In examining the impact of the mass influx of Cuban immigrants over the decades following the 1959 revolution, Mauricio Castro traces the politics of exile in Miami and the intersection of US foreign policy, local politics in South Florida, and emerging trends in urban development. He outlines how Cuban refugees became part of US Cold War political strategy and how unprecedented federal government spending on them drove the transformation of the city in various ways.

First, due to the economic and professional support the Cuban refugees received, Miami was transformed from a sleepy little town dependent on seasonal tourism to an “economic gateway to the Americas and the world” (7). Second, the Cubans, who, similar to the federal government, initially saw their sojourn in the United States as temporary, became an influential political and cultural force in South Florida and formed a Cuban-American voting bloc that significantly impacted US foreign policy (11). Third, the arrival of so many Cubans (increasingly of mixed-race heritage) redefined the racial boundaries of South Florida that had historically aligned with those in other Southern states. This inevitably provoked conflicts between the exiles and Miami’s African-American and white residents (79–80).

Castro describes the evolution of Washington’s Cuban refugee policy and how the special privileges Cuban migrants enjoyed were gradually pared back, thereby delinking it from US foreign policy. With successive and largely uncontrolled waves of immigrants from Cuba, the “Golden Exiles”—so called because of their image as the most successful immigrant community—became “excludables.” After the racial and political backlash against the Marielitos in the 1980s, by the mid-1990s the Clinton administration took the first steps to control the ever-growing numbers of Cuban migrants entering the country with the “wet foot, dry foot” policy and by signing migration accords with Havana (168–69). Although the Cuban American National Foundation was at the pinnacle of its political influence, Castro suggests this rolling back of Cuban immigrants’ rights represented a “crisis in clout” (204).

“In 1995, the Cold War came to an end in Miami,” he concludes, asserting that the federal government, which had simultaneously been the “patron” and “tool” of the Cuban-American community “had never shared the same devotion to a post-Castro Cuba [and] had moved on” (205). This argument is not convincingly supported by the epilogue to Castro’s book, in which he notes the increasing diversity of Miami’s population along with the widening social and political division within the Cuban-American community itself between the first-wave exiles and more recent arrivals from Cuba.

Over time, the South Florida Cuban-American political elite became absorbed into the ultra-conservative mainstream of the Republican Party and its neoliberal ideology. These politicians were no longer so ready to defend the rights of newer immigrants, especially when they perceived the frequent return trips to Cuba by those recent arrivals as undermining the effort to overturn the revolution. Under Presidents Trump and Biden, for the first time Cubans were subjected to detention and deportation.

Cuban-American political leaders such as Senator Marco Rubio were among the most vocal critics of Cuban “welfare chiselers” as opposed to “real refugees” (meaning themselves and their forebears). Meanwhile, these same Cuban-American Cold Warriors continued to wield significant influence over US foreign policy, insisting on the maintenance and tightening of harsh sanctions against Cuba (209–10).

By the dawn of the twenty-first century, Cuban immigrants had come to see themselves as Cuban-Americans, even while clinging to the label of exile, thereby asserting “a powerful narrative” as a psychological, social, and political identity (214). Using extensive national and local archives, Castro succeeds in presenting a complex history of the evolution of Miami, rejecting the view that it should be seen as “a curious outlier” (22). Although he recognizes that Miami’s economic transformation had “distinctive characteristics,” he argues that the city’s “underlying structures” should be seen as mirroring “broader trends in urban development during the postwar period, particularly in the South” (7).