Cuba's Exiles: Portrait of a Refugee Migration

This article provides a portrait of Cuba's exiles that encompasses all their waves of migration, while utilizing the Cuban exodus to shed light on the broader phenomenon of refugee migration. It argues that to understand the changing social characteristics of the exiles over twenty years of migration, we need to understand the changing phases of the Cuban revolution. Utilizing the Cuban exodus as data, the article uses Egon F. Kunz's (1973; 1981) theoretical framework for refugee migration to shed light on the refugees’ varying experiences, while also using the actual Cuban refugee experience to react to Kunz's abstract model.