LOUISVILLE, Ky. — Yahima Leblanc Núñez and her husband, Pavel Reyes, were Cuban government workers when, in 2009, they plotted an escape. Five years later, after an arduous trek across Central America, including 15 days in a Mexican jail, they arrived here with two backpacks of clothes and a single tidbit of information — “Kentucky Fried Chicken” — about the state they now call home.

There is no Little Havana here in Louisville. Nobody is banging pots and pans or dancing in the streets to celebrate the death of Fidel Castro, as Cuban exiles did in Miami. But there is a small, fast-growing community of “Kentubanos” — recent refugees like Mrs. Leblanc Núñez, 36, and Mr. Reyes, 42 — who will quietly mark Castro’s burial on Sunday by trying to put him out of their minds.

“I haven’t even thought about that,” Mr. Reyes said. “I just deleted that from my mind.”

Miami has long been the focus of the Cuban diaspora. But Cubans, who can enter the United States legally as “parolees” under a 1966 congressional act, have been resettling outside that city for years through State Department-backed refugee agencies headquartered there. In past decades, many were sent to Union City, N.J., nicknamed Havana on the Hudson. Now they are being funneled to cities like Lancaster, Pa.; Syracuse; and Louisville.

For these nascent diasporic communities — including Louisville’s “Kentubanos,” a term coined by Luis Fuentes, the publisher of El Kentubano, a Cuban-themed magazine here — Castro’s death has evoked a complex mix of emotions, including fear. Unlike their more vehement compatriots in Florida, many of whom have lived in the United States for decades, newly arrived refugees almost always have family back home.