Prio dedicated himself to the overthrow of Batista and provided financial support to various militant groups. Fidel Castro stopped by in Miami in 1955 to accept a hefty financial contribution and went on to Mexico to organize and train his military forces. In December 1956, Castro’s troops invaded Cuba and for the next three years fought the Batista regime from their base in the Sierra Maestra Mountains. Batista fled to Brazil on December 31, 1959 and later settled in Coral Gables. Castro’s triumph, or at least Batista’s downfall, was a cause for celebration among the large majority of exiles. “The familiar changing of the guard took place, with exultant fidelistas leaving, to be replaced by defeated batistianos. Scuffles broke out in the Miami airport between passengers arriving from and departing for Havana, causing local police reinforcements to be sent in.”3
It took another two years for Castro to proclaim his communist sympathies openly and for the United States to break off diplomatic relations. During 1959 and 1960, many Cubans saw the clouds gather and turned away from the revolution in disillusionment.4 At first, the return of exiles to Cuba exceeded the arrival of new refugees in Miami—the Cuban population in South Florida most likely dropped around this time. But as Castro’s revolution revealed its true colors, a growing number of Cubans packed their bags. On December 26, 1960, operation Pedro Pan commenced, in which desperate Cuban parents sent more than fourteen thousand children on their own to the United States, to be cared for by relatives, friends, and foster parents.
Between 1959 and 1961, about 50,000 exiles reached Miami.5 The first waves of refugees contained a large number of wealthy business people who had been able to hang on to their possessions and get out in time to bring their wealth to Miami. They were soon followed by other elite Cubans who had waited too long and had seen their properties confiscated. They, in turn, were succeeded by smaller business owners and professionals from the middle classes. The exodus accelerated in 1962. Between June and August, an estimated 1,800 Cubans arrived in Miami every week and by October of that year there were a total of 155,000 registered refugees. Leaving Cuba became harder after the failed Bay of Pigs invasion of April 1961, and even more difficult after the missile crisis of 1962.6 Still, by 1965 the number of exiles had climbed to 210,000.
In the national news in the United States, most attention was on Cuba, not South Florida. The CBS evening news on December 1, 1966 reported that “to a great extent these people represent the professional and business class of Cuba; the able, the educated, the successful…. Cuba has been gutted. This exodus is the biggest brain drain the Western Hemisphere has known.”7 The federal government’s preoccupation with Cuba was expressed in the immense resources dedicated to gathering intelligence on Castro’s government, Cuban politics, and counter-revolutionary movements in Miami. During the 1960s, there were three hundred to four hundred CIA agents in South Florida, making it the largest CIA “station” after Langley headquarters in Virginia.
The majority of refugees remained in Miami. They stayed with relatives and acquaintances, rented property, or received shelter from the authorities. Initially, local, public, and volunteer agencies banded together in Miami to assist the refugees.8 But as the numbers escalated, unease grew among the local population. And when, at the end of the missile crisis, it became clear that the Cubans were not likely to go home any time soon, politicians in South Florida took action. They requested emergency help with the “refugee crisis” from the federal government. In response, the Kennedy administration organized a large-scale program to resettle Cubans throughout the United States. It seemed to work, at first. By 1966 about 135,000 people were resettled all over the United States, with the largest concentrations in New York and California.
But in 1965 Castro agreed to the departure of large numbers of “traitors to the revolution.” The “freedom flights,” as they were called by the Cubans in Miami, continued until 1973 and by that time another 340,000 refugees had entered the United States, most choosing to stay in Miami. And that was not the only issue. Miami’s appeal to the exiled Cubans was simply irresistible, and the resettlement scheme was a losing proposition:
All the time that the freedom flights were coming into Miami, resettlement flights were leaving it in an attempt to distribute more evenly the burden of refugee resettlement. By 1978, 469,435 Cubans had been settled away from Miami. To federal and local bureaucrats, this was ample evidence that the “problem” of refugee concentration in South Florida had been resolved. In the late 1960s, however, a discreet countertrend started that saw resettled Cuban families trek back to Miami on their own. In 1973, a survey estimated that 27 percent of the Cubans residing in the Miami metropolitan area had returned there from other US locations. A survey conducted by the Miami Herald in 1978 raised that valuation to about forty percent. As a consequence of this accelerating return migration, by 1979, on the eve of Mariel, close to eighty percent of Cubans in the United States were living in Miami, making it, in effect, Cuba’s second-largest city and the refugees the most concentrated foreign-born minority in the country.9
During the first year of Castro’s revolution, life in South Florida seemed to be going on as usual. For most Miamians, the Cuban revolution initially seemed another episode of a familiar story and it was mainly greeted with indifference. In the 1960s, “Miami Beach’s spectacle of idleness, luxury and sex remained the predominant national and international image of the city.”10 The Beatles performed there on their first tour in the United States in February 1964, at the Deauville Hotel on Collins Avenue for a crowd of twenty-five hundred. They played in only two other American cities, New York and Washington, D.C. In 1965, Jacky Gleason moved his popular TV show from Manhattan to Miami Beach, exposing the allure of Miami to national audiences on a weekly basis.
But economically things were not going well and South Florida in the 1960s showed something of a disconnect from the rest of the country. The period from 1961 to 1969 witnessed one of the most sustained periods of economic expansion the nation had ever known, with annual growth rates near 5 percent. At the same time, South Florida’s economy was lackluster. The strong performance of manufacturing in the U.S. economy as a whole was mostly irrelevant to South Florida, where manufacturing had always been insignificant. It witnessed only minimal growth in tourism and most economic indicators were flat. The real estate business cycle had turned down after the high-rolling 1950s. The financial drain on resources with the arrival of Cuban refugees did not help. Then, in the early 1970s, the United States and much of the world economy went into a prolonged recession, which kept parts of the South Florida economy down for a long time.
The stagnation of the 1960s was particularly visible in downtown Miami. Since the turn of the twentieth century, this had been the bustling center for retailing, commerce, and popular culture. Prominent hotels were just around the corner on Biscayne Boulevard, and Bayfront Park was a popular public space. Within a few years, shops closed, hotels struggled, and people stopped coming. Petty crime increased and the area turned desolate at night.
In Miami Beach, the decline was conspicuous as well. By the mid-1960s, the MiMo hype had faded, money had become scarce, and not much of anything was being built. The deco district, already passé in the 1950s, turned seedy. Lincoln Road lost its shine and upscale shopping moved north to Bal Harbor. The Fontainebleau was operating well below capacity and in the circumstances its flamboyant pretentiousness turned a shade pathetic. A number of small hotels on Ocean Boulevard were forced to open up to middle-class northern retirees whose definition of excitement was bingo night. South Beach, once the most fashionable destination for the nation’s jet set, gradually became known as a slow-paced retirement resort. It acquired the cheerless nickname “God’s Waiting Room.”
The economic malaise was reflected in the decreasing growth rates of Dade County’s resident population: from 89 percent in the 1950s it dropped to 36 percent in the 1960s, then to 28 percent in the 1970s. Between 1960 and 1980, Dade County witnessed only one new incorporation, though Islandia could hardly be regarded a real town.11 Most significantly, net domestic in-migration for Dade County decreased in the 1960s and then, in