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By Mireya Navarro
New York Times, February 11, 1999
MIAMI -- In a classroom of newly arrived Cubans, Alex Alvarez, a Cuban
transplant himself, wasted no time recently scaring his students straight. "Welcome
to the capitalist system," he said. "Each one of you is responsible
for the amount of money you have in your pocket. The government is not
responsible for whether you eat or whether you're poor or rich. The government
doesn't guarantee you a job or a house.
"You've come to a rich and powerful country, but it is up to you
whether or not you continue living like you did in Cuba."
Such warnings were not necessary 40 years ago, when Cubans fleeing Fidel
Castro settled down here to await -- some to plot -- his downfall. They came
from a capitalist system, with enough education and the necessary ambition to
fulfill the American dream. But Castro has lasted so long that Miami now
reflects different Cubas.
The people from today's Cuba, the children of the revolution, include those
filling out job applications in Alvarez's class at the Training and Employment
Council of South Florida, where he admonishes them, "Put down 'High School,
Havana, Cuba.' Do not write 'Secundaria Ho Chi Minh.' "
The people from an earlier Cuba and their children have grown into a Miami
Who's Who. The mayors of the city and county of Miami, the county police chief
and the county state attorney are all Cuban-born or of Cuban descent. So are the
president of the largest bank, the owner of the largest real estate developer,
the managing partner of the largest law firm, nearly half of the county's
27-member delegation in the state Legislature and two of its six members of
Congress.
About the only accomplishment Cuban-Americans cannot claim is regaining
their country.
"There's an irony and pathos about the situation," a University of
Miami sociologist and expert on Cuban affairs, Max Castro, said. "They have
succeeded as immigrants and failed as exiles."
That success and failure is etched on Miami, the main repository of Cuban
dreams and dissent in the United States, where the news one day can be about the
welcoming of a Cuban-American company's shares to the New York Stock Exchange
and the next day about the arrest of four aging exiles embarking on a mission to
assassinate Castro.
But immigration over the decades has made Miami so distinctly Cuban that the
cultural clash is no longer between Cubans and Americans as much as between
different waves of Cuban immigrants.
With each batch of immigrants who win the annual visa lottery and with each
smuggled boatload of Cubans that land almost daily in South Florida, Cuban Miami
becomes less cohesive, encompassing a people who differ in social class, race,
generation and politics, and who increasingly come from different worlds.
The first and latest waves of Cubans, particularly, said a sociologist at
the University of Michigan, Silvia Pedraza, "live side by side but remain
aloof from one another."
Until recently the federal government had an open door policy for Cuban
immigrants, welcoming them as victims of communism. They still get special
treatment. Each year, 20,000 Cubans are granted visas by lot. Many of those who
make it here illegally are allowed to stay. Unlike many other immigrants, Cubans
meeting certain criteria are also eligible for government acculturation classes
and welfare benefits.
Immigrants from Cuba still count on welcoming relatives like Efrain Veiga,
who left Cuba as a child in 1962 and now, at 47, is the successful owner of
Yuca, a restaurant in Miami Beach. Veiga has visited Cuba twice and regularly
sends money to relatives there.
But even Veiga was startled by his latest experience with a cousin, whom he
had helped leave the island, put up in his home here and given a job in his
restaurant.
Veiga said he was surprised when his cousin balked at working weekends. The
restaurant owner was outright shocked, he said, when one of his waiters showed
up for work one day wearing a pair of expensive shoes he had given his cousin.
"Where did you get those shoes?" Veiga asked.
"Your cousin sold them to me," the waiter replied.
Veiga has hired other newcomers from Cuba and found many of them also stuck
in the day-to-day survival mode of modern Cuba, where trading shoes for dollars
could mean food on the table.
"Their lifestyle and way of thinking are different," Veiga said. "Deep
down they feel we owe them something, that we've had it better."
The shock is mutual. Students in Alvarez's class said one of their biggest
surprises in the United States was how hard people work. Another is how "Americanized"
their compatriots have become, they say.
"People are so materialistic," said Olga Rodriguez, 40, who came
legally last year with a 22-year-old son and 15-year-old daughter. "It's
like they have the dollar sign on their forehead. It hasn't happened to me yet.
I offer rides to classmates in language school even if I have to go out of my
way."
Eduardo Marquez, 30, arrived in the United States after a year in refugee
camps in Panama and Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. Only one of several distant relatives
offered to put him up when he finally got here in 1995, and then only for two
weeks. He said no thanks.
"They think we all steal," he said.
Marquez, a painter and sculptor who sold his art on the streets of Havana,
said his relatives had also painted too rosy a picture of life here. "I
thought that this was a wonderland, that you'd kick a rock and money would fall
out," he said. Instead, he has bounced from job to job and now works as a
busboy in a Boca Raton beach club while struggling to start a pest control
business.
Marquez does not regret leaving Cuba, and if the experience of most of those
who came before him is any guide, he, too, will make it. Cuba, however, still
has the pull of the 7-year-old daughter and a brother. He calls them both, sends
clothes when he can and plans to visit them once he becomes an American citizen,
he said.
"I'm not political, but from a human standpoint, they're killing of
hunger the people, not Fidel," he said, explaining why he opposed the
American trade embargo of Cuba. "People here think that in Cuba a group
could get organized to take Fidel out. That's really easy to say with a full
stomach."
It is true that many older exiles have lost touch, living off memories that
may or may not be accurate. But full stomachs have not tempered the craving for
their homeland of those who settled here in the 1960s, fleeing the
radicalization of the island and fearing political persecution and Communist
indoctrination of their children. They have recreated a pre-revolution Cuba
here, renaming streets after Cuban martyrs, reactivating Cuban social clubs,
trade organizations and businesses, filling supermarket shelves with "Cubano"
versions of coffee, cheese and bread.
In this parallel Cuban universe, Jose Lopez-Silvero, 78, and Alfredo Blanco,
80, president and vice president of the Sugar Producers of Cuba Inc., which
represents those whose companies were nationalized by the Castro regime, can say
exactly how much their former sugar mills are producing today, how much the
mills' workers earn. They have not seen Cuba since they left in 1960, but their
information is all first-hand, gleaned from recent arrivals and letters from
Cuba. Their ties, while no longer familial, remain emotional.
The sugar producers want to recover their nationalized properties, which had
been with some families for generations and which they regard as stolen. Their
group also has a plan for restoring the sugar industry to its past glory in "post-Communist
Cuba," one of many reconstruction plans hatched all over Miami for the
moment Cuba gains its "freedom," as if Castro's four-decade rule has
been just a temporary setback, a bad dream.
In their long exile, Blanco, still a sugar trader and sugar company
executive, and Lopez-Silvero, a retired corporate legal consultant, have
supported the 37-year-old American embargo. They blame its failure to induce
democratic change in Cuba on past Soviet subsidies and what they deem lax
enforcement of its toughest provisions.
They have seen change come close -- before the Bay of Pigs invasion failed,
after the Berlin wall fell -- only to be let down. Now, they say, it is only a
matter of time.
"Castro has to die some day," said Blanco, who is eight years
older than the ruler.
Many of the early immigrants' children, however, are not waiting to get a
first-hand taste of Cuba. Fed by their parents' nostalgia, aided by contacts
allowed with Cuba, driven more by curiosity than patriotism, they help fill
clubs that feature Cuban bands from the island and the charter flights to Havana
that leave several times a week from Miami International Airport.
Richard Blanco, 30, a civil engineer born in Madrid to Cuban exiles and
raised in Miami, visited Cuba in 1994 for the first time. He said the country
did not deviate much from the descriptions he had heard growing up, "except
for the poverty," and he felt totally at ease. Last year he published a
book of poems that laid out some of the feelings of his generation.
"For years they have come for you, awkward-size envelopes labeled 'Por
Avion,' " reads one poem. "Monthly, you would peel eggshell pages, the
white onionskin paper telling details: Kiki's first steps, your mother's death,
dates approximated by the postmarks. Sometimes with pictures: mute black and
whites, poor photos of poor cousins I would handle looking for my resemblance in
the foreign image of an ear, an eyebrow, or a nose."
While Miami's Cuban population evolves with American-born generations and
newcomers, other demographic forces at work are changing the face of Hispanic
Miami.
Cubans are still the single largest Latin American group, making up about 60
percent of the total Hispanic population, which accounts for more than half of
Miami-Dade County's population. But while the Cuban influx was accompanied by
the flight of local whites, it coincided with the arrival of other Hispanic
immigrants.
The Latin Americanization of Miami is slowly chipping away at the dominant
Cuban identity. In Little Havana, storefronts advertise Salvadoran corn pancakes
and waitresses hail from Honduras and Peru; on the radio, only one of three
stations continue its Cuba-oriented talk and the area's highest-rated
Spanish-language station is Colombian.
But if the tone is less virulent and the voices more diverse, prompting
moderate and liberal Cuban-Americans to come out in the open, Miami's political
discourse and much of the media coverage is still largely defined by hard-edge
conservatism. At times the city has the feel of a bubble suspended in time,
where issues are debated as if Castro had just taken over, where "communist"
is still the ultimate insult.
Polls have shown that a majority of Cubans here oppose even beginning a
political dialogue with the Cuban government while Castro remains in power, a
position zealously guarded by Cuban-Americans whose influence in Washington was
personified by the founder of the Cuban American National Foundation, the late
Jorge Mas Canosa, a man whom presidents consulted on policy toward Cuba.
That unwavering stance, coupled with an image of political intolerance and
violent episodes of right-wing extremism, has won the exiles little
international sympathy. Castro, some political experts say, has proved far more
shrewd at public relations than his opponents.
"We're seen as a narrow-minded," Castro, the University of Miami
sociologist, said. "The one political success has been to turn U.S. policy
in a hard-line direction, and that hasn't worked because it has the negative
connotation that it hurts Cuban people."
Cuban-Americans like Bill Teck, editor of the magazine "Generation N,"
a term applied to bicultural Hispanics members of Generation X, said his readers
and employees differ on Cuba policy issues but share a frustration that so many
see Cuba through a romantic prism, blind to its political prisoners, its lack of
democratic elections, its human rights violations.
"What we talk about is the failure of the cause of a free Cuba to
permeate the pop culture," said Teck, who was born here to an American
father and a Cuban mother.
But among the younger generations, the conservative message has become less
strident.
Alex Penelas, the Miami-born, 37-year-old mayor of Miami-Dade County and an
ambitious politician many here expect to someday run for president, has
inherited the conservatism of his parents. His father narrowly escaped a death
sentence for plotting against Castro in 1960, he said; Penelas never met his
paternal grandfather, who died in Cuba, and he blames Castro.
"I'm not convinced of this generational gap people talk about,"
said the mayor, who is fluent in both English and Spanish.
Unlike many of his elders, however, Penela has bicultural sensibilities. He
said he would not have snubbed Nelson Mandela for his friendship with Castro, as
Miami's Cuban leadership did when the South African leader visited here in 1990.
The incident, which included the withdrawal of an official welcoming
proclamation, prompted a three-year black tourism boycott of Miami-Dade County
and worsened feelings of alienation among blacks here.
"I would have met him, given him the proclamation and used the
opportunity" to give Mandela his opinion of Castro, he said.
And although he has lobbied for traditional Cuban-American causes like the
embargo, he has also reached out to black constituents, championed gay rights
and taken up the concerns of the numerous ethnic groups who now call Miami home.
Cuba still beckons, however. Penelas envisions "migration challenges"
from the island when the Communist Party loosens its grip on the island, as
Cubans here expect after Castro dies. But he also sees an economic bonanza for
Miami in trade and tourism if the embargo is lifted.
He also expects to play some role in Cuba's transition to democracy, plans
that are shared by many other Cuban-Americans and that some predict will create
new conflict as a post-Castro Cuba is reshaped. But like most Cuban-Americans,
naturalized or native born, he would stay put in Miami.
Fewer than 30 percent of the about 600,000 Cuban-Americans here would move
to the island, polls show. This is where more than half of all Cubans in the
United States have chosen to live, where the old have doctors, pensions and
offspring and where the young find opportunity and their own roots.
Miami, after all, is home.
Copyright 1999 The New York Times Company |