In 2015, when Donald Trump announced his presidential aspirations with that tirade against Mexican immigrants—whom he accused of being "murderers and rapists"—many of you looked the other way. "It's not our issue; that's their problem," you commented at dinner. "We are different," you repeated. "We are the Cuban exile."
Later, when he launched an attack against Muslims and, already as president 45, imposed his first travel ban, they supported him as well. After all, “we see burkas, we don’t know faces.”
In September 2024, during the final stretch of the recent presidential elections, Trump explicitly announced his intention to eliminate Humanitarian Parole and the CBP One application. The threat was widely publicized. Yet again, a significant portion of the exile community ignored it, even though many had just brought family members from Cuba thanks to that program or had friends under that status. They simply did not care. By that time, the MAGA candidate had delivered a fiery anti-immigrant speech at his golf course in El Doral, interrupted by enthusiastic applause from the audience.
If successful, it will render the children of many exiles stateless
The day of the elections arrived, and they were given a blank check, simultaneously condemning thousands and thousands of compatriots, including families and friends, to the debut of an unprecedented "Era of Fear" in 66 years of exile. No one can say they weren't warned.
With the start of the new administration, Secretary of State Marco Rubio —the son and grandson of Cubans, with a grandfather who avoided deportation thanks to the Cuban Adjustment Act— erased the TPS for hundreds of thousands of Venezuelan refugees in one fell swoop. He then repeated the punishment for Nicaraguans, Haitians, and Hondurans. “Nothing can be done,” many in the Cuban community justified. “They are lazy, gang members, dismemberers from the Tren de Aragua, infiltrators, people of low character.”
By March 2025, Trump swiftly canceled the programs of Humanitarian Parole for Cubans, Venezuelans, Haitians, and Nicaraguans. More than half a million people were placed in immediate danger of deportation, including about 110,000 Cubans. Their families. Their friends. Do you remember them? But once again, many turned a blind eye to the injustice, and even applauded the insults from a resentful and failed individual in a turban, who denigrated their loved ones from a screen, calling them “bread with steak.” A former “comrade” from a station in Havana who only “learned” of the repression in Cuba nearly 20 years after living in Miami.
The sad truth is that the tragic story of repression against Hispanics was just beginning.
When the masked ICE gangs began to pursue and arrest people on the streets of the United States based on their skin color or simply for speaking Spanish, there were some complaints, but once again, a significant number of our compatriots turned a blind eye while the chorus repeated the refrain of "gangsters and criminals." The truth was different: many of those arrested were construction and agricultural workers, students on their way to school, and teachers at their school doors.
They didn't even react to the shocking images of women chased in the streets, pregnant and terrified young girls, families forcibly separated in court after rulings designed to facilitate mass deportations. A simple scroll down the screen served as anesthesia against the suffering of others.
Then they put the spotlight on Cubans. First, they focused on the I-220B; then they turned their attention to the I-220A. Initially, it was gradual, testing the waters and gauging public reaction. However, there were only a few isolated protests. So they pushed further: they harassed truck drivers, arrested and deported to Cuba parents with no criminal records, some with small children who were seriously ill. Victims of the same dictatorship as all of us. Older individuals with relatively minor offenses committed many decades ago were thrown into cells like undesirable criminals. There were deaths. And silence. The deafening silence of this community.
When, for God's sake, did Cuban exiles commit a terrorist attack against the nation that welcomed them?
Subsequently, the anti-immigrant escalation received a new boost. In the very heart of Miami, the government quickly erected the infamous Alligator Alcatraz, a direct affront to the pride of the Cuban exile community, which kept its head buried in the sand, unable to articulate a response. ICE filled those cages with immigrants—many Cubans, many innocent of any crime—and subjected them to inhumane treatment (Amnesty International has even reported torture). And what did the congress members from Miami do? Mario Díaz-Balart, María Elvira Salazar, and Carlos Giménez applauded the detention camp operations, thereby justifying the worst episode of xenophobia in the history of the Cuban exile. Truth be told, they were not the only ones; a considerable portion of the exile community abandoned other Cubans to their fate.
Day after day, the White House intensified harassment measures against Cuban refugees. Tens of thousands of beneficiaries of the Humanitarian Parole —individuals who arrived in the country under a federal program— had their work permits revoked, stripping them of the opportunity to put food on their tables. When judges from various courts blocked these measures, Trump responded with an offensive in the appellate courts, replicating the same pattern of legal persecution applied against refugees with I-220A status.
And exile? Well, thank you.
Federal representatives and social media propagandists conspired to attack Joe Biden, the man who opened the doors of the United States to more Cubans than all previous presidents combined since George Washington. They blamed him for the crisis for having accepted a significant number of Cubans under the I-220A status, when it was actually Trump who introduced that formula in January 2017.
No primitive demagoguery can erase the truth: Biden's I220A recipients received work permits, started businesses, bought homes, many formed families, and had children. Donald Trump broke the record for deportations of Cubans during his first term (3385). And now he relentlessly pursues and deports them with stubborn cruelty.
Focused on eliminating the 14th Amendment of the Constitution, Trump's White House is simultaneously fighting yet another of its many battles in the Supreme Court to end the right to citizenship by birth, a genuine threat to many families in our community. If successful, it will render stateless the children of many exiles, if they had the misfortune of being born when their parents were not yet American citizens.
The question is not political in nature, but existential: Will the Cuban exile remain silent while those in power denigrate immigrants and refugees as people from "shithole countries" and "poison for the nation's blood"?
Will they continue to remain frozen in fear or apathy now that Trump has halted all immigration processes —residencies, citizenships— using the attack by an Afghan ex-CIA collaborator as an excuse? When, for heaven's sake, have Cuban exiles committed a terrorist attack against the nation that welcomed them?
Will our community remain silent after the suspension of the Family Reunification Program created in 2007 by George W. Bush?
Will you continue to turn a blind eye while fanatic extremists like Stephen Miller threaten to strip the nationality from those who "do not love the country" (that is, those who oppose the Trumpism agenda, in the purest style of the Cuban Stalinist experiment)?
Will the exile remain indifferent while ICE conducts its first raids in Miami?
What will our community do when:
- Raids have begun in Hialeah
- They strip their children of citizenship by birth
- Expel parents and grandparents from the country who used legal assistance programs
- They try to dehumanize people for engaging in legitimate political activism
- Abolish the Cuban Adjustment Act
- And finally, when will they corner you for sharing a simple critical post on social media?
It's no longer about the stranger, the other, the neighbor next door. They are deporting Cubans back to the very communist dictatorship they fled from. The one established by Fidel Castro in 1959.
You, we could be next.
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Opinion article: Las declaraciones y opiniones expresadas en este artículo son de exclusiva responsabilidad de su autor y no representan necesariamente el punto de vista de CiberCuba.
