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132 6 La Catedral del Exilio A Nicaraguan Congregation in a Cuban Church ISABEL DEL PINO-ALLEN Suyapa Velazquez remembers the day she re-joined Ms. Adela Jaramillo’s afterschool class at San Juan Bosco’s Catholic Church’s Religious-Civic-Patriotic School. With a hint of embarrassment and a bit of bewilderment, the Central American teen recalled, during her interview held at recess time in the afternoon , “I was out for a few months to help care for my little brother, and when I came back the other students had already finished studying the geography of Cuba, the meaning of Cuba’s coat of arms, and other important things.” In an effort to catch up to her classmates, Suyapa searched the Internet and proudly produced a report on Cuba’s geography, including the name of the country’s fourteen provinces. Much to her chagrin, she discovered her efforts were unappreciated and she was also mildly chastised for bringing to school current information whereas the school only teaches pre-Communist  facts about Cuba. “No, we don’t teach any of the changes that [Fidel Castro] has made in Cuba,” Angelita Esparraguera, the director and founder of the school, responded when asked why the school teaches out-dated curricula. “We use our own books. Our students need to learn our realities.” Welcome to San Juan Bosco parish, also known as la catedral del exilio (the exiles’ cathedral). While the church’s official name in the Miami Catholic Archdiocese is in English, Saint John Bosco, I never heard anyone refer to it in this way. Everyone refers to it in Spanish, San Juan Bosco. The parish has been the heart and soul of Cubans’ Little Havana’s Catholic community in Miami since the early s, when thousands of Cuba’s faithful fled during the early years of the Castro revolution, particularly as the government shut churches, religious schools, and other faith-related institutions. Originally nestled in a White, working-class area, the parish experienced a dramatic change in demography and leadership during the s. Cuban exiles became its priests and lay leaders as their distinctive Cuban community grew. They dedicated themselves L A CATEDR AL DEL EXILIO 133 to both the cultivation and preservation of Cubans’ Catholic identity. Cubans in Miami are well known for being tight-knit, for their dense bonding social capital that has been used to aid them economically and to promote their political views on the national and international screen (Pedraza-Bailey ; Portes ; Portes and Stepick ). Their unity derives from shared ideas and cultural traditions —cubanía—as well as deep antipathy for Castro. Cultivation of their faith, in contrast, was necessary for Cubans are among Latin Americans leastchurched populations, a fact true even before the  revolution (Tweed ). The Catholic Church preserved the exiles’ identity by promulgating anti-Castro sentiment and action as well as fidelity to the church. This chapter examines how one key Cuban parish in Miami generates civic social capital (CSC) with a distinctive anti-Communist spin. There is a twist, however . San Juan Bosco has remained firm in its ideology and techniques for social capital formation despite a major process of ethnic succession. No longer a parish preaching solely to Cubans but one still overwhelmingly financed by wealthier Cubans who have relocated to more affluent areas of South Florida, San Juan Bosco’s catchment area now is home to large numbers of Central Americans along with older Cubans too poor to move to the suburbs and more recently arrived Cubans. Because the recently arrived Cubans lived for decades in Cuba under Castro and have families there still, among other factors, these Cubans tend to hold different perspectives than the original exiles (Grenier and Pérez ; Grenier ). In short, the parish is experiencing a succession that challenges the bonding social capital that established San Juan Bosco. What lessons does this parish teach about handling demographic change and its effects on parish identity? History of the San Juan Bosco Parish: The Making of a Cuban Parish in Exile To appreciate how the parish is dealing with succession, it is important to tell the history of the creation of the parish as a distinctly Cuban ethnic parish. San Juan Bosco Catholic Church was founded in  by the first bishop of Miami, Coleman Carroll, to establish a church to cater to the burgeoning Cuban influx. The bishop opted to name the nascent church after a nineteenth-century Italian saint, Don Giovanni Bosco, who enjoyed a large following of...

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