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The first waves of emigrants from Cuba played a pivotal role in Miami’s development and enjoyed a level of entrepreneurial success that made them a model minority group in the United States. The arrival of the Mariel refugees in 1980 led to a reversal of the situation. Stigmatized by the US media and reluctant to continue the fight against the Castro regime from their new country of residence, they did not benefit from the networks of solidarity that had allowed earlier exiles to find jobs in Cuban enclave firms, move ahead, and eventually become entrepreneurs themselves. They sought instead to maintain ties with their parents who had remained in Cuba, meaning that they did not completely break with their country of origin. The bifurcation between the first generations of exiles, who were educated, had high incomes, and held anticommunist values; and the migrants who arrived in the twenty-first century, politically uncommitted, impoverished, and who frequently returned to Cuba, in fact dates back to the Mariel exodus.