Salon.com > Max J. Castro

Fevered rhetoric

Tue, 21 May 2002 19:36:00 +0000

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.

After Hurricane Elian

Wed, 28 Jun 2000 23:20:00 +0000

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.

Grumpy old men

Thu, 06 Apr 2000 08:00:00 +0000

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?

What went wrong?

Thu, 10 Feb 2000 17:00:00 +0000

George W. Bush's younger brother Jeb was on a roll. After
resoundingly defeating Democrat Buddy McKay in November 1998 to
become the governor of Florida, he had been enjoying a honeymoon
through 1999. Working with Republican majorities in the state's
House and Senate, a luxury not afforded a Florida governor since
Reconstruction, Bush had been able to pass much of his agenda,
including a controversial school voucher program.

Maybe most remarkably, Bush was putting together a multiracial
coalition rare among Republicans. Fluent in Spanish and married
to a native of Mexico, he has always enjoyed strong support among
the mostly conservative Cuban-American community in South
Florida. Lately his appeal to other Hispanics across the state
appeared to be increasing as well. And, in part as a result of
infighting among Democrats, Bush even had managed to pick up some
black support.

Milagro in Miami?

Fri, 28 Jan 2000 17:00:00 +0000

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.