Finally, on Wednesday, the nation watched the much-delayed reunion between Elian Gonzalez, the shipwrecked Cuban 6-year-old who is the subject of an international custody battle, and his two grandmothers. The atmosphere surrounding the meeting had all the flavor of a high-level diplomatic encounter between two warring states.
Because of the relentless media blitz, by now nearly every American knows the tale of the little Cuban boy whose mother drowned along with eight other people as they attempted to sail from the island to the United States. His grandmothers’ visit to the United States — which also made national news — was an effort to rally U.S. public opinion, lobby Congress and petition the U.S. Justice Department and the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) to enforce their decision that the child should be reunited with his father in Cuba.
The visit made national headlines, but nowhere did it monopolize public attention the way it did in Miami. Here the news is all Elian, all the time. It’s topic A in bars and in grocery stores. On Wednesday the local networks preempted their regularly scheduled programming to broadcast what they could of the grandmothers’ visit and the hoopla surrounding it.
The case is changing dynamics within the Cuban exile community, but also between the Cubans and Miami’s white and black residents, who have begun to take a rooting interest in the boy’s fate — but on the opposite side from most of their Cuban neighbors. The issue has plainly exacerbated tensions in what at least one historian has called an “ethnic cauldron.”
Of course, the grandmothers came to see Elian on their visit, as well as press their case with American authorities. But Lazaro Gonzalez, Elian’s great uncle and now his de facto guardian, would not agree to a private meeting in a neutral location. Gonzalez and his supporters, led by the Cuban American National Foundation (CANF), the leading anti-Castro organization in the United States, wanted the grandmothers to come to the Gonzalez’s Little Havana home for dinner and a visit with the child in the presence of Miami-based relatives.
The world watched the struggle unfold, the latest chapter in their legal, political and public-relations holy war to keep Elian in Miami. And some of the characters are well known here: Political consultant Armando Gutierrez, the key strategist on the team, is renowned for conducting some of the dirtiest campaigns in a city known for hardball politics. Among his clients: Rosa Rodriguez, the Miami-Dade Circuit Court judge who astonished legal experts across the country when she granted temporary custody to the Miami-based relatives and scheduled a March 6 hearing.
In the end, of course, thanks to INS pressure, Elian got to meet his grandmothers at the Miami Beach home of Sister Jeanne O’Laughlin, a Roman Catholic nun in the Dominican order and the president of Barry University, a private institution in Miami.
Sister Leonor Esnard, herself a Cuban-American who came to the United States unaccompanied by her parents in the early 1960s as part of the Pedro Pan program, witnessed the first encounter between the child and his grandmothers after more than two months of separation. “They were trembling, they hugged him repeatedly, they told him how glad they were to see him, they cried,” she told reporters.
O’Laughlin described the rumors and mutual mistrust that had to be overcome before the two-hour private meeting between Elian and his grandmothers could take place. “Fear was the greatest element” standing in the way of the meeting, she said. At one point it was discovered that prominent members of the CANF were present in the residence next door to the O’Laughlin house. They were asked to leave so the meeting could be conducted, and they complied, but later complained loudly on Cuban-oriented Spanish-language media. At another point, a cell phone belonging to one of the grandmothers rang. It was believed to be Elian’s father, Juan Miguel Gonzalez, trying to talk to the boy. The cell phone was confiscated.
The grandmothers later flew back to Washington without making a statement. But at Lazaro Gonzalez’s home, his 21-year-old daughter Marisleydis — who has assumed a maternal role toward Elian despite having met him only once before his voyage to Florida — was jubilant. “I feel he is more to this side than that side,” she said. Later Elian reportedly told a radio station, “Tomorrow they will make me a U.S. citizen.”
In a turnaround that exemplifies the heightened emotions of the situation, O’Laughlin said she feels Elián would be best off in the United States. She told reporters that prior to the meeting, she believed Elián should be with his father — but that what she had witnessed made her fearful that the Castro government was manipulating both the child and his grandmothers. “What I saw and felt really frightened me for the child,” she said. “When I look at the real fear, I say he would grow to greater freedom of manhood here.” She blamed both sides for the political manipulation and stressed her political neutrality. “I don’t represent pro-Castro, anti-Castro or INS.”
The story of Elian Gonzalez began as tragedy. It has degenerated into travesty. How that happened is a question that baffles many Americans, including many of the so-called Anglos and African-Americans who live among the estimated 800,000 persons of Cuban origin who make up the largest ethnic community in Miami’s Dade County.
A clear majority of Cuban Americans want Elian to stay in Miami. By a large margin, blacks and Anglos believe he should be returned to his father in Cuba, and almost unanimously reject such tactics as traffic slowdowns. Non-Cuban Hispanics are divided on both issues. Haitians are angry because while no effort is being spared to keep a Cuban boy in Miami, the INS once erroneously deported an American U.S. citizen of Haitian descent — who then died of AIDS after his condition deteriorated while awaiting a return to Miami.
“Why do they wave the Cuban flag if they want him to stay in the United States?” a “non-Hispanic white American,” in the local bureaucratic lingo, asked about the controversy. To understand, it helps to know about what the late Cuban-American writer and filmmaker Miguel Gonzalez-Pando called “Cuban exile country.” It’s a state of mind with a center: Miami. Here the exiles feel they have reconstructed a Cuba more real than the one 200 miles to the south warped beyond recognition by communism.
This ersatz Cuba functions with its own institutions and by its own rules and logic, within which what looks like blind intolerance by the rest of the world is seen as patriotism. In the “Cuban exile country,” an ersatz family who will raise a child as an anti-communist is better than a real family that will bring him up in the ways of Che and Fidel.
This nation in exile blends Cuban and American aspects; sometimes the result can be a curious concoction. In Miami, Elian Gonzalez is attending a private school called Lincoln-Marti, after the U.S. president and the Cuban national hero. It’s owned by Demetrio Perez, a fiercely anti-Castro exile who is a member of the local school board. In Perez’s school, children receive political indoctrination nearly as crass as in Cuba.
The battle for Elian now moves to Congress and the federal courts. In the end, if law and logic prevail, the child will be returned to his real family on the island. When it comes to Cuba, however, passion and politics have so often ruled during the last four decades that just about anything except a quick and sane solution is possible.
According to U.S. and international law, given plenty of evidence that Juan Miguel Gonzalez was a very involved parent and no evidence that he was in any way unfit, Elian’s return to Cuba should have been automatic. But he is too powerful a symbol. The CANF first printed a poster of Elian soon after his rescue, to use as propaganda against Fidel Castro when it was thought the Cuban leader might attend last year’s World Trade Organization meeting in Seattle. The boy’s very survival is depicted as a milagro, a miracle that proves the superiority of the exiles’ claim to him — and to Cuba — over Castro’s.
Of course the exiles have been dehumanized by their Cuban government adversaries, who have described them as “worms,” “scum” or the “Miami Mafia.” Still, their claim on Elian defies the awesome weight of law, logic and the parental bond. They have worked hard to expose Elian to the media, hoping the community and the country will bond with the adorable child and not want to let him go to a communist country. They want to show how well he is adapting, and how well he will live in the land of Disney. They’ve induced the child himself, who by now may be suffering from Stockholm syndrome, to say he wants to stay in the United States, even if that means being separated from his father, his four grandparents and his schoolmates.
But beyond their own community they are losing the battle of public opinion. Psychologically inclined Americans have come to describe it as “child abuse.” Outside of far-right Republican circles, they have failed to make the issue Fidel vs. freedom. Most Americans — no Castro dupes — instinctively value the rights of a father and four grandparents who had raised the child above those of a great uncle and his family who hardly knew the child two months ago.
But the Cuban exile country will not give up its claim. Normally, it would have no standing in the case, and in fact Attorney General Janet Reno said Judge Rosa Rodriguez’s ruling on the Miami family’s behalf had “no force or effect.” Normally, federal jurisdiction supersedes state jurisdiction in such immigration cases. But nothing is normal when it comes to this case, or to the tangled triangle fatally linking Cuban exiles, the U.S. government and the 41-year-old regime of Fidel Castro.
During President Bush’s Monday address in Miami, in which he offered modest policy alterations toward Cuba, his language was brimming with denunciations of Fidel Castro — including references to the Cuban leader as a “relic of the past” and a “tyrant” — tailor-made for an audience of fiercely anti-Castro exiles.
Bush has good reason to tell them what they want to hear: Cuban American voters were crucial in the razor-thin 2000 presidential balloting in Florida. Stung by the actions of the Clinton administration in the Elián González affair in 2000, more than 80 percent of Cuban Americans in Florida voted for Bush, according to exit polls, compared with the 62 percent of Cuban Americans who voted for Bob Dole in 1996. The swing represents tens of thousands of votes, bolstering the claim of some Cuban Americans that they won the presidency for Bush.
Monday’s event appealed directly to these voters. Gov. Jeb Bush, running for reelection in November, introduced his brother, the president, at the event, which had many of the trappings of a campaign rally, including a speech by Jeb in Spanish. The president later attended a $25,000 per couple fundraiser for the Republican Party at the home of Cuban American real estate developer Armando Codina, Jeb Bush’s former business partner. Ironically, President Bush’s Miami pep rally and his undying commitment to continuing a hard-line policy toward Cuba took place when support for such a policy is declining, not only with former President Jimmy Carter, who visited Havana last week, or the bipartisan Cuban Working Group, which consists of 40 members of Congress who last week called for easing sanctions, but with an emerging majority of Cuban Americans, as well.
A recent poll, for instance, showed a statistical dead heat among Cuban Americans on the issue of unrestricted travel to Cuba, even though the poll, commissioned by the Cuba Study Group, a loose association of a dozen wealthy Cuban Americans, probably skewed slightly conservative by excluding the responses of those Cuban Americans who said they were not interested in Cuba issues. (When asked why they weren’t interested, the most frequent answer was that they did not agree with exile politics.) And a poll conducted by Florida International University in 2000, which included Cuban Americans and a national sample of U.S. residents, showed 53 percent of Cuban Americans in Miami and 63 percent of all Americans nationwide supported unrestricted travel to Cuba. Support for the unrestricted trade of medicine and food was also substantially higher for both groups.
Evidence in the Cuban American community of a trend toward increased relations with Cuba also exists outside of polls. Last March, a group of prominent Cuban Americans hosted an anti-embargo conference at the posh Biltmore Hotel in Coral Gables that was attended by more than 300 people. Such a gathering would have been unthinkable in the climate of intimidation present in Miami just a few years ago. This time, Reps. William Delahunt, D-Mass., and Jeff Flake, R-Ariz., leaders in the 40-member congressional Cuba Working Group, addressed the crowd, while outside two dozen peaceful demonstrators failed to cause any disruption. The event, titled “The Time Is Now” (to revise Cuba policy), did prompt Reps. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen and Lincoln Diaz-Balart, hard-line Cuban American GOP Congress members from Miami, to call a press conference at an adjoining facility to denounce the event.
But even the Cuban American National Foundation (CANF), historically the most powerful hard-line group, is moderating its rhetoric while holding onto its support for the embargo. The Cuban Liberty Council, a group of ultra-hard-liners who broke with CANF over the new approach, continues to espouse hard-line policies and spew shrill rhetoric. But the group represents a declining sector of older exiles, and no longer the majority.
The trend toward moderation poses the question of why the Bush administration sticks to a failed and increasingly unpopular Cuba policy. The modest policy proposals Bush outlined include ending restrictions on humanitarian assistance by U.S. NGOs to Cuban civil society groups, working to restore direct mail service between the two countries, offering scholarships to the children of Cuban dissidents and modernizing Radio and TV Marti. There is not very much new in these policies, and few observers give them much chance of producing major changes in Cuba, where they are sure to be rejected.
But a good number of Cuban Americans still support the embargo, mostly those who’ve been here the longest and are vastly more entrenched politically and economically than more recent arrivals. They are more likely to be naturalized and registered to vote, with a much greater capacity to make political contributions. They may no longer be the majority of exiles, but they are the most important political demographic. As such, they pretend to speak for the community as a whole.
So in the immediate future, Bush’s veto power, along with the capacity of the GOP leadership of the House of Representatives to thwart the will of the majority of members through legislative maneuvers, equals little or no change in the status quo. But the increasing numbers of opponents to the embargo, even among Cuban Americans, won’t be able to be ignored much longer.
Now it is over. Elian Gonzalez returned to Cuba Wednesday after the U.S. Supreme Court declined to hear the appeal presented by the boy’s Miami relatives.
In the wake of “Hurricane Elian,” Miami is a city asunder. The divisions, evident on the surface in the silent duel of flags waving from cars and homes — here Cuban, there American, yonder both — are deep, complex, contradictory and often intimate.
Flags are not the only symbol of the struggle. At the height of local tension, after the Immigration and Naturalization Service removed the boy from his Miami relatives’ home in an April pre-dawn raid, critics of Miami’s Cuban-American leadership threw bunches of bananas at City Hall.
Since that incident, the banana has become the symbol of opposition to the status quo, and “banana republic” is the favorite epithet used by those who are fed up with the hard-line exiles’ clout in local government.
Is the Elian saga a turning point for the city, marking the beginning of the end of the exiles’ control of Miami politics? And does it also herald a softening of the U.S. hard-line policy toward Cuba, a policy exiles have done so much to maintain? It seems no accident that this same week, Congress will approve measures to allow U.S. agricultural sales to Cuba for the first time in 38 years. It’s the first significant break in the embargo and signals a major departure from the trend toward confrontation that characterized U.S.-Cuba relations five years ago.
It will be some time before we know the lasting impact of the Elian saga on Miami and the United States, but even now several things are clear. The Elian struggle has dramatically worsened ethnic tension in this multicultural city. The conflict pitted Cubans against Anglos, but also blacks against Cubans. African-American feeling grew so bitter that some blacks were willing to march with whites waving Confederate flags in the hastily organized “pro-American” demonstrations that drew several thousand protestors in the wake of the federal enforcement action to remove Elian from the Little Havana home.
Black attitudes, in turn, have hardened many Cuban-Americans’ feelings toward African-Americans, never very positive in the first place. Many Cubans see black involvement in the rallies — some of which had a xenophobic tinge — as meaning African-Americans have such rancor and envy toward Cubans they are willing even to consort with racists just to spite Miami’s newly-dominant ethnic group.
Virtually every racial and ethnic group in Miami is upset about the Elian drama, but many Cubans are feeling humiliated and besieged, and not just because of the repeated court defeats. The federal operation to retrieve Elian took place the very day the government in Cuba celebrated the 39th anniversary of the Bay of Pigs victory over exile invaders. For Cuban-Americans, the Bay of Pigs was a defining event, marking the end of hopes for an early return to the homeland, and giving rise to Cuban American allegiance to the GOP in the wake of President Kennedy’s perceived “betrayal.”
When, 39 years later to the day, a Democratic administration seized Elian, the exile community exploded. Hundreds flew the Cuban flag, while others flew the American flag upside down and a few hotheads even burned the Stars and Stripes. And then the long pent-up anger of many non-Cubans, black and white, boiled over, prompting pro-American demonstrations and fueling ethnic strife.
Many Cubans see the local black and white backlash as anti-Cuban racism and xenophobia. That element was not entirely absent, but it was more than that. Liberal whites and blacks who would not dream of supporting English Only laws or other anti-immigrant initiatives were outraged by the exile community’s hysteria. So they brought out the American flag and the bananas.
The “banana republic” label is laden with anti-Latin American connotations. It also doesn’t fit. Family members of Jorge Mas Santos, head of the Cuban American Foundation (CANF) — which bankrolled the fight to keep Elian in Miami — own controlling interests in telecommunications companies worth billions of dollars and listed on the New York Stock Exchange. CANF leaders are sophisticated about the workings of American capitalism and politics. That sophistication and clout, not bananas, is the secret of their success in plugging into the American political system and turning it to their own devices.
Miami’s Cuban-American community is more like Taiwan circa 1960 than the stereotypical banana republic. It’s a community of people displaced by a Marxist revolution. Here, economic success and professional expertise mixes with a fierce, anachronistic-sounding anti-Communism and authoritarian tendencies.
Ultimately, the Elian case may signal a turning point in U.S.-Cuban relations. The decision to allow agricultural sales is a huge step toward change. U.S.-Cuba relations worsened four years ago, with the downing of the “Brothers to the Rescue” airplanes in 1996, and the resulting approval of the Helms-Burton Act. In the ensuing years, business and farm lobbies began to actively work against economic sanctions, and U.S. public opinion seemed to turn away from support for diplomatic isolation and the embargo.
But as late as 1999, the hard-line lobby and the three Cuban-American members of Congress and their allies were able to turn back an effort to exempt food and medicine from the embargo. Have these forces been fatally wounded by their actions in the Elian fiasco? The action by the U.S. Congress to ease the embargo is an important indicator that may be the case.
One reason is that in the Elian saga, the iron triangle defined by the United States, Fidel Castro, and the exiles took on a new configuration. This time the governments of the United States and Cuba converged on a common position, leaving the exile community alone to fight a two-front battle. Even their Republican allies backed off when it became clear that there was no public support for citizenship for Elian Gonzalez or for hearings into the INS raid.
But is the new geometry lasting? Or can Cuban American conservatives make normalization as drawn out and excruciatingly difficult an affair as they made the resolution of the Elian saga?
In the Elian case, the hard-liners overreached so badly and looked so bad in the eyes of the U.S. public they gave their adversaries — the U.S. farm lobby, Cuban American moderates and other embargo opponents — the enhanced political clout needed to finally make a breakthrough. Even Sen. Jesse Helms, fierce anti-Castro stalwart, friend to Cuban Americans and sponsor of the Helms-Burton law toughening the embargo, voted to ease sanctions against the wishes of the Cuban-American lobby.
The story is different in Miami, where no changing of the guard can be expected, although there is a change in their tune. Some of the very people who helped fire tensions at the height of the controversy, including Miami-Dade mayor Alex Penelas, have been talking the language of dialogue and reconciliation ever since.
Yet the fruits of such efforts have been meager. For instance, top civic leaders met in the days following the INS raid to discuss scenarios in the event of Elian’s return to Cuba. But they were not able even to agree that all communities would accept a final court ruling, and allow the boy to leave without protest. But a split in the Cuban-American leadership has become increasingly evident since the Elian affair. Some leaders — most notably business executive Carlos Saladrigas and Pedro Freyre, head of the advocacy organization Facts About Cuban Exiles — are pushing a new, more moderate approach for the Cuban American community. They advocate focusing more on the post-Fidel future, and urge local leaders to draw a boundary between Miami governance and anti-Castro politics.
Calls for change have been rejected, however, by conservative Cuban American icons like the nonagenarian retired banker Luis Botifoll and by CANF. Instead, CANF has gone on the offensive, lambasting critics and launching a campaign of ads in the U.S. media exposing the government of Fidel Castro for human rights violations, and claiming that the Elian affair was not a defeat.
In reality, hard-line forces have been dealt three tough blows in quick succession. First, the Supreme Court struck down the state of Massachusetts’ sanctions against the government of Myanmar, invalidating Miami-Dade County’s own ultra hard-line Cuba policy. Next the Miami relatives lost their last chance to keep Elian in the U.S. when their appeal to the Supreme Court was rejected. Finally, Congress agreed to ease the embargo, striking a blow against the hard liners’ favorite policy, which they have fought tooth and nail to maintain and expand.
No community has been as touched by the Cuba debate as Miami. The Elian affair, like a seismic cataclysm, exposed deep social and cultural fault lines and brought to the surface long-suppressed resentments that, on many sides, seem to burn only hotter with time. Often, it is personal. In the wake of Elian, friendships were lost, affairs were ended and feuds flared: that is, wherever people did not opt for the more frequent recourse to a tense silence or to careful avoidance.
That toll was brought home to me with special force the day Elian was reunited with his father. On that night, I had a late dinner with my best friend and his girlfriend, both Cuban-Americans. I had just appeared on “Larry King Live,” debating CANF chairman Jorge Mas Santos, and my friends had watched.
Inevitably, our conversation centered on Elian and the events of that morning. Although both my friends thought father and son should be reunited — a decidedly minority view among Cuban-Americans — it soon became clear they felt very differently about the case. Based on instinct and scuttlebutt, the woman, who comes from a family of 1960s exiles with an upper-middle-class background in Cuba, took a dim view of Elian’s father, who she saw as a macho lowlife. But her boyfriend, my best friend — the child of dirt-poor Cuban immigrants who arrived in New York City in the 1940s — took personal offense, and countered with his own disparaging view of the Miami relatives. An argument ensued, turned bitter and ended in silence. The next day, my friend told me that his girlfriend had ended the relationship.
It’s a tale that could be recounted by a depressing number of people in Miami these sad and searing seven months. Yet let’s not write the city or the Cuban-Americans off just yet. My friends finally reasoned it out and decided to get back together. As Elian went home, there were no riots in the city, and the mood among militants was mostly quiet and resigned.
Maybe someday soon Miami will catch up with Taiwan, and Cuban-Americans will join the Koreans, North and South, who lately seem eager to settle their differences peacefully. I just hope I live to see and revel in that day.
All week long the radio news in Miami has blared the same report: “Negotiations between Justice Department officials and the Miami relatives of Elian Gonzalez are set to resume Thursday, April 6,” the reporters intone, over and over.
Now, with the arrival of Juan Miguel Gonzalez from Cuba to finally retrieve his son, the impasse of the past four months seems incredible: How has it come to pass that the U.S. Justice Department, the scourge of drug dealers and Bill Gates, has been forced to negotiate with the extended family of Elian Gonzalez, average working-class people who, according to a federal district judge and virtually every immigration and family-law expert in this country, don’t have a legal leg on which to stand?
The answer, of course, is the political strength of the Cuban-American community. But who are these people anyway, who make up four-tenths of 1 percent of the U.S. population, and how did they get such clout? Why do George W. Bush and Al Gore dance to their tune even against public opinion?
Why are they so obsessed with Fidel Castro that hatred of him and his system seems to outweigh all other values, even parental rights and, if you believe those who promise violence if Elian is removed from his uncle’s Miami home, the rule of law? And why do they use language and tactics, including stifling dissent, that strike Americans as undemocratic and invite comparison with Castro and his regime?
A key fact about the Cuban-American community, one that’s been obscured in this battle over a 6-year-old boy, is the fact that it’s a gerontocracy. The oldest, most traumatized, most bitter generation is still the largest and most powerful group of Cubans. Americans are used to thinking of the Latino population as young, but in this and many other ways, Cubans are closer to the white American norm than to Latino averages.
While the census found that 20.4 percent of Americans were 55 or older as of March 1999, among Cuban-Americans the figure is almost 31 percent. In contrast, only 9 percent of Americans of Mexican origin are over 55. Conversely, only 22 percent of Cuban-Americans are under 21, compared to 43.9 percent of Mexicans and 30.8 of the American population overall.
In Miami, there are still many tens of thousands who lived through the 1959 revolution and its sequel of dispossession of the wealthy and the middle class, executions and the taking of political prisoners. A social revolution, like a civil war, is a heart-rending, polarizing event that leaves deep scars and has a long afterlife. Americans are still arguing about the Confederate flag and the legacy of the Civil War more than 130 years later.
Not only do these revolution survivors outnumber younger Cubans, they often compel their deference, out of respect, affection, fear, loyalty, convenience or even indifference. And those who disagree usually find themselves at a distinct linguistic disadvantage debating older Cubans on those few Spanish-language radio stations that actually permit debate.
As a Cuban-American who has taken stands unpopular with the hard-line leadership — favoring the return of Elian to his father, for instance, and an end to the U.S. embargo — I know firsthand that there is a huge Cuban-American political closet, filled with people who agree with me but will never say so publicly. And I’ve experienced the bitterness of the generational divide in personal and painful ways. Recently, at a wake for the wife of my uncle, an ultraconservative Cuban-American about 15 years my senior (I am 48), I went to shake his hand. He refused point blank.
Stunned, I walked outside and told my cousin, a 40-year-old moderately conservative attorney. He tried to laugh it off at first, then was apologetic. When the conversation turned to politics, he told me privately that “the embargo doesn’t make sense” any more. But he had more important business to deal with and made it clear that he would not be speaking out on the issue any time soon.
But what explains the effectiveness of conservative Cuban-Americans in getting their way in the U.S. political system? Their clout is indisputable. They have forced the United States to maintain an eternal embargo against Cuba (in sharp contrast with our policies toward communist China policy). They’ve gotten the U.S. government to pay millions for television broadcasts to Cuba, TV Martm, that cannot be seen there because the Cuban government easily blocks the signal.
Indeed, this history helps explain why exile leaders embarked on what from the outside seems like a losing fight in the Elian case. If, year after year, I get the federal government to dish out big money for a television station with an audience of zero, surely I can get the U.S. government to give in, if our cause of freedom is made human in the persona of an adorable little boy.
Money is a big reason Cuban-Americans have succeeded in getting their agenda implemented. When Hispanic magazine identified the wealthiest Latinos in the United States, 40 percent turned out to be of Cuban origin. That’s 10 times what you would expect, since Cuban-Americans make up just 4 percent of the Hispanic population.
With an initial helping hand from the Reagan administration, Cuban-Americans have been translating financial status into political capital for two decades through the Cuban American National Foundation, a powerful lobby. Campaign contributions by the Cuban elite are complemented by the hundreds of thousands of votes of other Cubans concentrated in Florida, a swing state with the fourth largest number of electoral votes in the nation.
So politicians pander. The pandering reached new heights in the last week, when Miami-Dade Mayor Alex Penelas, a moderate Democrat, suggested his police force wouldn’t help the federal government transfer custody of Elian, and blamed President Clinton and Attorney General Janet Reno, in advance, for any violence by Castro’s enemies. Then Vice President Al Gore broke with Clinton and Reno, insisting the boy and his father should be given residency status and allowed to stay in the United States, a stance the New York Times called “brazen.”
These moves are a little surprising, since Republicans, not Democrats have typically been the Cubans’ best allies. (But there have been cracks in the GOP alliance, with Rep. Steve Largent, R-Okla., recently coming out for returning Elian to his father on the basis of parental rights.) But Democrats are trying to make headway with the exiles, noticing a growing number of Democrats and swing voters in the community, and encouraged by the knowledge that Clinton did considerably better among Cuban-Americans than previous Democratic presidential candidates, especially against Bob Dole in 1996. Many Cubans turned away from Dole because the Republican party was in the midst of anti-immigrant crusade, Dole had little charisma and he had no ties with the community.
But Gore may be pandering in vain. George W. Bush is simpatico with Latinos, and has deep ties through his brother Jeb, the Florida governor who for many years lived in Miami and speaks good Spanish. Plus, the Republican Party is avoiding xenophobia for the moment. Bush will do fabulously among most Cuban-Americans, while the vice president has now managed to upset Cuban-American liberals. Polls show 20-25 percent of Cubans in Miami oppose the embargo. These are the people most likely to vote Democratic and favor reuniting Elian with his father.
The end of the Elian saga is still uncertain, although the arrival of his father has tilted the momentum toward returning the boy to Cuba. Meanwhile, what is certain is that ethnic tensions in Miami have escalated.
Some Miamians have resented the fact that Cubans are an assertive people who never bought into the notion that as Latino newcomers they should submit to the dominance of Anglo natives. Ironically, it’s the same Cuban character trait Fidel Castro has displayed toward the United States for more than four decades. But now, many natives in Miami are feeling that Cubans, backed by a local power structure increasingly under their control, expect Cuban dominance and native submission. Penelas’ actions exacerbated those feelings, and could lead to an anti-Cuban backlash among Miami’s whites and blacks.
In the end, the Elian fight could be the last hurrah for old-guard Cubans, whose power is waning in the face of a new generation. If so, their agenda, including the embargo, will lose political support, too. But the demise of the hard-liners has been predicted before, yet the cold warriors always manage to survive — in Miami as well as in Havana.
