When Fidel Castro took over Cuba in 1959, 13-year-old José Azel joined the ranks of the underground opposition engaging in acts of sabotage. When Castro closed the country’s schools, José’s father became worried. So he sent his teenage boy on a brief trip to West Palm Beach in June 1961 on a cargo ship full of seminarians. It was the last time they saw each other.

From 2021 to June 2023, U.S. Customs and Border Protection reported just over 400,000 “encounters” with unaccompanied children. The quality of care for these kids has been dubious at best and abusive at worst. Today’s numbers may be unprecedented, but this group is not—in fact, they are part of a long tradition of young people finding refuge in the U.S. without their parents.

In the early 1960s, the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare created the Unaccompanied Cuban Children’s Program to care for thousands of minors fleeing their country after its 1959 revolution. Colloquially, it was known as Operation Pedro Pan—a reference to the tale about the boy who could fly. Like today, in the 1960s a vocal contingent of naysayers balked at the newcomers: Some feared that there could be communists in the unvetted masses, while others asked why taxpayers should shoulder their financial weight. Yet drowning out these doubtful voices was a larger willingness to accept the children and to affirm the country’s tradition of sanctuary and freedom in doing so.

The more than 14,000 Cuban minors who arrived to the U.S. between 1959 and 1962—then the largest group of unaccompanied children in U.S. history—were among the 250,000 Cubans who trekked across the Florida Straits during that period. In contrast to today’s migrants, the Cubans were cast as refugees and symbols of anticommunist heroism. President John F. Kennedy reminded the country that welcoming refugees was a Cold War imperative. In a letter to Congress, Kennedy heralded the U.S. as “a refuge for the oppressed” with a “long humanitarian tradition of helping those who are forced to flee to maintain their lives as individual, self-sufficient human beings in freedom, self-respect, dignity, and health.”

The Children’s Program resettled young people across the nation in group homes and with foster families throughout the country—from Helena, Montana, to San Antonio, Texas, to Dubuque, Iowa—largely paid for by state and federal coffers. At times, parents did not know where their children had been relocated.

The program relied on a vast network of federal and state offices and a long list of nonprofit church groups, child welfare agencies, and Pan American and KLM airlines, which would help procure seats for these children, as well as embassies, parochial schools, and a counterrevolutionary network in both nations. Those without immediate family support in the United States—more than 8,300 children—received care through the Catholic Welfare Bureau and other religious, governmental, and non-governmental organizations.

Some Pedro Pans found respite with Protestant, Jewish, and secular organizations, but the nucleus of the program was the Catholic Church, which assumed responsibility for 7,346 Cuban children. At the program’s helm was Bryan O. Walsh, an Irish priest who’d recently relocated to Miami, and embraced his mission with gusto. Walsh later called his role in Operation Pedro Pan “an opportunity given to me by Divine Providence to combat communism.” He had ample support from the Church, which also opened its doors to Catholic leaders isolated and banished by the Cuban government.

After arriving in the U.S. with a group of Catholic seminarians, José Azel jumped into the world of American adolescence. The transition was connected to the automobile, and he remembers the immense glee he felt registering for a driving permit. Football, rock ‘n’ roll, and an occasional cigarette rounded out the adaptation process for the young man.

Other Pedro Pans tell similar bittersweet stories of their crossings. Mayda Riopedre was a 15-year-old student at American Dominican Academy in Havana when she arrived in Miami. Mayda had lived a privileged and “very American” life in Cuba— she took classes in English and U.S. history, listened to American shows on the radio, took ballet and piano lessons, and had a French tutor.

After spending a month in a transitional shelter, Mayda Riopedre and her sister spent a month at St. Mary’s Home in Dubuque, Iowa, where they went bowling for the first time, before being sent to live with a family in Signal Mountain, Tennessee. She retains some very pleasant memories of her time there, but she also recalls a favorite outdoor spot where she would look at the mountains and cry inconsolably. The sisters and their parents reunited two years later, and today Mayda considers herself “lucky” and will be “forever grateful” for the foster family.

Why did so many parents choose to send their children away? The upheaval of the revolution—including school closures and new revolutionary pedagogy, nationalized property, and rumors that Castro’s government would dispossess parents of their children—was frightening enough to make the decision feel warranted for many Cuban families.

They also believed that the separation—and Castro’s reign—would be brief. But most Pedro Pans did not see their parents for months or even years —and in rare cases, like José Azel’s, ever again.

Now in their 60s and 70s, the former Pedro Pans—many of whom are part of Florida’s large Cuban community—find themselves ensconced in the vitriol surrounding today’s migrant children. Unlike the majority of Pedro Pans, who lived comfortable lives in Cuba, these young people come from locales ravaged by violence and economic scarcity.

And they are receiving a very different welcome. In 2019, 3,000 children were housed at a center in Homestead, Florida, five miles from the Florida City camp that had sheltered hundreds if not thousands of Pedro Pans. Then the Trump administration closed it, which drew criticism from those who argued that the state should provide suitable accommodation for children, as it had done 60 years prior with the Cuban Children’s Program.

More recently, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis bickered with the Miami Archdiocese after he issued an executive order that curtailed the ability of Florida agencies to care for undocumented migrants, including children. Pedro Pans took sides: Some argued in favor of sheltering the minors while others sided with DeSantis and drew differences between today’s young migrants and the Cold War context of their own crossings.

As their hesitancy indicates, today many Americans are reluctant to support similar groups in need. The country took in just 11,411 refugees in the 2021 fiscal year, the lowest number since 1980. UNICEF estimates that a record 43.3 million children live in forced displacement worldwide. Those crossing the U.S. border often remain invisible or banished to the status of a national crisis rather than an opportunity to provide help. But the Pedro Pans, aided by government assistance and everyday American altruism, exemplify what is achievable when we harness our abundant resources and guarantee our healthy tradition of refuge for the world’s most vulnerable populations.

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Those who were forced into the ships of the infamous slave trade probably thought of themselves using ethnic and territorial terms that have been lost to us. But across the ocean, enslavers and local elites lumped Africans of many different backgrounds into a single category of debasement, “Negroes,” and sustained this category through laws that regulated freedom.

But the creation of racial identity through legal means took some surprising turns.

From the beginning, enslaved people and free people of African ancestry used those same laws to claim freedom and citizenship for themselves and their loved ones. They created spaces for communities where “blackness” and freedom were not only possible, but foundational.

Although free people of color were few in number compared to enslaved people, and lived on the margins of plantation societies in many ways, the contests over their identities, status, and rights were the terrain on which race was made. Legal contests over freedom determined whether and how it was possible to move from slave to free status, and whether claims of citizenship would be tied to racial identity.

By the early 18th century, Cuba, Virginia, and Louisiana (all colonies themselves, of the Spanish, British, and French Empires, respectively), had legal regimes that constituted blackness as a debased category equivalent to enslavement. But 150 years later, by the mid-19th century, the social implications of blackness in each of these regions were fundamentally different.

In Cuba in the 1850s, a free man of color could marry a white woman, attend public school, and participate in a religious association that gave him opportunities to be part of public life. But, in 1850s Louisiana or Virginia, a free man of color saw his churches and schools being shut down, faced prosecution for marrying across the color line, and ran the risk of being kidnapped, imprisoned, and even re-enslaved for remaining in the state in which he was born.

In Louisiana or Virginia, when a person sought to prove in court that he was not a person of color, he would bring evidence of civic acts, because citizenship and whiteness were so closely linked in political thought and legal doctrine that a citizen must be a white man, and only a white man could be a citizen. In Cuba, similar conduct was not necessarily incompatible with blackness.

The key to understanding these divergent trajectories lies in the law of freedom. Different approaches to freedom were rooted in various legal traditions. The right to manumission, for example, was firmly entrenched in the Spanish law of slavery, and so in Cuba manumission, or release from slavery, was not tied to race, a crucial difference from both Louisiana and Virginia.

One turning point in this story was the Age of Revolution. The populations of free people of color, who claimed freedom in rising numbers, exploded in all three jurisdictions, and the example of the Haitian Revolution inspired the enslaved as it struck fear in the hearts of enslavers.

But the expansion of freedom meant different things in the Spanish empire and in the U.S. republic. Communities of people of color in Cuba and Spanish Louisiana owed their existence to legal understandings and customary practices anchored in traditions of the ancien regime. Enslaved people who managed to purchase their freedom or, more rarely, obtained manumission through other means, became members of highly stratified societies. Black freedom did not imply social equality and republican rights.

By contrast, in Virginia during the Age of Revolution, the expansion of manumission, and the increase in freedom lawsuits, were tied to questions of citizenship, and of black participation in the new political order under conditions of equality. Enslaved and free people of color alike infused these questions with a sense of urgency, as they made use of every available legal loophole to purchase or make claims for their own freedom. Their actions produced dramatic results: by the early 19th century, the proportion of free people of color in Virginia had increased significantly.

Virginia’s white citizens witnessed these trends with horror and petitioned to outlaw manumissions. It was, literally, a reactionary request: to restore the colonial law of freedom. The 1806 law requiring freed slaves to leave the state fell short of that goal, but marked the first step towards a social order in which blacks could only exist as slaves.

After Nat Turner’s rebellion in 1831, whites’ political will to exclude free blacks intensified. Slaveholding states in the U.S. South responded to threats of rebellion, and to Northern abolitionists’ demands for immediate emancipation, with a defense of slavery as a positive good: the best possible condition for debased “Negroes.” To galvanize the support of non-slaveholding whites, Southerners cemented white solidarity by defining citizenship and voting rights along racial lines.

This movement created a paradox: egalitarian democracy would go hand-in-hand with the expansion of racist practices and ideologies. As slaveholders appealed to non-slaveholders with the promise of broad citizenship rights for all white men, free people of color became increasingly anomalous, and even dangerous to the polity. That is why colonization efforts that sought to remove free blacks to a distant location in Africa prospered in 19th-century Virginia and Louisiana (which changed hands to the United States in 1803), but not in Cuba.

That is also why Virginia and Louisiana acted in the 19th century, especially in the 1850s, to end the possibility of manumission, self-purchase, or freedom suits. By 1860, free people of color in Virginia and Louisiana were increasingly forced to leave the state upon emancipation or to live under threat of prosecution. A few even chose “voluntary” re-enslavement in order to remain with their families.

Free people of color continued to claim freedom in court, and fought tenaciously for the basic rights to a homeland, to remain close to friends and kin, and to live in their communities of origin. Yet they saw their militia and schools shut down, and their churches survived only under white leadership. Increasingly contested battles in court over racial identity attested to the growing anxiety over black citizenship and the need to prove whiteness in order to claim basic rights.

By 1860, Cuba had diverged significantly from Louisiana and Virginia—not in its legal regime of slavery, but rather in its regime of race. Enslaved people in Cuba took advantage of legal reforms that were not intended for their benefit to carve out greater freedoms for themselves. But in Virginia and Louisiana, where the status of communities of color was reduced to something closer to slavery, race rather than enslavement became the true “impassable barrier,” in the words of Justice Roger B. Taney. In Cuba, where free people of color could be rights-bearing subjects, enslavement was the dividing line.

Laws regulating free people of color also served as a template for post-emancipation societies seeking ways to keep black people in their place. Slavery laws did not translate forward in the same way that regulations based on race did. When Southerners sought to restore the antebellum order after the Civil War, they could not re-impose slavery, but they passed Black Codes whose language echoed the laws regarding free people of color almost exactly. Under the Black Codes, freedmen could enter into contracts, own property, and appear in court on their own behalf. But in myriad other ways, their lives were constricted, just as they would have been if emancipated before 1861.

In the U.S., laws limiting the immigration of free people of color from one state into the other were the first immigration restrictions. These statutes echo into the 20th century—and to the present day—in limitations on the right to immigrate into the U.S. based on racial and national identity. In Cuba, on the other hand, legal racial barriers came under increasing attack even before final emancipation in 1886. In the 1880s, limitations on interracial marriages were eliminated and racial segregation in public services and education was outlawed. These changes were an imperial imperative. As the colonial state of Spain sought to retain control over its restive colony of Cuba, it had to cultivate the political support of the free black population. By 1898, the island’s short-lived political regime of “autonomy” recognized black males as voting subjects with equal rights.

The transition from black slavery to black citizenship was neither linear nor preordained. It was as contentious and ferociously contested a process in Cuba as it was in Virginia and Louisiana. But the new struggles for standing and citizenship took place against the backdrop of significantly different legal regimes of race. From being enslaved to being a citizen, the connecting tissue before and after emancipation for black people was not “from slave to citizen,” but from black to black.

The post The ‘Ferociously Contested’ Story of How Blackness Became a Legal Identity appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

The earliest modern experiment in detaining groups of civilians without trial was launched by two generals: one who refused to bring camps into the world, and one who did not.

Battles had raged off and on for decades over Cuba’s desire for independence from Spain. After years of fighting with Cuban rebels, Arsenio Martínez Campos, the governor-general of the island, wrote to the Spanish prime minister in 1895 to say that he believed the only path to victory lay in inflicting new cruelties on civilians and fighters alike. To isolate rebels from the peasants who sometimes fed or sheltered them, he thought, it would be necessary to relocate hundreds of thousands of rural inhabitants into Spanish-held cities behind barbed wire, a strategy he called reconcentración.

But the rebels had shown mercy to the Spanish wounded and had returned prisoners of war unharmed. And so Martínez Campos could not bring himself to launch the process of reconcentración against an enemy he saw as honorable. He wrote to Spain and offered to surrender his post rather than impose the measures he had laid out as necessary. “I cannot,” he wrote, “as the representative of a civilized nation, be the first to give the example of cruelty and intransigence.”

Spain recalled Martínez Campos, and in his place sent general Valeriano Weyler, nicknamed “the Butcher.” There was little doubt about what the results would be. “If he cannot make successful war upon the insurgents,” wrote The New York Times in 1896, “he can make war upon the unarmed population of Cuba.”

Civilians were forced, on penalty of death, to move into these encampments, and within a year the island held tens of thousands of dead or dying reconcentrados, who were lionized as martyrs in U.S. newspapers. No mass executions were necessary; horrific living conditions and lack of food eventually took the lives of some 150,000 people.

These camps did not rise out of nowhere. Forced labor had existed for centuries around the world, and the parallel institutions of Native American reservations and Spanish missions set the stage for relocating vulnerable residents away from their homes and forcing them to stay elsewhere. But it was not until the technology of barbed wire and automatic weapons that a small guard force could impose mass detention. With that shift, a new institution came into being, and the phrase “concentration camps” entered the world.

When U.S. newspapers reported on Spain’s brutality, Americans shipped millions of pounds of cornmeal, potatoes, peas, rice, beans, quinine, condensed milk, and other staples to the starving peasants, with railways offering to carry the goods to coastal ports free of charge. By the time the USS Maine sank in Havana harbor in February 1898, the United States was already primed to go to war. Making a call to arms before Congress, President William McKinley said of the policy of reconcentración: “It was not civilized warfare. It was extermination. The only peace it could beget was that of the wilderness and the grave.”

But official rejection of the camps was short-lived. After defeating Spain in Cuba in a matter of months, the United States took possession of several Spanish colonies, including the Philippines, where another rebellion was underway. By the end of 1901, U.S. generals fighting in the most recalcitrant regions of the islands had likewise turned to concentration camps. The military recorded this turn officially as an orderly application of measured tactics, but that did not reflect the view on the ground. Upon seeing one camp, an Army officer wrote, “It seems way out of the world without a sight of the sea,—in fact, more like some suburb of hell.”

In southern Africa, the concept of concentration camps had simultaneously taken root. In 1900, during the Boer War, the British began relocating more than 200,000 civilians, mostly women and children, behind barbed wire into bell tents or improvised huts. Again, the idea of punishing civilians evoked horror among those who saw themselves as representatives of a civilized nation. “When is a war not a war?” asked British Member of Parliament Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman in June 1901. “When it is carried on by methods of barbarism in South Africa.”

Far more people died in the camps than in combat. Polluted water supplies, lack of food, and infectious diseases ended up killing tens of thousands of detainees. Even though the Boers were often portrayed as crude people undeserving of sympathy, the treatment of European descendants in this fashion was shocking to the British public. Less notice was taken of British camps for black Africans who had even more squalid living conditions and, at times, only half the rations allotted to white detainees.

The Boer War ended in 1902, but camps soon appeared elsewhere. In 1904, in the neighboring German colony of South-West Africa—now Namibia—German general Lothar von Trotha issued an extermination order for the rebellious Herero people, writing “Every Herero, with or without a gun, with or without cattle, will be shot.”

The order was rescinded soon after, but the damage inflicted on indigenous peoples did not stop. The surviving Herero—and later the Nama people as well—were herded into concentration camps to face forced labor, inadequate rations, and lethal diseases. Before the camps were fully disbanded in 1907, German policies managed to kill some 70,000 Namibians in all, nearly exterminating the Herero.

It took just a decade for concentration camps to be established in wars on three continents. They were used to exterminate undesirable populations through labor, to clear contested areas, to punish suspected rebel sympathizers, and as a cudgel against guerrilla fighters whose wives and children were interned. Most of all, concentration camps made civilians into proxies in order to get at combatants who had dared defy the ruling power.

While these camps were widely viewed as a disgrace to modern society, this disgust was not sufficient to preclude their future use.

During the First World War, the camps evolved to address new circumstances. Widespread conscription meant that any military-age male German deported from England would soon return in a uniform to fight, with the reverse also being true. So Britain initially focused on locking up foreigners against whom it claimed to have well-grounded suspicions.

British home secretary Reginald McKenna batted away calls for universal internment, protesting that the public had no more to fear from the great majority of enemy aliens than they did from “from the ordinary bad Englishman.” But with the sinking of the Lusitania in 1915 by a German submarine and the deaths of more than a thousand civilians, British prime minister Herbert Henry Asquith took revenge, locking up tens of thousands of German and Austro-Hungarian “enemy aliens” in England.

Tanauan reconcentrado camp, Batangas, the Philippines, circa 1901. Image courtesy of University of Michigan Digital Library Collection.

The same year, the British Empire extended internment to its colonies and possessions. The Germans responded with mass arrests of aliens from not only Britain but Australia, Canada, and South Africa as well. Concentration camps soon flourished around the globe: in France, Russia, Turkey, Austro-Hungary, Brazil, Japan, China, India, Haiti, Cuba, Singapore, Siam, New Zealand, and many other locations. Over time, concentration camps would become a tool in the arsenal of nearly every country.

In the United States, more than two thousand prisoners were held in camps during the war. German-born conductor Karl Muck, a Swiss national, wound up in detention in Fort Oglethorpe in Georgia after false rumors that he had refused to conduct “The Star-Spangled Banner.”

Unlike earlier colonial camps, many camps during the First World War were hundreds or thousands of miles from the front lines, and life in them developed a strange normalcy. Prisoners were assigned numbers that traveled with them as they moved from camp to camp. Letters could be sent to detainees, and packages received. In some cases, money was transferred and accounts kept. A bureaucracy of detention emerged, with Red Cross inspectors visiting and making reports.

By the end of the war, more than 800,000 civilians had been held in concentration camps, with hundreds of thousands more forced into exile in remote regions. Mental illness and shattered minority communities were just two of the tolls this long-term internment exacted from detainees.

Nevertheless, this more “civilized” approach toward enemy aliens during the First World War managed to rehabilitate the sullied image of concentration camps. People accepted the notion that a targeted group might turn itself in and be detained during a crisis, with a reasonable expectation to one day be released without permanent harm. Later in the century, this expectation would have tragic consequences.

Yet even as the First World War raged, the camps’ bitter roots survived. The Ottoman government made use of a less-visible system of concentration camps with inadequate food and shelter to deport Armenians into the Syrian desert as part of an orchestrated genocide.

And after the war ended, the evolution of concentration camps took another grim turn. Where internment camps of the First World War had focused on foreigners, the camps that followed—the Soviet Gulag, the Nazi Konzentrationslager—used the same methods on their own citizens.

In the first Cuban camps, fatalities had resulted from neglect. Half a century later, camps would be industrialized using the power of a modern state. The concept of the concentration camp would reach its apotheosis in the death camps of Nazi Germany, where prisoners were reduced not just to a number, but to nothing.

The 20th century made General Martínez Campos into a dark visionary. Refusing to institute concentration camps on Cuba, he had said, “The conditions of hunger and misery in these centers would be incalculable.” And once they were unleashed on the world, concentration camps proved impossible to eradicate.

The post The Invention and Evolution of the Concentration Camp appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

My mother didn’t need to hear anything more. As soon as he left, she bundled my sister and me into our white Chevy station wagon and drove to the base commissary. I was not quite five years old, my sister not quite three. At the commissary, my mother filled two grocery carts with food, candles, matches, batteries, and propane for the camp stove.

My father flew fighter-interceptors, meaning that if Soviet bombers carrying nuclear weapons were headed toward the United States, it was his job to intercept and destroy them because a nuclear blast at altitude would cause less damage than a ground hit. I was still young enough to form a mental picture of him as Superman, flying fast into space to smash bombs with his fist, reeling back from explosions but then shaking himself upright and flying safely home. I was too young to ask what a nuclear blast would do to him and his plane, but even when I was old enough to ask I didn’t.

The Cuban Missile Crisis now seems like ancient history, but Cold War hostilities shaped my life and the lives of many others who grew up pricking with a constant sense of threat, which stern codes of silence demanded we never speak of. That silence was deepened in families like mine: An Air Force film for children taught us to be wary of questions, even from friendly teachers, when small bits of home life could, for a spy, add up to classified information. Such a code of silence now, in an age when everyone shares every feeling on Facebook, seems as surreal as a 9-megaton bomb. Such wariness seems absurd in an era when former missile sites have been converted into picnic spots.

The author’s father near the cockpit of his F4. During the Cuban Missile Crisis, he flew an F102. Courtesy of Karen Bjorneby.

That autumn day in 1962, my mother pulled our station wagon, brimming with provisions, into the carport. Our neighbor was outside, in red lipstick and black stretch pants, smoking a cigarette and watching her two sons play around a tree. She came to help with the groceries, and when my mother asked if her husband, too, had gotten a call, she laughed. She wasn’t worried, she said; it was all just posturing. And if not, she shrugged, we’d all be dead anyway. So she wasn’t preparing for anything except Halloween.

My mother packed our countertops with Saltines and Spam, cookies and peanut butter, canned soup and canned vegetables. In the basement, she made up sleeping bag-beds and filled Coleman jugs and spare canteens with water. That night, the president appeared on television and matter-of-factly explained that the Soviet Union was installing nuclear missiles on Cuba, and that this crisis might lead to war.

We settled in to wait. For two weeks, my mother kept my sister and me close, doing her best to cheer us. She spoke to no one, because she couldn’t risk answering anyone’s questions; she couldn’t let on that my father was involved in the crisis or tell anyone where he was.

My parents had been married for eight years by then. That they came together is an American story in itself. My father was a boy from Ketchikan, Alaska, where his grandfather had been the sheriff, and my mother was a girl whose parents had traveled back and forth from Tampa to Detroit looking for work, and who’d won a scholarship to college in Texas. She met my father in Big Spring, at an Elks Club party where she taught him to dance to the song, “Put Your Little Foot.” He was tanned and tall—nearly too tall for cramped cockpits—with extraordinary peripheral vision and the controlled aggression and high tolerance for pain and fear the Air Force then selected for in their pilots. And he was a jokester, a man who subscribed to both Mad Magazine and Scientific American.

My mother was a willowy redhead, her flirtatious charm covering an iron resolve borne of a Depression-era childhood etched by poverty and hunger. When my father was gone, she kept the car in repair, the taxes paid, and the furnace going. Whenever she could, she helped other wives cope. And she was a crack shot—never would she choose preparing for Halloween over striving to survive.

That same day, inside a few military hangars at a small-town airport in the plains of Nebraska, my father was helping rack nuclear missiles onto fighter jets, his included. Then he flew to Homestead AFB, thirty miles south of Miami. As he entered Florida airspace, he said later, the view on his radar screen was like nothing he’d ever seen before. The entire state seemed to vibrate; so many planes were flying in, it looked like a beehive, swarming with nuclear-armed aircraft, all prepared to obliterate Cuba.

What was strange to me then was the sudden silence on the base. All my life, we’d lived less than a quarter mile from the flight line, so that my father could get to a plane in fifteen minutes. I’d grown up with the sound of engines in my ears, with the crack and thunder of a fighter breaking Mach I overhead. Each night I fell asleep to jet-whine, like a lullaby. But now, all was quiet. I slept badly. I was too young to understand the crisis, but I wasn’t too young to know that if the planes weren’t flying, something was wrong.

Not one of those nuclear-armed aircraft ever took off toward Cuba to unleash Armageddon. President Kennedy negotiated an end to hostilities by agreeing to remove American missiles from Turkey in return for the Soviet Union removing their missiles from Cuba.

The author’s mother in the mid-1960s. Courtesy of Karen Bjorneby.

The crisis ended, my father came home, and we all feasted on moon pies. Our house was an abundance of loving gratitude and relieved laughter. But throughout the days of waiting, my mother had worried over one big question: If nuclear war broke out, yet the base remained standing, would she share her food with our unprepared neighbor and her two sons? Or would she apologize, then close and lock our door?

It’s hard to imagine, now, the omnipresent dread shadowing those years before the U.S. and the Soviet Union signed treaties limiting missile development and deployment. If I tell you that when I was 11, I was required to take a six-week long class called “Civil Defense,” intended to teach us how to survive a nuclear strike, you might think that gruesome or even cruel. But my classmates and I, then stationed at Homestead, Florida, listened to our fathers’ planes taking off and landing every day around the clock. And that Civil Defense class gave me private answers to my some of my impossible-to-ask questions.

Our teacher handed out a one-inch thick workbook, full of maps and math problems. I studied the expected damage and fatality at various distances from the blast site. Some people would die in the fireball or the shock wave, some later from burns or catastrophic radiation exposure. Everyone within thirty miles would die or be seriously injured.

I learned about radiation poisoning: vomiting at the lowest level of exposure; bleeding from the mouth, skin, and kidneys at the next level; delirium, coma, then death. I learned how to triage who might survive and who definitely wouldn’t. My own exposure to fallout would depend on distance and wind conditions. Using the workbook’s math problems, I calculated how soon I’d have to find a shelter before exposure killed me, and then how long I’d have to stay there as radiation levels declined. It looked, to me, hopeless. Even if I survived a direct strike, normal winds could spread enough radioactive fallout fast enough that people hundreds of miles away could die after only an hour’s exposure. Our neighbor in Kansas City, I realized, had been right.

More than 50 years after the Missile Crisis, I cannot sleep without the sound of engines nearby. I keep a turbo fan right beside my pillow, and if I’m away from home an app on my phone plays engine noise for me. If I wake in the night, and all is silent, the thought still flares through my mind: Something is wrong.

The post A Half Century Later, the Cuban Missile Crisis Haunts My Dreams appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Critics of the president’s opening to Cuba accuse Obama of appeasing the Castro regime, but they missed the historic significance of the trip.

When Obama went on Cuban TV and radio to say that he’d made the visit to “bury the last remnant of the Cold War in the Americas,” he might as well have been burying the nation’s virulently anti-American regime, not just Washington’s outdated policies.

Obama’s visit did more to spotlight the truly heinous nature of the Castro regime than a half-century of non-engagement ever did. It was moving to watch the American president, at the head of a willing and eager trade delegation, tell Cuba’s trapped youth he hopes they become more connected to the outside world. It was moving to watch how the American president deftly shamed the grumpy elderly Cuban dictator Raúl Castro into addressing reporters’ questions about human rights at what Cuban officials had planned to be a stilted and scripted press conference.

Obama’s words and his very presence in Havana spoke loud and clear to the Cuban people: America is not your enemy, or your problem. But you-know-who is.

For decades, the Castros, along with the right-wing exiles who’ve long insisted on a U.S. embargo, made Washington out to be the perfect scapegoat for the regime’s brutality and poor governance. Obama has said “no más” to that tired script. If Congress follows the president’s lead and lifts the embargo (a failed and foolish departure from America’s belief in the subversive power of engaging other dictatorships around the world), the Communist regime will be deprived of its entire self-justifying narrative.

Obama’s trip to Havana, the historical capital of Latin America’s anti-Americanism, came at a poignant time when that revolutionary leftist worldview is in full retreat across the hemisphere. Venezuela is fast becoming a failed petrostate, where people are turning towards the anti-Chavista opposition and away from dreams of an anti-U.S. Bolivarian South American order. In Bolivia and Ecuador, too, the left is losing its grip on power. And Brazil’s Labor Party is engulfed in an existential political crisis.

Obama’s second stop on his Latin victory lap last week, Buenos Aires, was a full-on celebration of the fact that Argentina voted its leftist Peronists out of office. At his press conference with the new conservative Argentine President Mauricio Macri (a man quite comfortable with taking questions from reporters), Obama could not have been more effusive about the shift in that nation’s orientation. He said Argentina’s historic transition was seeing the country “reassume its historic leadership role in the region,” implicitly bashing the previous Peronist governments that aligned themselves with Cuba and Venezuela and against Washington and free markets. Obama also addressed a Cold War remnant by acknowledging some U.S. complicity in the human rights abuses committed by that nation’s 1970s military dictatorship, and pledging to declassify more U.S. government documents from that era.

What’s most satisfying about this weakening of the destructive Cold War left in Latin America is that it is accompanied, if not enabled, by a widespread rejection of the idea that the United States is the enemy. The levels of distrust and hostility towards the “empire” to the north are at historical lows across the region.

The decline of anti-Americanism is notable in the most important Latin American partner to the United States, the nation across our southern border. Anti-Americanism used to be a staple of Mexican political discourse. But at a recent conference in Mexico City, Gerardo Maldonado of the think tank CIDE cited polls from 2014 in which 49 percent of Mexicans say they “admire” the U.S.; 32 percent are “indifferent”; and only 14 percent view us poorly. The Pew Global Attitudes Survey in 2015, for its part, found that 66 percent of Mexicans had a favorable view of the U.S., compared to 65 percent of respondents in the U.K.

Andrew Paxman, a historian at CIDE, explained that what he calls traditional “gringofobia” in Mexico—a form of xenophobia that demonizes Americans, especially its political and business leaders, as culturally inferior imperialists who can be blamed for most of Mexico’s woes—dates to the 19th century, but has been surprisingly absent from Mexican politics of late. Paxman credits greater cross-border engagement as the demystifying balm. The explosion in bilateral trade post-NAFTA and the constant movement of millions of Mexican workers back and forth across the border, spreading word of what the U.S. is really like, have helped strengthen feelings of trust, understanding, and friendship.

There is a specter clouding this triumphant moment in U.S.-Latin relations, of course, and that is Donald Trump’s presidential candidacy. Trump’s xenophobic and bombastic rhetoric is a dream come true for the beleaguered anti-American left in Latin America, whose leaders see in the candidate a fellow authoritarian populist with a recognizable style. Trump’s rambling rallies—with their mix of picaresque humor, vague promises of great things to come, and menacing bullying of media and opponents—are reminiscent of Hugo Chávez at his most entertaining.

For Mexicans, Trump’s hateful anti-Mexican rhetoric poses a real test of their newfound trust in the U.S. Paxman says he is starting to see an uptick in gringophobic language in Internet memes and opinion columns. A couple of weeks ago there was an editorial in Excélsior, a major Mexican daily, entitled “That’s How They See Us in the United States,” which falsely claimed that Trump’s anti-Mexican rhetoric was shared by most of the candidates.

And Paxman says that it’s already typical among cartoonists to draw Trump with a swastika: “If he’s elected, a common reaction here will be ‘Americans can’t be trusted—they elected a Nazi.’” And that could have a spillover effect in Mexican politics, according to Paxman, giving the leftist perennial presidential candidate Andrés Manuel López Obrador an opening in the 2018 elections to attack the current governing consensus for pro-American openness and pro-market reforms. His message, Paxman believes, could well become: “Why are we aligning ourselves with a country that hates us? Why are we letting those who hate us control our oil?”

That would be an appealing message for the desperate left throughout Latin America. Indeed, if Donald Trump wins the election next November, it will be a time for anti-American leaders in the region to take a victory lap, and to thank their lucky stars for their improbable reversal of fortune.

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Cuba has long been such a titillating no-go zone for American travelers. Never mind that hordes of Canadians and Europeans have been going to Cuba for decades, for Americans the Caribbean island nation has been off-limits since the Kennedy presidency. If you didn’t have relatives there, going to Cuba has thus amounted to making a statement, either of cool defiance or serious purpose, since only certain types of visitors could obtain a license from the U.S. government to go. (Technically, the license is to spend U.S. currency there.)

Even better, going to Cuba has been risqué without being all that risky. Nobody is going to hurt you like they might in Yemen or Nigeria. Street crime is virtually nonexistent and your biggest danger was from the guy at José Martí Airport who might stamp your U.S. passport right off the flight from Cancun and leave you vulnerable to a hefty fine for “trading with the enemy” when you get back home.

President Obama’s trip to Havana this week marks the end for this status-conferring ritual—and winsome party story—available to white-collar subversives who relish the forbidden fruit. After all, what’s trailblazing and salacious about following in the footsteps of a trade delegation that included members of Congress, and CEOs from companies like Marriott looking to make deals?

This is where I get to boast that I went to Cuba last summer as part of the last wave of American travelers to jump over the knee-high barriers to see the island before it gets re-colonized by U.S. corporate interests. But here’s a confession you won’t hear from everyone who peeked into the locked box: What I saw there was deeply sad. If Cuba occupied a special place in the imagination of the American thrill-seeker, it is a place that deserves to die.

Cuba in the late-embargo period resembled a giant work of fiction. The jet that took me there from Miami (I went on a scholastic visa) was operated by a charter company but painted with the livery of American Airlines. The notes I traded my dollars for were Cuban convertible pesos—the CUCs or “kooks” used by foreigners and the rich—a luxury currency pegged to the U.S. dollar. Communist iconography was limited to statues and a few obligatory billboards complaining about the blockade. Nobody I met under the age of 60 expressed any zeal, let alone fondness, for the ongoing “revolution.” The entire country felt like a plantation run for the personal benefit of the Castro family.

A curious fact about Cuba: Literacy is among the highest in the world, at 99.7 percent. But there is almost nothing around to read, not even approved dogma. Bookstores are rare in Havana and almost nonexistent everywhere else. The only newspaper, Granma, is distinguished by its thinness and its utter lack of anything interesting to say. Virtually nobody sits on park benches reading, as if the activity were shameful. And of course there are no electronic tablets. There is barely any Internet.

The working fleet of Harry Truman-era Detroit cars remains on display, and the food is just as scarce and crappy as the guidebooks warn, but even more prevalent is the double-mindedness required of any individual to get along in a repressive society. Cubans behaved one way in public and another behind closed doors. “We live a lie here,” one woman told me in a city on the southern coast. “Nobody believes in the rhetoric. But we have to go along with it.” The bifurcation of the mind is a long-term national illness.

The most common complaint (quietly) expressed throughout Cuba is the lack of any reward whatsoever for imagination or hard work. You may labor for years on a project and still be forced to accept a monthly wage of $15 per month, with bare nutritional staples. Education, housing, and health care are virtually free, but with a lifetime guarantee of no hope for advancement or distinction. Being Cuban with an imagination is a particular kind of torture. Labor is truly alienated here, though not in the way Karl Marx intended.

The names of Raúl or Fidel Castro are rarely spoken aloud; a common gesture when referring to the government is to stroke an unseen beard. In the absence of a successful revolution, the people found personal release in sex—“the only thing Fidel couldn’t nationalize,” goes the old joke—and turned infidelity and speed-flirtation into national games. Tourists wielding dollars need not look far to find a desperate prostitution trade, both of the conventional variety and of the unspoken expectation of a morning “gift.”

Old Havana is undeniably charming but only because it is poor and somewhat hopeless, full of spontaneous scenes that look like a Gershwin opera unfolding under the balconies of 18th-century Spanish townhouses, their fading parlors lit with harsh shadeless lamps.

Walking through the city at night under arcades splashed with shades of ebony and maroon and seeing dozens of alleys and passageways stemming from a single block, each leading to new bad rooms, is to see a real-life 1959 film noir improbably preserved less than 90 miles from the Florida Keys. But Cuba exists in this state of functioning ruin because of the selfishness of its leadership, the autism of its official politics, and the complicity of shortsighted U.S. diplomacy. If you’re a tourist, the place is a grotesque amusement park, with the theme of a totalitarian state.

An entire generation of Cubans have been forced to squander their life’s possibilities under an oppressive system hostile to progress or personal initiative. The exodus to Florida stood as a lesson in cold Darwinism, for it seems likely that America took in many of the most daring personalities who were willing to risk their all.

Memories of a blockaded Cuba will linger before they fade entirely, before Cuba becomes like a Costa Rica of open borders and consumerist values. While the crowds of ordinary American visitors should be aware they are treading into a special place in its twilight days, their journey should also come with a mindfulness of just how contorted and artificial the mid-20th-century Cuban distinctiveness was, and what a high price in human potential was paid for it.

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In histories of slavery, we often hear about people who wanted to be free. But Rose Herera and countless other men and women in the throes of emancipation sought more than freedom. They sought justice. An elusive dream, justice meant seeing former owners punished for their misdeeds. It meant reuniting shredded families. It meant getting paid for years of unrequited toil. It meant gaining civil and political rights. Without justice, Rose Herera could not feel truly free.

Rose Herera’s quest for justice reveals the vast gulf between abolition and emancipation. It was one thing for the Union to overthrow slavery in law and practice during and after the Civil War. It was another for ex-slaves to enjoy the experience of freedom. Paying attention to stories like Herera’s can help us to see the wrinkled human face of what Abraham Lincoln called America’s “new birth of freedom.”

Too many of these stories are unknown, because their subjects were ordinary people who did not make much of an impression upon history. Rose Herera used to be one of them. But luckily, I stumbled across her story tucked away in an obscure Senate report, published in 1866, about a rumor that black people in the South were being kidnapped and sold into slavery in Cuba.

Even though I am a professional historian of 19th-century America, I had never heard of this rumor, or Rose Herera, but the report piqued my curiosity and I wanted to learn more. So I began my own quest to track Rose Herera’s life, and the fate of her children, across sacramental registers, bills of sale, newspaper ads, city directories, court minutes, lawyers’ effects, and dead letters in Washington, New Orleans, and Havana.

A few scraps of archival detritus make it possible to discern the bare skeleton of Rose Herera’s life. Rose-her baptismal record offers no last name at birth, no father-was born into slavery in the rural parish of Pointe Coupée in Louisiana in 1835. She grew up in a creole world of cotton, Catholicism, and cruelty. When she was a teenager, her owner sold his plantation and moved downriver to New Orleans, taking Rose and several other slaves with him to the febrile city.

The Tomb of the Unknown Slave, at St. Augustine’s Catholic Church in New Orleans

To pay off stubborn debts, Rose’s owner sold her and the others, including Rose’s mother, in the local market after the Panic of ’57. These transactions were meticulously recorded according to the law; the bills of sale can be found in the Notarial Archives in New Orleans among thousands of well-indexed documents that testify to a commerce in humans as routine as it was brutal. The City Directory, the phonebook of its era, listed “Slave Dealers” in alphabetical order. Glib ads for the sale of people streamed down the columns of the newspapers. One for Rose called her a “good washer and ironer.”

Rose was sold four times from 1857 to 1861, finally ending up in the pocket of a dentist named James De Hart, one of thousands of European immigrants who boosted the free, white population of New Orleans before the Civil War. Assimilating to his new land, De Hart purchased Rose and her two children on the eve of Louisiana’s secession from the Union. Rose was pregnant at the time, and when her daughter Josephine was born, she, too, became De Hart’s property. This is how slave owners accrued capital gains.

Rose’s children appear in the notarial records as if by spontaneous generation, without a father. The hidden reality was that some time after arriving in New Orleans, Rose met a free man of color named George Herera. They were married by a Catholic priest in the city, but their marriage had no legal force, and the church has no record of it. Still, they had five children together, and after George died of tuberculosis in 1864, Rose clung to his Spanish surname, Herera.

Buying Rose and her children catapulted the De Harts into masterhood. They owned no other slaves; indeed, they owned little else. Their main assets were Rose and her children. Unfortunately for the De Harts, their timing was terrible. Secession led to war, and war to emancipation. Yet this progression was not inevitable or uniform. There was much local variation. In New Orleans, for example, slavery’s demise did not come through the vaunted Emancipation Proclamation, which only covered slaves residing in rebel-held territory as of January 1863.

Captured by Union forces in the spring of 1862, the city was exempted from the Proclamation’s grasp. Slavery crumbled there anyway through what President Lincoln called the “friction and abrasion” of war, or more precisely, resistance by enslaved and free people of color in concert with sympathetic Union soldiers. A black and blue alliance. To escape Union retribution and confiscation, James De Hart fled to Cuba in the fall of 1862, leaving his family and slaves behind.

At the very moment that Lincoln signed the Proclamation, New Year’s Day 1863, Rose Herera (and her infant son) sat in jail, where she had been incarcerated in mid-December on assault charges. While Rose was locked up, Mary De Hart visited her several times to press her to go to Cuba, but Rose refused to play the role of the faithful slave. She would not go. Finally, in mid-January, De Hart boarded a steamship bound for Havana with three of Herera’s children-Ernest, Mary, and Josephine-over the protests of Rose’s husband and mother. Slavery was still legal in Cuba.

Precisely two years later, Mary De Hart returned to New Orleans to visit her friends. The war was drawing to a close. A new “free state” constitution had abolished slavery in Louisiana and was being put into effect by a Union army that now included thousands of black soldiers. In this revolutionary moment, Rose Herera turned the tables on her former mistress by accusing her of kidnapping and demanding the return of the children. Like so many other newly freed people, she seized the opportunity to try to reunite a family shredded by slave owners. What set her ordeal apart was merely that her children had been smuggled to Cuba.

Getting them would not be easy. For one thing, Rose’s charge had no basis in law. A slave owner could not kidnap her own slaves, and because the Emancipation Proclamation didn’t apply to New Orleans, the Herera children still belonged to the De Harts when they were taken to Cuba. The case was summarily dismissed from a civilian court, but that was not the end of it.

The Union army throughout the South operated military courts, known as provost courts, which heard cases involving newly freed people on the assumption that they could not get justice elsewhere. The case of U.S. v. De Hart was tried in one of these provost courts. Not only was Rose Herera able to get a well-connected lawyer to help her, but she was allowed to testify in court against her former mistress. That in itself was a revolutionary act.

Mary De Hart’s trial took place in April 1865, in the shadows of far more Earth-shattering events. It deserves a place in our history, too, for it dramatizes and humanizes the dynamics of law and justice for newly freed people in the era of emancipation. It raises the question of whether masters could ever be held to account for what they had done to their human property.

The answer, in this case, was yes and no. The Union commander in New Orleans, who had the final say, decided that Mary De Hart could not be found guilty of kidnapping under the law. Still, determined to find her guilty of something, he concluded that she had violated the spirit of Louisiana’s own slave code, which prohibited enslaved mothers from being sold apart from their children.

This highly strained and deeply ironic judgment was not the end of the story. It was soon reversed by a new, more lenient commander who allowed Mary De Hart to return to Havana upon the promise of restoring the children to their mother. The promise had not been fulfilled when the 13th Amendment abolishing slavery in the United States was ratified at the end of 1865. The children remained enslaved in Cuba, where they soon became entangled in an international scandal over human trafficking.

That scandal is another story. For now, it is enough to reflect on the gulf between abolition and emancipation. Slavery ended in the United States, yet Rose Herera’s children found themselves beyond freedom’s reach. Their predicament shows the lengths to which slave owners would go to hold onto their human property and the difficulty that ex-slaves faced in winning justice. But Rose Herera did not give up. Today, her dogged quest to recover her children should inspire us anew to seek justice and, finally, achieve emancipation.

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Turning to economist Rafael Betancourt in front of a full-house crowd at MOCA Grand Avenue, Miller asked what the opening of Cuba means for the average Cuban. “It has opened up the possibility of diversity both politically and economically,” said Betancourt. But it doesn’t mean the end of socialism.

Will a more capitalist economy, and an economy that receives more money from the U.S., asked Miller, create a gap between the haves and have-nots?

Betancourt said that gap already exists in Cuba, and began in the early 1990s, after the Cuban economy lost the support of the Soviet Union. Until Cuba eliminates its dual-currency system, however—most Cubans are paid in the Cuban peso, but most goods on the island must be bought with currency convertible pesos—the gap will continue to exist.

What does the fact that more Cubans will be running businesses—and incurring risks—mean for the country’s culture? Or, asked Miller, “can good-hearted socialism survive this?”

UCLA Latin America and Caribbean literature scholar Jorge Marturano joked, “I think it’s difficult to survive most kinds of capitalism.” He said that the bigger question is: How will the Cuban state regulate this new economy? Will families sending remittances from the U.S. to Cuba have to pay a tariff to the government? Cubans, like everyone else, hate taxes—but that’s also because they’re not used to paying them.

The Castro regime offered a lot of support for the arts and access to Cubans of all classes—although what the artists themselves could say and what kind of art they could make was limited, said Miller. How will a new Cuban economy affect artists and writers?

Artists and writers, predicted Marturano, will flourish as they are able to travel and have their work shown, played, and read outside Cuba.

Miller said that she hears a lot of Americans talking about wanting “‘to get to Cuba before it changes.’” Can Cuba’s culture withstand the arrival of Starbucks and McDonald’s—and what is unique about it?

Cuban culture is “very, very complex,” said Marturano. We think “that Cuba doesn’t change, but this is a lie.” Cuba has been changing for 50 years. Tourists go to Cuba and see old cars and think the country is static, but culture is everyday life—and people change on a day-to-day basis.

Betancourt agreed, adding that Cuba never had an iron curtain when it came to culture and music; people on the island were listening to the Beatles even when they were banned. And although people are asking what will happen when U.S. tourists come, Cuba has received 41 million tourists in the last 10 years. What’s changing is that the country is becoming part of the world in a more integrated way than it has been.

Ann Louise Bardach, author of Without Fidel and Cuba Confidential, said that if you want to see old Cuban culture, you’re best off visiting Miami, where Cubans are full of nostalgia (and you can listen to classic Cuban music at a club called Café Nostalgia). “Cubans on the island are desperate for change and movement,” she said. “What we find cute and quaint when we visit Cuba isn’t so cute and quaint when you’re living on $6 a month.”

Among recent reforms in Cuba was Raul Castro’s announcement that he will retire in 2018. Miller asked Bardach: “Is this the end of the Castros?”

To be in your 80s and announce your retirement a few years down the line is to choose “a very safe date,” said Bardach. “If [Raul is] feeling very peppy in 2018, I think that’s subject to revision.” And many Castro family members still have significant amounts of power. They aren’t going anywhere right away—although the country’s political landscape and their role in it is changing.

Betancourt said that power is going to be distributed in many different ways, but “we don’t know what this will look like.”

The future of human rights in Cuba also remains in question. The Cuban government has always defined any support of dissidents or intellectuals outside the fold as mercenaries, said Bardach. People have been sent to jail for putting out pamphlets or suggesting that the country adopt a two-party system. One woman was sentenced to 15 to 25 years for opening a library in her home. “We cannot forget these people in the midst of all this,” said Bardach. Raul Castro wants to model Cuba after China—by controlling the media, dissident movements, and the Internet.

Marturano said that he is also concerned about the future of Afro-Cubans. Will they become a part of the middle class? Many don’t have family in the U.S., and thus won’t benefit from increasing remittances. One of the Cuban Revolution’s successes was its creation of a more racially equal society, said Marturano, but “everything that you gain you can lose in the future.”

In the question-and-answer session, an audience member asked if, after the Castros die, Cubans who lost property under the regime will be compensated, as East Germans were after the Soviet Union collapsed.

Bardach said that there is a long list of hundreds of millions of claims, and people will get back only a fraction of what they lost. (She added that the longer people live in the U.S., the larger their assets in Cuba grow: “At one point, everyone had a sugar plantation,” she joked.) But mentioning East Germany also brought up an even thornier question. Cuban state security was modeled on the Stasi secret police, said Bardach. What will happen to Cuba’s many files on everyone from regular people to the four speakers on stage?

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