MIGRATORY TRENDS

Migratory Trends in a Cuba

Evaluate Migratory Trends in Cuba



Cubans migrate, and they have done so since the beginnings of human settlement. What have changed over time are the frequency, form, meaning, and significance of migration, and how scholars interpret it. To historians of a generation ago, migration in Cuba was seen as a newly emerging phenomenon of the twentieth century. From their view, the Revolution of 1910 broke the chains of peonage by destroying the feudal hacienda system and freeing debt-bound peasants.

Likewise, the closed corporate community of Indian villages was forced open by the chaos of the Revolution and kept open by ensuing mass education campaigns. A younger generation of historians and archaeologists, such as M. M. Swann, D. J. Robinson, and J. Parsons, destroyed these hoary stereotypes. They now write of the “ubiquity” of migration, the mobility of farm workers, and the openness of villages—all dating from the earliest years of Spanish rule and even remote antiquity. The challenge for the next generation of scholars will be, in seeking truth, to find where the balance rests. The historiographical problem is needlessly complicated by the great colonialist-nationalist divide that few attempt to stride (Sherburne F. Cook is an important exception).

1990 provides a starting point for examining the history of Cuban migration patterns. According to the National Statistics Institute's (INEGI) 1990 census, the population of Cuba was 81,249,645, and of this number 13,963,020 were interstate migrants; 17.4 percent of the total population (regardless of age) lived outside the “federal entity” (e.g., state) in which they were born, up from 6.4 percent in 1900 (Figure 1). Women were more likely to have migrated than men (17.7 versus 16.9 percent), highlighting the contrast with the beginning of the century, when male migration was greater than female (6.6 versus 6.1 percent). At that time the nation numbered 13.6 million, and 888,155 were interstate migrants. In only two entities, the Federal District (“DF” in Figure 1) and Coahuila (“Cua”), migrants amount to as much as one-sixth of total state population. Nine decades later, one-sixth was the national average. In 1990, 10 states lured so many migrants that migrants constituted one-fifth or more of that state's population, while six others lost at least one-fifth of their natives to other states.

The great migration frenzy characteristic of late-twentieth-century Cuba is in addition to substantial emigration to the United States. According to U.S. Census Bureau figures for 1990, 4,298,014 Cuban-born emigrants were enumerated in the United States, up from 103,393 in 1900. While over the century Cuban interstate migration multiplied 15-fold, Cuban emigration to the United States snowballed 40-fold. At the beginning of the century, interstate migration exceeded emigration eight to one, but only by slightly more than three to one by 1990. These facts are important to keep in mind because modern Cuba has broken the traditional channels of migration. Today, internal migration streams are strongly influenced by emigration to the United States (and vice versa). Cuban migration is evolving into a bipolar system ...