In Cuban Catholics in the United States, Gerald Poyo offers a richly detailed account of Catholic Cubans' experiences in Cuba and in the United States, and the ways in which their faith commitments and longing for la patria informed their exilic and diasporic realities. Poyo's meticulous history of twenty eventful years that began with Castro's Revolution offers a nuanced understanding of this time period. He deftly shows why many Cuban Catholics felt a deep sense of betrayal by Castro and the Revolution, a man and movement they initially embraced but that in the end contradicted Catholic social teaching. Poyo captures the hope, confusion, and feelings of betrayal and despair experienced by those Cubans who were forced out of the country and who have lived as exiles in the United States. The eight chapters are headed thematically under helpful titles such as “Reform and Revolution,” “Betrayal and Dissent,” “The Social Question,” and “Ethnicity and Rights.” The book captures the journey of a small group of Cuban exiles who remained committed to returning to and reclaiming Cuba while they worked hard to establish themselves in the South Florida diaspora.
What is especially useful about Poyo's treatment of this time period in Cuban history is that he provides the wrenching details of the immediate pre-Revolutionary years and the Revolution itself, helping the reader to understand the complexities of the movement and the issues facing Cubans. He contextualizes Cuban Catholics of the late 1950s and early 1960s with the Iberian Catholic Action movement in which Catholic laity and priests were calling on Catholics to commit to social justice and to live their faith in the public sphere. As Poyo emphasizes, many, if not most, Catholics supported revolutionary developments and wanted reform and social change. Catholics supported initiatives such as Castro's agrarian reform project because they fit well with social teachings (49). Aside from the wealthy landholding elites who were threatened by the Revolution from the start, most Catholics, according to Poyo, championed social reform and grounded themselves in papal encyclicals. Groups such as Catholic Action, Agrupación Católica Universidad (ACU), and Juventud Estudiantil Católica (JEC) became disenchanted and ultimately opposed to what became a full-fledged communist revolution that, according to Catholic Action, embraced “atheism and materialism which negates spiritual values and morals” (58–59). By the end of 1960, Castro was denouncing the “anti-revolutionary activities” of Catholics, especially those activist priests seen as “henchmen in cassocks” (73). Several Catholic opponents of the Revolution's anti-religious, communist ideology were silenced through death or deported. Poyo details the anguish of these exiles and offers compelling evidence of the new regime's rage toward anyone who contested the new Cuba. One of the most important contributions of this book is that it complicates and challenges any easy championing of Castro's Revolution by showing the immense anguish and grief experienced by Cubans who were deeply committed to reforming their country. Indeed, Poyo dispels any notion that these exiles were simple right-wing reactionaries, and the reader comes away with a new appreciation and understanding of this generation's ideals and struggles.
As Poyo points out, Cuban Catholics differed from other Spanish-speaking Catholics in the United States in that even though they came with their own priests, they did not automatically embrace the parish-based Catholicism of the United States. In Cuba, Catholics put their energies in lay-run movements. Once in the United States, white Cuban Catholics became involved in lay-initiated movements like the cursillo, the weekend-long “short course in Christianity” that was popular with other Spanish-speaking Catholics. In fact, by 1966, seventy cursillos had been held in the Miami area for Cuban Catholics—a very high number that indicated the need for community, stability, and a space outside of the institutional church (100).
In addition to their lay Catholic initiatives and involvement, these exiles formed important relationships with white ethnic priests as well as Cuban priests-in-exile. Parish priests reached out in powerful ways to the ever-expanding exile community and helped them in material and spiritual ways. The Catholic Church in Miami was the major player in relief for Cuban exiles, and it was Miami's Bishop Coleman Carroll who convinced the Eisenhower administration to officially declare Cubans as political refugees in 1966. Exiled Cubans nurtured a religious nationalism through the shrine to the Virgin of Charity (Ermita de Nuestra Señora de la Caridad). Throughout, Poyo's book reads as a story of the suffering, exile, and ultimate redemption of white Cuban Catholics. The dedication of the shrine in 1962 was an important moment of redemption for a generation of exiles, as well as an important place of devotionalism and pilgrimage for subsequent generations of Cuban Americans. Cuban Catholics in the United States complements previously published monographs on Cuban Catholics, most notably Thomas A. Tweed's Our Lady of the Exile (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997). Poyo builds on the work of Lisandro Pérez and David A. Badillo, both of whom have written about early to mid-twentieth-century Cuban Catholics, and provides the most comprehensive work to date on the first- and second-generation exiled Cubans.
This is a well-researched and well-written book on a “small segment” of Cuban refugees, those who “practiced their religion on a regular basis and lived their lives in relation to Catholic faith and tradition” (3). While the author stays true to his objectives, he could have rendered the exiles even more complex (which is his stated aim in the introduction) if he had written more comparatively. By exploring the experiences and lives of the Mariel boatlift Cubans, for example, those black and mulatto working-class Cubans who practiced Santería alongside Catholicism, Poyo could have shown points of intersection and tension, creating a fuller portrait of exilic and racialized identities. Yet these are in the end minor critiques. Poyo has written a definitive book on a group of exiled Cuban Catholics that should be read by those who study U.S. Latino history as well as those in American religious history more broadly.
