Miami.

For all the new problems they may raise, Cubans have pumped millions of dollars into the local economy, much of it derived from federal assistance.

Though they are accused of lowering property values, they have revitalized several blighted commercial areas by opening hundreds of shops, sidewalk cafes, bars and other businesses. Miami’s plushest nightclub, Les Violins, is owned by a Cuban refugee. Pupils who speak little or no English at first pose difficulties for schools, but many American children are learning to speak Spanish fluently. And, as School Superintendent Hall admits, “the Cuban kids seem to win all the school essay contests on democracy.”

To those who cry that the city should force all new Cuban immigrants to settle elsewhere, Monsignor John Fitzpatrick, chancellor of the Roman Catholic diocese of Miami, retorted: “How unbecoming it is that these foolish, un-American statements are often made by the descendants of the Irish, the Italian, the Polish and the English immigrants who came here since the early 1600s seeking refuge from oppression and hunger.”