Excludable: Race, Policing, and Migration in Cuba and the United States, 1959-1986

Abstract

“Excludable: Race, Policing, and Migration in Cuba and the United States, 1959-1986” explains the development of coercive state projects to address social problems associated with poor and working-class, disproportionately Afrodescendant urban communities in revolutionary Cuba and the post-1960s United States. It examines the trajectories of Cubans who left for the United States in the 1980 mass migration known as the “Mariel boatlift” and centers the experiences of individuals who were confined in carceral institutions in both countries to reveal fundamental social, political, and legal forces that made people into “criminals” in the Americas. In both Cuba and the United States, residential segregation, economic stagnation, coercive labor regimes, and race and class prejudice formed a common backdrop for projects of policing and confinement intended to transform socially marginal populations into model citizens. When persistent crime and poverty exposed the insufficiency or flaws of such projects, political leaders and law enforcement officials on both sides of the Straits of Florida increasingly prioritized the removal of members of these communities from society. Despite distinct conditions in each country and the two governments’ divergent political ideologies and economic systems, state actors in both Cuba and the United States justified these actions as necessary to address certain unlawful or undesirable activities, most of which entailed illicit forms of work.

“Excludable” shows that longstanding theories about urban poverty and Afrodescendant pathology shaped the crime control policies of Cuba and the United States between the 1960s and the 1980s. While the communities most frequently targeted for policing in revolutionary Cuba were multiracial, they had become identified socially with Blackness through a long history of residential segregation and racial discrimination. Although most of the Cubans who participated in the Mariel boatlift did not identify as people of African descent, they became collectively identified with Blackness, poverty, and crime in the United States during a period of rising austerity, intensifying urban policing, and resurgent nativism. In both countries, carceral projects that targeted these groups fell heaviest on Afrodescendant subjects while also weighing on many poor and working-class people not identified as of African descent.

Finally, “Excludable” reveals that both the Cuban and U.S. governments used banishment as a solution to social problems. While most of the people who participated in the Mariel boatlift had no criminal record, the Cuban government encouraged or compelled tens of thousands of its citizens to leave in 1980 because of their histories of arrest and confinement. In the United States, the Mariel arrivals were treated according to a new refugee policy that consigned them to a provisional legal status and limited their access to public assistance. Amid these constraints, many of the Mariel arrivals had trouble maintaining stable jobs and housing. When ad hoc forms of support proved inadequate, local and federal governments increasingly responded to those who struggled to get by – or broke the law to get ahead – with policing, imprisonment, and, eventually, deportation. Such responses helped to make noncitizens accused of crimes a newly pivotal “problem” in U.S. immigration policy.