Escape to Miami: An Oral History of the Cuban Rafter Crisis

by Elizabeth Campisi

Overview

While the Naval base in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba is well-known for its infamous prison camp, few people are aware of its prior use as an immigrant detention center for Haitian and Cuban refugees. Beginning in August 1994, the United States government declared that thousands of Cubans who had launched themselves into the Florida Straits on rickety rafts were "illegal refugees" and sent them to join over fifteen thousand Haitians already being held on Guantánamo after fleeing a violent coup in Haiti. Escape to Miami recounts the gripping stories of the rafters who were detained in Guantánamo during the 1994-1996 Cuban Rafter Crisis. After working in the camps for a year as an employee of the U.S. Justice Department, Elizabeth Campisi conducted life history interviews with twelve of the rafters, chronicling their departures from Cuba, their rafting trips, life on the base, and their initial experiences in Cuban Miami. Through these remarkable narratives, the book details the ways in which the rafters used creative expression, such as performance and artwork, to cope with the traumas they experienced in the camp. Campisi explores these coping mechanisms, showing that, when people work through individually-traumatic experiences as a group, the new meanings they create during that process can come together to change existing cultures or create new ones. Vivid and engaging, Escape to Miami gives voice to the untold stories of Guantánamo. This book is a must-read for anyone interested in policy, Latin American history, and human rights.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780199394425
Publisher:	Oxford University Press
Publication date:	05/13/2016
Series:	Oxford Oral History Series
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	304
File size:	16 MB
Note:	This product may take a few minutes to download.

About the Author

Elizabeth Campisi is Project Coordinator at the Center for Public Health Continuing Education, University at Albany, SUNY.

Table of Contents

Preface Introduction 1. Historical Context of the Rafter Crisis 2. On Becoming a Balsero: Disenchantment, Disaffection and Escape. 3. Improvisations: Trauma and Coping in the Camps 4. My Introduction to Gitmo 5. My Experiences in the Camps 6. Crisis, Creativity, and the Flavor of Freedom 7. Epilogue: A Different Kind of Rafter Crisis: PTSD and the U.S. Cuban Community Conclusion Appendix Bilbliography

Editorial Reviews

04/25/2016
Anthropologist Campisi examines the Cuban Rafter Crisis, when tens of thousands of Cubans boarded makeshift rafts in a desperate attempt to reach the U.S. In 1994, after Congress “tightened a decades-long embargo” against Cuba, the Clinton administration declared any rafters attempting to leave Cuba to be “illegal refugees.” That action undermined a “long-standing open arms policy” as the U.S. began interdicting and detaining refugees at the American naval base in Guantánamo Bay, from where they were gradually allowed into the U.S. through early 1996. Campisi bases her history on the year she spent working at Guantánamo for the U.S. Justice Department as an interviewer and mediator, also including first-person accounts from interviews. These provide a distinctive view of the rafters’ little-documented experience. She recounts how, amid poor living conditions, bureaucratic incompetence, and beatings and other U.S. military misconduct, the rafters demonstrated “idealism, intelligence, determination, and creativity in the face of overwhelming experiences” and created a distinctive camp culture with informal social institutions, paintings, sculptures, and music to formulate meanings and identities despite severe and unceasing trauma. Campisi’s style is generally dry and academic, but this important oral history contains multiple threads of contemporary relevance: U.S.-Cuba relations, refugee crises, immigration, and the legal abyss of Guantánamo Bay. (June)

Publishers Weekly

"...Campisi has captured both the triumph and the trauma of what is surely an indelible identity within the Cuban diaspora....[A] strong study....It would lend itself to graduate and undergraduate classes in ethnography, migration, oral history, global health, Latin American and Caribbean studies, and Cuban studies."—Holly Ackerman, New West Indian Guide

From the Publisher