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

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)