Many Cuban exiles dismiss Puerto Rico’s independence and praise U.S. citizenship as an unquestionable privilege. However, they often overlook the fact that they didn’t succeed because of that citizenship; instead, they prospered due to the political sponsorship the United States provided them during the Cold War. It wasn’t individual merit. It was a U.S. strategy
Starting in 1959, after the Cuban Revolution, Washington turned Cubans fleeing Castro into valuable pieces of its anti-communist narrative. U.S. officials didn’t treat them like other Latin American immigrants. They welcomed them as political refugees and as living proof of communism’s failure.
In 1966, Congress passed the Cuban Adjustment Act, which allowed Cubans to obtain legal residency after just one year on U.S. soil. That privilege, granted exclusively to Cubans, is an anomaly in the history of U.S. immigration policy.
The federal government provided housing, education, healthcare, loans, and English classes. But one factor mattered even more: social capital. Many early Cuban exiles came from the island’s professional and middle classes. Even if they arrived with no money, they brought education, networks, English fluency, and a mindset aligned with white American power structures. They knew how to navigate the system and integrate, which helped them succeed.
In contrast, Puerto Rico’s migration between 1940 and 1960 came mainly from rural areas. It was a population of poor, uneducated individuals. They were U.S. citizens, but they had no real access to the benefits of that citizenship. While the U.S. opened doors for Cubans with special laws and funding, it redlined Puerto Ricans into industrial ghettos in the Northeast and left them to survive. U.S. institutions treated Cubans as allies and Puerto Ricans as surplus labor.
In cities like Miami, Cubans quickly filled institutional power positions, not because they were inherently better, but because the government cleared the path for them. The U.S. adopted them as a strategic community because they fit the image Washington wanted to project.
That’s why it comes across as either cynical or profoundly ignorant when some Cubans look down on Puerto Rico’s call for sovereignty. They often say Puerto Ricans should “be grateful” for U.S. citizenship, as if it were a generous gift. They ignore that Congress imposed that citizenship in 1917 without a vote and that Puerto Rico’s relationship with the U.S. has been one of subordination since the 1898 invasion.
What’s more ironic is that inside Puerto Rico, some have given up on imagining the island as a nation. The pro-statehood movement doesn’t organize around collective dignity, but around a list of federal benefits. Its supporters reject independence out of economic fear: What would we lose? Would we lose the Nutrition Assistance Program, Medicare, and the EITC? That’s not how a state is built, not even a federated one.
And here’s the most revealing part: not even the poorest and most federally dependent U.S. states operate with that mindset. Mississippi and West Virginia both receive more federal funds than they contribute, but they don’t tie their political identity or their self-governance to the size of Washington’s check. What’s happening in Puerto Rico is different: clientelist politics that infantilize the population and reduce the island to a passive consumer of federal funds. No community becomes free by measuring its future in federal benefits.
And with all due respect to the Cuban exile community and its tragedy, don’t come here to dismiss Puerto Rico’s independence by equating it with communism. Because let’s be honest: not even with Castro in power would Cuban exiles accept a Cuba governed by Washington. So why do they expect Puerto Rico to do it, with gratitude?
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