Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, August 28, 1994 TAG: 9410120002
SECTION: HORIZON PAGE: D1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: BARRY BEARAK/LOS ANGELES TIMES
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
\ MIAMI is Fidel Castro's communist revolution turned inside out, the capital of a Cuban diaspora that has managed to turn a dowdy, one-season tourist town into a U.S. gateway for Latin American profit-making.
Miami and Havana stare at each other across the Florida Straits - Cubans here, Cubans there - one heart with two opposing brains. As if in some bizarre time warp, the Cold War lives on in the moist, subtropical air.
Rarely has this been truer than recently. Castro has once again opened the exits to his disenchanted, allowing thousands to flee the island in makeshift vessels. Some of the tiny crafts are no more than a wooden plank atop two inner tubes strung together with twine. The impromptu sailors aboard them have come to be called ``balseros,'' or rafters.
Their haphazard crossing presents too chaotic an exodus for America's orderly immigration policy. This is very much as Castro wants it. For a generation, the United States has tried to choke his revolution with a trade embargo. He owes Uncle Sam no favors.
In the resulting havoc, President Clinton has issued an extraordinary decree. Arriving Cubans no longer will enjoy the special status that long has given them automatic asylum.
Clinton's decision is a source of trauma and confusion for the 560,000 Cuban Americans in Miami, so ready to welcome their freedom-seeking brethren, so cautious about the tricks of a wily nemesis that many here mythologize.
``Wait and see, Castro will outsmart Clinton,'' said Rafael Penalver, a Miami attorney and Cuban activist. ``This has all been a Castro show designed to get Clinton to the negotiating table and toss Fidel a lifeline.
``Castro will announce some meaningless elections. It will tempt Clinton with a chance to look tough and claim a victory, as if he stopped the exodus and led Cuba down the path to democracy.''
There's no evidence to support such a theory, but this grand theme of a sly, all-powerful Fidel recurs here always, constant as the palm fronds and the palmetto bugs. Castro, the evil genius. Castro, history's great survivor.
It is presumed that U.S. presidents are no match for him. The inexperienced John F. Kennedy is still blamed for failing to support a refugee brigade with air power during the Bay of Pigs invasion in 1961. For a time, Ronald Reagan was singularly thought to be Fidel's equal. Cubans here called him ``El Machaso'' - the great macho. But Reagan came and went and Castro remained.
So what is crafty Fidel up to this time, with the balseros? Cubans in Miami do not want a repeat of 1980. Back then, Castro opened the Mariel harbor. Miami's exiles rushed over there in boats, ferrying some 125,000 new refugees away in a ragtag armada of skiffs, racing sloops, sailboats and shrimpers.
In the simplicity of that exultant spring, the armada was called ``the freedom flotilla.'' In a flurry of affection, the refugees were dubbed the Marielitos.
But, slowly, Castro's trick became apparent. Along with the poor, huddled masses he had sent a few thousand criminals. The poor needed schools, shelter and medical care. The criminals required guns, drugs and victims.
Miami's earlier Cubans had come to pride themselves on their up-by-the-bootstraps prosperity. They had been model citizens. Suddenly, with the Marielitos, Miami was the host city to an en masse Cuban prison break.
``The people from Mariel were also generally darker-skinned and not so well-dressed and not so well-educated,'' said Arturo Villar, who does market studies, specializing in Cuba. ``There was a negative reaction.''
By the nose-counting of pollsters, the majority of Miami residents agree with Clinton's new Cuban refugee policy. It has the support of city and state officials, as well as the benediction of the Cuban-American National Foundation, a powerful lobbying group whose chairman, Jorge Mas Canosa, has commended himself as a fitting successor to Fidel.
Nevertheless, nearly all Cubans blanch at the idea of fugitives from Castro being held behind barbed wire in U.S. custody.
``I'll tell you this,'' said Manuel Coll, at age 60 a pot-bellied, overheated man. ``If Clinton gets rid of Castro, I guarantee you that Miami will turn American again. We Cubans will all go back.''
Actually, surveys show that only 5 percent to 10 percent would return for good. Cuban roots have sunk deep in Miami. A generation has grown up with memories of Super Bowls and Bruce Springsteen and suburban malls.
In the old days, Havana had been like Miami's older half-brother, a place of rumbas and rum, gambling and sin, where a guy like Sky Masterson could bring a doll for a hot weekend.
Now, Havana is austere, hungry, wanting: a pitiable, woebegone relative. Miami is flush and glamorous, with foreign tourists poking their toes in the ocean and fashion models posing under the street lamps.
Latinos are in the majority in Miami, with the percentage going up. Slightly more than half of the nation's Cuban Americans live in greater Miami, according to Thomas Boswell, a geographer at the University of Miami. Cuban Americans make up 39 percent of the city's population, according to the 1990 census.
Other Latinos flock here as well. There are 74,000 Nicaraguans, 69,000 Puerto Ricans, 54,000 Colombians, 23,000 Dominicans, 23,000 Mexicans. Of late, these other groups have been arriving the fastest. In 1970, 83 percent of Dade County's Latino population was Cuban; in 1990, it was 59 percent.
But it is the Cuban Americans who wield the power, in business and culture and politics. They have three representatives in Congress.
Well-established now, their community has had time to mature. A younger generation is not as scarred by exile, as torn between worlds.
Extremism in the defense of ``libertad'' is now a vice. Moderation has begun to emerge. It is even possible to urge negotiations with Castro without fear of violent reprisal.
``There are so few communist countries left, and the U.S. has come to terms with the others, why not Cuba?'' said Maria Christina Herrera, an outspoken college professor living in Miami.
Six years ago, her home was bombed after she made similar statements. Such intolerance was once the practice. In 1976, a car bomb blew off the legs of popular radio newscaster Emilio Milian. He had dared to criticize anti-Castro terrorist bombings that had swept the city.
In 1979, and again in 1982, bombs blasted through the walls of a cigar factory owned by Orlando Padron, who had earlier visited Cuba to negotiate the release of political prisoners. The cigar maker was photographed handing a stogie to Castro.
Such memories seem somehow distant now, from some blurry time when communism was fully potent and red predators appeared to be nibbling at the globe.
There are still limits, however. And there always will be as long as Castro stays in power. In April, Miami lawyer Magda Montiel Davis went to Havana, attending a three-day conference called ``Emigration and the Nation. On a widely-circulated videotape, she is shown at a reception greeting Castro with a kiss on the cheek.
Afterward, back in Miami, her life was threatened. Crowds gathered outside her home in protest. Six secretaries at her firm - all Latinas - quit in protest.
Some things remain unforgivable, like kissing that demon Fidel, the face that launched a thousand rafts.
by CNB