CUBA NEWS
The Miami Herald

Cuban Americans brace for new travel policy

Cuban Americans with relatives on the island are preparing for additional restrictions on travel to Cuba, though some question how or if the rules will be enforced.

By Elaine De Valle, edevalle@herald.com. Posted on Mon, Jun. 07, 2004.

Sonia Fandiño is in Havana with the 15-year-old son she didn't dare put on a raft 10 years ago when she fled Cuba. She has to make every moment of this trip count: The next time she sees the boy, he could be an adult.

Under proposed new restrictions announced by the White House last month, Fandiño would not be able to return to the island until 2007.

Legally, that is.

But, like many who visit family still in Cuba, she doubts the new rules can be enforced.

''I will go however I can,'' said Fandiño, a 54-year-old secretary.

"I will swim if I have to.''

She could go through a third country, such as Jamaica or the Bahamas -- a loophole used by many Cuban Americans to skirt the current once-a-year rule.

Pedro Fernández has gone through Toronto and Merida, Mexico. And that's what he will do again -- though it costs him more -- to visit relatives in Santa Clara.

''[The federal government] can do whatever they want,'' the restaurant manager said as he planned another trip at Isla Express, a Hialeah agency licensed to provide travel services to the island. "The Cubans will do what they have to.''

But a U.S. State Department official told The Herald that Cuban Americans should not rely on the spotty enforcement of the past once the new rules take effect, probably late this month.

''We're going to keep more careful track of people who travel to Cuba,'' said the official, a Cuba Desk staff member who spoke on condition that he not be named.

''We're going to ask the travel service providers for more information about who has traveled to Cuba,'' he said, adding that agencies will lose their licenses for failure to provide accurate information.

People will also be asked about their last trip to Cuba, he said, and could be prosecuted for making a false statement to a federal official if they lie.

"We're also going to ask for a lot more detailed information on the family member they are going to be visiting. We want the Cuban identification number of the individual who is going to be visited, to ensure that we are not getting people who don't authentically have a relative in Cuba. We have ways of checking, which don't relate to the Cuban government.''

'HONOR SYSTEM'

But, the official admitted, some likely will try to skirt the law.

"It's the honor system at a certain point. But if someone is intent on breaking the law, they should know that we are going to be increasing enforcement and be prepared to pay the consequences.''

Fines for traveling illegally to Cuba vary widely but can run into many thousands of dollars.

Many exiles applaud the changes.

''No more business with Castro's communist terrorist system,'' said Emilio Izquierdo Jr., a spokesman for a group of former political prisoners. "No trips to Cuba. No money to Castro.''

But some Cuban Americans who favor ending all travel restrictions have begun distributing a petition that asks President Bush to reconsider. Other activists went to Washington to tell legislators and officials the move would be counterproductive.

Hundreds of would-be travelers have called travel agencies to try to see their loved ones before the changes are implemented.

The State Department official said that it won't matter -- the changes will be retroactive.

''So if someone traveled in December of 2002, then they would be eligible to travel again in December 2005,'' he said.

The aim is to cut Castro's access to dollars by reducing travel that the government considers frivolous.

John Kavulich, executive director of the U.S.-Cuba Economic Trade Council, which watches and reports on economic indicators and conditions on the island, says there were about 179,000 U.S. visitors to Cuba in 2003, representing 10 percent of Cuba's total visitors for last year. The economic impact was about $200 million, he said.

NOT TYPICAL

However, despite numerous websites that pitch the natural beauty of the pearl of the Antilles and posters of white Varadero beaches at agencies on nearly every business block in Hialeah, most people agree that a majority of the Cuban Americans who visit the island do not spend like typical tourists.

''I don't go to hotels, to restaurants,'' said Zoila Martínez, who visits her father in Holguín as often as she can and buys whatever food, clothing and sundries she can on the black market so all her money doesn't go into government coffers.

Kavulich agrees that Cuban Americans spend less than other licensed travelers, such as students or church groups or business conference participants.

But they are also a large majority of the U.S. visitors.

Of the approximately 154,000 people licensed to travel from the United States to Cuba in 2003 -- there were another 25,000 or so unlicensed travelers -- about 85 percent ''were people of Cuban descent visiting family,'' Kavulich said.

The new restrictions could cut travel by Cuban Americans to the island by as much as 40 percent, Benigno Perez, an official with the Cuban Foreign Ministry, told The Associated Press.

Some of those who travel say that three years is a reasonable wait.

Others who visit extended-family members are aghast at what they say is the harshest of the proposed changes: Travel to visit aunts, nephews, cousins and others outside the core family is prohibited altogether under the new rules.

''It's so unfair,'' said a teary-eyed Mercedes Hidalgo, 52, before boarding a chartered flight late last month to visit her niece in Sancti Spiritus -- perhaps for the last time.

''She's like a daughter to me. I raised her since she was tiny,'' Hidalgo said.

'She calls me 'Mami.' And I may never see her again.''

Hidalgo says she will follow the rules.

WON'T BE DETERRED

Juan González, a factory worker who left in the 1980 Mariel boatlift, said he won't.

''Be it Bush, be it Fidel, be it whoever. I am going to visit my father,'' he said.

Travel to Cuba has historically been a touchy, divisive subject in South Florida. Agencies that cater to Cuba travel have been firebombed. Travelers have been ostracized.

Many who spoke to The Herald about traveling to Cuba did not want to provide their full names for fear neighbors or co-workers would disapprove.

BOTH SIDES OF ISSUE

One interview at a cafeteria in Hialeah sparked an argument.

''I'm sick of these Cubans who come and then eight months later are clamoring to go back to leave their hard-earned money there, with Castro,'' said Cristobal, a mechanic who sends money to his brother but hasn't returned to the island since he left in 1994.

"They should just end all trips to Cuba. Period.''

His remark made the woman behind the counter wince. Gisele, 27, left her Matanzas home four years ago after she was picked for the visa lottery and came here -- alone.

She says she's glad she came. Gisele is studying English at night and has her own small apartment. She saved enough money to visit three times.

'It's difficult when your mother says, 'Come, even just a day. Don't bring anything, but come. I want to see your face.' ''

Bush and Kerry spark renewed Cuba debate

By Lesley Clark And Elaine Devalle. lclark@herald.com. Posted on Mon, Jun. 07, 2004.

The last politician in Miami to criticize U.S. policy against Fidel Castro and call for a new way was defeated in a landslide.

Now Democrat John Kerry has assailed President Bush's recent crackdown on travel and gifts to people on the island, saying it's too punitive on Cuban Americans and their relatives across the Florida Straits. Last week Kerry said he would encourage what he called ''principled travel'' to the island and lift the cap on gifts. He also said he would push for greater international cooperation and condemnation of Castro.

Democrats warned Sunday against drawing comparisons to former state Rep. Annie Betancourt's failed bid for an open congressional seat in November 2002.

Kerry isn't calling for an end to the U.S. trade embargo, as Betancourt had suggested. And U.S. Rep. Mario Díaz-Balart, who defeated Betancourt, had a hand as a state House member in ensuring that the newly created congressional district he won was reliably Republican.

But the Betancourt-Díaz-Balart race was notable for sparking what observers said was an unprecedented public debate in Miami over U.S.-Cuba policy and how best to oust Castro.

DIVERGENT VIEWS

The dialogue centered on two polarized approaches: exiles who believe the only way to force Castro out is to tighten an economic stranglehold, and moderates who generally back the U.S. trade embargo but want to be able to visit and help relatives financially.

Bush -- pressured by hard-line exile groups that had expected more action from the Republican who came into office with promises of strong sanctions -- has sided with those on the right, though he hasn't given them everything they wanted.

Some support ending remittances entirely and restricting travel even further.

Bush last month announced a boost in aid to dissidents on the island and a renewed effort to broadcast Cuban government-jammed Radio and TV Martí -- along with cutting back travel to once every three years and clamping down on those who can receive cash assistance from U.S. relatives.

NEW OPENING

Some Democrats suggest that by playing to the conservative base, Bush has carved out an opening among more moderate Cuban Americans who want to travel back to the island and help family.

''There's a change in this community, and I think those Republicans are going to begin to experience it,'' said Hialeah Mayor Raul Martinez, a Cuban-American Democrat who has been repeatedly reelected to office and who is appearing in TV ads to tout the Democratic Party. "Hurting the Cuban families only alienates us from the Cuban people.''

At stake is a massive voting bloc that traditionally votes Republican. But Democrats note that, in a state that delivered Bush the presidency by fewer than 600 votes, every vote counts, and a sliver of discontented Cuban Americans could benefit Kerry. Bush in 2000 got 80 percent of the Cuban-American vote.

It's an approach that confounds Republican strategists.

JOSE VENTO,

owner of Joe Barbershop in Hialeah

''He is completely out of touch with the reality of the Cuban-American community and U.S. policy,'' said state Rep. David Rivera, a Miami Republican who authored a letter to Bush last summer that warned him he needed to get tougher on Castro or risk losing Cuban-American support at the polls.

"Maybe they've made a play for a semblance of moderation, but I don't perceive it exists, and if it does, it's not very politically active.''

VOTERS SPEAK

In interviews with The Herald on Sunday, the debate over the right approach raged, but it was unclear whether either election-year strategy will make much of a difference among a voting populace that is weary of political promises.

''One thing is what they say now to get the vote and another is what they do,'' said Angel Sánchez, 45, a BellSouth employee sipping a cafecito at La Carreta in Westchester. "It's all a game.''

Sánchez is leaning toward the incumbent -- ''better the devil you know than the devil you don't'' -- mostly because the president has a job to finish, he said: "He needs to resolve what he started in Iraq.''

But Sánchez, who left Cuba in 1992, still has family on the island, and he disagrees with the administration's get-tough tactics on Cuba.

He said he may vote against Bush if the changes are carried out, "to send a message.''

Behind him, José González shook his head.

''They should cancel all the flights to Cuba,'' said González, a registered Republican and construction worker who left Cuba in 1967 and is voting for Bush, again, "because of his policy in Cuba. That's number one.''

OTHER FACTORS

Other Cuban-American voters said their opinions were shaped as much -- or more -- by the war in Iraq and the U.S. economy.

''Every four years it's the same thing. All the candidates want to talk about Cuba,'' said José Vento, the owner of Joe Barbershop in Hialeah. "I vote for whoever is best for the country, and I think Bush has been very good so far.''

Those who said they supported Kerry said they, too, did so for other reasons.

''The president we have now is for rich people,'' said Cristina Dominguez, who works for the Florida Department of Adult Services.

"I'm more American as far as politics is concerned. This is my country. This is what I worry about most.''

Expand travel to Cuba, Kerry says

Sen. John Kerry, disputing President Bush's actions on Cuba, told The Herald that he would open Cuba to 'principled travel' and lift a restriction on sending money to people on the island.

By Lesley Clark. lclark@herald.com. Posted on Sun, Jun. 06, 2004.

Denouncing President Bush's crackdown on Fidel Castro as election-year politicking that ''punishes and isolates the Cuban people,'' John Kerry told The Herald that he would encourage ''principled travel'' to the island and lift the cap on gifts to its people.

In his first detailed remarks on Cuba policy since clinching the Democratic presidential nomination, the Massachusetts senator sought to carve out a middle ground in what has been a dicey subject for him. He embraced the U.S. trade embargo against Cuba and support for dissidents, but criticized Bush's restriction of travel and cash gifts to Cubans on the island as a "cynical and misguided ploy for a few Florida votes.''

Kerry said in the telephone interview Friday that Bush's new hard-line policy restricting travelers to a single visit every three years "punishes and isolates the Cuban people and harms the Cuban Americans with relatives on the island while leaving Castro unharmed.''

''Selective engagement, not isolation, is the best way for the American people to send real, not just rhetorical, hope for a better future to the Cuban people,'' he said.

Kerry, who has a long voting record generally sympathetic to increasing contact with the island and has faced Republican criticism for shifting stances on the trade embargo, sought to fine-tune his position.

'THE HEMINGWAY BAR'

A decade ago, Kerry, an influential force behind the decision to lift the trade embargo against Vietnam, pushed to ease travel restrictions in Cuba. He said Friday, though, that he would lift only the ban on Cuba travel that is not ''pure tourism,'' suggesting that democracy efforts in Poland, Russia and China were aided by similar "political travel.''

''It's travel that is engaged between families, travel engaged for culture and advancement,'' he said. "I think you want to begin a process that engages on a principled, measurable goal rather than just going to the Hemingway bar somewhere and spending some money.''

Kerry said he would also lift the restriction on remittances to allow gifts to ''households and humanitarian institutions.'' Bush has restricted gifts to only ''immediate family members,'' but Kerry said the money can be a ''powerful tool'' to help Cubans on the island start small businesses "and thereby gain a measure of autonomy.''

OTHER COUNTRIES

And he accused the Bush administration of failing to better engage the international community to oppose Castro, a position that mirrors his criticism of the president's strategy on the war in Iraq, which Kerry has said has damaged U.S. credibility.

''If we were more effective,'' he said, "we would have a little more goodwill in the bank to be able to effectively move the international community with respect to Cuba.''

Kerry's stab at a more nuanced Cuba policy comes as some suggest that by playing to those exiles who urged him to get tough on Castro, Bush may have alienated more moderate Cuban Americans, particularly newer arrivals with relatives still on the island. Nearly 200,000 people traveled to Cuba from the United States last year, and some Cuban-American groups have pledged to launch voter registration drives to target Bush.

PRESIDENT'S ACTIONS

Bush's new restrictions came after pleading from hard-line exiles who said the Republican president sorely needed to shore up his conservative base after failing to deliver the aggressive anti-Castro strategy that he had promised the Cuban community during the election and a 2002 visit to Miami.

At least eight in 10 of Florida's nearly half-million Cuban-American voters backed Bush in 2000, when he won the state by just 537 votes, but polls conducted before he announced the new restrictions last month suggested that his approval ratings were slipping.

The new restrictions, which include reducing the number of visits to the island and limiting spending during family visits, met with acclaim from some of his Republican critics.

But the rift between Bush and some in the traditionally loyal GOP voting bloc energized Democrats who hope to peel at least a sliver of votes away from the president as part of an aggressive push to target Hispanic voters in the state. Democratic strategists note that if they can take away even a portion of the Cuban-American electorate, their nominee can win Florida -- and the White House -- just as President Clinton did in 1996, when he won an estimated 40 percent of the Cuban vote.

Democrats have been divided on whether to court Cuban Americans on Cuba or on issues such as healthcare and education. But Kerry's campaign said it believes that Bush has given the Democratic candidate an opening by pursuing a hard-line strategy.

A spokesman for the Bush campaign suggested that Kerry's remarks were pandering "from a candidate who, every time he had the opportunity, voted against restrictions on Castro.''

''Sen. Kerry's talk is always tough, but his votes always go easy on Castro,'' said the spokesman, Reed Dickens. "His policy proposals for the people of Cuba are policies that are already in existence. They show a lack of understanding of the existing policy and a total disconnect with his entire voting career.''

Republicans have already sought to label Kerry as soft on Castro, pointing to a 2000 interview in which Kerry told The Boston Globe that the only reason the United States treated Cuba differently from China and Russia was the "politics of Florida.''

KERRY'S VOTE

Kerry voted against the final version of 1996 legislation designed to strengthen trade sanctions against Cuba, but told a Miami television reporter during a visit to South Florida that he backed the measure.

He said Friday that he supported the embargo, but voted against the final version because it included a controversial provision to allow Cuban Americans to sue foreign ventures using property confiscated by Cuba.

The Bush administration has maintained the Clinton policy of preventing such lawsuits, but Kerry said Friday that the administration is looking at enforcing the provision, which the European Union has denounced.

''This will further strain relations with Canada and our European allies when, frankly, we most need them,'' Kerry said. "Instead, I will work to craft a policy toward Cuba that our allies can join and support.''

For many in Miami, Reagan was a voice for freedom

Supporters in South Florida, including many exiles, remembered a strong anti- Communist and a friend of their causes.

By Fabiola Santiago. fsantiago@herald.com. Posted on Sun, Jun. 06, 2004.

As the nation grieves for President Ronald Reagan, he is remembered by many in South Florida as a formidable anti-Communist, a champion for freedom who helped liberate Nicaragua and Grenada from the grip of totalitarian regimes, a U.S. president who minced no words when it came to Fidel Castro.

No other U.S. president touched Miami's Cuban and Nicaraguan exiled communities more. In his presidential visits to the city, he wore crisp, white linen guayaberas, the traditional garb of the tropics. He raved about Cuban food -- and best of all, he was tough on Castro and the Sandinistas.

''Cuba sí, Castro no,'' Reagan shouted during a historic 1983 visit to Miami, winning the hearts of Cuban exiles.

''Cubans were traumatized by the lack of understanding of their anti-Communist stands and were anxious to find allies. In Reagan, Cubans found a fierce anti-Communist, and there was an emotional, ideological union. A very special rapport was established,'' said Carlos Pérez, a Miami businessman who was named by Reagan in a 1984 State of the Union address as an example of what can be achieved in America.

ANTI-CASTRO STANCE

Reagan opened the doors of the White House to Cuban exiles and gave high-profile status to their cause, pushing for the creation of Radio Martí and energizing the anti-Castro fight, if not with action, at least with high-spirited rhetoric.

In large measure, thanks to the overwhelming support of the Reagan administration, Jorge Mas Canosa and other Cuban exiles were able in a short time to build an influential anti-Castro force: the Cuban American National Foundation.

Alongside the Cuban cause was the U.S.-backed contra war against the Sandinistas in Nicaragua. In Reagan's administration, Nicaraguan exile leaders found ideological and financial support.

''Nicaragua is free because of Ronald Reagan,'' said Nicaraguan banker Roberto Arguello. "He was highly focused on getting rid of the Sandinistas. He made it part of his strategy to get rid of the evil empire that had planted seeds in Nicaragua, Cuba and Grenada. Ronald Reagan is revered by Nicaraguans.''

Reagan visited Miami several times during his presidency to campaign for Republican candidates and as a guest of the Cuban American National Foundation.

During his 1983 trip to Miami on May 20, Cuba's Independence Day, President Reagan sat down in a Little Havana restaurant and ate a typical Cuban meal of roast chicken, moros -- black beans and rice -- fried sweet plantains and coconut flan.

''He didn't just taste the food. He ate the whole thing and he loved it,'' remembered the then co-owner of the restaurant, Wilfredo Chamizo, who sat at the president's table.

After the meal, Reagan's cook, who was traveling with him, asked Chamizo for the recipe and tips on how to get the ingredients in Washington. Twice after the visit, the restaurant sent the president two shipments of plátanos and frijoles negros.

Reagan, in turn, invited Chamizo to visit the White House.

''Can you imagine what an honor all this was for an insignificant Cuban refugee?'' Chamizo said, his voice breaking. "This is an incredible country where the highest-ranking man reaches the most humble. I will always remember him with endearment and gratitude.''

IMMORTALIZED

Reagan's visit put La Esquina de Tejas, at the corner of West Flagler Street and 12th Avenue, on the tourist map. Twenty-one years later, the framed pictures of his visit still adorn one wall of the restaurant, and the street sign along Southwest 12th proclaims it "Ronald Reagan Avenue.''

''To us, he is unforgettable,'' Chamizo said. "I still have people who come with newspaper clippings of his visit. Everyone wants to have their picture taken here where Reagan ate.''

To Chamizo, who came to the United States in 1961, Reagan was "the greatest president the United States has ever had. He was responsible for the collapse of the Communist system. The Communists thought they were going to rule the world and they crumbled.''

It was such adoration that grew the ranks of the Republican Party in Miami-Dade, which had been until then a Democratic stronghold.

Miami-Dade Republican Party Chairman Mary Ellen Miller's admiration for Reagan dates back to 1976 when he ran in the primary against Gerald Ford. Although Reagan lost the nomination, he was invited to speak at the Republican convention.

''He brought the house down with the shining city-on-the-hill speech,'' Miller said. "That's what he wanted for America.''

Miami's Charles E. Cobb, a senior partner at the investment firm Cobb Partners, was undersecretary of commerce under Reagan for two years.

''He's the leader who gave the United States its confidence back and convinced Americans we had abundant resources,'' Cobb said.

Some of Reagan's South Florida supporters visited him in California after he left the presidency.

The last time Pérez saw Reagan was in 1991 when he visited the president in his Los Angeles office.

'He was affectionate and asked, 'How are my friends in Miami?' '' Perez recalled.

Rooster retro

The works of painter Mariano Rodriguez are a window into the Cuban identity.

By Elisa Turner, elisaturn@aol.com. Posted on Sun, Jun. 06, 2004.

Cuban artist Mariano Rodríguez was clearly thrilled to his paint-stained fingertips by the feathered bluster of rooster tails.

Beginning in the 1940s, he painted roosters with so much assertive allure that art historians consider them icons of Cuban culture and identity. In 1956, he even painted a rooster sprouting a swirling storm of boomerangs. Could this bizarre creature somehow be a zany Cassandra crowing a warning about the Cuban missile crisis still six years away?

Such prescience seems beyond the realm of possibility, but it is true that the 1950s boomerang-mania flitting about the United States, in the years when Cuba was a chic playground for wealthy Americans, came at a time when America had launched a space race with the Soviet Union -- and had also acquired a lust for sleek space-age designs in everything from coffee tables to a watered-down weapon of a toy from Australia called the boomerang.

In this context, Boomerang Rooster makes for a curious footnote in the mostly compelling exhibit Mariano Rodríguez (1912-1990): An Homage at Cernuda Arte gallery in Coral Gables.

The show offers an important overview of the career of Mariano, as he signed his canvases and as he's known to scholars. Preceded by such better known elders as Wifredo Lam and Amelia Peláez, Mariano is part of the second generation of Cuban modern artists who came to prominence in the 1940s.

His show at Cernuda presents 40 works spanning five decades of art making, but with a special emphasis on his lusciously colored paintings of the 1940s. These works glisten with the expressionist delight, the palette of Matissean brilliance, and the sweeping brushstrokes he summoned in order to render his favorite subjects: prideful roosters, succulent fruits and luxuriant women.

It's the sort of work that, in 1942, caught the eye of a legendary tastemaker in 20th century art, Alfred H. Barr Jr., then director of New York's Museum of Modern Art. During Barr's travel to Cuba that year, he purchased for MOMA Mariano's 1941 painting, Rooster, which shows an especially resplendent creature bristling with feathers of magenta, red, olive and indigo.

This grand gallo is flanked by columns of ornate wrought-iron grill work, an echo of the Cuban baroque style of architecture and design that Peláez had been successfully incorporating into her luminous still lifes and interiors.

VANGUARD ARTISTS

Peláez and Mariano were among several of Cuba's vanguard artists that Barr chose -- guided in part by influential Cuban critics, artists and collectors -- for his well-received exhibit at MOMA in 1944, Modern Cuban Painters.

About this work, Barr wrote: "There is almost no painting of the Cuban scene comparable to our often literal or sentimental painting of the American scene and there is little obvious regional and nationalistic feeling. Cuban color -- and Cuban motifs -- are plastically and imaginatively assimilated rather than realistically represented.''

Still, as art historian Edward J. Sullivan pointed out in his 1996 survey of 20th century Latin American art, Barr misunderstood how much these paintings also reflected a surge in ''cultural nationalism,'' particularly in their disdain for classical Spanish influences or American sources. Instead, Paris -- and the artist studios of Montmartre -- as well as Mexico and its new murals were the favored aesthetic departure points for Cuba's artists, as they chose to describe their surroundings in more experimental, unsentimental ways.

Included in the Cernuda Arte show is a painting from that historic MOMA exhibit, Fish Bowl of 1942. Owned by dealer Ramón Cernuda and his wife Nercys Cernuda, Fish Bowl presents figures lounging in dreamy somnolence.

In this painting, a woman of heavy and distorted Picasso-esque proportions surveys the small universe of utopian serenity within a fish bowl. She basks against a background of dense, loosely delineated architectural details and floral abundance.

But serenity is in short supply in another painting from 1940, Women Fighting. Here, a pair of Amazons with massive knees and knuckles grapple with a stark, denuded forest in the background. One woman has grasped the other's head with both hands, distorting her face into a grimacing mask.

Like Lam and Peláez, Mariano belonged to an innovative group committed to throwing out the stuffy advice and colonial-minded restrictions being peddled in the early 20th century by academicians at Cuba's premier art school in Havana, the San Alejandro Academy of Fine Arts, which had been founded in 1818.

SURPRISING BREAKAWAY

The artist's breakaway aesthetic may seem especially surprising, given his close ties to the academy. His mother was an artist who'd studied with one of the more flexible teachers at San Alejandro, landscape painter Leopoldo Romañach.

Mariano also taught in the mid-1930s at the short-lived Free Studio in Havana, founded by artist Eduardo Abela as an alternative to San Alejandro. And in 1936 Mariano traveled to Mexico and met up with some of the Mexican Muralists, including one of Diego Rivera's assistants, Pablo O'Higgins.

But this was not, apparently, an especially rewarding encounter, at least in Mariano's eyes. According to Cernuda, the artist destroyed nearly all his work from the 1930s. Indeed, the political activism embedded in the muralist movement does not surface in any obvious way in most of Mariano's art.

He's best remembered for his gorgeous handling of color, with streaming shades of sun-washed brilliance that delineate the exaggerated, monumental contours of both woman and rooster in one of his most beautiful and outrageously sensual paintings, Woman with Rooster of 1941, also included in the gallery exhibit.

In this painter's eyes, the countryside rooster strutting his colorful stuff must have shimmered in the Caribbean sun like strokes of paint in sexy reds and oranges. Call these hues kissing cousins to the colors saturating the flesh of tropical fruits like pomegranates and papayas Mariano also liked to paint, or saucy heirs to the lush arabesque forms Matisse painted after his own encounter with the lavish, humid sensuality of Morocco.

Mariano continued to paint throughout most of his life in Cuba, where he held various posts in Fidel Castro's cultural bureaucracy. In the early 1960s, he served a one-year stint in Cuba's consul in India. There he painted an impressionistic, quasi-abstract portrait of a woman wearing a white sari. It's a work of fluttering colors and shapes that was part of an exhibit earlier this year in Monte Carlo, in a survey organized by the government of Monaco and Havana's Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes.

But it seems that for Mariano, the fluid accomplishments of the 1940s were not to be repeated with the same dynamic verve. There's a falling off, a simplification of his previous densely orchestrated compositions, and an occasional descent into sweet tropical clichés depicting well-endowed women and bulbous fruits.

Beauty at all costs seemed to be Mariano's watchword, and though he skirmished a bit with abstract forms, even unleashing them into funky boomerang curves, he never quite let go of his fascination with feathers and figures.

Elisa Turner is The Herald's art critic.

Free speech celebrated

Five South Floridians will be honored Sunday by the People for the American Way Foundation for safeguarding the right of free speech.

By Christine Armario, carmario@herald.com. Posted on Sat, Jun. 05, 2004.

A pair of Cuban exile librarians, a Coral Gables minister and an immigrant rights defender are among the South Floridians who will be honored by a national civil rights organization Sunday for defending the freedom of expression.

The third annual ''Celebrate Free Speech'' award presented by the Florida chapter of the People for the American Way Foundation will recognize the actions five South Floridians took under adverse conditions.

o Leonard Turkel, a retired contractor from Miami Beach who has long been active in civic issues, accompanied black friends into a ''whites only'' diner on Flagler Street in downtown Miami in the 1950s as an act of nonviolent protest.

o The Rev. Donna Schaper, senior pastor of the Coral Gables Congregational Church, opened the doors of church for debate during November's Free Trade Area of the Americas conference.

o Ramon Colas, a child psychologist, and Berta Mexidor, an economist, began a network of independent libraries in Cuba, even after being repeatedly detained by police.

o Anna Fink, co-director of Unite for Dignity in Miami, provided leadership training to empower local immigrants to defend their communities' interests.

''There are serious mistakes when one group can shut down other people's freedoms,'' said Turkel, 73. "All of us -- whether we agree or disagree -- need to be very cautious about protecting freedom of speech.''

Colas and Mexidor said they conceived the idea of starting an independent library in the province of Las Tunas after hearing Fidel Castro say that no books were prohibited in Cuba.

Soon, their neighbors were reading the works of Reinaldo Arenas, Guillermo Cabrera Infante and other dissidents in exile.

They were detained on several occasions and in 2001 came to the United States, where they filed for political asylum.

Since then, they have traveled throughout the world educating people about the lack of freedom of speech in Cuba.

''The prize will be more than anything a recognition of the independent librarians in Cuba,'' Colas said.

The Celebrate Free Speech award was started in 2002 by the Miami office of People for the American Way to promote free speech.

''Today people are talking to each other about issues of free speech,'' said Jorge Mursuli, director of the group's Florida office.

"Things will happen; people will disagree, [but] no matter how painful any of the things that happen to this community, relationships build.''

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