These loans involved seeming trust by the Latin bankers who made them. Portes and Sensenbrenner call that trust enforceable. Why? Because the Cuban exiles were virtually trapped. They could prosper in this transplanted Cuban community only if they proved reliable in repaying their loans. They could not prosper as well anywhere else. They could not return to Cuba, and there was no welcoming community elsewhere. No other community of people had natural access to their reputations and could have trusted them, in the sense of having good reason to believe that their incentive to be trustworthy was compelling, even overpowering. They were an unusual case: outsiders with almost insider status in one exclusive community on which they were fully dependent. The availability of that status was brief. By 1973, character loans ended, because the newly arriving Cubans were no longer known to the local banking community, and they might also have had little or no recent entrepreneurial success in Cuba on which to ground a reputation.

XREF: Connects to the sociology of social capital and enforceable trust in closed networks.

Russell Hardin, Trust and Trustworthiness, loc. 585