Last September a new museum opened in Miami’s oldest skyscraper, a Mediterranean Revival building from 1925 modeled after the majestic Giralda cathedral tower in Seville, Spain. During its first decades the seventeen-story building housed The Miami News. In 1962, three years after Fidel Castro’s forces overthrew the Cuban dictator Fulgencio Batista and established a revolutionary state, the skyscraper became the home of the Cuban Refugee Center, a haven for the half-million Cubans who arrived in Miami between 1962 and 1974, fleeing the increasingly radical government in Havana. It was on the basis of this history—which the museum documents in its centerpiece permanent installation—that the building became known as the Freedom Tower.
Like the building itself, the city of Miami has to some extent become synonymous with the Cuban exile community. Nearly 70 percent of Miamians speak Spanish at home, and more than half the population is foreign born. Almost every Cuban American with family that arrived between 1962 and 1974 has some kind of personal connection to the Freedom Tower; in many households, stories about frightened migrants receiving warm welcomes there have become part of family lore.
That largesse was the official policy of the US government, which by 1974 had spent $957 million on Cuban refugee assistance. At the Freedom Tower some of that money went toward setting up the new arrivals with English classes, small loans, subsidized childcare, housing assistance, and job training. A permanent exhibit at the new museum recreates the room where the migrants were processed: side-by-side American and Cuban flags, a stenciled sign reading “Bienvenidos a Los Estados Unidos,” and the Bulletin Board of Good Luck, which showed job listings. In one of the recorded testimonies included in a display, the Cuban musician Emilio Estefan recalls standing in line outside the tower as a teenage arrival to the country, waiting for food and medical care. The help he received there, he told his interviewer, reminded him “not to lose faith in humanity.”
In 1973, with the suspension of a program of twice-daily flights that had shepherded émigrés from Cuba to South Florida since 1965, Cuban immigration dwindled to a trickle. The following year the refugee center closed its doors, and the Freedom Tower fell into disrepair. More than two decades later the building was purchased by Jorge Mas Canosa, a Cuban American businessman and political activist who had forged close ties to the Ronald Reagan White House. Hitching his hopes for regime change in Cuba to the Republican Party, in 1981 Mas Canosa founded the Cuban American National Foundation, which lobbied for hard-line policies against the Castro government and successfully organized many Cuban Miamians into a dependable GOP voting bloc. After he bought the Freedom Tower in 1997, he sought to restore it as a monument to Cuban American Miami and a tribute to the community’s evolution into a dominant force in the city and beyond. Many of the politicians from Cuban Miami who entered state and federal government in the years that followed and pushed for aggressive policies against Havana—including Secretary of State Marco Rubio—publicly launched their campaigns using the Freedom Tower as a backdrop.
It was fitting, then, that acting attorney general Todd Blanche chose the Freedom Tower’s Grand Hall to announce the Department of Justice’s criminal indictment against Raúl Castro—Cuba’s former president and still the most significant figure in the country’s politics—for murder and conspiracy to kill US nationals. (The government alleges that Castro was involved in the 1996 downing of two civilian aircraft piloted by members of the Miami-based aid organization Brothers to the Rescue.) That afternoon throngs of Cuban exiles gathered in front of the building, some wearing MAGA hats, others crying tears of joy.
In that moment two histories converged: the story of Cuban migration to the city and that of the United States’ anti-Castro policies, for which Cuban Miami has long served as a driving force and a crucial base of support. For decades Washington’s Cuba policy epitomized the combination of hard and soft power at the center of its cold war liberalism. The US imposed sanctions intended to bring Castro’s government to the point of collapse and at the same time made a point of showing benevolence toward refugees fleeing the regime, touting their exodus as proof of communism’s failure.
Since returning to office, Donald Trump has summarily dismantled that approach. Cubans in Miami voted for him overwhelmingly; they heard his rants about mass deportation but assumed he would target only criminals. They also believed that recent arrivals could still count on the protections of the Cuban Adjustment Act (CAA), the landmark 1966 legislation that allowed any Cubans who had landed in the US after Castro took power to apply for a green card if they remained there for at least two years. In 1976 the law was amended to allow Cubans to apply for legal residency after only a year and a day in the country. For Cubans, unlike others, the protections that came with residency were applied retroactively, effectively signaling to immigration officials that Cubans were not to be removed.
Though it was never described as such, the law represented a kind of amnesty. It gave Cubans a legal path to citizenship however they had arrived, whatever their status, whether they had illegally overstayed a tourist visa or were granted the murky status of “temporary parole.” One of the hundreds of thousands of people to avail themselves of the law’s benevolence was Rubio’s grandfather, whose 1962 deportation order was nullified by its passage. In the decades that followed, Cubans were generally spared from immigration crackdowns thanks to the CAA.
No longer. In the first year of his second administration Trump all but decimated political asylum for immigrants from around the world, making no special exception for Cubans, as both parties long had. The rate of denials of asylum cases increased by half and has only continued to increase in 2026. And while the CAA remains the law of the land, Trump’s administration no longer seems to feel bound to observe it. Since the beginning of Trump’s second term an estimated 45,000 Cubans have received deportation orders. The Cuban Ministry of the Interior reported that last year 1,669 Cubans were deported back to the island. By May 2026 another 612 had been forcibly returned. The most recent flight, carrying seventy-six people, landed in Havana just a day after Blanche announced that the US was indicting Castro. Still others have been deported to third countries, with Mexico accepting as many as six thousand between January 2025 and March 2026. Many more Cubans have joined countless other migrants in legal limbo as authorities institute travel bans and pause green card applications.
According to the Center for Engagement and Advocacy in the Americas, a nonpartisan think tank, the Trump administration’s policies since January 2025 have left at least half a million Cubans vulnerable to detention and deportation. Some of them are currently languishing in ICE custody. A number of them have died there. In June 2025 a seventy-five-year-old Cuban citizen named Isidro Pérez died at Krome detention center just outside Miami; he had lived in the US for fifty-nine years. On January 3, 2026, a fifty-five-year-old Cuban national and father of four named Geraldo Lunas Campos died during an altercation with guards at a detention center in El Paso; an autopsy ruled the death a homicide. In April two young Cubans in ICE custody died of apparent suicide. Almost everyone in Miami knows someone affected by the changes to immigration policy. The mood in the community is “terror,” one immigration attorney told us as the crackdown ramped up last year. Terror, agreed another, “and Stephen Miller is Robespierre.”
Even as the Trump administration deports Cuban asylum seekers, it has dedicated itself to exacerbating the crisis to which they will return, a crisis that has emerged from many factors. The Cuban state has long underinvested in critical sectors like public health and agriculture as well as in basic infrastructure like gas, electricity, and water. In October 2024 the country’s power grid suffered a complete collapse, plunging the entire island into darkness. Other total blackouts followed later that year and the next. Meanwhile US sanctions against Cuba, which date back to the sweeping embargo that Washington imposed in 1962, hardened significantly during both Trump terms, with especially acute repercussions after Washington’s January abduction of Venezuela’s Nicolás Maduro, one of the island’s closest allies and an essential provider of its petroleum.
On January 29 the US imposed a punishing oil embargo that has pushed the country’s already troubled economy to the brink. On May 13 the Ministry of Energy and Mines announced that the island had depleted its oil reserves. Schools have shuttered; surgeries have been postponed. Doctors have told interviewers that they are losing patients to preventable deaths. Other health care providers have reported a noticeable increase in the use of antidepressants, mood stabilizers, and stimulants, suggesting that a large part of the population is essentially self-medicating its way through the crisis.
Friends and family in Havana tell us of thirty-six-hour blackouts and of whole weekends spent with only three hours of electricity. In the countryside, blackouts last much, much longer. When the power comes back—even if it’s at 3:00 AM—people get up to try to do everything that requires electricity, from charging phones and getting online to showering, collecting water, and cooking. But often the lights go out before they finish their chores. It feels like a particularly sophisticated form of torture. These are the conditions to which Trump is deporting Cubans, the CAA be damned.
If Trump effectively nullified the Cuban Adjustment Act, previous administrations hastened its demise. Bill Clinton struck an early blow in response to the Cuban rafter crisis of 1994. The collapse of the USSR and the disappearance of Soviet subsidies sent the island into an economic tailspin, ushering in an era of severe shortages and rationing that Fidel Castro called the Special Period. Tens of thousands of Cubans tried to reach the US aboard anything that might float. Many of them were captured at sea by the US Coast Guard and endured lengthy detentions at the US naval base at Guantánamo. All told, approximately 35,000 managed to enter the US; no one knows how many died trying.
Clinton responded with a directive that came to be called the “wet foot/dry foot” policy. Until then it had made no difference whether migrants were found at sea and reached the US with the help of the coast guard or whether they landed in Florida unassisted. Now, however, this distinction became crucial. After the bilateral accord of May 2, 1995, migrants who made it to a land border (“dry foot”) could begin their countdown to apply for legal residency under the CAA the moment they arrived. Those intercepted at sea (“wet foot”), even in US waters, were returned to Cuba.
These were not deportations, since the migrants had not yet landed in the US, but they marked a dramatic deviation from the traditional welcome given to Cubans. By discouraging many Cubans from making the treacherous sea journey, the policy helped bring an end to the rafter crisis. But it also gave Cubans seeking to flee the island an incentive to find other means to do so: the land route culminating at the US–Mexico border.
The 650,000 Cubans admitted to the US over the subsequent two decades arrived by sea, by air, and, increasingly, by land. Arrivals at the US–Mexico border began slowly, but they accelerated significantly in 2015 and 2016, as Barack Obama and Raúl Castro embarked on a policy of normalizing relations between the two countries. Many Cubans believed that normalization would result in the end of the CAA, since it was the antagonism between the two nations that had underpinned the law’s exceptional treatment of Cubans in the first place. Obama did not have authority to end the legislation; that belonged to Congress. But as one of his last acts in office, on January 12, 2017, his administration signed a new agreement with the Cuban government that rescinded wet foot/dry foot and stipulated that even Cuban migrants who arrived on US soil could no longer count on automatic admission. “Effective immediately,” read the White House’s statement, “Cuban nationals who attempt to enter the United States illegally and do not qualify for humanitarian relief will be subject to removal.”
The accord represented an important shift in policy for both governments. Cuba promised not only to take back new arrivals deported by the US but also to consider, on a case-by-case basis, the return of any Cuban national in the US who had a final order of removal prior to the date of the new agreement—a number approximating 40,000. For its part, Washington vowed that Cuban migrants would now be treated in the same manner as those from other countries.
Neither of those things turned out to be quite true. Between April 2017 and July 2021, on behalf of ICE, the State Department provided Cuba with a list of 5,998 people it sought to repatriate. Cuba refused all but thirty-one. In December 2019 the Trump administration, declaring Cuba to be recalcitrant in the matter, slapped visa sanctions on Cuban officials.
Cubans, meanwhile, kept arriving in record numbers, and they were not necessarily treated like other migrants. In theory, their admission was no longer automatic. But decades-old policies can create well-worn grooves for migrants and immigration officials alike. When Cubans crossed the border, they tended not to evade detection but to seek it out. They willingly turned themselves over to authorities, confident that, as Cubans, they would be fine. And, in fact, that proved mostly true: the vast majority of these arrivals received asylum or adjustment to residency status after a year and a day.
At the same time, developments in Cuba were pushing more of the island’s residents to foreign shores. Starting in 2017 Trump not only reversed Obama-era normalization but implemented new economic sanctions on the island and eliminated permissions for “people-to-people travel,” which had effectively opened the door for US tourists to visit Cuba—a significant economic opportunity for a country that derived much of its revenue from tourism. Then came the Covid-19 pandemic, which decimated the Cuban tourism industry. In 2019 Trump also placed caps on remittances that friends and family could send back to Cuba, at once undermining a substantial part of the country’s gross national income and severing a crucial lifeline for ordinary Cubans, whose median monthly salary had for years hovered around thirty dollars. (It is less than half that now.)
The Cuban government underwent a considerable shift of its own in 2018, when Miguel Díaz-Canel became the country’s president after almost sixty years of Castro rule. To mark the transition, the government issued the slogan Somos continuidad (We are continuity), a declaration to Cubans both on and off the island that, despite the new leadership, the regime would not be liberalizing. A few months into his tenure, Díaz-Canel signed a decree limiting artistic and cultural initiatives that had not received prior authorization from the Ministry of Culture. A group of artists, journalists, and activists responded by establishing the San Isidro Movement, perhaps the most consequential domestic opposition the island has seen this century.
Named for the Havana neighborhood where it was founded, the group produced and performed art not authorized by the state, and on November 27, 2020, it organized a protest outside the Ministry of Culture. Police surrounded the area, but hundreds of people remained into the early hours of the next morning, dispersing only after Cuban officials agreed to a dialogue with the protesters. In the following weeks, however, the government imposed what Amnesty International called “frightening levels of surveillance” both on participants and on independent journalists who covered the demonstration. Activists reported heightened police presence outside their homes; knowing they would be risking detention if they went out, they found themselves consigned to de facto house arrest.
Meanwhile the Díaz-Canel government was implementing a number of disastrous economic changes. Currency reforms sent inflation soaring into the triple digits. Blackouts became more frequent and lasted longer; the most basic of medicines, from acetaminophen to penicillin, were impossible to come by unless friends or relatives sent them from abroad (or sent money to buy them at exorbitant prices on the underground market). Eggs and milk became scarce and unaffordable.
People’s understanding of risk changes when they cannot feed their children. On July 11, 2021, thousands of Cubans went out in the streets to protest. The demonstrations began in San Antonio de los Baños, about eighteen miles southwest of Havana, but soon spread across the island. Protesters wanted vaccines, they declared; they wanted food. “Down with communism!” they shouted. Others chanted “Patria y Vida” (Fatherland and Life), the title of a reggaeton-inflected protest song released by a group of dissident musicians tied to the San Isidro Movement. Fidel Castro had traditionally closed his speeches by posing the stark alternative of “Fatherland or Death,” a slogan he coined on March 5, 1960, the same day that the Cuban photographer Alberto Korda took his endlessly reproduced image of Che Guevara. The song “Patria y Vida” refuses the old slogan’s choice. “The people are tired of enduring,” raps one of its vocalists, El Funky. “We await a new dawn.”
The Cuban government’s response to what became known as the 11J protests was no surprise. Díaz-Canel appeared on television to blame the US. “They will have to step over our cadavers,” he warned, “if they want to confront the Revolution.” He immediately sent security forces into the streets, meting out violent repression and mass arrests. As of late 2025, 359 of the 11J protesters remained in prison; some face sentences of more than twenty years.
If there were a model petitioner for the original protections of the CAA, it would be Oscar Casanella. Casanella took a gradual route to political life. Having come of age during the Special Period, he entered the University of Havana in 1998 to study biochemistry. There he befriended Ciro Díaz, a math student and musician.
At first “all we wanted was to go out and party and find a girlfriend,” Casanella told one of us, Miriam Pensack, from the living room of his apartment in Hialeah, a Cuban enclave adjacent to Miami. But in their first year at university, Díaz joined a rock band called Porno para Ricardo (Porn for Ricardo), which soon became famous for its sexually explicit and politically inflammatory lyrics. Through Díaz, Casanella grew close with the rest of the band, hanging around during rehearsals and helping them plan performances.
It was fun at first, Casanella remembered, “trying to organize concerts [without] state security catching wind of it.” He was an excellent student and not formally a member of the band, and he assumed he wasn’t “on [the state’s] radar.” Upon graduating in 2004 he took a job at the National Institute of Oncology and Radiobiology. In the following years he completed a master’s degree in Switzerland, returned to Cuba, and married. His time overseas had opened his eyes to new political possibilities, and after his return, as he saw his friends trailed and arrested by security forces, his sense of indignation grew.
In 2013 Díaz, then abroad, called Casanella to say he was coming home. Together with friends—some opposition activists, some not—Díaz planned a party. The following night, security forces knocked on Casanella’s door. They warned him not to attend the gathering, but he made it clear that he planned to go anyway. Trouble followed him to work, where he lost his access to the Internet—a tightly regulated and largely inaccessible commodity in those years. His supervisor took him off major research initiatives, and Casanella found himself confronted with one contrived obstacle after another. In 2016 he was fired.
In mid-2018 Casanella helped found the San Isidro Movement. The following year, he was arrested for marching in a gay pride parade that hadn’t been approved by state officials. Photos circulated online of plainclothes police officers placing him in a choke hold; another showed his bruised, swollen face following his release from custody. He was arrested again the next year for protesting police brutality. By April 2021 he was under house arrest, leaving his home only occasionally and always trailed by state security. The 11J protests came and went without him. He had another reason to keep a low profile: a week before the demonstrations erupted, he and his wife learned that she was pregnant with their second child. They decided they had to find a way to leave.
Casanella’s name was on the state’s list of “regulated” individuals with suspended passports. But in November 2021, as activists prepared a march on behalf of incarcerated 11J protesters (the government prevented it from taking place), security forces informed him that he had thirty days to recover his passport, get his affairs in order, and leave the country. “If you haven’t left in thirty days,” they warned, “you’ll go to prison for sedition.”
A few weeks later Casanella, his wife, and their four-year-old son, Pablo, took a flight to Bogotá and another to Costa Rica. Then began the negotiations with coyotes—the border smugglers who make handsome fees ferrying migrants up the Northern Triangle of Central America. They crossed the border between Nicaragua and Honduras on horseback; between Guatemala and Mexico they traversed a river and descended a steep ravine. Eventually they waded through a drainage ditch to cross from Ciudad Juárez to El Paso, tailed by the Mexican border patrol. At the southern border the family joined an ever-growing wave of Cuban migrants who mingled with people from all over the world seeking entry to the US from Mexico. The Casanellas crossed the border in early January 2022 and surrendered themselves to US agents on American soil. Casanella’s wife was seven months pregnant.
The family received I-220A status, a designation that granted them release on their own recognizance. They flew to Miami, where they temporarily moved in with Casanella’s sister, and in the following weeks they applied for political asylum. It should have been an easy case: Casanella was a political exile in the fullest sense. Then Trump won a second term and escalated Clinton’s and Obama’s challenges to the CAA into an all-out assault.
On the first day of his second term, Trump terminated the Humanitarian Parole Program for Cubans, Haitians, Nicaraguans, and Venezuelans (CHNV), which Biden had established in January 2023. The program had allowed the legal entry of up to 30,000 migrants a month from the four countries combined, all of whom needed to be sponsored by a US citizen or resident who could support them financially. The parole was for two years, but Cubans were able to apply for residency after one year and a day under the CAA.
Soon Trump began targeting people who had entered the country legally under the CHNV program. In February 2025 the government paused pending applications for work permits and adjustment to residency from parolees. A month later DHS sent letters to CHNV parolees announcing its intent to revoke their parole and commanding them to self-deport unless they had “obtained a lawful basis to remain in the United States.” Under normal circumstances, having a pending application for residency conferred on the applicant a “period of stay authorized by the Attorney General.” Most Cuban parolees—as many as 150,000 people—counted on the government to keep its promises under the CAA. But in June 2025 the administration revoked their parole, referring to those affected as “illegal aliens” even though they had broken no law in entering the country.
In the spring of 2025 migrants of various categories began being detained on the spot when they showed up for routine appointments with ICE. Last April, in a case that horrified the community, a Cuban woman living in Tampa was separated from her seventeen-month-old daughter, whom she was still breastfeeding. The woman was detained and deported to Cuba; her baby lives with the father, the woman’s husband, in the US.
Proliferating cases of detained and deported Cubans have received widespread coverage in the South Florida news. One woman, Liyian Páez, who voted for Trump, described feeling betrayed when her husband was deported to Cuba in April 2025; she was left to care for her two children alone. Another Cuban national, a grandmother who had for the past thirty years lived and raised her family in South Florida, was shocked to receive a deportation order at a regular immigration check-in; she had ninety days, officials informed her, to leave the country. Twenty-two-year-old Alexander Peraza, who had worked at the Cuban restaurant El Palacio de los Jugos—a Miami institution—spent a year in ICE detention before becoming one of the first Cubans to be deported to Guantánamo Bay.
Cuban asylum applicants who—like the Casanellas—had been given I-220A papers at the border faced similar challenges when they showed up for their hearings at immigration court. As has now become de rigueur for asylum applicants from around the world, the judges started summarily dismissing their cases, often with no explanation and without giving the claimants the opportunity to say anything in their defense. Legally no one with a pending asylum application can be deported, but the Trump administration found a work-around. In April 2025 the Executive Office for Immigration Review issued a memorandum permitting judges to preemptively discard asylum applications based solely on the responses on the paper form itself, denying applicants the opportunity to provide oral testimony to bolster their case. Subsequent Board of Immigration Appeals decisions made it even easier to dismiss asylum petitions without a hearing.
A judge’s dismissal allows ICE agents to pick up people as soon as they leave the courtroom. Some petitioners walking out of immigration court in Miami were taken to Krome, a defunct cold war missile base west of Miami that since the Mariel Boatlift of 1980 has been a notorious site for immigrant detention. Others were shipped to Texas or Louisiana or Washington state. Closer by, in the middle of the Everglades, is the hastily constructed Alligator Alcatraz, where at least 630 Cubans were held in 2025. When Trump visited it on July 1, 2025, he joked about detainees having to outrun alligators if they tried to escape; “The only way out, really, is deportation,” he gloated. In June 2026, after much controversy and litigation, DHS reported that all detainees held at the site were transferred out, and crews began dismantling the facility.
Last spring Miami almost witnessed a deportation that would have been unthinkable even one year earlier. When the protest song “Patria y Vida” was nominated for two Latin Grammys, including song of the year, in November 2021, five of the musicians traveled to the awards ceremony in Las Vegas. Four of the five were already in exile by then, but one of the cowriters, El Funky (Eliecer Márquez Duany), traveled from Cuba for the ceremony. Before he left Havana, government agents intercepted him and told him not to return—so he stayed in the US. He had to leave too suddenly to say good-bye not just to a number of his friends—including Luis Manuel Otero Alcántara and Maykel Osorbo, two leaders of the San Isidro Movement languishing in prison—but to his father, who has since died. In the following years El Funky forged a life in Miami, marrying a Cuban-born US citizen, continuing to make music, and finding ways to support San Isidro Movement members who remained on the island. Then, in May 2025, he learned that the US had rejected his application for permanent residency, despite the protections of the CAA. He had less than thirty days to leave the US or risk deportation.
News coverage of El Funky’s predicament made ample reference to his prior vocal support for Trump, a detail he was less than keen to discuss when we spoke to him in August 2025. “Do you support Trump, don’t you support Trump,” he said. “People need to understand, I’m not even American.” Within Miami’s Cuban American community his case stirred particular outrage. Under pressure from lawyers, activists, and Miami congresswoman María Elvira Salazar, the US reopened his case, and on August 15, hours before we spoke to him, he received his green card. He hopes he can see his mother again now: as a legal permanent resident he can travel to somewhere like the Dominican Republic and fly her there to meet him. In our call he said he hoped other Cuban exiles would receive favorable news as well: “I know it’s a bit more difficult with Trump and his new laws.”
Not everyone in the community described Trump’s policies so delicately. Mike Fernandez, a health care executive and Miami power broker, showcased his antipathy on a string of billboards dotting the city’s thoroughfares. Fernandez has long had an antagonistic relationship with the current president: on the wall of his office, above a photo of him smiling with former Israeli prime minister Shimon Peres, hangs a framed 2015 cease-and-desist letter from Trump’s attorney warning Fernandez away from his “fool hearted” efforts to disseminate “certain radio, television and newspaper advertisements directly and personally attacking” the then presidential hopeful.
Early last year Fernandez began to use his billions to issue public condemnations of Cuban American elected leaders he considers complicit in immigration policies that harm so many in the districts they represent. One of his billboards shows Rubio and the House representatives Carlos Giménez and Mario Díaz-Balart, each with a red strip over his mouth that reads “Trump.” Next to them a caption asks, “IN A COMMUNITY OF IMMIGRANTS WHERE ARE THE VOICES TO PROTECT US?”
For the past decade Fernandez has faced hostility and even threats from community members for his anti-Republican turn, but he told us that he sensed that Trump’s immigration crackdown was prompting some introspection among Miamians. A poll conducted last fall by the Miami-based strategy firm Bendixen and Amandi International confirmed his intuition, finding that Trump’s net approval among Cubans was 59 percent as of last October, a noticeable drop from the roughly 70 percent of Miami Cubans who had voted for him just a year earlier. In December Miami elected Eileen Higgins as mayor, the first Democrat to reclaim the office from the GOP in almost thirty years.
Trump’s renewed pressure campaign on the Cuban government, should it result in significant change in Cuba, may restore any support he might have lost among the exiles in Miami. But not everyone agrees on what change will look like or how to achieve it. Some in South Florida have condemned Washington’s apparent willingness to negotiate with Cuban power holders, claiming the approach doesn’t go far enough and calling instead for total regime change and even military intervention. María Elvira Salazar, the Republican congresswoman, urged constituents to stop sending all help to family in Cuba, because only that kind of pressure would cause the government to fall. But many who publicly support such hard-line political rhetoric quietly continue sending money, medicine, and necessities to their loved ones. Meanwhile, tens of thousands of Cubans in the city remain in anxious suspension—unsure what might happen in Cuba and what fate awaits their family members on both sides of the Florida Straits.
Among them is Casanella, who has received no determination on his petition for asylum. Four and a half years after he entered the US, his case remains pending, leaving him continuously vulnerable to deportation. His eldest son, Pablo, now nine, has grown increasingly aware of his family’s situation; in his letter to Santa Claus last year he asked for political asylum for his father, alongside a Lego set. Early one morning that fall ICE had knocked on the Casanellas’ door. No one answered; they spent the following days afraid to go outside.
Casanella misses Havana but is getting fonder of Miami. Recently he and his family took a ride on the Skyviews Miami Observation Wheel on Biscayne Boulevard. From the gondola two hundred feet above the city, the Freedom Tower looks small among the newer buildings twice its size, a monument to a welcome no longer offered. In the future, passengers on the gondola may well see a new, much taller skyscraper across the street, looming over the onetime Cuban Refugee Center: the Donald J. Trump Presidential Library.
—June 24, 2026