The Exile Industry Against Cuban Knowledge

Miami talks about Cuba every day, but it has not built the intellectual infrastructure to study it rigorously; in that vacuum, rumor, propaganda, public money, and the click economy prevail.

The Question Miami Cannot Answer

A friend from Virginia recently asked me a simple question. His son, an editor at a major television network, needed expert voices on relations between the United States and Cuba. Where, my friend wanted to know, was South Florida’s leading center for Cuban Studies?

I had to answer, with some embarrassment, that there is no such center; at least, not in the way one should exist.

The absence is hard to justify. South Florida is home to the largest Cuban community outside the island and occupies a central place in the U.S. debate over Cuba. Yet it lacks a permanent, interdisciplinary, scholar-led institution that produces sustained research and policy analysis on Cuba, the diaspora, migration, media, political economy, and relations between Washington and Havana. Where organized knowledge should exist, there are fragments: archives, events, scholarships, commentators, and noise.

Archives Are Not Thought

This is not to say that nothing exists. Florida International University (FIU) had the Cuban Research Institute for decades and maintains the long-running FIU Cuba Poll; its recent fragility, rather than erasing its history, confirms the underlying problem: valuable programs without the scale or autonomy needed to function as a permanent intellectual center [7, 8, 9]. The University of Miami, for its part, combines a Cuban Studies Program with the Cuban Heritage Collection, an extraordinary collection described as the largest repository of materials on Cuba outside the island and the most comprehensive collection on Cuban exile and the global diaspora [27, 28, 29]. The University of Florida, in Gainesville, also preserves important Cuban and Caribbean holdings through its Latin American and Caribbean Collection and digital archives [25, 26]. These are indispensable resources, but they are not equivalent to a permanent center of thought on Cuban Studies.

Collections matter, but they do not think. Exhibitions, oral histories, digitization projects, panels, and visiting fellowships are valuable; they do not replace professors, doctoral students, field researchers, economists, historians, sociologists, political scientists, demographers, legal scholars, digital archivists, and media analysts working year-round on a shared Cuban Studies agenda.

When Journalists Cannot Find Experts

The shortage is evident in practice. Journalists depend on activists or television figures to explain migration, sanctions, remittances, polls, military enterprises, cultural policy, or civil society. Graduate students have few local mentors engaged in active field research. And universities turn to visitors, retirees, adjuncts, librarians, and moderators where there should be permanent professors, postdoctoral fellows, data analysts, oral-history specialists, digital curators, and policy writers.

The problem is not personal but structural. South Florida’s Cuban Studies infrastructure depends too heavily on administrators, commentators, archivists, event organizers, visitors, isolated scholars, and reputational capital. Public visibility, travel, institutional proximity, or media availability can help, but they do not replace a permanent academic machinery: faculty lines, peer-reviewed publications, graduate programs, data, policy analysis, and interdisciplinary teams with autonomy and continuity.

That imbalance reveals a failure of institutional recognition. If South Florida concentrates the largest Cuban diaspora outside the island and is a central stage for the recurring conflict over U.S.-Cuba relations, Cuban Studies should be treated as strategic intellectual infrastructure, not as a marginal heritage function or an occasional public-relations program. The institutional hierarchy honors Cuban memory ceremonially, but it has not shown the same respect for Cuban knowledge: faculty positions, research budgets, doctoral pathways, and policy-analysis capacity to study a community of national and hemispheric importance.

Millions for Propaganda, Crumbs for Knowledge

The contrast with federally funded communications is striking. The Office of Cuba Broadcasting, responsible for Radio and Televisión Martí, recorded an annual budget of $25 million for fiscal year 2024 [16, 17]. Earlier reviews by the Government Accountability Office noted that the United States had spent more than $500 million over decades on broadcasts to Cuba and raised recurring concerns about strategy, quality, contracting, audience measurement, audience size, and impact [18, 19].

That budget is only one piece of a broader public architecture. GAO’s 2025 review of Cuba democracy assistance noted that, since fiscal year 1996, Congress had regularly appropriated funds for programs promoting democratic values and human rights in Cuba, channeled through USAID, the Department of State, and grants to the National Endowment for Democracy [20]. But that architecture changed decisively: as of July 1, 2025, USAID stopped implementing foreign assistance, and surviving functions were realigned under the Department of State [21, 22]. Earlier oversight also documented persistent problems in Cuba-related programs, including weak contracting practices, limited audience data, monitoring failures, and gaps in risk management [18, 19, 20].

Funding tied to democracy assistance and Cuba-related media has supported independent outlets, civil-society groups, human-rights organizations, and information initiatives. Some of that work may be important. But the ecosystem has also created a subsidized communications market where urgency, outrage, ideological certainty, and visibility before donors can matter more than patient verification.

That is the paradox: there is money for broadcasting, activism, fellowships, panels, archives, digitization, and media spectacle. What remains weak is the university infrastructure capable of producing transparent, peer-reviewed, sustained research in the region best positioned to do so.

The Network That Survived USAID

Cuba-related support circulated for years through congressional appropriations, USAID, the Department of State, the National Endowment for Democracy, the Office of Cuba Broadcasting, nonprofit implementing organizations, media outlets, university programs, and transnational advocacy networks [15, 20]. After USAID’s operational shutdown as an implementer of foreign assistance, that network did not disappear: it reorganized around the Department of State, compliance systems, broadcasting infrastructure, public-policy forums, and research production [21, 22]. Miami remains symbolically central, but authority is distributed both outside and inside the city.

The Exile Industry as a Moral Economy

The old formula for this web is Miami’s exile industry: advocacy groups, broadcasters, consultants, lawyers, contractors, political fundraisers, grant recipients, media personalities, policy entrepreneurs, and symbolic gatekeepers who turn Cuba into a permanent source of budgets, access, influence, and moral authority. It is not just a community; it is an economy of anti-Castro legitimacy.

For a long time, that industry has depended on presenting itself as the authentic voice of Cuban Miami. But the Cuban community has changed. Recent migrants, younger Cuban Americans, families with mixed immigration status, entrepreneurs, professionals, students, remittance senders, cultural workers, and transnational households do not necessarily fit the old Cold War script. Their concerns are often more practical than performative: family reunification, travel, remittances, business openings, humanitarian aid, immigration stability, civil society, and a future in which Cubans inside and outside the island participate in rebuilding the country.

That is why the discussion of a Center for Cuban Studies is not merely academic. It is a dispute over who produces legitimate knowledge about Cuba when exile politics, government funding, Miami media, and the click economy compete to define public truth. Without strong institutions, the community is trapped between two impoverishing simplifications: the hard-line slogan and Havana’s propaganda.

The Quiet Dismantling of Cuban Studies

The weakness of Cuban Studies in South Florida did not emerge overnight. It reflects a slow dismantling, driven by political pressure, donor discomfort, legal restrictions, and institutional drift. A serious center needs faculty positions, graduate training, access to fieldwork, archives, visiting researchers, publications, and protection from ideological vetoes [3, 4, 5]. Instead, institutions learned to privilege safer activities: heritage, memory, public programming, and temporary grants.

Academic institutions have too often reflected the pressure of an older intransigent minority rather than the reality of more recent Cuban communities. The problem is not that every older exile is extreme, nor that anti-communism is illegitimate in itself. The problem is that a small organized right-wing faction has exercised disproportionate veto power over what can be studied, funded, invited, questioned, or said. Universities that should reflect the complexity of South Florida’s Cuban population have instead learned to avoid controversies that might unleash accusations, donor retaliation, political attacks, or media campaigns.

The shift can be read as institutional hybridization. The classic repertoires of exile — memory, anti-Castro politics, donors, patriotic obligation, and political access — did not disappear; they were translated into the language of grants, professional communications, conference circuits, digital platforms, legal compliance, and policy expertise. The result is neither old exile politics nor a technocratic replacement, but a hybrid ecosystem in which sentiment, bureaucracy, media, and research compete to define legitimacy.

Florida’s restrictions on academic travel proved especially damaging. Florida’s 2006 Travel to Terrorist States Act limited the use of state-university funds and related resources for academic travel to Cuba and other countries then designated by Washington as state sponsors of terrorism [1, 2]. News coverage at the time and criticism from civil-liberties organizations warned that the law would affect fieldwork, interviews, archival access, faculty exchanges, and graduate training. Even after legal and political battles, the chilling effect was clear: scholars became cautious, administrators avoided provocation, and research agendas narrowed.

More recent state rules on “countries of concern” worsen the problem by making Cuba-related research appear administratively risky, even when the academic work is legal and necessary. Earlier research warned that such regimes can chill fieldwork directly, indirectly, and epistemically: directly, by restricting funds or travel; indirectly, by encouraging administrators to avoid controversial projects; and epistemically, by reducing what younger scholars dare to study [1–5].

FIU, UM, and Institutional Fragility

Recent transitions at FIU illustrate that fragility. Jorge Duany, a Ph.D. anthropologist and long-standing scholar of Caribbean migration, retired after twelve years leading FIU’s Cuban Research Institute [10]. The university has publicly described the institute’s work around conferences and public talks, the FIU Cuba Poll, and a Mellon-funded fellowship program for threatened Cuban scholars [7, 8, 9]. After his departure, Sebastián A. Arcos is listed as the institute’s interim director; his background combines administrative experience, human-rights activism, and public commentary, not an academic research career comparable to that of a permanent chair [23]. At the University of Miami, Michael J. Bustamante strengthened the academic component from the Cuban Studies Program and the Cuban Heritage Collection as director of academic programs, but that appointment confirms another part of the problem: UM has archives, programs, and affiliated faculty, not a robust autonomous interdisciplinary center dedicated to producing sustained research on Cuba [24, 27]. One swallow does not make a summer.

The Black Box of Cuban Money

The problem is not simply whether one institution has more staff than another or whether one archive receives more funding than another. The real question is whether the money raised, donated, appropriated, or granted in the name of Cuban Studies builds permanent academic capacity. Public pages describe missions, collections, fellowships, events, digitization, preservation, and community outreach. What they do not clearly provide is a complete annual accounting that separates acquisitions, cataloging, salaries, fellowships, travel, events, endowment income, donor-restricted funds, and unrestricted operating support.

Without that transparency, “lack of budget” stops being an explanation and becomes an accountability gap. If millions of dollars have circulated through Cuban collections, fellowship programs, broadcasting agencies, and democracy-promotion channels, the public deserves to know how much of that money actually strengthens books, archives, faculty research, graduate training, and long-term analysis.

Regulatory compliance also became a hidden form of power. Audits, partner vetting, legal review, reporting, and sanctions due diligence favor large, Washington-oriented implementers over smaller organizations rooted in Miami. Administrative capacity becomes confused with credibility; a system created to promote Cuban civil society ends up rewarding those best able to survive paperwork, political volatility, and donor risk.

Truth Under Contract

Here, too, the logic of “truth under contract” appears: when information depends on grants, metrics, political access, or institutional alignments, independence does not necessarily disappear, but it must be demonstrated with greater rigor. The question is not only who pays, but what incentives that payment creates, what topics it rewards, what doubts it punishes, and which voices are left out of the distribution of legitimacy [12, 15, 20].

When Research Is Missing, Rumor Rules

When rigorous institutions are weak, rumors occupy the throne. The information ecosystem about Cuba increasingly circulates through grant-funded media, exile influencers, government broadcasts, advocacy groups, and algorithmic outrage. In that environment, “digital radio bemba” becomes professionalized: insinuation produces clicks, suspicion generates urgency, urgency feeds arguments for Congress, and scandal justifies budgets, campaigns, and reputations [11–14].

The Rise of Influencers

The most damaging inversion is already visible: an old exile establishment that claimed to guard the purity of the first arrivals has been absorbed by an economy of recent arrivals trained in Cuba in political survival and now turned into digital influencers. Through websites, livestreams, podcasts, YouTube, Facebook, WhatsApp, and X, insinuation, sensationalism, accusation, and social proximity become political currency. The result is not memory or civic leadership, but an attention market in which outrage replaces evidence.

A rumor can begin as a neighborhood whisper, become a Facebook post, travel through WhatsApp, acquire moral urgency in a podcast, turn into a YouTube segment, and reappear as pressure on a university, a museum, a cultural center, or an elected official. The influencer does not need to prove the claim: the platform rewards speed, mockery, repetition, and emotional charge [11–14].

That mechanism connects with another recurring problem: Miami’s public life is no longer organized only in institutions, newspapers, universities, or civic associations, but also in digital plazas where visibility is confused with legitimacy. Platforms do not merely transmit debate; they order it, accelerate it, and turn it into a permanent test of loyalty. In that environment, nuance looks suspicious, doubt looks like betrayal, and accusation travels faster than evidence [11, 12].

This is radio bemba in the age of the algorithm: rumor, mockery, derogatory nicknames, spectacle journalism, and metrics turned into a machinery of disinformation and digital obedience. What once traveled by word of mouth now moves through views; verification yields to virality; accusation becomes a credential; and the influencer takes the place of the cultural arbiter. The problem is not only that lies circulate, but that the architecture of attention turns outrage into authority [11–14].

GAESA and the Danger of the Fast Number

This does not mean that every funded outlet is dishonest or that every leak is false. It means that the public needs stronger standards. A recent example is the coverage of GAESA, the Cuban conglomerate linked to the Armed Forces, based on leaked financial statements and reported by Nora Gámez Torres in the Miami Herald and republished by Yahoo News [30, 31]. Document-based journalism is stronger than rumor, but even there readers need provenance, timeliness, accounting unit, currency, exchange rates, financial categories, and independent verification before turning “billions” into a political slogan.

The initial publication of those figures was, at minimum, rushed. The public reading turned balances and assets into an apparent dollar fortune, without sufficiently transparent confirmation of the reporting currency, accounting unit, and conversion method. Later critiques noted that part of the problem lay in interpreting as dollars amounts that, in the apparently leaked documents, could correspond to millions of Cuban pesos [31]. That difference is not a minor technicality: it changes the scale of the finding, alters its economic meaning, and shows why neither regime secrecy nor journalistic haste should replace an independent audit.

The same logic helps explain why the relationship between the United States and Cuba seems to move, again and again, toward escalation without strategy: memory turned into policy, law turned into leverage, and moral outrage turned into a substitute for a roadmap. Without independent analysis, pressure can be presented as a solution, even if it merely shifts the cost of conflict from governments to Cuban families [14].

What Miami Must Build — or Admit It Does Not Want to Build

South Florida should be the world capital of Cuban Studies. It has diaspora, archives, memory, political urgency, linguistic capacity, donors, and national relevance. But a serious center cannot be built as a tribute to the loudest faction of exile politics. It must reflect the entire Cuban community: older exiles and recent arrivals, families divided by migration, academics and entrepreneurs, artists and activists, people who oppose authoritarianism without reducing Cuba to a permanent ideological battlefield.

Such a center should publish periodic public-policy reports, maintain open budgets, support fieldwork and archival research, train graduate students, host visiting scholars, commission peer-reviewed studies, and serve journalists without becoming another propaganda platform. It should study Cuba as a country, the diaspora as a social force, and U.S.-Cuba relations as a complex field: not as a fundraising slogan, an echo chamber, or a concession to Miami’s most punitive voices.

South Florida does not need more ceremonies, slogans, or noise. It needs intellectual power. Until it builds that, the exile industry will continue occupying the place of Cuban knowledge. And Miami will keep speaking for Cuba without fully understanding it.

Numbered References in APA 7 Format

[1] American Association for the Advancement of Science. (2006). Florida law prohibits academics from conducting research in Cuba. Science.

[2] American Civil Liberties Union of Florida. (2006). The ACLU of Florida condemns the new law limiting international travel and academic research.

[3] Fraussen, B., & Halpin, D. (2017). Think tanks and strategic policy-making: The contribution of think tanks to policy advisory systems. Policy Sciences, 50(1), 105–124. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11077-016-9246-0

[4] Koz, O. (2021). Building research capacity through an academic community of practice: A design case study. Journal of Applied Research in Higher Education. https://doi.org/10.1108/JARHE-12-2020-0437

[5] Pautz, H. (2020). Think tanks and policymaking. In Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Politics. Oxford University Press. https://doi.org/10.1093/acrefore/9780190228637.013.1420

[6] Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. (2022, December 9). Florida International University grant detail.

[7] Florida International University Institute for Cuban Studies. (n.d.-a). FIU Cuba Poll. https://ics.fiu.edu/research/fiu-cuba-poll/

[8] Florida International University Institute for Cuban Studies. (n.d.-b). Mission. https://ics.fiu.edu/about/mission/

[9] Florida International University News. (2023, January 13). FIU’s Cuban Research Institute to provide temporary safe haven to threatened scholars from Cuba. https://news.fiu.edu/2023/fius-cuban-research-institute-to-provide-temporary-safe-haven-to-threatened-scholars-from-cuba

[10] Florida International University Steven J. Green School of International & Public Affairs. (2024, September 11). CRI director retires after successful 12-year tenure. https://sipa.fiu.edu/news-events/news/2024/cri-director-retires-after-successful-tenure.html

[11] González, P. A., Jr. (2026). Radio bemba in the age of the algorithm. Medium. https://medium.com/@pedroagjr10/radio-bemba-en-la-era-del-algoritmo-ccbdcdd199a3

[12] González, P. A., Jr. (2026). Forged in obedience: The enchantment of the click. Medium. https://medium.com/@pedroagjr10/forjados-en-la-obediencia-el-embeleso-del-clic-41c5c46c69de

[13] González, P. A., Jr. (2026). Exile vs. Havana: The struggle for the future. Medium. https://medium.com/@pedroagjr10/exilio-vs-la-habana-la-pugna-por-el-futuro-d7a2ba1a88fe

[14] González, P. A., Jr. (2026). U.S.-Cuba relations in 2026: Escalation without strategy. Medium. https://medium.com/@pedroagjr10/relaciones-entre-estados-unidos-y-cuba-en-2026-escalada-sin-estrategia-1ff652822c77

[15] National Endowment for Democracy. (n.d.). Active grant listing. https://www.ned.org/active-grant-listing/

[16] U.S. Agency for Global Media. (2024a). Office of Cuba Broadcasting fast facts. https://www.usagm.gov/wp-content/uploads/2024/12/USAGM-OCB-OneSheet-11-6-24.pdf

[17] U.S. Agency for Global Media. (2024b). FY 2024 agency financial report. https://www.usagm.gov/wp-content/uploads/2024/11/FY-2024-AFR_-USAGM.pdf

[18] U.S. Government Accountability Office. (2009a). Broadcasting to Cuba: Actions are needed to improve strategy and operations (GAO-09–127). https://www.gao.gov/products/gao-09-127

[19] U.S. Government Accountability Office. (2009b). Broadcasting to Cuba: Observations regarding TV Martí’s strategy and operations (GAO-09–758T). https://www.gao.gov/products/gao-09-758t

[20] U.S. Government Accountability Office. (2025). Cuba democracy assistance: USAID should improve collection of security risk information to help awardee mitigation efforts (GAO-25–107712). https://www.gao.gov/products/gao-25-107712

[21] ABC News. (2025, July 1). USAID programs now being run by State Department as agency ends operations. https://abcnews.go.com/Health/usaid-programs-now-run-state-department-agency-ends/story?id=123373289

[22] U.S. Department of State, Office of Inspector General. (2025). Evaluation of the Department of State’s approach to realigning U.S. Agency for International Development functions (AUD-GEER-25–20). https://www.stateoig.gov/report/aud-geer-25-20

[23] Florida International University Institute for Cuban Studies. (n.d.-c). Sebastián A. Arcos. https://ics.fiu.edu/faculty/arcos-sebastian/

[24] University of Miami Libraries. (2023, June). University Libraries welcome director of academic programs for the Cuban Heritage Collection. https://news.miami.edu/libraries/stories/2023/06/university-libraries-welcome-director-of-academic-programs-for-the-cuban-heritage-collection.html

[25] University of Florida Digital Collections. (n.d.). Cuba: Archives & Manuscripts. https://ufdc.ufl.edu/collections/cubanmanuscripts

[26] University of Florida Latin American and Caribbean Collection. (n.d.). Using the collection. https://lacc.uflib.ufl.edu/collection/

[27] University of Miami Libraries. (n.d.-a). Cuban Heritage Collection. https://www.library.miami.edu/chc/

[28] University of Miami Libraries. (n.d.-b). Mission & history. https://www.library.miami.edu/chc/missionhistory.html

[29] University of Miami News. (2015, February 2). Cuban Heritage Collection receives $2M gift. https://news.miami.edu/stories/2015/02/cuban-heritage-collection-receives-2m-gift.html

[30] Gámez Torres, N. (2025, August 6). These Cuban companies are actually run by the military, secret documents show. Miami Herald. Reprinted by Yahoo News. https://www.yahoo.com/news/articles/cuban-companies-actually-run-military-195252341.html

[31] Lindsay, R., & Burdge, B. (2025, August 29). The Miami Herald’s fuzzy math makes case for economic warfare on Cuba. FAIR. https://fair.org/home/the-miami-heralds-fuzzy-math-makes-case-for-economic-warfare-on-cuba/