>>Good morning and welcome to Global Perspectives, I'm David Dumke.

Today we are joined by Dr. Jorge Duany, who is the director of the Cuba Research Institute at Florida International University.

He's also a professor of anthropology.

Thank you for joining us today.

>>Thank you for having me.

>>Dr.

Duany, you've written extensively on Cuba and Puerto Rico, as well as the populations of Cubans and Puerto Ricans who are living in the U.S. mainland today.

We're in Florida having this interview.

How has immigration how have the immigration patterns of those two groups specifically changed Florida politics and national politics, for that matter?

>>Well, as many of your viewers may know, Cubans have been coming to Florida for decades after the 1959 revolution on the island.

And since 1960, they have really changed Florida in most ways, especially South Florida.

The Miami metropolitan area, as well as other parts of the state.

And then something interesting happened, which was that Puerto Ricans also began to come in large numbers, I would say, in the 1970s and eighties, mostly to this part of the state, to central Florida and especially Orlando.

And now they have become the second largest group of Hispanic origin.

Not as big as the Cubans in South Florida, but still are competing for power and for influence in both state elections and even, you know, nationwide.

>>The Puerto Rican population, particularly has has changed dramatically in central Florida, especially after Hurricane Maria.

What what are assumptions did some government officials and politicians make about this population that vote overwhelmingly Democratic?

Has that played out?

Where is where's the population stand politically?

>>Yeah, the first thing to say is that Puerto Ricans on the island can't vote for the president or vice president of the United States.

But once they move to to Florida or to other states of the union, they can.

And so that makes for a potential voting bloc of very big significance.

And especially after Maria, there was a lot of speculation here in the state and even in Puerto Rico as to how this new bloc of voters, since they're U.S. citizens by birth, would influence local elections.

So far, it hasn't.

It doesn't seem to that they have been decisive, but they have tipped, you know, some elections, governors elections and local elections here in Orlando, primarily toward the Democratic candidates, but also favoring, for example, in the last elections, Governor DeSantis.

>>Do non Puerto Rican politicians treat this voting bloc, the potential swing voting bloc, as a monolith?

Do they know how to address it?

It has different needs.

It has a different background.

It's part of the broader Latino vote, but it's got very specific identity.

>>Yeah, I think political operators and candidates have have increasingly learned to make the distinction, for example, between central Florida and South Florida and between Cubans and Puerto Ricans.

Some of the issues that affect Puerto Ricans don't affect Cubans and vice versa.

So, for example, the status issue, the relationship between the United States and Puerto Rico is a very high concern for many Puerto Rican residents of this area.

It is not for Cubans in South Florida, where Cuban politics dominate the discussion.

So I think increasingly, you know, there are different markets, so to speak.

And for example, if you look at campaigns, you often see that there are small differences, even when they're done in Spanish, for example, that there would be minor distinctions in the way that some words, for example, that make sense to Puerto Ricans here in Orlando don't make sense in for Cubans in Miami.

>>You mentioned the status issue as being a big one.

And of course, the politics in Puerto Rico were largely dictated for a long time, for decades, really, on the status issue.

You had the pro statehood party, you had the Commonwealth Party, and you had a much smaller Independence Party in terms smaller in terms of vote.

Have those policies has that issue then moved to the mainland?

And does it remain a priority for Puerto Ricans living on the mainland, or are they looking more bread and butter issues?

I think both.

I think still status remains an important topic, according to several polls that I have seen lately, both for Puerto Ricans on the island and here in the States.

Ironically, in many ways, Puerto Ricans were moved to the United States, have voted already with their feet.

In other words, they tend to support statehood as the final solution to the issue of status.

But but still, there are other groups, a sizable minority, I would say, who support either commonwealth or some sort of permanent association with the United States.

And you're right, the independence movement has become increasingly small.

Five, 10% of the vote in most elections over the past decades.

What's happened in the last few few elections, which I think you hinted at in your question, is that there have been additional parties.

There are two main parties now in addition to the statehood Commonwealth Independence Party that don't take a stand on status and are more focused on bread and butter issues, the recovery of the island after Hurricane Maria, the reconstruction of the power grid, ecological issues and economic issues, how to rebuild the economy after being in shams for more than a decade.

So what's happened then is that the political landscape in Puerto Rico now is much more diversified.

And no, none of the parties, even the two majority parties, seem to hold a majority of the vote.

>>So do you see politicians kind of searching for the message that resonates with the majority of Puerto Rican voters right now?

>>I do think so.

And again, that's a big change in the way they handle the political discourse and political campaigns, because it was basically the three parties were aligned in terms of what their option was for the future of Puerto Rico.

Now, I think increasingly voters are expecting candidates to to take a stand on on other issues that have very little to do with that.

>>What are some of the other issues that that voters are particularly interested in?

>>Yeah, I mentioned, for example, the issue of after the impact of the hurricane.

Questions of sustainability, for example, how to prepare for other natural disasters that will probably continue.

The question of how to transform the traditional economic development strategy in Puerto Rico, which is based on industrialization and on the attraction of US capital for factories on the island that no longer seems to be the way out of the economic crisis.

So tourism, for example, has been proposed as the alternative, but it's not very clear what exactly will replace the Operation Bootstrap, which was a name that this strategy which was successful for a few decades.

But again, in the last few years, many of these factors have left the island.

>>What are some of the reasons that the Puerto Rican economy has not sustained?

You mentioned Operation Bootstrap, and it had some successes early on.

There has been other plans that have been both based from Puerto Rican politicians and as well as those from Washington.

What's worked and what hasn't worked?

>>Well, I think the the postwar strategy to industrialize the island did work for three decades, roughly between the 1940s and 1970s.

And then it began a slow but steady decline since then, until about 20 years ago.

Congress decided to eliminate a very important cornerstone stone of that strategy, which was Section 936 of the IRS code, which allowed US companies to operate in Puerto Rico and other territories without paying taxes.

That Section 936 was eliminated and that led to the slump in which Puerto Rico began around 2006.

And in the past couple of years, there seems to have been a slow recovery, mostly because of the injection of federal funding for emergency responses to the hurricane.

But still that once the industrialization by invitation, as it was called, also disappeared as a major strategy, it's not clear what kind of economic strategy can sustain economic growth on the island for the next decade.

>>Along with this, of course, and you mentioned, you know, Puerto Ricans voting with their feet in some ways, but we're also talking about economics.

Demographics is a challenge for Puerto Rico, because it's not just who the numbers who are leaving and going to the mainland, but what ages.

So a lot of the, as I understand it, a lot of the workforce is leaving.

>>Yeah.

Yeah.

Surprisingly, when I looked at some of the comparative statistics recently, I found that Puerto Rico has one of the highest rates of people over 65 years old, even higher than the United States.

So something like 25% of the population is now in the older ages and it's bound to continue.

So in the next 15 to 20 years, it's probably going to reach one third of the population because in part, the two major reasons demographically, one of them is a large number of young people between ages 18 to 45 that are coming to the U.S. And also the fertility rate has is one of the lowest in the world as well.

Puerto Rico is not replacing itself in terms of the population because every Puerto Rican woman in childbearing age has less than one one child per per person.

So that's not enough to replace a population long term.

And in fact, the population has been declining in the past 15 years or so by a very large number.

I think it was half a million people in the last decade.

So it's a combination of factors, the low birth rate as well as the aging of the population produced by migration.

And then, which is a quite positive trend, the increasing median age of the population, they expect the life expectation of Puerto Ricans is quite high in some years has been higher than in the US.

So in the eighties, in fact.

So that makes for a long life.

But but again a more pressure on the health care system, on on pensions and other kinds of services that the government has to provide.

>>What accounts for the the falling fertility rate you're talking about?

>>In order to explain that, I think you have to go back to the postwar years or in the 1940s and fifties.

Puerto Rico is one of the most highly populated, overpopulated countries, depending on how you use that term, but certainly very high density that then led to policymakers and politicians to promote both family planning on the island and large scale migration.

So it was a twin kind of strategy to decrease the growth and it was very successful, whether you like it or not.

I mean, some people are very critical of the kinds of measures, for example, of making all kinds of the pill, for example, the of the controlling of the of the fertility was used in Puerto Rico experimentally in the 1940s and fifties.

And even today it's quite often used.

Condoms were available, readily available and sometimes free on the island.

And perhaps more problematically, the very high sterilization rate of the Puerto Rican female population is one of the highest in the world, not as high as it was 20, 30 years ago.

But together, all those factors helped to keep the growth of population at a very low rate.

And then with the rise in migration of 1940s and fifties and then now in the last few decades, Puerto Rico has lost a significant part of its population.

>>Puerto Rican population who has left, who has gone to the mainland.

Of course, you're talking about different generations have gone and gone to different locations.

How do Puerto Ricans who have been in the United States mainland longer behave differently than Puerto Ricans who are newer migrants post Maria migrants, for example?

>>Well, because most of the earlier Puerto Rican migrants since the 1920s, the first one actually the first flow, went to Hawaii and then after 1920 was overtaken by New York as the primary destination until about 1970s.

Most Puerto Ricans, 80% or so, ended up in that city.

And that's why the sobriquet "Nuyorican" was coined to describe anyone who lived in the US really is still used in Puerto Rico to describe anyone living even in Orlando.

But then in the 1970s and eighties, as I mentioned before, Puerto Ricans began to shift their destinations.

They looked at Orlando and other places south, even California, Texas and other places around the northeast of of of the United States rather than New York City.

So they began to disperse.

And so this is something that in some communities and I think here in Orlando, it is quite dramatic that you have the encounter between first generations of Puerto Ricans who are coming in directly from the island and second, third generation Puerto Ricans who are coming in from the Northeast, Connecticut, Massachusetts, New Jersey.

Some kinds of relationships between these two sectors of the Puerto Rican population is not necessarily very easy, primarily because of the language issue.

And I have observed that here in my short visits to Orlando for years, in which you have people who, for example, if they were born and raised in the U.S., they tend to speak English as their first language, where those coming indirectly come with the intent to be to speak Spanish.

And there's some friction there.

I think it's something that Puerto Ricans negotiate, for example, in their voluntary association.

What language are we going to speak?

I wouldn't speak English, Spanish or Spanglish, but it continues to be an issue because on the island, the question of national identity is very much tied to Spanish language fluency.

If you don't speak Spanish and you don't speak Spanish with a Puerto Rican accent, some people will consider you to be an outsider and not really part of the Puerto Rican nation.

>>You also have trends of circular migration with Puerto Ricans.

So do you see Puerto Ricans going back to the island after being in the U.S. for a long time?

And is that really what a lot of a majority of the population wants?

Or do they just want to focus on their life, wherever that is?

>>Yeah, well, it's it's it's it's only natural for migrants to want to return.

Whether they do, in fact, depends on a number of issues like resources, you know, whether they have ties to the receiving community, etc.. Puerto Ricans have always returned in significant numbers from the very beginning.

But in the 1970s, they began to move en masse to Puerto Rico.

And in some years, according to the available data, there were more Puerto Ricans returning to the island than leaving.

And that also has taken place in the last couple of years after Maria, especially because there was a spike in the number of Puerto Ricans who came to Florida and other parts of the U.S.

But many of them actually did not intend to stay here.

They left because they needed medical care or their children had to be sent to school, or they simply wanted to flee the the natural disaster.

But in fact, in 2019, we saw for the first time in years a net migration back to the island.

So my sense of looking at the numbers and now actually the migration is is quite it's almost zero when you consider the number of people coming in and out.

So it looks like, yes, the circular migration, the movement back and forth continues and it's it's part of the equation.

The situation in Puerto Rico that responds to changing opportunities to natural disasters, to social networks, and to the desire, for example, among older Puerto Ricans to retire and go back to the place where they were born.

>>You also want to make a transition a little away from Puerto Rico.

You're doing some comparative studies right now on the Cuban population and the Puerto Rican population.

So I want to talk a little about the Cuban population.

There are also different generations of Cubans as well.

So some of the what are some of the similarities between the Cuban population and the Puerto Rican population.

>>It's a topic I've been fascinated by, by for a long time, especially, I should say, that I was born in Cuba and raised in Puerto Rico.

So that's why I have-- >>You live your work.

>>Yes.

Yes.

It's very autobiographical.

I was part of the first wave of migrants from Cuba in the early 1960s when my family left and I was a small child.

And then we went to Puerto Rico a little later after a stint spending some years in Panama.

So it's very personal.

And but I've tried to look at it also from academic perspective.

And to answer your question, I think the comparison is is relevant because the two groups have very similar historical backgrounds.

Their cultural actually and religious practices are intertwined because of the longstanding Spanish colonial influence that these were the two last remaining colonies in the Western Hemisphere until 1898.

So they share a language Spanish, which is actually very similar in their dialectical expressions as compared to other forms of speaking Spanish in the Americas and in Spain.

And so there's a lot of affinity between the two countries.

However, of course, there are a lot of differences, especially political differences.

After the Cuban Revolution 1959, Cuba became increasingly distant from the US and in fact opposed to it, whereas Puerto Rico actually became increasingly part of the U.S. not yet a state, but but still more connected economically and politically.

So those are some of the similarities and differences.

And plus, I think it's relevant also to mention that there was a small but important Cuban community in Puerto Rico of which my own family was a part which reached its peak in 1970 with about 35,000 people.

>>But you still are having today even new waves of Cuban immigration.

How is this?

Is this going to continue?

Is this inevitable that this wave is going to continue until there's a change in government in Cuba?

>>Yeah, I mean, actually, I was surprised to see some of the numbers in the past couple of years.

It's actually the moment the current moment is is the highest single number of Cubans, more than half a million who have left the island and then ended up in the Mexico-U.S. Border because that's the main route right now rather than the sea route between Cuba and Florida.

It's the largest number of Cubans ever trying to enter the United States.

Many of them have, you know, precarious legal status.

They're not admitted as permanent residents.

Some of them are paroled.

Some of them apply for asylum.

We don't know exactly how many of those 500,000 or so have permanent residency.

But yeah, I would expect, unfortunately, the flow to continue because current economic and political conditions in Cuba are so dire that it's pushing, especially again, the young people out of the island.

>>Are these newer wave of Cuban immigrants.

Are they the same in terms of their social outlook or politics than older generations who came, for example, when your family came?

>>Yeah, well, I just actually gave a class on that topic yesterday online and I was talking about the six waves of migrants.

And for example, if you compare the earliest wave in 1959 to 62 with the current wave, which began around 2017, they really are very different socially speaking.

So for example, the number of professionals and managers who left in the early stages was extremely high, whereas the current wave, it's very typical when you compare the occupations on the island and the occupation, the occupations that they're going to develop here.

So it appears that the early waves are much more selective of the middle and upper classes in Cuba than they are now.

And again, that reflects the complexity of the economic crisis on the island that is pushing almost everyone out of the island.

>>Of course, immigration has become a huge political issue in the United States.

People make a lot of noise over it, but there doesn't seem to be a lot of negative noise about Cuban immigration specifically.

Is that what does that say about politics?

>>It says a lot.

Of course.

I was surprised, for example, that even locally in Miami, the largest single concentration of of Cubans, recent immigrants from Cuba is in Hialeah.

The city of Hialeah has one of the highest percentages of Hispanics and mostly Cubans.

And there there has begun to to be some public attention to the issue of the recent immigrants in fact quite negative attention because of, for example, the mayor of Hialeah, Esteban Bovo, has called for a number of measures to face the incoming crisis.

It's hard to tell exactly how many of them are settling in and in Hialeah, but just to mention one example, they have the city council there has begun to legislate and regulate the number of of trailers that are being used for temporary occupation and it's supposedly because of the newer immigrants who are renting these areas that are not, you know, officially housing units.

And similarly, they have begun to regulate the number of boats that people can have, especially in front of their yards, which apparently in Hialeah is quite common and not not a nice sight for their neighbors.

So aside from that, I think Miami has been able to absorb the the new immigrants without much of a crisis as it was, for example, in earlier stages, like Maria in 1980, the number of children who enter the public school system and who don't know English and have to be trained in bilingual schools, for example, is significant, but apparently not something that has overburdened the educational system.

>>What are some of the other services that that, you know, immigrants or migrants from Puerto Rico, for example, what are some services that are needed that are common?

What are some of the unique to Puerto Ricans and Cubans?

>>Yeah, well, I think number one would be language, especially because most of the recent immigrants don't speak English as their dominant language.

So they need to have bilingual at least services in schools and government services and health care.

And that's actually the state has done pretty well because of the existence of a bilingual workforce.

And I remember, for example, when Puerto Ricans came to Orlando in 2017 after the hurricane, the first thing they did was at the airport to be received by a local government center, directing them to all kinds of services in Spanish, because that was their primary language.

So housing, education and and health would probably be the number one and two or three issues.

>>Before the show started, we were talking a little about some of the problems.

And one of the biggest ones for the Caribbean, again, Puerto Rico, Cuba, Dominican, anywhere, Haiti, is the issue of climate change.

And how that could could shape migration is the population aware of this, first of all?

And are policymakers aware of this and what isn't being done or what should be done?

>>Well, I have to say, until until Hurricane Maria happened in 2017, September 2017, two weeks before Irma, a smaller but also deadly hurricane on the island and in the Caribbean in general.

I wasn't as a as a student of migration, quite well aware of the impact of these forces.

I am now because I, like many other people, have learned that these major changes in the weather, extreme weather, particularly in the Caribbean, because it's so vulnerable to earthquakes in particular and - not hurricanes, but also earthquakes, flooding would be another one.

The level high level of of the sea rise and rising temperatures, those will be some of the strongest components of climate change that affect the Caribbean in a special way.

And unfortunately, it appears the experts who have looked at this think that it's going to get worse, it's not going to get better.

So there will be another hurricane that will displace people from their homes, whether it's this year or the next or in the next decade.

It's going to happen.

I think in the case of Puerto Rico, there has been some public attention to these emerging climate changes.

So there have been committees that have been formed on on the energy side, for example, there's a clear recognition by everyone involved that Puerto Rico has to become more resilient in the face of these changes and to prepare for blackouts.

For example, after Hurricane Maria, Puerto Rico experienced the longest blackout in U.S. history for more than 11 months.

And that's really unbearable.

Together with other kinds of problems that just the regular population experience.

So there's there's resistance to to change.

For example, I just recently read one of the recommendations of the Committee on Climate Change appointed by the legislature, which was not to build any more than it's already built in the coastal areas because those are going to be the ones that are going to suffer more, including, for example, or similar to those here in Florida.

I don't know that that's going to to pass as a recommendation officially by law because of the resistance by developers and others who want to live and to build near the near the sea.

There's also the recommendation, which I think is more practical, to rebuild some of the natural infrastructure, like mangroves, for example, or similar natural resources, to at least mitigate some of the damage that will come from these high tides, etc..

So there's this a growing attention.

Whether those measures will be put in place in time for the next catastrophe is yet to be seen.

>>We always prepare for the last one.

>>Yeah.

>>We have time for just one more question that I wanted you to talk a little about the Cuban Research Institute and what you work for.

>>I head the Cuban Research Institute at Florida International University.

I've been doing this for 12 years now.

The institute itself has been was founded in 1991 and has continued to operate similar to the Puerto Rican research hub here at UCF and other studies and study centers like the Puerto Rican Studies Center in New York and the Latino Study Center.

The mission is to study Cuba and its diaspora in every discipline from history to literature.

And we have a large number of faculty members who are doing work there, teaching about Cuba and its diaspora.

They're doing research on various topics.

We also have a very large Cuban student population, as you know.

And then our our basic activity is to organize public events, to disseminate the research that's been doing - been going on for both from for from our faculty and other people who are invited to speak about their work.

>>Critically important work, especially as we look at how to - how best to to work with this population, absorb it and benefit from it.

Thank you for joining us so much today.

Dr. Duany.

>>Thank you very much.

>>And thank you for joining us.

We'll see you again next week on another episode of Global Perspectives.