2025-08-27
7 分钟The Economist. Hi, John Prudhoe here.
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The Freedom Tower, a Miami museum overlooking Biscayne Bay that honours the history of Cuban exiles,
will be unveiled next month after its $65 million facelift.
Between 1962 and 1974,
it was the Cuban Refugee Centre and through it passed around 400,000 people who fled after the 1959 revolution led by Fidel Castro.
They received food, money, medicine and a warm welcome.
One of the museum's exhibits notes loftily that freedom is not just a dream but a shared responsibility.
That message is hard to square with the feeling that South Florida's Cubans have today.
In the harsh immigration facility that officials insist on calling Alligator Alcatraz,
some 95% of detainees are citizens of Latin American countries.
Most are from Mexico, Guatemala or Cuba,
and most entered the country in the past few years by avoiding official border crossings and airports.
Hundreds of thousands of Latin Americans fear that same fate after the Trump administration ended programmes that gave some of them hope for future residency.
Yet it is Cubans who feel most hard done by,
because they have in the past enjoyed exceptional immigration privileges.
Under the Cuban Adjustment Act, or CAA, passed in 1966,