How have the demographics of Chicago’s Cuban population changed? In the early ’60s there was an abundance of upper- and middle-class professionals coming into the U.S. and Chicago, but by 1965 the population looked a lot closer to the makeup of Cuba as a whole.
What does the future hold for Chicago’s Cuban community? Number one, it’s shrinking. In the early ’70s there were about 45,000 Cubans here. Now I’ve heard it [is] about 11,000. So many people are retiring to Miami while younger people have gone in search of their roots in Miami. It’s also harder to get here: The flow of immigrants from Cuba has been curbed since 1994-1995. One thing about Cuban immigration that is sometimes forgotten is that people used to think we would be going back to Cuba. Especially in the early ’60s, there was an idea that communism would fall and people would return. But Fidel [Castro] is still there, and Cubans coming to the U.S. today don’t think they are returning.
What are the politics of Chicago’s Cuban community?
There’s a myth here that Cubans have always been Republican. It began with the idea that Cubans supported President Reagan because he had a well-articulated plan for Central America and Cuba. But I think there is another important factor–that Democrats in Florida were like the Democrats in other Southern states and weren’t very inclusive of Cuban-Americans. Here there are a lot of Cuban Republicans as well as Democrats. When Harold Washington ran for mayor, in the primary and the general election, a higher percentage of Cubans voted for him than any other Latino group.
