Dominican-American baseball players,
who also came from a country with a
strong baseball tradition.
As the children and grandchildren of
the first Cuban exiles who had fled Castro
matured, significant cultural differences
emerged between the old and new
generations of Cuban Americans. The
latter have been less likely to share their
parents’ loathing of Castro and have had
little yearning to return to a free Cuba.
These young, upwardly mobile Cuban
Americans (YUCAs, as they are known)
could speak both English and Spanish,
but preferred English. While their par-
ents and grandparents may have consid-
ered the United States nothing but a
temporary way station, these younger
Cuban Americans saw in it their perma-
nent home.
CENTRAL AMERICANS
Though Central American immigration
had been on the rise since the end of
World War II, the flow of immigrants
from that region took a sharp upturn in
the 1980s, driven by the cold war–related
civil wars that wracked the region during
the decade. In the 1980s, 425,000 Central
Americans immigrated legally to the
United States, and far many more are
believed to have come illegally. The
largest number of legal immigrants came
from El Salvador; by 1997 there were
607,000 Salvadoran-born people living
in the United States, not much fewer
than the country’s 632,000 Dominican-
born people. Many other immigrants
came from Guatemala and Nicaragua.
Turmoil at Home
In the 1980s El Salvador, Guatemala, and
Nicaragua all experienced dire civil wars.
In all three cases the conflicts arose in rad-
ically unjust societies, where a tiny elite
controlled most of the country’s wealth,
leaving the majority of the population in
desperate poverty and political oppres-
sion. The U.S. government under
Presidents Ronald Reagan (1981–1989)
and George Bush (1989–1993), however,
viewed the conflicts as theaters of the
cold war, where anticommunist forces had
to be supported, and communist, or even
left-leaning, forces had to be countered,
lest the Soviet Union expand the foothold
it had already established in Cuba.
In El Salvador a left-wing guerrilla
insurgency known as the Farabundo
Martí National Liberation Front
(FMLN) waged war against the country’s
government from 1980 to 1992. Because
the U.S. government viewed the FMLN
as a Soviet-Cuban proxy, they supported
the Salvadoran government with money,
arms, and military advisors, despite
mounting evidence from international
human rights groups that government
forces and progovernment, right-wing,
paramilitary groups called “death squads”
were conducting systematic murder and
torture. Among atrocities linked to the
Salvadoran government in 1980 were the
assassination of Archbishop Oscar
Arnulfo Romero, an advocate for the
country’s poor, and the 1980 rape and
murder of four American churchwomen.
In 1992 Salvadoran president Alfredo
Cristiani finally negotiated a peace treatyA CHANGING COMMUNITY 209On June 28, 2000, Elian Gonzalez returned
to Cuba with his father, Juan Miguel
Gonzalez, after a bitter custody battle
with Elian’s U.S. relatives, who believed he
should remain in the United States on
political grounds. This was Gonzalez’s
statement before leaving the United
States, translated from Spanish:I would like to thank the North
American people for the support
they have given us and to the U.S.
government. I think that this has
allowed me to meet very beautiful
and intelligent people in this
country, and I hope that in the
future this same friendship and
this same impression that I have of
the U.S. people, that the same
thing can become true between
both our countries, Cuba and the
U.S. I am very grateful for the sup-
port I have received. I am
extremely happy of being able to
go back to my homeland, and I
don’t have words really to express
what I feel.This was the statement made a short time
later by Armando Gutierrez, a spokesper-
son for the Lazaro Gonzalez family, who
had cared for Elian in Miami and fought
his return to Cuba:Elian’s arrival and the subsequent
fight for his life was like a wake-up
call for the Cubans in Miami. Many
had become complacent with our
lives in the United States of
America. Young and old, rich and
poor, so many have forgotten the
crisis in our country that brought us
to this country. Elian’s mother
brought him to this great country
seeking the promise of our Statue
of Liberty. She and her son were
among the huddled masses yearn-
ing to breathe free. How tragic that
unlike the immigration of so many
Americans, myself included, Elian
Gonzalez cannot yet be free.
Lazaro Gonzalez wants everyone
to know that the family will still fight
for Elian to be free regardless of
where he’s at.ELIAN’S RETURN TO CUBA:
CLASHING VOICES