By now, everyone in the community knows the story of Orestes Lorenzo Perez. Just over two weeks ago, the former Cuban Air Force major flew to a beach town outside Havana in a 31-year-old Cessna, picked up his wife and two sons and spirited them back to Florida. It wasn’t the first time Lorenzo had defied Cuban airspace: on March 20, 1991, he zoomed into Key West’s Naval Air Station in a Soviet-made MiG and promptly defected. Immediately, he set about trying to free his family, whom he characterized as a “hostage” of the Castro regime, and founded Parents for Freedom. Lorenzo met repeatedly with U.S. and U.N. officials, receiving plenty of sympathy but no assistance. So he took his mission into his own hands, accepting a $30,000 aging plane from a Cuban heiress and the help of two Mexican women who traveled to Havana to deliver coded instructions of the planned escape to his wife.
Calling his exploits “a triumph of love against evil, and truth against lies,” Lorenzo sent an electrifying political, as well as familial, message to the expatriate community. “I think that he is forming himself as a new breed of Cuban leader,” says Jorge Davila, who worked as a Havana journalist until 1982 and is now a columnist and editor for The Miami Herald’s Spanish edition, El Nuevo Herald. “He is young, comes from the ranks of the military, is clear in his principles, showing love for his family and his homeland-values that have gotten lost in Cuba.” By focusing on the family, instead of human rights or capitalism, Lorenzo is carving out a novel debate on Havana. “We have to form a new politics, rescuing our values, rescuing the family,” he told NEWSWEEK. “All that every Cuban has to do is to fight for his children.” Would Lorenzo, a veteran of the Angola war, consider a life in politics? “I have no aspirations,” he says. But he can’t resist denouncing Cuba’s continuing disintegration. “The point is to rescue a country that is drowning,” he says. “A totally alien culture was imposed: a country in which people danced Russian polkas, in which Eastern European laws were translated into Spanish.” If Lorenzo has his way, Cuba will once more be a place where the Maximum Leaders are parents, and the national dance is the danzon.
