Escape to Miami: An Oral History of the Cuban Rafter Crisis by Elizabeth Campisi (review)

The Cuban rafter crisis came to a head in 1994, when thousands of Cubans were intercepted and sent to the US naval base at Guantánamo Bay. In 1994, President Clinton labeled Cubans fleeing on rafts through the Florida Straits as "illegal refugees," changing the migratory status of Cubans fleeing the island. This change in policy was an extension of Cold War and postrevolutionary Cuban diplomatic relations. Escape to Miami examines how the four decades of Cuban-US relations after the Cuban Revolution affected Cubans on the island and in Miami. This oral history provides deeper insight into how the military base at Guantánamo provided a prototype for the imprisonment and torture of "enemy combatants" there after 9/11, as well as current detention camps at the US-Mexico border. Examining the Clinton administration's policies in the 1990s and the current use of immigration detention in policy development is useful for thinking through Latina/o immigration experiences from the perspective of Cuban experiences and their similarities with contemporary practices at the border.

Elizabeth Campisi worked in 1994 with Cuban refugees at Guantánamo—called "Gitmo" by the military—as part of the staff providing services under the Justice Department's Community Relations Service, including mediation, resettlement interviewing, family reunification, and recreation. In her role as resettlement interviewer, Campisi describes herself as a "vulnerable observer"; she later became a trained anthropologist and embarked on this oral history research. Her experiences at Guantánamo informed her methodology; she used ethnographic and oral history methods to conduct her interviews. The book intertwines social history, her experience working at Guantánamo, and interviews she conducted after the camp closed. Her initial approach was to understand the social history that led to the rafter crisis. She conducted life history interviews, a year of participant observation in Miami's Little Havana neighborhood and Hialeah, and interviews with Cuban Americans and exiled artists and academics; she also listened to Cuban exile radio stations and attended community events. Campisi did research in Cuba as well, where she studied Cuban art, especially folk art in galleries and markets. She lived with three families for seven weeks while doing her research. Trauma studies also informs her methodology, as Cubans who left the island and were later interned in camps at Guantánamo and in Panama (where rafters were also sent during the period) experienced multiple levels of trauma: living under dictatorship and being targeted by the government; being at sea and enduring its many dangers; and living in detainment and with uncertainty as to when they would reach the United States. In response to this trauma, Cubans at Guantánamo created art. Campisi highlights their creativity in repurposing all types of available materials to make art in response to their trauma.

Escape to Miami is organized into six chapters, plus an introduction and epilogue. Chapter 1 provides background on immigration policy between Cuba and the United States, beginning in the 1980s with the Mariel boat lift and connecting that to the balsero crisis of the mid-1990s. Chapter 2 details the sociopolitical background of the rafter exodus—that is, what led people to want to leave Cuba and risk their lives at sea. Campisi details the intricacies of how untenable life in postrevolutionary Cuba had become for so many, pushing people to abandon their families and risk their lives. Chapter 3 explains how the US government turned the base at Guantánamo into an immigration camp because of its diplomatic and legal status: "The base's isolated location near the eastern tip of the island, and its situation as a military base located in a sovereign nation with which the United States had no formal diplomatic relations, made Gitmo an island within an island" (56). The conditions on the base were meager, creating a crisis within a crisis for Cubans waiting in uncertainty. Chapter 4, "Coping in the Camps," provides...