Understanding Elian: The Politics of Childhood in Miami and Havana, 1959--1962

This dissertation examines the centrality of symbolic and actual children to the transnational processes that propelled the 1959 Cuban Revolution and the subsequent formation of the US resident Cuban exile community. It argues that the bodies and symbolic representations of children were pressed into "nation-making" service by a Revolution that sought to fulfill Cubans' frustrated dreams of democratic governance, social equality, and national autonomy; however, as it turned swiftly towards socialism and the USSR in 1960, the state's imposition of new understandings and practices of childhood challenged Cuban middle class and Catholic values and traditions, provoking resistance to the new regime and sparking a massive exodus to southern Florida. Arriving in the United States at the height of the Cold War, Cuban refugees relied heavily upon child-centered anti-communist discourse to secure favorable treatment from the federal, state and municipal agencies and actors that oversaw their immigration and settlement. They and their US allies also made strategic use of representations of children to garner support from Miami's Anglo-American majority, many of whom were initially distressed by the rapid influx of Cuban refugees but sympathized with their Christian and middle class family values and anti-communist politics. Exiles thus developed a child-centered "creation myth" that explained their community's origins even as it promoted social coherence among a rapidly expanding but politically fragmented exile population. Children were similarly at the heart of exile leader's efforts to mobilize opposition to Fidel Castro's socialist Revolution and to elicit US support for their counterrevolutionary efforts and democratic-capitalist vision of their island nation's future. By 1962, when the resolution of the October Missile Crisis secured both the long-term viability of the Cuban Revolution and the indefinite extension of exiles' sojourn in the United States, struggles to define, control and make symbolic use of Cuban childhood had become inextricably intertwined with the mutually antagonistic ideologies and "nation-making" projects of the island and exilic Cuban communities. This "politics of childhood" resurfaced dramatically during the heated 1999 Elian Gonzalez custody battle, revealing its ongoing importance to revolutionary and exilic community identities and to relations between the Cuba and the United States.