From “Contrarevolucionarios ” to “Economic Migrants”: Portraits, Perspectives and Meanings of Cuban Emigration Phenomenon

In the aftermath of 1959, Cuban citizens ’ social behaviour became subject to political interpretation and emigration practice was openly defined as a form of political dissent. Since then, the Cuban Government has maintained a rigorous control over exits from the island and emigrants have been excluded from the nation and been branded as “counterrevolutionary”. This resulted in strict politics of mobility control and in the creation of the juridical category of Emigrado [lit. emigrant], a status defining “counterrevolutionary ” emigrants and which implied important restrictions of citizenship rights in Cuba. Nowadays, even if de facto it is a figure no longer considered a political traitor but an “economic migrant”, de jure the Emigrado is still political, because the normative and juridical corpus concerning migration has remained almost unchanged since 1961. Tracing the origin of these divergent interpretations of the Cuban migration- as political or economic act- to the different phases of the Revolution, this paper aims to analyse the polar perspective regarding Cuban exodus and discuss the meanings of this case as a migration phenomenon