The Cubans of Union City: Immigrants in a New Jersey Community (review)

For more than fifty years, Cuban migration to the United States has generated thousands of studies and hundreds of books that have analyzed that community from every imaginable angle and perspective. Yet that abundant body of work suffers from a great imbalance since the overwhelming majority of those studies have focused on the migration’s largest enclave in South Florida, particularly Miami. There are few, if any, studies of other sizable Cuban communities in Los Angeles, New York City, Chicago, Washington D.C., and the second largest Cuban community in the United States: Union City, New Jersey, a.k.a. “the northernmost Cuban province” (p. 3). Those familiar with the Cuban community in Miami will welcome this work as a useful tool that will facilitate comparative analyses and a better framework to contextualize the foundations, development, and history of Cuban communities in the United States.

Despite vast historical and cultural differences between Miami and Union City before the Cubans’ arrival, the exile communities founded in both cities after 1959 developed strikingly similar ethnic enclaves. Both communities were and are driven by the same political passions, work ethics, entrepreneurial skills and experience, and family values that provided the basis for their slow but inevitable adaptation to and integration into American society, albeit largely on their own terms. Community development followed a pattern marked by the creation of private schools, Spanish-language newspapers, radio stations, and a wide variety of small and midsize businesses—restaurants; clothing, jewelry, and hardware stores; accounting and law firms; and banks—that catered almost exclusively to the Cuban community. Most if not all businesses offered the important amenity of Spanish-speaking clerks and attendants. And in Union City, like in Miami, the exiles organized themselves in social groups based on place of residence in Cuba (municipios) in order to preserve and strengthen their ties to the homeland, stay close to the political situation in Cuba, and to prepare for their return to Cuba as soon as Fidel Castro’s government was overthrown and the Cuban Revolution reversed. That hope vanished after the failure of the Bay of Pigs invasion in 1961, and the Cuban exile communities realized that it was time to develop deeper roots in the United States.

A resident of Union City since the 1960s, the author has witnessed and participated in the community’s most important cultural and political events. The narrative covers all major events related to Cuba and the Cuban immigration to the United States from the perspective of those who, for various reasons, settled in the northeast, away from Cuban Miami. The 102 interviewees reflect on every wave of the Cuban migration, from the “Freedom Flights,” to the Mariel boatlifts, to the balseros’ exodus, and how each wave of Cuban migrants affected the community. The author and her informants are also not shy to comment on the sensitive subject of political violence in the community. Most importantly, unlike most studies on the Cuban migration, this work focuses on two important contributors to community building: women and the Catholic Church. The role of women as central figures in the family and their contributions to the local economy and social and civic organizations are well documented through interviews with female community leaders, local press reports, and journal articles. A similar method is used to show the Catholic Church’s role as the spiritual, and at times political, leader of the community both in Cuba and in Union City. Members of the clergy candidly discussed their collaboration with the U.S. government during the “Peter Pan” program, and their position on Pope John Paul II’s visit to Cuba in 1998. In sum, The Cubans of Union City is an important work of original research, thoroughly documented, and well written. Cuba’s “northernmost province” can now take its rightful place in the literature of the Cuban migration to the United States.