History Professor Pens Book on Cuban Catholic Experience in America

“The University of Notre Dame Press this fall will publish a new book by St. Mary’s University Professor Gerald Poyo titled “Cuban Catholics in the United States, 1960-1980, Exile and Integration.”

Everyday life for Cubans in the United States during the 1960s and 1970s involved an intimate interaction between commitment to an exile identity and reluctant integration into a new society. For Catholic Cuban exiles, their faith provided a filter through which they analyzed and understood both their exile and their ethnic identities. Catholicism offered the exiles continuity: a community of faith, a place to gather, a sense of legitimacy as a people. Religion exerted a major influence on the beliefs and actions of Cuban exiles as they integrated into U.S. culture and tried at the same time to make sense of events in their homeland. “

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