Reference
- Freedom FlightsBetween December 1, 1965, and April 6, 1973, there were 3,049 flights between Varadero, Cuba, and Miami, Florida, that brought 260,561 Cuban exiles to the United States at an estimated cost of $50 million to the U.S. government. An estimated additional $100 million was spent on employment, relocation, food, medical care, and shelter for the resettlement of the Cuban refugees...
- Soviet immigrationEmigration from the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR; Soviet Union) was, for most of its history (1917–91), forbidden. Those who did emigrate were usually dissidents and came from many, mostly non-Russian ethnic groups, including Jews, Armenians, Estonians, Latvians, Lithuanians, and Ukrainians. There was little or no sense of Soviet identity; the history, social organization, and areas of settlement varied from group to group. As a result of the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991, it is usually within the context of the specific ethnic groups that immigration is most meaningfully discussed...
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Online Articles
- Controversies of US-USSR Cultural Contacts During the Cold War: The Perspective of Latvian RefugeesThis article analyzes the conflict that emerged regarding the so-called US-USSR "cultural contacts" during the Cold War within the exile community of American Latvians. While most of the American political and cultural elites saw cultural exchanges with the Soviets as beneficial, the reactions of the emigres were much more controversial and polarizing. This study reveals the unrecognized side of the Cold War politics as experienced by the refugee groups. The study employs American, Latvian and Soviet publications, memoirs, interviews and archival materials.
- The Defeated of the Greek Civil War: From Fighters to Political Refugees in the Cold WarIn the fall of 1949, after the end of the Greek Civil War, the bulk of the defeated Greek Communist (KKE) fighters were covertly transported from Albania to Soviet Uzbekistan. This article addresses the covert relocation project, organized by the Soviet Communist Party, and the social engineering program intended to create a prototype Greek People’s Democracy in Tashkent
- Managing Displaced Populations: The Friedland Transit Camp, Refugees, and Resettlement in Cold War GermanyThis article examines the resettlement of displaced populations in both postwar German states from 1945 to 1955. Specifically, it investigates who were the displaced populations circulating between the occupation zones, and what methods the German civil governments and occupying military authorities used to aid and resettle them. Through a case study of the Friedland refugee transit camp, this article argues for an expansive understanding of the term “refugee” to include more groups, ranging from Displaced Persons and German expellees to returning prisoners of war and civil internees.
- The Role of the Protestant Church in the US Refugee Resettlement Program during the Early Cold War Era: The Methodist CaseThe active involvement of Christian churches in the us refugee resettlement program originated and evolved soon after World War ii. Refugee relief was an instrument of America's Cold War strategy. At the same time, the humanitarian and missionary impulses of American churches, which were at work independent of the diplomatic cause, provided impetus for their relief activities.
- Symbolic Politics and Policy Feedback: The United Nations Protocol Relating to the Status of Refugees and American Refugee Policy in the Cold WarImmigration scholars routinely overlook the 1968 U.S. Senate ratification of the United Nations Protocol Relating to the Status of Refugees, an international treaty defining a refugee in ideologically neutral terms. They dismiss this moment as symbolic because U.S. law continued to define a refugee as someone fleeing communism until the passage of the 1980 Refugee Act.
Streaming Media
- This Day In History: December 1, 1965 – Airlift of Cuban Refugees BeginsThe airlift of Cuban refugees to the U.S. begins.
- Cubamerican: A Million Refugees' Quest for FreedomCUBAMERICAN is the stirring story of how the Cuban Revolution shattered the Cuban family. Spanning the past 60 years of Cuban history, the film evokes this tragedy and its universal themes of loss, freedom, assimilation, struggle and triumph through the stories of Cuban exiles that have achieved acclaim in diverse fields in the U.S.A. and beyond, rendering a mosaic of a bittersweet exile experience.
Perspectives
Americans at the Gate
Unlike the 1930s, when the United States tragically failed to open its doors to Europeans fleeing Nazism, the country admitted over three million refugees during the Cold War. This dramatic reversal gave rise to intense political and cultural battles, pitting refugee advocates against determined opponents who at times successfully slowed admissions. The first comprehensive historical exploration of American refugee affairs from the midcentury to the present, Americans at the Gate explores the reasons behind the remarkable changes to American refugee policy, laws, and programs. Carl Bon Tempo looks at the Hungarian, Cuban, and Indochinese refugee crises, and he examines major pieces of legislation, including the Refugee Relief Act and the 1980 Refugee Act. He argues that the American commitment to refugees in the post-1945 era occurred not just because of foreign policy imperatives during the Cold War, but also because of particular domestic developments within the United States such as the Red Scare, the Civil Rights Movement, the rise of the Right, and partisan electoral politics. Using a wide variety of sources and documents, Americans at the Gate considers policy and law developments in connection with the organization and administration of refugee programs.
Czech Refugees in Cold War Canada
During the Cold War, more than 36,000 individuals entering Canada claimed Czechoslovakia as their country of citizenship. A defining characteristic of this migration of predominantly political refugees was the prevalence of anti-communist and democratic values. Diplomats, industrialists, politicians, professionals, workers, and students fled to the West in search of freedom, security, and economic opportunity.Jan Raska's Czech Refugees in Cold War Canada explores how these newcomers joined or formed ethnocultural organizations to help in their attempts to affect developments in Czechoslovakia and Canadian foreign policy towards their homeland. Canadian authorities further legitimized the Czech refugees' anti-communist agenda and increased their influence in Czechoslovak institutions. In turn, these organizations supported Canada's Cold War agenda of securing the state from communist infiltration. Ultimately, an adherence to anti-communism, the promotion of Canadian citizenship, and the cultivation of a Czechoslovak ethnocultural heritage accelerated Czech refugees' socioeconomic and political integration in Cold War Canada.By analyzing oral histories, government files, ethnic newspapers, and community archival records, Raska reveals how Czech refugees secured admission as desirable immigrants and navigated existing social, cultural, and political norms in Cold War Canada.
Asylum Speakers
Offering the first interdisciplinary study of refugees in the Caribbean, Central America, and the United States, Asylum Speakers relates current theoretical debates about hospitality and cosmopolitanism to the actual conditions of refugees. In doing so, the author weighs the questions of "truth value" associated with various modes of witnessing to explore the function of testimonial discourse in constructing refugee subjectivity in New World cultural and political formations. By examining literary works by such writers as Edwidge Danticat, Nikòl Payen, Kamau Brathwaite, Francisco Goldman, Julia Alvarez, Ivonne Lamazares, and Cecilia Rodríguez Milanés, theoretical work by Jacques Derrida, Edouard Glissant, and Wilson Harris, as well as human rights documents, government documents, photography, and historical studies, Asylum Speakers constructs a complex picture of New World refugees that expands current discussions of diaspora and migration, demonstrating that the peripheral nature of refugee testimonial narratives requires us to reshape the boundaries of U.S. ethnic and postcolonial studies.
Fleeing Castro
A stirring account of the covert effort to smuggle Cuban children into the United States in the aftermath of Fidel Castro's rise to power, Fleeing Castro brings to light the humanitarian program designed to care for the children once they arrived and the hardship and suffering endured by the families who took part in Operation Pedro Pan.From late 1960 until the October 1962 missile crisis, 14,048 unaccompanied Cuban children left their homeland, the small island suddenly at the center of the Cold War struggle. Their parents, unable to obtain visas to leave Cuba, believed a short separation would be preferable to subjecting their offspring to Castro's totalitarian Marxist state. For the children, the exodus began a prolonged and tragic ordeal?some didn?t see their parents again for years; a few never did.Until now, this chapter of the Cuban Revolution has been relatively obscure. Initially the result of an effort by James Baker, headmaster of an American school in Cuba who worked closely with the anti-Castro underground, Pedro Pan quickly came to involve the Catholic Church in Miami and, in particular, Father Bryan Walsh, who established the Cuban Children's Program, the nationwide organization that cared for those children without relatives or friends in the United States?almost half of them. The latter program, in effect until 1981, was the first to allot federal money to private agencies for child care, an action with far-reaching repercussions for U.S. social policy.Victor Andres Triay traces this story from its political and social origins in Cuba, setting it in the context of the Cold War and describing the roles of the organizations involved in Cuba and in the United States. Making use of extensive interviews with Baker, Walsh, and influential underground figures, as well as personal letters that document the fears and dreams of both the parents and the children, Triay presents this history of Pedro Pan?the largest child refugee movement ever in the Western Hemisphere--with the drama of an international thriller and the pathos of a heartbreaking family drama.
The Lost Apple
From 1960 to 1962, 14,048 Cuban minors arrived in Miami. María de los Angeles Torres was six years old when she took part in this massive airlift-now known as Operation Pedro Pan-in which parents, terrified that the new communist government would ship their children to Soviet work camps, sent them instead to America. Torres examines the event from both a historical and a personal perspective. This 'relentless investigator of history' (Miami Herald) forces declassification of key documents, challenging us all finally to come to terms with this pivotal yet largely neglected exodus.