Miami’s Freedom Tower turns 100 as more Cubans are being deported than ever before

When Miami announced last month that it was going to assist federal authorities in arrests of individuals over their immigration status, an unusual number of people showed up at City Hall to protest what they called a “betrayal.” If the “city of immigrants” was going to pass that kind of law, it was time to retire the roosters and domino tables from Calle Ocho, and melt down the monuments to Cuban patriots, said one resident who summed up their collective frustration. If you’re going to do that, they said, “tear down the Freedom Tower.”

The Freedom Tower turns 100 this month amid a multi-million-dollar renovation that seeks to guarantee its historic legacy. The structure’s architecture was inspired by the famous Torre de la Giralda bell tower in the southern Spanish city of Seville, briefly served as Miami’s tallest building in 1925, and was home to the first local newspaper. It has been progressively obscured by new skyscrapers that seem to pop up on a daily basis in downtown Miami, but what makes the tower an icon is that it was where the first Cuban immigrants arrived during the 1960s, those who would lay the groundwork for what would become the region’s most important metropolis, a community of exiles who have become a touchstone in the United States due to their cultural, political and historic relevance.

“The tower represents the pride of a community that had to come to another country, left their family and started from scratch, with nothing but the clothes on their backs,” said award-winning music producer Emilio Estefan, who along with his wife Gloria was honored with the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the country’s highest honor awarded to a civilian. “I am proud of Cuban exile, and the tower is a tribute to it,” said Estefan, who emigrated as a child and co-chairs the tower’s centennial advisory committee.

In 1965, the U.S. government organized the so-called Freedom Flights for Cubans looking to escape the newly formed government of Fidel Castro. It is estimated that more than a half million took refuge in southern Florida. The Cuban Refugee Center, later known as “El Refugio”, was established in the tower. It was, quite simply, a place where hundreds of thousands of recent arrivals could receive governmental support, like rent assistance and canned food, and file their immigration paperwork, explained Guillermo J. Grenier, a sociology professor at the International University of Florida. Grenier himself came to the center when he arrived from Cuba as a young boy in the ‘60s.

The bus route going west from the tower down Calle Ocho led to the development of Little Havana, which at the time was an affordable and accessible neighborhood, remembers Grenier, who went there with his parents to shop for groceries. In 1973, after the Freedom Flights had ceased, the yellow-and-white Neo-Renaissance-style building became known as the Freedom Tower, “the Cubans’ Ellis Island”, where a new exiled identity was formed: that of a person who “has no country, because they don’t consider themselves part of the process in their own homeland, and they are still not American,” explained the professor.

But while plans advance for the centennial celebration, which include a permanent exhibition called Libertad with personal stories and historical objects, a little over a mile away in Miami’s federal immigration court, Cubans are for the first time being detained and deported after their hearings. Hundreds of thousands who arrived after 2019 and received documentation at the Mexican border have not been able to renew their immigration status, despite the Cuban Adjustment Act, which has been on the books since 1966. Another half million who arrived via humanitarian programs have seen their status abruptly canceled by the Trump administration, finding themselves in limbo from one day to the next. Many live in Miami with family members who were rescued from rafts, or who arrived in overcrowded boats during the Mariel exodus, or who entered the country by land before 2017, when the policy known as “wet foot, dry foot” was in use, which allowed them to stay automatically.

Ramón Saúl Sánchez, one of the most prominent Cuban statesmen in exile and founder of Movimiento Democracia, arrived at the tower when he was 12 years old with his younger brother. They never saw their mother again. His story is one of more than 300 whose audio has been collected for a show about the tower’s legacy, which will make its debut during the centennial celebrations. For decades, Sánchez has been a fervent activist for Cuban freedom, human rights on the island and for emigrants. He is known for leading flotillas to the Straits of Florida in homage to the victims of Castroism, and advocates for those arriving via rafts with hunger strikes — including one that he carried out in front of the tower itself. It was his phone number that families called “to find out about a loved one who had left by sea.” He was recently seen, silent, at a protest on Calle Ocho by Cubans with 1-220A conditional parole, who have not been able to renew their status.

Sánchez was imprisoned in the 1980s for refusing to testify in the case of a paramilitary group of exiles, and for years did not regularize his immigration situation because he wanted to continue being Cuban so that he could return to the island should democracy be reinstituted. In 2002, after changes made to U.S. laws post-9/11, he applied for residency, and was denied in 2016. He has not been able to regularize his status since. Two years ago, a judge halted his deportation when his lawyer told the court that sending him to Cuba “would be a death sentence.” Other Cubans in similar situations have been recently arrested by immigration authorities, even after living in the United States for years.

“I run the risk that they will deport me, but I feel like I can’t shut up,” said Sánchez. “We are living in shameful, distressing times, and if we do not raise our voices, even those who support these policies will suffer.” “Those of us who have lived through a dictatorship like the one we’ve lived through have a moral commitment to those who escaped. Damn it, in 66 years, we Cubans have learned nothing,” he concluded.

The tower was entered into the National Register of Historic Places in 1979 and has changed ownership several times. In the 1990s, it was briefly the headquarters of the influential Cuban American National Foundation, and in recent decades has been under the management of Miami Dade College. In 2008, it was designated as a national historic landmark and in 2013, it received the Cuban dissident and representative of the new movement for a free Cuba, Yoani Sánchez, proof of the building’s powerful continuing symbolism.

Madeline Pumariega, the president of Miami Dade College whose family was processed at El Refugio upon their arrival from Cuba, said the building’s renovation not only honors the tower’s past, “but also embraces its future as a fully revitalized center for the community that it has always served.”

“Although immigration continues to be a complex subject, our role is not to participate in politics, but to honor the human stories that defined Miami’s past and continue to play a fundamental role in its growth and values. The tower represents the resilience of those who sought liberty and a better life,” she said via email.

The “us and them” of Cuban exiles in the Trump era

Cuban artist Eliéxer Márquez, better known as El Funky, one of the composers of Patria y Vida, the song that became the anthem of the vast protests of July 11, 2021, said that in exile “there is an obvious division.” Márquez arrived in the United States in 2021, had a disastrous immigration process, and was at risk of being deported. Some opposition groups provided support “with letters vouching for him.”

“The new exile is a young person who doesn’t know the past trajectory of activism. You have activists who see them in need of work, and they don’t even help them get a job,” he said. “Who leads the exiled march here? I don’t know any place where the exiled community gathers, where they discuss how to help their brothers. They say that before, they’d give you clothes and money, that you could stay in someone’s house for a while. That has changed a lot,” said Márquez, who has never gone to the tower, but knows that it is “an important place for many exiles.”

Professor Grenier, who has done extensive work on migration, immigrant assimilation and Cuban Americans, said that recently arrived Cubans are experiencing a “perfect storm.” On one side, the Republican Party has aligned itself against immigrants, he says.

The majority of Cubans are Republicans due to the party’s strategy in the ‘80s during the Ronald Reagan administration to attract unaffiliated minority groups, during a time when the Democratic Party was in transition and less open to newcomers, explained Grenier. Cubans were early beneficiaries of this strategy, which led to the formation of local political leaders and opened the door to U.S. citizenship, giving rise to the term “Cuban American.” Since then, “Cubans are Republicans,” says the professor, who in his research on recent arrivals has seen that many, even if they have little knowledge of the North American political system, “knew from their aunt who was here, that if they worked they could get ahead, and that the Republican Party is the one for Cubans.”

On the other hand, each immigration wave has been met with the sentiment that “those who came after are not like the ones who came before,” says Grenier. Since the Mariel exodus, when some 125,000 Cubans arrived in the United States in overcrowded boats, “those who were already here viewed the new group differently, like regretful revolutionaries. Many said, ‘Those people aren’t like us, they waited to see how things would turn out before coming.’ It was the moment in which the sense of ‘us and them’ began to take hold, and was established as the norm among exiles,” the professor explains.

“You come to a country as an immigrant and you want to become a part of it, to assimilate, not be seen as different,” said Grenier. “All of that is now on steroids, thanks to Trumpism,” he added. “Even the recently arrived, who don’t realize how unprecedented Trump’s term has been, are taking part. They see that their aunt is a Republican, and that to be part of the community, one of the parameters is belonging to the party and even though they can’t vote, with all those considerations, because they want to belong, they jump on the bandwagon,” he said.

It was only for the case of Elián González, the little boy who was rescued when the boat he and his mother were traveling on to flee Cuba capsized in 2000, that the community came together to demand he be allowed to stay, in part because the boat people represented the ultimate test for those seeking liberty, says Grenier. “It was an odd case. The desire to unify the family overcame all laws. Now we’re seeing that reunification no longer counts. Now the community has not come together. The feeling is that those who are being deported aren’t like us. It’s a double standard, like in Cuba. You shut your mouth and go to Walmart and buy your things and nothing changes in your day-to-day life, but if one of your family members gets deported, you will be impacted,” he said.

“The Freedom Tower is a symbol of people fleeing a toxic regime, but now we have a regime that is driving out immigrants. What the Freedom Tower was, the representation of exiles who received their peers, that symbol is no longer so deeply rooted in the community. That represents a collapse of the exile community,” said Grenier.

Other Cubans, like Rubén, a paramedic who arrived through the CBP One program and did not want to share his last name because his legal status was revoked in April as part of the new White House policies, said that he doesn’t know what the Freedom Tower is — though he would like to “someday learn that part of Cubans’ history.” The idea of driving downtown from his apartment in Broward, where he works as a roof repairman, is what holds him back. He’s seen immigration raids and immigration authorities’ checkpoints, and he is afraid.

Sánchez, for his part, is “sadden by his own people.” “I wouldn’t have carried out the hunger strike if I wasn’t madly in love with my community, my people, who are victims of tyranny,” he said on a telephone call, his voice breaking. “I would like that tower, which is full of tears and painful memories, that received people who arrived here without their parents, to be full of shame. I may die without seeing my home country freed, but I never thought that I would die seeing this, my country that I love madly, heading towards a dictatorship.”

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