“Don’t tell us we’re not Cuban!” How political nostalgia makes Miami and Miami makes nostalgia political

This chapter explores how cultural memory, projected onto Miami from both sides of the Florida Straits, converges to create the imagined place of Cuban heritage in Miami that to a large degree serves as the foundation for political activism in US state- and national politics. From the Freedom Tower, where arriving Cubans from 1962 to 1974 were given assistance, to the cafés where Cuban-Americans get their “cafecitos,” Miami is awash in Cuban cultural memory. (Levine & Asís, 2000; Grenier & Moebius, 2015) The early history of the Cuban community is, however, all but non-existent in the narratives of the diaspora, which focus on the post-1959 waves of migration in response to the government of Fidel Castro. The chapter will consider the earliest campaigns to promote Miami as a city, in the 1890s, focused on entrepreneurial Cuban cigar factories, giving streets and places Cuban names and even importing building materials from Havanese houses (Sicius, 1998). Similarly, the chapter addresses the Cuban government's framing of Miami as a place outside Cuban history and finally, it highlights the subjective narratives of Cuban migrants in Miami, and their nostalgic effort to frame Miami as a Cuban place, while simultaneously maintaining ownership of the homeland of Cuba. This chapter is based on a methodology that addresses the full range of cultural memory from its canonisation (A. Assmann, 2008), through its mediation (Erll, 2011) to its reception into a subjective imagination. The latter step will be based on the analysis of a series of oral history interviews, conducted in Miami Dade County with Cuban-Americans who arrived between the Mariel Exodus of 1980 and the Balsero Crisis of 1994. These will be analysed through a method based on the work of Gunnar Olsson and his concept of cartographic reasoning (Olsson, 2007).