The Triple Package (5 page)

Some Cuban Exiles had a head start when they arrived in America.
Alfonso Fanjul, a sugar magnate whose lands were confiscated in 1959, had enough money to restart his business on 4,000 acres he bought in Florida; today the Fanjul Corporation (still controlled by the Fanjul family) is the world’s largest sugar producer, with Domino Sugar among its many holdings. Unlike the Fanjuls, the
Bacardis (along with a number of other elite businessmen in Cuba) had jubilantly supported the Revolution, even throwing Castro an extravagant welcome luncheon at one of their breweries near Havana—which Castro did not attend. But within a year Castro seized all of the Bacardis’ Cuban assets. Before leaving, the family destroyed their prize possession—a unique yeast culture used in the fermentation of rum—getting just enough of it out of Cuba to continue their rum dynasty in Puerto Rico and Mexico.

Most of the Exiles, however, came to the United States the way Roberto Goizueta did: with practically nothing.
As of 1961, émigrés leaving Cuba were prohibited from taking more than five dollars and were required to relinquish the rest of their property to the state. Like Goizueta, some worked their way up to dizzying heights in the business world.
Gedalio Grinberg fled to Miami in 1960; in 1983 he bought the Movado watch company, and today his family members remain the controlling shareholders (and his son the CEO) of the Movado Group, with its $500 million in annual net sales.
Carlos Gutierrez arrived in Miami at the age of six with his family, knowing no English; he would become CEO of Kellogg and was the United States secretary of commerce from 2005 to 2009. In 1962,
Ralph de la Vega, the ten-year-old son of a wholesale grocer in Cuba, arrived in Miami with no family, no English, and no money; in his memoir,
Obstacles Welcome
, he writes of living on U.S. government-supplied “Spam-like meat” that came in containers “the size of paint cans,” and cleaning bathrooms to put himself through college. In 2008, de la Vega became CEO of AT&T Mobility, with 65,000 employees and annual wireless revenues of more than $50 billion.

It’s often pointed out that the Exiles, poor as they were when they arrived in Miami, had been relatively privileged in Cuba. Some had attended the finest Havana private schools; some knew English; some had vacationed in the United States. But it’s simply not true that these immigrants stepped off a plane right into America’s middle and professional classes. Most were not only penniless when they arrived, but “had
no idea . . . where to take their families, much less where to find a job.” For the overwhelming majority, the story of their success was one of arduous toil, swallowed pride, and sacrifice for their children.
Former executives parked cars; judges washed dishes; doctors delivered newspapers. Women who had never held jobs before worked as seamstresses, hotel maids, or shrimp sorters at warehouses by the
Miami River—work so painful they called it
la Siberia
. As one émigré put it, “I was determined that my children would be middle class even if I had to have two jobs—which I did for fourteen years.”

These descriptions may sound like overly uplifting American immigrant success stories, but as Cuba expert Susan Eckstein puts it, “
Cubans more than most Latin American immigrants have lived the American dream.” By 1997, a list of the eighty
wealthiest Hispanic American multimillionaires contained thirty-two Cubans, even though Cuban Americans constituted only about 5 percent of the U.S. Hispanic population. As of 2004, over 30 percent of U.S.-born Cuban Americans held
managerial and professional positions, as compared with 18 percent of Hispanics as a whole. According to a 2002 analysis, over 90 percent of Cuban American students between the ages of eighteen and twenty-four were
enrolled full-time in college, reportedly the highest rate of any ethnic group in the country. Only forty years after the Exiles had arrived in the United States, the
total revenue of Cuban American businesses exceeded that of the entire island of Cuba.

About a third of Miami’s population, Cuban Americans
also dominate Miami politics. Both the mayor of Miami-Dade County (one of the most powerful positions in the state) and the mayor of the city of Miami are Cuban American, the latest in a series of Cuban Americans to have held those offices. Nationally,
all three Latinos elected in 2012 to the U.S. Senate—Ted Cruz, Marco Rubio, and Robert Menendez—were Cuban American.
Cuban actors and entertainers are household names, including Andy García (whose family moved to Miami after the failed Bay of Pigs Invasion and built a million-dollar perfume company), Cameron Diaz, Eva Mendes, and Gloria Estefan.

In trying to quantify Cuban American success, it’s important to distinguish the Exiles from
later waves of Cuban immigrants who
began arriving in 1980.
These more recent immigrants came from much poorer backgrounds, including the 125,000 Marielitos and tens of thousands of
balseros,
or rafters, who floated across ninety miles of water on makeshift vessels. The Cuban Exile community is
mostly white, whereas a substantial fraction of the Marielitos and post-1990
New Cubans were black or of mixed race.

The Cuban American “economic miracle” has been primarily a phenomenon of the Exiles and their children. Cuba’s pre-Castro social stratifications have been replicated in the United States. The Marielitos
and New Cubans frequently received a
cold shoulder from the Exiles. They are not prominent in business and are largely
absent from Miami’s power elite.

Thus the Cuban American story is a complex one. Statistically, the New Cubans have fared no better—indeed on some dimensions worse—than other Hispanics. Only 13 percent of the Marielitos have college degrees—about the same percentage as other Hispanics. Some 70 to 80 percent of New Cubans speak English “less than very well.” Their poverty rates (about 15 percent of adults under the age of sixty-five; almost 40 percent over the age of sixty-five) are roughly double that of the Exiles, and their overall median income is below that of other Hispanics.

By contrast, the Exiles have distanced themselves from America’s other Hispanic groups in both their self-identification and their bank accounts. Not only did the Exile community far outperform other Hispanic groups in the U.S.; by 1990, nearly 37 percent of
the Exiles’ U.S.-born children earned more than $50,000 a year, whereas only 18 percent of Anglo-Americans did.

The
majority of the nonwhite Marielitos chose to resettle outside Miami. Many live
in New York City and Los Angeles, joining the large populations of other Hispanics in those cities. By contrast, the
Exiles live in a world of upward mobility, thriving business success, exclusive Miami private clubs, outsize political influence, and rising representation on Ivy League campuses—a group that can justifiably boast of having joined America’s elite.

—

T
HE DISPROPORTIONATE SUCCESS OF
certain West Indian and African immigrant groups, as compared with non-immigrant American blacks, has been the subject of intense debate for some time. Although immigrants make up only 8 percent of America’s black population,
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their overrepresentation at America’s best universities and on Wall Street is well-known. Hard numbers, however, are surprisingly hard to come by.

Ivy League universities, for example, every year announce the “African American” percentage of their incoming class, but they will not disclose how many of these students are from immigrant families or provide national-origin information about them. Investment banks are in general extremely secretive about who works for them. They don’t make public any information about the racial composition of their employees. As a result, researchers are obliged to rely on sample surveys and are sometimes consigned to poring over lists of surnames trying to decide which ones “sound African.”

The most comprehensive and reliable survey on the black immigrant presence at American universities, conducted by Princeton sociologist Douglas Massey in 1999, indicated that
41 percent of black Ivy League freshmen had at least one foreign-born parent. In 2004, Harvard professors Henry Louis
Gates Jr. and Lani Guinier asserted
that by their reckoning, a majority of Harvard’s black students were immigrants or their children. Today, if Yale Law School is any measure, the overrepresentation of first- and second-generation black immigrants at top U.S. schools may be even higher.

In the first-year class of 2011–2012 at
Yale Law, 18 students out of total class of 205 were members of the Black Law Students Association. Of these 18 students, only 2 were African American (a term we’ll use—unideally—to refer to blacks in the United States who are neither immigrants nor the children of immigrants) on both sides. Of the other 16, 3 were Nigerian, 2 Ethiopian, 1 Liberian, 1 Haitian, 1 half-Ethiopian and half-Jewish, 1 half-Haitian and half-Korean, 1 half-Jamaican and half–Puerto Rican, 1 half-Panamanian and half–African American, and 1 half-Swedish and half–African American. In all, 12 of the 18 had at least one foreign-born parent.

Among black immigrants, Nigerians are the largest and most successful group. In 2010, there were some
260,000 Nigerians in the U.S., a mere 0.7 percent of the black American population. Yet in 2013, 20 to 25 percent of the 120 black students at
Harvard Business School were Nigerian. As early as 1999, Nigerians were overrepresented among black students at elite American colleges and universities by a
factor of about ten.

As Nigerians graduate from these schools, they have predictably flourished. Nigerians have done
particularly well in medicine. Overall, Nigerian Americans probably make up around 10 percent of the nation’s black physicians. And medicine may not even be the real Nigerian forte. By comparison with other blacks in the United States, according to a PhD dissertation on high-achieving second-generation Nigerian Americans, “
Nigerians dominate” investment banking. Or as one African American analyst at Goldman Sachs recently joked, “If my only life experiences were at Goldman, my impression would be that Nigeria must have a billion people, because most of the black
people I met were Nigerian.” In addition, Nigerians appear to be
overrepresented at America’s top law firms by a factor of at least seven, as compared to their percentage of the U.S. black population as a whole.

The success of Nigerians—as well as Ghanaians and certain other African immigrant communities—continues a trend observed decades ago in America’s black West Indian immigrants. Several of the country’s most famous 1960s civil rights and black power activists, including Marcus Garvey, Malcolm X, Shirley Chisholm (America’s first black congresswoman), and Stokely Carmichael, were
West Indian by birth or descent. In 1999,
only Jamaica sent more blacks to America’s selective colleges than did Nigeria. In 2001, the son of two Jamaican immigrants,
Colin Powell, became America’s first black secretary of state. And the man who promoted Powell to general in 1978 was
Clifford Alexander, the country’s first black secretary of the Army; Mr. Alexander’s father was a Jamaican immigrant. For decades, at least in America’s northern states, West Indians and their children “have been disproportionately represented in the
business, professional, and political elites.”

It’s important to emphasize that West Indian and African immigrant success in the United States is not at all uniform and in any event is not comparable to that of, say, Indian or Jewish Americans, whose incomes are the highest of any groups in the country. Several African immigrant groups, particularly those from Somalia, Sudan, or other countries with large refugee populations, are
among the nation’s poorest. And even the most successful groups are not (yet) topping the income charts, although they are doing better than the national average.

For example, in terms of income,
Nigerian Americans dramatically outperform black Americans
and also outperform Americans in general. Almost 25 percent of Nigerian households make over $100,000 a year; only 10.6 percent of black American households
overall do. Five percent of Nigerian American households earn over $200,000 a year; the figure is only about 1.3 percent for black America overall. The median Nigerian American household income is $58,000 a year; the national median is $51,000. In 2010, Nigerian men working full-time earned a median income of $50,000, while the figure for all U.S.-born men was $46,000.

Given that Nigerian Americans obtain college and advanced degrees at one of the highest rates in the country, the fact that they only somewhat out-earn the national average is noteworthy. A number of factors almost certainly contribute. For one thing, the Nigerian community
includes a significant number of new arrivals and their children. Some of these new arrivals are very poor (pulling down the overall income statistics); many are in the middle of their university or postgraduate careers. Thus the big payoffs from Nigerian educational attainment are probably still to come. But a larger factor may well be discrimination. African immigrants frequently testify to experiences of racial discrimination, and data repeatedly show that high-skilled immigrants from Africa
end up in unskilled jobs far more than any other immigrants (except those from Latin America) and other Americans overall.

For all these reasons, however, Nigerian American success—including their extraordinary performance relative to the overall black population—is of special importance to this book. Conservatives like Dinesh D’Souza have argued that African Americans’ poverty is the result not of discrimination, but of a “
dysfunctional” culture that includes a “conspiratorial paranoia about racism” and a “celebration of the criminal and the outlaw as authentically black.” Some liberals assert, on the contrary, that African American poverty is entirely the
product of racism, whether overt, covert, or “structural.” Both sides of this argument are mistaken.

As we’ll discuss later, the success of Nigerian Americans and
certain other black immigrants—who face many of the same institutional obstacles and prejudices as African Americans—
is
significantly due to cultural forces. While many factors contribute to the lower overall socioeconomic status of African Americans, the Triple Package is an important part of the story behind black immigrant success. The lesson to take, however, is not that native-born American blacks have only themselves to blame for their economic position. The lesson is that the United States did everything it could for centuries to grind the Triple Package out of African American culture—and is still doing so today.