The Cuban Presence in D.C.

(Excerpted from a report to the Smithsonian for the D.C. Latino History Project and the D.C Humanities Council’s ‘Santeria Traditions in Washington D.C.’ project. The full study can be obtained by contacting the Latino Center.)

The Cuban presence in the greater D.C. metropolitan area is the focus of this prototype case-study. As a small ethnic community that arrived well before, but also alongside a tremendous wave of Salvadorans and other Latino communities, a Cuban-focused case study allows us to consider the place-making processes of a “low-density cultural group.”[i] Further, the Cuban presence in D.C. presents the clearest justification for the necessity of attending to international relations and political economic practices in analyzing the local production of historical memory.  It would be counterproductive to ignore the role the federal government, and by association Washington D.C.’s geographic identity as the nation’s capital, plays in bringing refugees and migrants to the United States.

Accordingly, this blueprint has three basic aims: 1) to offer a synthetic historical overview of the Cuban presence in the Washington D.C. metropolitan area; 2) to explicate how U.S.-Cuba international relations, shifting refugee statuses, and intra-group class-based distinctions brought Cubans to the metropolitan area as opposed to other well-established points of entry such as Miami;[ii] and 3) to attain a sense of how religious practices, as well as other modes of musical and cultural production, create long-standing multiethnic Latino spaces within and beyond the immediate borders of the federal district.  In lieu of offering concluding remarks, this essay will review how findings gleaned from a space production theoretical framework and a historical-ethnographic approach can inform future projects and research.

Overview of Cuba-U.S. relations

This analysis of Cuba-U.S./la Habana-D.C. relations does not begin in 1959, the year that President Fulgencio Batista fled Cuba thereby creating political space for a revolutionary government and engendering the historical moment in which each country’s political and economic sensibilities ostensibly parted ways.  In addition to being politically, economically, and culturally linked because of geographic proximity throughout the colonial era, U.S. and Cuban representatives were already creating migratory ties by traveling back and forth between la Habana and Washington D.C. during the nineteenth century.  One example is Narciso López—a native of Venezuela and former general of the Spanish army who attempted to annex Cuba in the 1840s for the United States using violent force.  He acted as a “filibuster,” which refers not to a prolonged speech that obstructs advancement but to “irregular armies of adventurers from the United States and to the individuals who joined such armies.”[iii] More specifically, filibusters pursued “territorial conquests and other booty through intervention in foreign, domestic conflicts in which the United States was a neutral.”[iv] López organized multiple expeditions to invade Cuba.  His actions align themselves with the Manifest Destiny agenda and the “Young America” movement that were sweeping Washington D.C. and the U.S. at large during the mid-nineteenth century.[v] The U.S.’s position as “neutral” is arguable but López’s strategic discussions with then President Polk set a precedent for U.S.-Cuba international relations, economic ties, and military interventions.  Moreover, his “Young American” contemporaries, who rallied to annex Cuba, created overt and at times covert relationships that encouraged movement and place/policy-making between the two countries well before the Spanish-American War in 1898.

Twentieth century migration to the United States out of Cuba not only owes much to nineteenth century military and political networking but also to international business opportunities in South Florida.  As early as 1886, Cuban entrepreneurs opened cigar factories near Tampa to evade import taxes thereby establishing migration outposts that solidified that region’s influx of political refugees in the 1950s.[vi] Indeed, the United States has a long history of cultivating international migration routes with Cuba.  The following table gives us a historical glimpse of Cuban immigration to the United States over the past two centuries.

NUMBER OF CUBANS ADMITTED INTO THE UNITED STATES AS IMMIGRANTS, 1871-1958[vii]

As the table demonstrates, Washington D.C., as the head of the U.S. federal government, has a long history of legally admitting Cubans.  It is worth mentioning that U.S. occupation and/or military interventions in the Caribbean at large (i.e. Cuba 1897, Haiti 1915, Dominican Republic 1916) often preceded the metaphorical welcome banners and subsequent accelerated immigration to the United States.[viii]

The Cuban Revolution and the Cuban Missile Crisis altered Cuba-U.S./la Habana-Washington D.C. relations and affected the mobility of residents between the two nations.   There are three general phases.  Before the notorious Bay of Pigs invasion in April 1961, the U.S. welcomed approximately 125,000 Cubans as temporary political exiles after Revolution.   Many relocated to Southern Florida.  It was not until December 1960, however, that the federal government organized an official response to the influx.  After establishing the Cuban Refugee Emergency Center in Miami, President Kennedy initiated a Cuban Refugee Program.[ix] At this early point, resettlement was already strained.  Many Cubans arrived on air flights during the next phase, roughly between 1961-1973.  Some estimates cite the number of incoming “freedom flights” around 1500-1700 a week.  Later, between 1973 and 1980, the U.S. limited Cuban migration to political prisoners.  Although these periods were generally dominated by anti-Castro foreign policy objectives, there were moments of dialogue.  President Carter, for example, attempted to initiate talks “without preconditions” in 1977.[x]

Cuban migration to Washington DC: An International, Black-Majority City

The idea of Washington D.C. as a federally mandated destination point for Cuban refugees was never propagated.  According to census data published in 1970, approximately 1% of Cuban nationals, or 6,957 individuals, had settled in the federal district and surrounding areas.[xi] Regardless, they established themselves and a proportionate amount did so soon after the revolution.  Yet, historians and political scientists’ written accounts of those time periods mention D.C. as a physical outpost only briefly, if at all.[xii] Paradoxically, many of those authors, particularly intelligence, policy, and defense researchers published their analyses through Washington D.C metropolitan area institutions.[xiii]

One exception is Margaret S. Boone’s immensely informative community study of Cuban immigrants in D.C. in 1974.  According to some of the women with whom Boone worked, relocating to the Washington D.C. area, as opposed to New York City or Miami, was a deliberate compromise.  On one hand, D.C.-based Cubans had to sacrifice warm weather as well as geographic proximity to the homeland and to family members but they also gained cultural diversity, non-industrial/professional work settings, and a general sense of political autonomy.[xiv]

According to Boone, early immigrants followed one of three general trajectories.  Financially stable Cubans bypassed the heterogeneous neighborhoods of “Adams Mill-Morgan area” and the “Columbia Road area” to settle in Takoma Park, Maryland or the Barcroft/Alexandria Virginia area.  One draw of that seemingly anomalous destination point in Virginia was the combination of an apartment complex known as “Little Havana” and a special foods grocery store that catered specifically to the Cuban influx. At the time of her research, the owners of that store had opened an outpost in the Adams Mill-Morgan area.  Family members, however, resided in Bethesda, MD.[xv] Another pull factor was the large lake and the idea of buying upmarket lakefront property.[xvi] According to Boone’s informants:

Barcroft is the area where pre-revolutionary social life has been recreated to the fullest extent possible in Washington.  Those who participate in it are, in both American and Cuban terms, upper middle class.  This status is first derived from family prestige, and secondly from wealth and education.  These factors were highly inter-related before the Revolution, and maintained through children, who are brought up knowing the status difference between families, and acting accordingly.[xvii]

Cubans who did not relocate to Barcroft, because of class or status-related obstacles, settled in Takoma Park, Maryland.  There were resources, like a Spanish-language film theater called Teatro Takoma, but more importantly, Boone’s informants cited a clear difference in residents based on willingness to integrate with whites and blacks as well as foreign-born residents from Latin American countries.[xviii]

A newspaper article featuring a refugee who was named Businessman of the Year by the Ibero-American Council Chamber of Commerce further illuminates Takoma Park’s connection with the low density Cuban diaspora.  Gilberto Gonzalez migrated to the United States in 1963 to escape Cuba’s communist regime.  After working in the sugarcane fields in Florida and unsuccessfully investing his life savings in a Baltimore-based ethnic food store, Gonzalez opened a bodega in Adams-Morgan.  By 1984, Gonzalez owned “five-store, family-owned food chain and a distribution warehouse, with an estimated gross of $11 million.”[xix] Gonzalez’s daughter, Sara Perez, then a resident of Takoma Park, offered her opinion in the article.  This text suggests that inter-state and intra-district business routes, particularly foodway exchanges, catered to and connected Latino communities residing in D.C., Maryland, and Virginia.

Before moving forward chronologically, we must take a moment to consider that most Cuban exiles populated these two suburban outposts and the highly diverse areas of Adams Mill-Morgan and Columbia Road before 1970.  Keep in mind two critical factors about the built environments in which Cubans were immersing themselves.  Foremost, Washington D.C. underwent a transformation in the 1940s, and specifically after the Second World War; in providing a home for the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund as well as embassies, the federal district diversified its foreign-born population and class categories.

There was also the reality of living in a black-majority city.  An oral history conducted with Dominican-born Juana Campos, for example, who initially migrated to New York in 1940 but moved to Washington D.C. because “it was so clean,” shares her experience as an Afro-Caribbean, Spanish-speaker living in the federal district among a diverse, but racially segregated population.   In an interview with Hector Corporan, conducted for the Anacostia Community Museum’s Black Mosaic exhibit, Campos relates her experience with two other Dominicans (presumably Afro-Dominican) at an all-black school.  She remembers making her classmates laugh when she spoke Spanish.  Although she admits having limited contact with other Spanish-speakers in the city, she recalls working for a “high-society” woman from Costa Rica in the late 60s (after MLK’s assassination) and meeting a Jewish Cuban who worked as a tailor in a dry-cleaning business called “Dry Cleaning King Dry Clean.”  She mentioned that he did not “serve” blacks.[xx]

The lived experiences of some of these individuals may be found at the Latin American Youth Center’s Art and Media House.  This improvised archive (literally piles of documents and materials), which needs to be attended to immediately, houses pieces of a project conducted in 2003 called “The Great Generation.”  There is an interview with Felix Carvajal, a seventy-eight year old Afro-Cuban who moved to the United States in 1967 with only the clothes on his back.  The trove contains a transcript of his interview, recorded tapes, and photos.  Another archive worth pursuing may be found at the Andromeda clinic and its precursor—the Washington Free Clinic.  Dr. Ricardo Galbis, a Cuban-born psychiatrist who was trained at the Sorbonne and Georgetown University, founded the Free Clinic with a colleague in 1968 and then the Andromeda clinic in 1970, which continues to cater specifically to the local Hispanic community and their cultural-linguistic realities.[xxi]

The Mariel Boatlift: Cultural Production & Local Responses to National Foreign Policy

In May 1980, the Organo del comité de la comunidad hispano-americana de Virginia, published a special edition of Información chronicling “el Exodo Cubano de 1980.”[xxii] In addition to featuring a passionate, of-the-moment account of Cuban-American relations (read: overtly biased anti-Castro article) written by Herminio Portell-Vila—Editor Latinoamericano, American Security Council—the special issue offers readers political mobilization information.  Those sections speak of a Cuban assistance committee organized by Dr. Luis H. Vidana, then head of the Spanish Speaking Committee of Virginia, and “last minute news” offering the following message:

Al momento de cerrarse esta edición, se ha acentuado la posibilidad de un acuerdo entre el Gobierno Americano y Cubano, en relación con la salida oredenada de cubanos.  En cualquiera de nuestras Oficinas se encuentra copia de las planillas que deben firmar los familiares a ese efecto [regards the aforementioned Cuban assistance committee].  Es un paso más, pero no podemos afirmar aún que sea el definitivo y total.[xxiii]

I cite this passage to reinforce the idea that the local is national; this locally produced news bulletin created a parallel Cuba-America political discourse in which local actors like Portell-Vila and Vidana were shaping on-the-ground actions/responses to national foreign policy.   Portell-Vila’s article, for example, makes this point explicit.  It is worth citing at length.

La mente tortuosa de Castro entonces se negó a permitir la salida para Perú y Costa Rica, puso obstáculos a los viajes para España y anunció que todos los refugiados en la embajada de Perú en La Habana y los que quisieran seguirles, tendrían permiso para VENIR A LOS ESTADOS UNIDOS, POR EL PUERTO DE MARIEL, al oeste de La Habana. Fue así que surgió el éxodo cubano de 1980 para los Estados Unidos, ya que el Presidente Carter contestó a las bravatas de Castro con la promesa de que los Estados Unidos recibirían hasta 250,000 cubanos.  Centernares de pequeños barcos, fletados al efecto por los cubanos radicados en los Estados Unidos, fueron de Cayo Hueso a Mariel, a pesar de todos los riesgos de la travesía, y el 15 de mayo treinta mil de ellos ya estaban en los Estados Unidos, recibidos y atendidos por funcionarios oficiales y entidades privadas de carácter cívico o religioso.  Los cubanos de los Estados Unidos recaudaron millones de pesos para ayudar a los recién llegados y todos tuvieron ropas, medicinas, albergues y buena acogida popular. Naturalmente que el Comité Hispanico del Norte de Virginia en el acto se asoció al movimiento en escala nacional para ayudar a la nueva oleada de refugiados cubanos.

El Sr. Raúl A. Caballero atendió a la familia de Mario y Xonia G. . . , con su pequeña hija Dayana, quien ya está yendo a la escuela en Fairfax.  Los padres ya están orientados en la comunidad.  En la capital federal Luis P. . ., y Wilfredo R. . ., ya van encaminados.  Sus relatos de la estancia en la Embajada de Perú, el viaje a Mariel y luego la travesía de Mariel a Cayo Hueso, son emocionantes.  El Dr. Luis Humberto Vidaña, presidente del Comité Hispanico, presentó a los recién llegados en una asamblea en la que fueron acogidos con entusiasmo.  Cuentan ellos que entre los refugiados en la Embajada de Perú, había médicos, ingenieros, funcionarios de régimen de Castro, artistas del cabaret “Tropicana”, atletas, etc. con sus familias, ansiosos de escapar de los horrores del comunismo.

Portell-Vila prefaces a call to action with an overview of the Mariel boatlift negotiations, which does not echo President Carter’s sentiments exactly, but definitely reinforces a similar interpretation of America as a country in which “liberty” is a key word.[xxiv] The most interesting portion of the long excerpt, for a historian, is Portell-Vila’s description of that wave of Cuban refugees—their occupations and diverse backgrounds.  The work of future researchers would be remiss without searching for these actors.

Although this special edition offers detailed information about local responses to a national issue, it is but one source—a text that is written for and by a presumably sheltered population of Cubans living in the D.C. metropolitan area.[xxv] There are other sources of information, particularly oral histories, which complement and complicate their narratives. This is especially true of Cuban migrants like Hector “el Negro” Tabío, a singer, musician, and santero who came to Washington DC in Sept. 1980 along with 125,000 other Cubans as part of the Mariel boatlift.  Initially, he traveled to the Miami tenant camps but pleaded to be sent elsewhere, to Washington DC where the rest of his musical group lived.  José Sueiro hosted him and used NEA money to support Tabío’s singing and teaching.[xxvi] Tabío later performed with Ernesto Guerra and Roberto Batista at the Black Mosaic Anacostia Exhibit’s opening celebration in 1994.  Their musical ensemble Otonowa performed variants of rumba—“guaguancó,” “the columbia,” and the “yambú”—thereby “contrasting with the commercial rumba of the 1930s.”[xxvii]

Not all expositions of Afro-Cuban musical idioms, however, were viewed favorably, particularly after 1980 and especially when those repertories supported Santería rituals.  Another Cuban who relocated to the D.C.-area is Francisco Rigores, a santero and musician, perhaps best known for his collaboration with “los Invasores de los 80.”[xxviii] In 1987, Carlos Sanchez, writing for Washington Post, covered his use of animal sacrifice for Santería rituals. Sanchez noted that a calf, goat and pig, along with six doves, three chickens, three roosters, and six quails were confiscated from his home on Park Rd.  It was also noted that he acquired those animals in Thurmond, MD for $400.[xxix] The backstage practical logistics of animal sacrifice are interesting because they unveil how these cultural practices help sustain regional economies.  Another thread we can follow regarding this point involves tracing inter-ethnic Santería practices outside of private homes, particularly natural areas of the metro-area such as Rock Creek Park and the Potomac River.  Rigores envisioned a distinct but parallel scenario when he threatened to sacrifice animals in front of the White House if his animals were not returned to him in time for the December feast days.  Although he was eventually absolved of any wrongdoing, this case received negative attention, especially from the Washington Humane Society.  In 1993, the Supreme Court effectively ruled that the right to sacrifice animals for religious purposes is protected by the Constitution.

At that point in time (1987), it was estimated that 10,000 Cuban-Americans lived in the Washington D.C. area.  I am not suggesting that this was the first time Santería practices and or animal sacrifice had been covered locally[xxx] but it did reinforce antagonistic public perceptions of post 1980 migration from Cuba to the United States. Early on, the social construction of the Mariel boatlift in the public sphere had already perpetuated an “undesirable elements theme,” which created a blanket interpretation for Cuban immigrants after 1980. Criminality, homosexuality, and other abnormalities were often associated with the marielitos.  It was also claimed, from a basic, realpolitik international relations perspective, that Castro wanted the U.S. to absorb a degenerate population. These meta-narratives effectively directed post-1980 refugees away from the already-crowded Miami area and towards other U.S. cities.  St. Elizabeth’s hospital in Washington D.C., for example, was one destination point for the mentally ill.[xxxi]

The issue of race also complicates the narrative. Earlier waves of Afro-Dominicans and Afro-Panamanians as well as Afro-Cubans—who came to the United States during the Mariel boatlift in 1980 and were redirected to the Washington D.C. metropolitan area—also dealt with the reality of being black, not only in terms of phenotypic characteristics but also cultural and linguistic diversity.  Research has shown that local organizations such as the Afro-Caribbean Youth Center and the Martin Luther King Memorial Library collaborated to address those issues.  In 1983 they hosted “La Noche de los Jóvenes Afro-Caribeños,” which featured dances, songs, and poetry from Panama, Guatemala, Colombia, the Dominican Republic, and Mexico.[xxxii] This local event was but one way the District showcased Afro-Caribbean cultural production.

As early as 1969, for example, Ralph Rinzler, director of the Smithsonian Festival of American Folklife, collaborated with Bernice Reagon to organize a program “that would celebrate the shared aesthetics of black music as performed and sung by African Americans of the former English, French, and Spanish colonial regions of the Americas.”[xxxiii] That year, Cuban musicians Arsenio Rodríguez, his brother Israel “Kiki” Rodríguez, and close friend D.C.-based bassist Luís Salomé played Cuban secular folk music as well as a selection of Palo Monte, Santería, and Abakuá in a program entitled “Black Music through Languages of the New World.”[xxxiv] A photograph of their performance is housed in the Center for Folklife and Cultural Heritage.  Their collaboration is important because it exposed the diverse repertoires of Afro-Cuban music to a wider public.  For our purposes, their relationship is particularly striking because it connects a D.C./local site of Afro-Cuban religiosity and cultural production to a transnational circuit of Latin American music.  A rich strand of future research could include remapping/ reconstructing when international superstar Arsensio Rodríguez and his brother practiced musical and spiritual interests in the Columbia Heights neighborhood with Salomé.

Luis Salomé and his wife Caridad [Hernández] lived and worshipped in Columbia Heights for more than three decades. They resided in a house on Parkwood Rd. as early as the 60s.  Although they have passed on, their home continues to serve as an inter-ethnic Santería community meeting place.  Its value as a living historical artifact is immeasurable.  This past year, I had the pleasure of interviewing 82-year-old Eloy Hernández, Caridad’s brother who relocated to D.C. during the Mariel boatlift. Eloy’s sister moved to Washington D.C. in the 1950s. His sister Juana, however, had already relocated in the late 40s to seek a better life.  She came to D.C. with a contract to work as a domestic worker.   He recalled that his sister Caridad and her husband Luis Salomé acquired the house on Parkwood Rd. in the 1960s.  They resided within the district, in and around the Columbia Heights area, for most of their life. Hernández shared a photo he took in his house in the mid 1990s.  It showcases an altar built in honor of San Lázaro, complete with candles, fruit, statuettes, and monetary offering. But most importantly, it features a portrait of Caridad.  I have scanned a copy and included the image in the appendix.

Hernández graciously shared his personal history and allowed me to take photographs of his basement and backyard, the places where he celebrate Santería rituals.  When taking the photos, I focused on how he organized the space—construction of altars, organization of items in his personal botánica, for example—in order to convey to future researchers and curators the visual/practical dimensions of a space production theoretical framework.  These photos are filed in the archive (2010, vol. 3, multiethnic space) but I have also included a couple in the appendix of this report.  Admittedly, there are ethical concerns when divulging such information.  I received his verbal consent and he will receive a copy of this report.  Also, he had previously offered his story and details and location of his practices to the Washington Post in 2000.[xxxv]

Another way to continue excavating their historical legacy/cultural footprint of Cubans and their collaborations with other Latino communities is to focus on the Latin American Youth Center (15^th & Columbia), which hosted “la escuela de rumba” from 1978-1982. This community music school was founded by veteran Latin and Latin Jazz musicians María Rodríguez and Luis Salomé, as well as Dominican singing star Camboy Estevez, and José Sueiro, then director of the D.C. newspaper El Latino.   The school, in all of its physical manifestations, whether at the Latin American Youth Center, at festivals, or in private homes, laid the groundwork for dialogue and debate not only among Cubans but also Dominicans, Puerto Ricans, Anglo-Americans, and African-Americans of all ages.  Moreover, rumberos’ artistic labor and spatial practices have had regenerative effects beyond the music world.  They have lent themselves to places where santería practices are kept alive.  Religious beliefs continue to live and breathe through the repetition of certain lyrics and rhythms—a particular touch of a batá drum, for example, can be polyvalent and represent a diverse repertoire of idioms including Lucumí, Arará, Abakuá, and Kongo.  Through an explicit focus on those embodied expressions, on ephemeral acts and improvised encounters, we are able to excavate histories that may or may not be documented.  The point here is not to move away from books or to privilege the power of oral histories but to acknowledge the limits of textocentrism.  Using this lens, the next steps of this project should continue to work towards exploring the historical intersections among space production, cultural performance, and political economy to understand the presence of Latinos in the DC metropolitan area.