Fear & Dread in Cuban Miami
Ada Ferrer and Miriam Pensack on the Cuban Americans left in immigration limbo
For decades, starting with the passage of the Cuban Adjustment Act in 1966, refugees and asylum seekers from Cuba enjoyed a distinctly smooth pathway to legal residency in the US. In a typical cold-war-era “combination of hard and soft power,” Ada Ferrer and Miriam Pensack write in our July 23, 2026, issue, “the US imposed sanctions intended to bring Castro’s government to the point of collapse and at the same time made a point of showing benevolence toward refugees fleeing the regime, touting their exodus as proof of communism’s failure.” Many ended up in Miami, where they became profoundly identified with the city itself.
Since the start of his second term, Ferrer and Pensack write, Donald Trump “has summarily dismantled that approach,” deporting thousands of Cubans and issuing deportation orders to tens of thousands more. Even as his administration forces out Cuban migrants, it has “dedicated itself to exacerbating the crisis to which they will return,” subjecting the island to a fuel embargo that has pushed its economy and society toward ruin. In Miami, these changes have reshaped daily life. “Tens of thousands of Cubans in the city remain in anxious suspension,” Ferrer and Pensack report, “unsure what might happen in Cuba and what fate awaits their family members on both sides of the Florida Straits.”
Below, alongside Ferrer and Pensack’s essay, we have collected five dispatches from our archive on Cuba.
Broken Promises in Cuban Miami
Ada Ferrer & Miriam Pensack
Last September a new museum opened in Miami’s oldest skyscraper, a Mediterranean Revival building from 1925 modeled after the majestic Giralda cathedral tower in Seville, Spain. During its first decades the seventeen-story building housed The Miami News. In 1962, three years after Fidel Castro’s forces overthrew the Cuban dictator Fulgencio Batista and established a revolutionary state, the skyscraper became the home of the Cuban Refugee Center, a haven for the half-million Cubans who arrived in Miami between 1962 and 1974, fleeing the increasingly radical government in Havana. It was on the basis of this history—which the museum documents in its centerpiece permanent installation—that the building became known as the Freedom Tower.
Like the building itself, the city of Miami has to some extent become synonymous with the Cuban exile community. Nearly 70 percent of Miamians speak Spanish at home, and more than half the population is foreign born. Almost every Cuban American with family that arrived between 1962 and 1974 has some kind of personal connection to the Freedom Tower; in many households, stories about frightened migrants receiving warm welcomes there have become part of family lore.
That largesse was the official policy of the US government, which by 1974 had spent $957 million on Cuban refugee assistance. At the Freedom Tower some of that money went toward setting up the new arrivals with English classes, small loans, subsidized childcare, housing assistance, and job training. A permanent exhibit at the new museum recreates the room where the migrants were processed: side-by-side American and Cuban flags, a stenciled sign reading “Bienvenidos a Los Estados Unidos,” and the Bulletin Board of Good Luck, which showed job listings. In one of the recorded testimonies included in a display, the Cuban musician Emilio Estefan recalls standing in line outside the tower as a teenage arrival to the country, waiting for food and medical care. The help he received there, he told his interviewer, reminded him “not to lose faith in humanity.”
In 1973, with the suspension of a program of twice-daily flights that had shepherded émigrés from Cuba to South Florida since 1965, Cuban immigration dwindled to a trickle. The following year the refugee center closed its doors, and the Freedom Tower fell into disrepair. More than two decades later the building was purchased by Jorge Mas Canosa, a Cuban American businessman and political activist who had forged close ties to the Ronald Reagan White House. Hitching his hopes for regime change in Cuba to the Republican Party, in 1981 Mas Canosa founded the Cuban American National Foundation, which lobbied for hard-line policies against the Castro government and successfully organized many Cuban Miamians into a dependable GOP voting bloc. After he bought the Freedom Tower in 1997, he sought to restore it as a monument to Cuban American Miami and a tribute to the community’s evolution into a dominant force in the city and beyond. Many of the politicians from Cuban Miami who entered state and federal government in the years that followed and pushed for aggressive policies against Havana—including Secretary of State Marco Rubio—publicly launched their campaigns using the Freedom Tower as a backdrop.
It was fitting, then, that acting attorney general Todd Blanche chose the Freedom Tower’s Grand Hall to announce the Department of Justice’s criminal indictment against Raúl Castro—Cuba’s former president and still the most significant figure in the country’s politics—for murder and conspiracy to kill US nationals. (The government alleges that Castro was involved in the 1996 downing of two civilian aircraft piloted by members of the Miami-based aid organization Brothers to the Rescue.) That afternoon throngs of Cuban exiles gathered in front of the building, some wearing MAGA hats, others crying tears of joy.
In that moment two histories converged: the story of Cuban migration to the city and that of the United States’ anti-Castro policies, for which Cuban Miami has long served as a driving force and a crucial base of support. For decades Washington’s Cuba policy epitomized the combination of hard and soft power at the center of its cold war liberalism. The US imposed sanctions intended to bring Castro’s government to the point of collapse and at the same time made a point of showing benevolence toward refugees fleeing the regime, touting their exodus as proof of communism’s failure.
Read the full article on the Review’s website here.
From the Archive: Letters from Havana
Joshua Jelly-Schapiro on the false hope of Cuba’s “re-opening”
Alma Guillermoprieto on Barack Obama’s 2016 visit to Havana
Esther Allen on the history of American influence in Cuba
Jeri Laber on a series of human rights interviews with Cubans
Arthur Schlesinger Jr. on four days with Fidel Castro
I live in Miami and am of Cuban descent. I am just as concerned about my Haitian neighbors and students.