For decades, the 90 miles between Florida and Cuba wasn't measured in miles, but in months — the time it took for a single letter to cross the border.
On Wednesday night, UF’s Center for Latin American Studies hosted a screening and discussion of letters sent to and from Cuba after the 1959 revolution – exploring the fragile communication channels connecting Cubans on the island and in Florida.
UF students and faculty from a Caribbean diaspora class and other interested spectators filled the Smathers Library room where the event took place.
The event, titled “Corresponding Across the Sugar Curtain: Island-Exile Communications during Cuba’s ‘Not-So-Cold’ War,” underscored a continuing effort by Florida universities to bridge the gap between academics and personal narratives.
Michael Bustamante, the Bacardí Chair of Cuban & Cuban American Studies at the University of Miami led the event. Bustamante’s book, “Cuban Memory Wars: Retrospective Politics in Revolution and Exile,” details how written communication connected Cubans across national boundaries.
During the discussion, Bustamante said the mail provided a unique window into the private lives of Cubans that macro-politics often ignore.
Mail allowed Cubans to “occupy a shared world, albeit [a] precarious one, not just worlds apart,” he said.
Alfonso Garotte, a 1965 UF graduate who immigrated in 1960 as a child, shared a key memory of this era. Garotte was part of the Operation Pedro Pan flights, where over 14,000 unaccompanied minors were sent to the U.S. by parents fearing communist indoctrination.
"My father's last words when I left ... 'You'll be back soon, because the United States will not allow this to last very long,'" Garotte said.
Garrote never saw his father again. He said his family had to communicate by sending mail through Spain. However, he said his family’s Spanish dual citizenship gave them opportunities others lacked, like easily communicating with his homeland.
UF Professor Lillian Guerra, an expert of Cuban and Caribbean history and instructor of the “Cuba & Puerto Rico: Colony, Nation and Diaspora” course, joined the presentation to discuss how the history of separation has evolved into the modern day.
According to Guerra, transnational communication between Cuban families continues to this day.
She said that, while technology like WhatsApp has replaced the handwritten letter, digital communication introduced a new kind of emotional strain. She has friends and family who have stopped checking their phone messages, because they can’t handle the pain of seeing their loved ones in situations they can’t fix from afar, she said.
"The impact of suddenly having all of these routes to communication has ... really not been good,” she said. “It’s created more tensions, because people are just speaking off the cuff.”
Contact Aaron Zagal Yaji at azagal@alligator.org. Follow him on X @azagalyaji.
Aaron Zagal Yaji is a Public Relations and Economics freshman in his first semester at The Alligator. He covers El Caimán's metro beat. In his free time, he enjoys going to the beach (or reminiscing about it), cooking Peruvian food, and squandering his money on golden shiny things.
