As the Castro regime begins its second decade in power and the great headline-making upheavals of 1959-1962 pass into history, the excited, emotional journalism of those years is giving way to sober, factual studies of the Cuban Revolution. Richard R. Fagen and his assistants, putting together and expanding previously printed articles on the Cuban refugees, have provided us with a useful survey of a great Latin American migration, the flight of some 500,000 people (7% of Cuba’s population in 1960) from the menaces and privations of a Communist dictatorship. Using questionnaires filled in by 400 male heads of households registered with the Refugee Center in Miami, the authors give reliable information about a much praised, much maligned, and much misunderstood group of people.
As might be expected, the average refugee is neither the traitorous gusano of fidelista propaganda nor one of “the bravest men in the world” (Jacqueline Kennedy at the Orange Bowl rally, October 1962). Among the half-million who fled Cuba are Batista supporters and former guerrillas, doctors, lawyers, farmers, and fishermen, the rich and the poor, university professors and illiterates. In some significant respects the refugees studied do differ from the general population from which they came. Their average income (1958) was $5900, four times that of the average Cuban worker. There were 8.8 times as many lawyers and 5.5 times as many professionals and semiprofessionals among the refugees as one would get in a random sample of Cubans. Less than 6 percent of the refugees were Negroes or mulattoes, as against 27% listed as part Negro in the 1953 census.
Fagen examines the causes and implications of these and similar findings in a level-headed, sensible way, with extensive quotations from relevant material. In the end, the refugee exodus is seen to resemble similar outpourings from Soviet Russia, from Hitler’s and Ulbricht’s Germanies, from China, Hungary, and Palestine. The flight of so many enemies may have stabilized the Castro government by removing them to a place where they could no longer fight against it, although the loss of so many technicians was a severe economic blow. If the exiles had been unable to leave, Fagen suggests, there would probably have been a great many more incidents of sabotage, jail sentences, and executions. His final conclusion is that Fidel’s decision to allow the exodus and the American decision to assist it resulted in “one of the more humane solutions to the trauma of change in contemporary Cuba.”
