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Out with the old?

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To prop up their influence, the anti-Castro hard-liners gambled big on Elian. Now what?

April 10, 2000
Web posted at: 12:45 p.m. EDT (1645 GMT)

The "Banana Republic" label sticking to Miami in the final throes of the Elian Gonzalez crisis is a source of snide humor for most Americans. But many younger Cuban Americans in Miami are getting tired of the hard-line anti-Castro operatives who have helped manufacture that stereotype--especially the privileged, imperious elite who set themselves up as a pueblo sufrido, a suffering people, as martyred as black slaves and Holocaust Jews, but ever ready to jump on expensive speedboats to reclaim huge family estates the moment the old communist dictator stops breathing.

And the younger set in Miami isn't frustrated only by what's been happening over a six-year-old. Prodded by the old-guard Cuban-American leadership, the city of Miami is refusing to let the Latin Grammy Awards be held there because performers from Castro's Cuba may be part of the program. The move will cost the town some $40 million in revenue and considerable pop-culture cachet. And so last week, John de Leon, 38, a Cuban American who is president of the Miami chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union, filed suit to void the local law that prevents shows by artists from Castro's Cuba. In the past, De Leon might have received instant death threats from militant anti-Castro groups, but they are caught in an Elian quagmire of their own making and are proving to have more bark than bite. "I think the intimidation cycle has been broken in this town," says Elena Freyre, a Cuban exile and Miami director of the moderate Cuban Committee for Democracy. "Elian may mean the defeat of the traditional exile line."

Tired of seeing their community portrayed as a martial camp in the Everglades, moderate Cuban Americans in Miami are finally raising their voices above the din of the city's Spanish-language, anticommunist talk radio. Political debates that used to be whispered in Little Havana kitchens are now held in clubs where the rhythms of once forbidden Cuban salsa bands like Los Van Van resound. Members of the new Cuban-American guard despise Castro too--but not so much that they disdain the First Amendment. As a result, they see their ascendancy as more than a chance to democratize Miami's discussion on how best to democratize Cuba. It's also a bid to reconnect the city--plagued by voter fraud and rampant official corruption--to mainstream U.S. civic values, as well as to its potential as the hemisphere's trade, tourism and cultural nexus.

A key divide between the old and new guards in Miami is that many if not most of the latter were born in the U.S. While their parents still dream of Havana, the kids are far more concerned with using their computer and business skills to turn Miami into "Silicon Beach." That indigenous culture has been dubbed Generation n, after a Miami-based magazine run by Cuban-American Bill Teck. Most of the new guard is willing to go along with the American mainstream, which, in recent polls, believes the U.S. should scrap its 39-year-old trade embargo against Cuba. That policy has not only failed to dislodge Castro but also looks archaic alongside Washington's commercial ties to such communist regimes as China and Vietnam.

The old guard won't have any of that and isn't about to throw in the towel, despite the many setbacks in the Elian debacle. Jorge Mas Santos, the millionaire chairman of the hard-line Cuban-American National Foundation, Miami's powerful political machine--and son of the foundation's fiery former leader, Jorge Mas Canosa, who died in 1997--attributes the moderate trend to "Middle-American ignorance about Cuban repression." But De Leon, who has broken with the exile taboo and visits Cuba, insists that the practical way to change the island is to look beyond Castro and start building democratic and capitalist bridges there in preparation for his demise. Exile leaders like Ramon Saul Sanchez, who once headed a clandestine paramilitary group that trained for a possible invasion of Cuba, say that kind of dialoguista thinking "just props up a dictator." Freyre counters that the demagogic feud with Castro is self-serving, propping up the political and economic clout of the C.A.N.F. in Miami--and in Washington, where the lobby can still make politicos like Al Gore do the Exile Shuffle. The Elian episodes certainly were additional steps in that hoary choreography.

Miami moderates are fed up with that bellicose symbiosis between Castro and the hard-line exiles--a desperate craving for geopolitical attention in this post-cold war world. Few dispute the genuine grievances of the exiles, especially those who have suffered human-rights abuses under Castro, like imprisonment for "counterrevolutionary activities." But the older hard-liners, despite their protestations of U.S. patriotism, are still steeped in the authoritarian political culture that existed in Cuba long before Castro took power in 1959. Since then, the U.S.'s Cuba policy has indulged the notion that Miami, because of its special anti-Castro mission, sometimes gets a pass on the democratic rules that the rest of the country observes. That was in evidence last month when Miami-Dade County Mayor Alex Penelas--widely considered a more progressive exile leader--vowed that his cops wouldn't help federal officials take Elian to his father. However, as University of Miami sociologist George Wilson points out, because Miami's Cubans are perhaps the country's most privileged refugee group, "most Americans refuse to believe that their civil disobedience over Elian is legitimate." Viewed from that perspective, shutting down freeways is no longer protest, merely petulance.

As for liberating Cuba, the hard-liners have, in a perverse way, always been Castro's friends. "The belligerent actions of the hard-line exiles in Miami simply keep giving Castro an excuse to crack down on us," says dissident leader Elizardo Sanchez. Post-Castro Cuba, he insists, will be governed by moderates, not right-wing exiles. The same, perhaps, may someday be said of Miami.


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Cover Date: April 17, 2000

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