Passion over Cuba, Castro endures

Posted on Thu, Feb. 09, 2006

Passion over Cuba, Castro endures

Miami may be hip, but for Cuban exiles, there's still the Cold War to
fight and mixed messages from the Bush administration to decipher.
BY OSCAR CORRAL
ocorral@MiamiHerald.com

Two suspected agents for communist Cuba are taken down in Miami.

A local anti-Castro developer gets nabbed on weapons charges.

A Cuban exile militant sneaks into the United States and shakes the
American security system.

Welcome to 21st century Miami, trapped in the anachronistic geopolitics
of the Cold War. Osama who? Saddam what? Iraq where?

Here, the daily pathos of Cuba remains center stage to many -- just as
it was almost a half century ago.

Passion over Cuba may be aging in Miami -- certainly many of the younger
Cubans who arrive here prefer to leave politics behind -- but it is no
less urgent to thousands of older exiles. The hot topic on Spanish
language radio last week was whether Bush had betrayed the Cuban exile
community because he failed to mention Cuba in his State of the Union
address.

While younger U.S.-born Cuban Americans -- and more recent Cuban
immigrants -- are less virulent and more moderate, the viewpoint of
older, more conservative exiles still rules, political analyst and
Democratic pollster Sergio Bendixen said. ''Until Cuban exiles get their
country back and figure out a way to get rid of Castro, nothing else
will matter to them,'' Bendixen noted.

''It absolutely is a throwback,'' said Miami historian and Miami Dade
College professor Paul George, who leads guided tours through Miami and
Little Havana. ``Cuban exiles are still worried about the Castro issue,
and they hinge everything around that issue, the existence of Castro.
But the rest of the country has long forgotten that this Cold War period
ever happened.''

Well, not everyone. The Bush administration still gives Castro his due
with harsh Cold War-era rhetoric and toughened travel policies.
Hard-line Cuban-American voters who have twice delivered their votes for
Bush expect nothing less.

''Miami is as anachronistic and dinosaur-like as Fidel Castro, because
we are a response to him,'' said Miami filmmaker Joe Cardona, who has
chronicled generations of Cuban exiles in his films. ``And until that
issue is resolved, Miami Cubans will continue living in his world.''

Cuba took center stage in major South Florida cases from Immigration and
Customs Enforcement, the U.S. Coast Guard, FBI, U.S. Attorney's Office
and Florida International University -- just to name a few of the
institutions enmeshed in exile dynamics the past year.

LOT OF ACTIVITY

''There's a lot of activity,'' said Florida International University
professor Dario Moreno, who analyzes Cuban exile politics. ``The truth
is that the Cuban community is still very hard line and remains trapped
in the Cold War environment because Cuba is still trapped there, too.
Cuba is the issue that grabs the public's attention, the media's
attention, and the government's attention.''

With Castro still alive, and an American president who has vowed to do
all he can to bring democracy to Cuba, the tension sometimes seems to
boil over. Among the flash points:

• Cuban exile militant Luis Posada Carriles sneaked into the country and
asked for asylum. Considered by Castro to be a terrorist, but by many
exiles to be a freedom fighter, Posada remains detained in an
immigration facility in El Paso, Texas, awaiting word on if he will be
released.

• In November, the FBI arrested Posada's biggest financial supporter,
Santiago Alvarez, and Alvarez's employee, Osvaldo Mitat, on weapons
charges -- a move that irritated many exile leaders, who claimed that
the Bush administration was playing into Castro's hands.

• A month later, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice announced the
administration would again convene a Cabinet-level commission to revise
U.S. policy on Cuba by May.

• The cry against the controversial ''wet-foot, dry-foot'' Cuban
immigration policy reached a fever pitch after the Coast Guard
repatriated 15 migrants found on a piling on the old Seven Mile Bridge
in January. A Cuban exile activist, angry at the Bush administration,
launched a high-profile hunger strike and Cuban-American congressional
representatives demanded that the Bush administration review the policy.

• The same day the 15 migrants were repatriated, the U.S. Attorney's
Office and the FBI announced the arrests of a professor at Florida
International University, Carlos M. Alvarez, and his wife, Elsa Alvarez,
who also worked at FIU. They are accused of being unregistered covert
agents for Cuba. Their arrest was commended by Cuban exile activists,
who claim Miami is full of Cuban spies.

• On Jan. 20, the Treasury Department allowed the Cuban national
baseball team to play in the World Baseball Classic, a move strongly
criticized by Cuban-American congressional representatives.

• Three days later, the Treasury Department announced one of its biggest
crackdowns ever on illegal travel to Cuba, a move applauded by
Cuban-American leaders.

• And last week, the Treasury Department disrupted a meeting between
Cuban government officials and U.S. oil industry representatives in
Mexico City when Treasury called the Sheraton Hotel there and informed
executives that they could be sanctioned for violating the U.S. embargo
on Cuba. Sheraton evicted the Cubans, angering government officials in
Mexico and Cuba. ''More than ever you see the political hopscotching . .
. and insincerity [by] some of these local politicians in regards to
Cuba,'' Cardona said. ``It's getting a little tougher for them to be
consistent.''

POLITICS

Some Bush detractors smell political opportunity in Washington's
inconsistencies.

''Most people realize that this administration has done almost nothing
to perpetuate the views that many of the people held when they voted for
them on Cuba politics,'' said Joe Garcia, a consultant for the New
Democrat Network. ``I believe Cuba is about to become a focus again.
This is all stuff to gear up for the electoral cycle. The spy case was
an attempt to put up some points on the Republican side.''

Manuel Vasquez Portal, a former Cuban dissident journalist and poet now
living in Miami, has a different view than older exiles. ''I feel that
time is being wasted to litigate personal differences, while the
principal goal of democracy in Cuba has been lost at certain times,'' he
said.

Democratic pollster Bendixen said exiles by now have realized that the
federal government's attempts to squeeze the Castro government and help
bring democracy to Cuba have been fruitless, but that doesn't mean
they're ready to jump ship and register as Democrats.

''I still remember listening to Cuban radio here in the first years of
exile, and I can't tell a big difference between what La Cubanisima was
saying back then, and what Radio Mambi is saying today,'' Bendixen said.

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