Chapter 6 explores memories of domestic service and intimacy between the 1960s and 1980s. Using oral history interviews, the chapter argues that the memories of former domestic workers and former employers of domestic workers informed their racial politics in the present. These memories were almost entirely devoid of political activism, even though this book has demonstrated that domestics were politically active for all of twentieth-century Cuban history. Instead of politics, the emblematic memory that Cubans retained was “the emotional logic of domestic service,” which allowed and even celebrated harmony between black and white Cubans while maintaining a strict and often unspoken racialized hierarchy. After the official end to domestic service in the 1960s, nostalgia for domestic service became a way for anti-Communist Cubans in exile and on the island to argue that pre-1959 had not been racist, as the revolutionary government has always insisted. This chapter historicizes the emotions around domestic service and demonstrates that an institution that had always distilled racial hierarchy in Cuba into its purest form was used to argue for a horizontal equality that never existed.

The chapter describes the unique benefits the Eisenhower through Nixon administrations extended to Cubans after their arrival, as refugees, even though they did not meet near-universally accepted criterion for refugee status. The chapter then addresses the impact the entitlements had on Cubans’ adaptation to the United States in the 1960s and 1970s, as well as Cuban American economic mobility relative to that of native-born people into whose midst they moved, and tensions the privileging of Cubans unleashed between Cuban newcomers and native-born people. Settling mainly in Miami, Cuban immigrants provoked a major nativist response, race riots, and White flight. While the entitlements were good for the Cuban immigrants, they generated inequities and resentments, and unintended consequences.