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Everyday life for Cubans in the United States during the 1960s and 1970s involved an intimate interaction between commitment to an exile identity and reluctant integration into a new society. For Catholic Cuban exiles, their faith provided a filter through which they analyzed and understood both their exile and their ethnic identities. Catholicism offered the exiles continuity: a community of faith, a place to gather, a sense of legitimacy as a people. Religion exerted a major influence on the beliefs and actions of Cuban exiles as they integrated into U.S. culture and tried at the same time to make sense of events in their homeland.
Cuban Catholics in the United States, 1960-1980 examines all these facets of the exile and integration process among Catholics, primarily in south Florida, but the voices of others across the United States, Latin America, and Europe also enter the story. The personal papers of exiles, their books and pamphlets, newspaper articles, government archives, and personal interviews provide the historical data for this book. In his thorough examination Gerald E. Poyo provides insights not only for this community but for other faith-based exile communities.
“Gerald E. Poyo’s skilled, well researched, and balanced account of the evolution of Cuban-American Catholicism during the 1960s and 1970s concedes at the outset that ‘Catholics represent only a small slice of the Cuban exile story.’ Yet he convincingly demonstrates their importance in the larger exile narrative, suggesting that the religious traditions of first-generation Cuban-American Catholics offered coherence to a massive exile population shocked with the religious decay and general disruption brought on by postrevolutionary society.” —The Americas
Gerald E. Poyo is professor of history at St. Mary's University. He is the author and editor of a number of books, including With All, and for the Good of All and Presente! U.S. Latino Catholics from Colonial Times to the Present.