Recent Cuban Immigrants Not As Entrepreneurial, Says UF Professor

February 14, 1997

GAINESVILLE — Recent Cuban immigrants are less likely than their predecessors of the 1950s and 60s to start businesses and become a boon to the local economy, said a University of Florida professor.

While the first wave of Cuban immigrants in the 1950s and 60s started many businesses, most significantly in construction, home repair and furniture manufacturing, their children tend to enter professions such as law or medicine.

“The newer Cuban immigrants do not seem to be as entrepreneurial as the first wave,” said Barbara Zsembik, a UF sociology professor who recently completed a study of Latino populations from the 1990 U.S. census reports. “This could be because the market is saturated, or because it takes a while to earn the start-up capital for new businesses, or it could be because they are from a different segment of Cuban society.”

With the children of those first Cuban immigrants entering white-collar professions rather than taking over the family business, and more recent Cuban immigrants working in blue-collar and service industries, opportunities for a new group of immigrants may arise. A group likely to take the Cubans’ place as entrepreneurs are the Nicaraguans, who have slowly been migrating to America since the Sandinista regime of the 1980s.

“The Nicaraguans are relatively new immigrants who are likely to own their own business and have the same sort of backgrounds and cultural ties as the first wave of Cubans,” Zsembik said. “Like the Cubans, they also tend to value education and hard work, so the Nicaraguans are predicted to be a similar success story.”

It is fairly common for the children of immigrants to be less entrepreneurial than their parents, said Allan Burns, a UF anthropologist who has studied immigrant groups.

“When immigrants first arrive, they tend to be older and they tend to be

entrepreneurs,” Burns said. “Their children then usually fall into the normal U.S. education pattern, which is to delay entrance into the job world until completing a lot of schooling, and

they become accultured to the general U.S. trend of working for someone else rather than working for yourself.”

The first Cuban immigrants were mostly from the middle-class business segment of society, a specific class and culture that could have helped them become business owners more easily than other groups of immigrants.

“The Cubans were a distinctive group; they came to America without much and became model immigrants,’” Zsembik said. “They have been extremely successful and can be compared to the Jews, the Chinese or the Japanese, groups who worked to create part of the national economy. The Cubans valued hard work and education.”

The first group of Cubans tended to settle in large urban centers in Florida, mainly Miami, but with large populations also moving to Tampa and Orlando. Cuban businesses in those areas have helped not only their own communities, but also the U.S. economy.

“These businesses not only serve the Cuban community, they are connected to non-Cuban businesses throughout the Southeastern United States,” Zsembik said.

Because the Cubans were considered political refugees, they received help from the American government that other immigrants did not receive, another factor that might have helped the Cubans start their own businesses.

“The government helped the Cubans a lot, with bilingual programs and small business loans,” Zsembik said. “Castro at the time was seen as a real threat, and the U.S. took a hearty stance against this dictator and tried to help these immigrants in any way it could.”