Cuban American people

(Cuba Twitter)-Cuban American, Cubano estadounidense, is a United States citizen who traces his or her "national origin" to Cuba. Cuban Americans are also considered native born Americans with Cuban parents or Cuban-born persons who were raised and educated in US. Cuban Americans form the fourth-largest Hispanic group in the United States and also the largest group of Hispanics of European ancestry (predominantly Spanish) as a percentage but not in numbers.

Many communities throughout the United States have significant Cuban American populations. However Miami, Florida, with a Cuban population of 837,985 in its environs, stands out as the most prominent Cuban American community, in part because of its proximity to Cuba. It is followed by the Tampa Bay Area and North Jersey, particularly Union City and West New York. With a population of 141,250, the New York metropolitan area is the largest Cuban community outside of Florida.

Immigration policy

Before the 1980s, all refugees from Cuba were welcomed into the United States as political refugees. This changed in the 1990s so that only Cubans who reach U.S. soil are granted refuge under the "wet feet, dry feet policy". Cuban immigration also continues with an allotted number of Cubans (20,000 per year) provided legal U.S. visas.

According to a U.S. Census 1970 report, Cuban Americans as well as Latinos lived in all 50 states. But as later Census reports demonstrated, the majority of Cuban immigrants settled in south Florida. A new trend in the late 1990s showed that fewer immigrants arrived from Cuba than previously. While U.S. born Cuban Americans moved out of their enclaves, other nationalities settled there.

In late 1999, U.S. news media focused on the case of Elián González, the 6-year-old Cuban boy caught in a custody battle between his relatives in Miami and his father in Cuba, after the boy's mother died trying to bring him to the United States. On April 22, 2000, INS agents took Elián González to the Cuban Interests Section in Washington, D.C. From there, his father took him back to Cuba.

US Census and ACS

In the most recent census in 2000 there were 1,241,685 Cuban Americans, both native and foreign born and represented 3.5% of all Hispanics in the US. About 85% of Cuban Americans identify themselves as being White, mostly Spanish, which is the highest proportion of all other major Hispanic groups. In Florida, Cuban Americans have cultural ties with the state's large Spanish American or European Spanish community. In the 2007 ACS, there were 1,611,478 Americans with national origins in Cuba. 983,147 were born abroad in Cuba, 628,331 were U.S born and of the 1.6 million, 415,212 were not a U.S citizen.