Out with the old?
To prop up their influence, the anti-Castro hard-liners gambled
big on Elian. Now what?
By Tim Padgett
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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