Events in Cuba – the refugee exodus, the rioting in Havana last month – are shattering the myth of Castro’s charismatic control. But these same events are also erod-ing the myth of monolithic unity among Dade County’s Cuban-American population, now some 600,000 strong. Years of waiting have dulled the counterrevolutionary edge. Despite the rhetorical hard line, and despite the fact that the vast majority of Miami Cubans still hope Castro will be forced out, fully 70 percent say they will never return to Cuba to live. The exile generation – those who fled Cuba in the ’60s and fought the covert war against Castro – is getting older. The second and third generations, broadly prosperous and gradually assimilating, are hyphenated Americans now.
Cuban-Americans are visible and rising in every sector of the South Florida economy and in all professions. They dominate the county’s two largest cities, Miami and Hialeah, but there is no Cuban ghetto: Cubans live all across Dade County and as far north as West Palm Beach. They have elected two Cuban-Americans to Congress and numerous local officials, and their habit of voting en bloc – as Republicans – has antagonized other ethnic groups. All in all, the Cuban presence is pervasive and powerful. But the thousands of new refugees who arrive every year are changing the Cuban community’s traditional ideological mix. “We don’t have any idea what “politics’ is,” says Luis Castillo, 31, who fled Cuba three years ago. “Over there, you start talking about politics and people curse you out. A young Cuban’s ambition is to have a car, food and clothes. He’s not interested in anything else.”
So the cold war ends at Kmart – and for hard-liners in Miami’s Cuban community, in a last-ditch struggle to keep Bill Clinton from cutting a deal with Castro. Jorge Mas Canosa, head of the Cuban American National Foundation, publicly praises Clinton for sending the refugees to Guantanamo. Like other conservatives, Mas Canosa believes that Castro’s decision to allow the rafters to leave has two cynical motives – to reduce discontent over Cuba’s desperate economic situation and to force Washington to lift the U.S. economic embargo. Hard-liners oppose any concession, and many say that blocking a larger exodus is the surest way, short of U.S. military action, to bring about Castro’s downfall.
But the human plight of the island population is leading many Miami Cubans to disagree openly with leaders like Mas Canosa. For many, the sticking point is the Clinton administration’s recent decision to halt what are known as “remittances” to Cuba. Remittances are cash transfers that allow many Cuban families to buy food and other products in government-owned “dollar-stores.” Those with relatives still on the island, like Jorge Toledo, 32, say they will defy the ban. “I’m not going to let my family die of hunger,” Toledo said. “If the changes were really going to topple Fidel from power, I’d support them. But that’s not going to happen, especially without a blockade.
“We are divided,” he continued. “No one elected Mas Canosa to speak for the community – he just wants to be president of Cuba. A blockade only means conditions are worse for people and the politicians stay where they are. Look at Haiti.”
Signs of this political ferment are everywhere. In a trendy cafe on South Miami Beach last week, two Cuban intellectuals amiably debated the issue that is galvanizing the city – what to do about the balseros. “As a Cuban-American, I don’t feel that America should be home for everyone,” said filmmaker Rafael Fernando Oller, 30.
“How can anybody turn away people coming here for freedom?” said his friend Roberto Montes, 45, a painter. “I came here at 13 – how can I say no?”
“America has no right to say Cubans are political refugees and Haitians are economic refugees,” Oller replied. “We have to be consistent.”
These political disagreements may reflect another tension in Cuban Miami – the sharp differences in social background between recent refugees and those who came to America in the 1960s, during the first great wave of Cuban emigration. First-wave refugees tended to be educated professionals and businessmen – the heart of prerevolutionary Cuba’s middle class. Arriving with little or no money, and sometimes with nothing more than the clothes on their backs, these emigres worked for years to achieve their present prosperity.
But later refugees, including the 125,000 or so Cubans who descended on Miami during the 1980 Mariel boatlift, have tended to be working-class, less educated people. The disparity has led to obvious class antagonisms that first surfaced during the Mariel boatlift and are surfacing again today. Some of the balseros “don’t realize that when [you] come to the United States . . . you have to work really, really hard to be successful,” said advertising saleswoman Carol Falla, 26. Falla, whose father fought at the Bay of Pigs, admitted that the possibility of renewed immigration from Cuba poses a quandary for her. “I believe they should be allowed in. [But] there’s another part of me that says, “Why do we even care? Why is Castro our problem?’ " Florida, she said, already has too many “dirtbags,” and if the balseros are eventually admitted, she said, “I just don’t think they should come to Miami.”
The real subject of the Cuban community’s current debate, then, is everything – the future of exile politics, the nature of nationality and, ultimately, who the Cuban-Americans really are. As Montes put it, “When I’m in the United States, I feel Cuban. But when I’m outside the country, I’m American.” The insular world of Miami’s Cubans is changing – as immigrant cultures inevitably do.
PHOTOS: New questions for the exile community: Cubans celebrate a patriotic holiday in downtown Miami, prominent business leaders gather at the American Club for lunch and politics, weekend warriors in a volunteer paramilitary group train for the invasion they hope will someday liberate the island.
