The History of Florida (100 page)

gerated tales of economic success in the “promised land”—a familiar theme

in immigrant literature. The introduction of regular steamship service be-

tween Miami and Nassau by the early twentieth century made the trip to

proof

Florida cheap and convenient. According to Bahamian population studies,

ten to twelve thousand Bahamians left the islands for Florida between 1900

and 1920—about one-fifth of the entire population of the Bahamas.

In early-twentieth-century Florida, Bahamian newcomers found work as

railroad laborers, as construction workers and stevedores in early Miami,

and in clearing land for agriculture and residential development. The emer-

gence of Miami as a tourist center provided job opportunities for Bahamian

women as maids, cooks, and laundry and service workers in the city’s tour-

ist hotels and restaurants. Large numbers of Bahamians also worked in the

citrus industry and as field hands in south Florida agriculture. Many Ba-

hamians came as migrant laborers during the harvest season, returning to

the islands each summer. In the years before effective federal regulation of

immigration, Bahamian blacks moved easily and often between the islands

and south Florida.

The Bahamian presence in Miami and south Florida was proportion-

ately large. By 1920, when Miami’s population stood at 29,571, the foreign-

born made up one-quarter of that total. More than 65 percent of Miami’s

immigrants—some 4,815 individuals—were blacks from the West Indies,

mostly Bahamians. They comprised 52 percent of al Miami’s blacks and 16.3

478 · Raymond A. Mohl and George E. Pozzetta

proof

Agricultural, construction, and service workers from the Bahamas provided an impor-

tant labor force over several decades during Miami’s early history. This scene from a

papaya plantation in the early twentieth century typified the Bahamian labor migra-

tion to Florida. R. E. Simpson postcard photograph from the personal collection of

Raymond A. Mohl.

percent of the city’s entire population. In 1920, Miami had a larger popula-

tion of black immigrants than any other city in the United States except

New York. As agriculture expanded along south Florida’s Atlantic coastal

region, Bahamians responded to new work opportunities. Consequently,

the 1945 Florida state census reported more foreign-born blacks living in

Palm Beach County (5,597) than in Dade County (4,609).

For thousands of Bahamians from the 1890s to the 1940s, the widespread

perception of economic opportunity in Florida was too strong to resist.

Immigration and Ethnicity in Florida History · 479

Work was plentiful, but Bahamians routinely encountered racial segrega-

tion and discrimination in Florida. Racial confrontations involving Baha-

mian blacks and white policemen in Key West, Miami, and Jacksonvil e

were not uncommon. Unaccustomed to harassment and racial barriers, Mi-

ami, Key West, and West Palm Beach Bahamians in large numbers joined

the Universal Negro Improvement Association, the black nationalist move-

ment led by Marcus Garvey.

As was true of Latins in Tampa, Bahamians built flourishing ethnic

communities in Florida, especial y in Key West and in Coconut Grove and

Overtown, two black neighborhoods in early-twentieth-century Miami

where they established businesses and laid the foundations for churches

and a vibrant organizational life. The permanence and stability of these

neighborhoods, along with strong links to the islands, contributed to cul-

tural maintenance and an enduring ethnic identity. Unfettered Bahamian

migration ended with World War II, when the agricultural labor supply in

Florida came under governmental regulation. But enough Bahamians had

already settled permanently in south Florida to sustain the growth of cohe-

sive communities held together by a strong sense of identity and cultural

distinctiveness.

Bahamian migration to Florida was paral eled by the early Cuban mi-

proof

gration to Key West and Tampa. Florida’s human connection to the Ca-

ribbean intensified as the twentieth century progressed. In retrospect, it is

somewhat prophetic that the achievement of Cuban independence (1898)

and the founding of Miami (1896) coincided at the end of the nineteenth

century. The era of the Spanish-American War represented the first phase

of that magnetic pull that has linked Miami and Havana as the twin cities

of the Caribbean for much of the twentieth century. Key West, Tampa, and

New York continued to be centers of Cuban exile life in the United States

through the 1920s, but Miami was already beginning to emerge as a conve-

nient place of political exile for Latin American revolutionaries, dissidents,

and dictators. By the late 1920s, as many as 1,000 Cuban exiles, mostly young

and radical university students opposed to the dictatorial regime of Gerardo

Machado, had set up an exile headquarters in Miami. With the success of

the 1933 Cuban Revolution, anti-Machado exiles in Florida returned home,

with the blessing of the
Miami
Herald
, which editorialized prophetical y

in 1933 that “Miami’s gates will always be open to Cubans, should the time

ever come again when they need a refuge.”6 Actual y, that time came rather

quickly, since ousted Machado supporters immediately took up new places

in Miami exile.

480 · Raymond A. Mohl and George E. Pozzetta

Bahamian labor migrants continued to work in Florida agriculture well into the twen-

tieth century. These farmworkers arriving in Miami by plane in April 1943 were part of

a special temporary labor program during World War II. Courtesy of the State Archives

of Florida,
Florida Memory
, http://floridamemory.com/items/show/29468.

It had become a natural pattern. As Harry Guggenheim, U.S. ambassa-

proof

dor to Cuba in the early 1930s, noted at the time, Cuban exile leaders went

to New York and Washington to solicit financial and political support, but

the chief point of exile had already become Miami, where, Guggenheim

said, “the rank and file of emigres and followers of the junta concentrate,

since they can live more easily in Florida’s sunshine.”7 Older communities of

earlier Cuban immigrants were still thriving in Tampa and Key West, num-

bering about 7,400 and 1,600 respectively in 1930. But a new Cuban exile

community began to emerge in Miami during the 1930s; by 1940, Miami

had more than 1,100 Cuban-born residents, a colony that gradual y grew

even larger during the next two decades. Cuban-born workers, especial y

women, made up a large portion of the garment workers in Miami’s needle

trades in the early 1950s. Even before the success of Castro’s revolution in

1959, a concentrated area of Cuban settlement had begun to take shape in

Miami’s central city, and the neighborhood was already being called “Little

Havana.” So the exiles who flowed out of Cuba in such astonishing numbers

during the 1960s and after were only the latest in a long line of Cubans who

historical y sought refuge in Florida.

Despite the concentration of Latins in Tampa and of Bahamians and Cu-

bans in Key West and Miami in the early twentieth century, Florida had

Immigration and Ethnicity in Florida History · 481

not yet become a major destination for immigrants to the United States. In

1930, for instance, the foreign-born made up about 12 percent of national

population; by contrast, Florida had just under 70,000 white and black im-

migrants at the time, or about 4.7 percent of the state’s total population.

According to the 1930 U.S. census, more than half of those immigrants lived

in the Tampa, Miami, and Jacksonville metropolitan districts. In addition to

English, the most popular “mother tongues” of Florida’s urban immigrants

in 1930 were Spanish and Italian in Tampa; German, Yiddish, and Arabic

in Jacksonville; and German, Yiddish, and Spanish in Miami. Despite small

numbers of foreign-born, urban Florida was already displaying some ethnic

and cultural diversity by the 1930s.

Over the next thirty years, immigration statistics for Florida converged

with national patterns. By 1960, for example, the proportion of immigrants

in Florida’s population had increased marginal y to 5.5 percent. For the na-

tion as a whole, the immigrant proportion had declined to 5.4 percent of

total population, reflecting the demographic consequences of the federal

immigration restriction legislation of the 1920s. The foreign-born propor-

tion for most of Florida’s cities and counties hovered at or below the state

average. But some dramatic exceptions appeared, such as in Miami Beach,

where 33 percent of the city’s population was foreign-born in 1960—mostly

proof

East European Jewish immigrants who had retired to Florida from north-

eastern states. Demographical y speaking, Miami-Dade County appeared

as an oddity in the 1960 U.S. census, with 113,000 foreign-born—over 40

percent of the state’s total—whose mother tongues included German, Pol-

ish, Hungarian, Russian, and Yiddish, as well as English and Spanish. Pock-

ets of immigrants clustered in other parts of Florida, too. Tarpon Springs,

with many Greek immigrants, was almost one-quarter foreign-born. The

foreign-born made up 14 percent of the population of Lake Worth, a small

city in Palm Beach County where Finnish immigrants began settling in the

1930s. Jacksonvil e had a miniscule foreign-born population in 1960, but

the city had long been home to several thousand Syrian-Lebanese people, a

multigenerational ethnic community that grew to over 25,000 by the 1990s.

Surprisingly, Canadian immigrants, largely a post–World War II phenom-

enon, comprised the largest foreign-born group in the Orlando, Jackson-

ville, Tampa–St. Petersburg, and Fort Lauderdale–Hol ywood metropolitan

areas. Final y, Miami-Dade County already had more than 50,000 Hispanics

in 1960, reflecting both a growing Puerto Rican community and the early

surge of Cubans just before and just after the fall of Batista in 1959.

The success of Fidel Castro’s Cuban Revolution in 1959 permanently

482 · Raymond A. Mohl and George E. Pozzetta

altered the trajectory of Florida’s demography. The migration of Cuban ex-

iles to the United States forms one of the most compelling and fascinating

chapters in the history of American immigration. Over the course of a half

century, more than 1.1 million Cuban exiles arrived in the United States, a

large majority of whom settled in Florida, especial y the Miami area. They

came to the United States in several waves over five decades, an erratic mi-

gration flow dictated by the state of U.S.-Cuban relations at any particu-

lar time. This relationship also dictated the form of the exile movement.

At various times, the Cubans arrived in Florida by airlift, boatlift, travel

through third countries, or as escapees on small boats and rafts. American

policymakers, beginning with the Eisenhower administration, encouraged

the exile migration to destabilize and discredit Castro’s communist regime.

To a large degree, however, Castro control ed the timing and methods of

exile migration, periodical y opening and closing the doors, thus permitting

the exodus of dissidents to defuse political opposition or internal economic