Cuban Americans' attitudes shift

"I don't think of the people there as pawns for us to play with," Yera, 32, said in Spanish as his eyes welled with tears. "They include my parents. They include my sister. I truly feel for them. I don't want to hurt the Cuban government if it's going to hurt them."

Even before Castro resigned as president last week after nearly half a century of dictatorial rule, a slow but sweeping shift in Cuban American attitudes was already evident here -- one with profound ramifications for U.S.-Cuba relations.

Many Cuban Americans are growing weary of the U.S. government's attempts to isolate Cuba, a hard-line stance that militant Cuban exiles have largely dictated for the last four decades, and has yet to yield any real changes there.

Instead, Cuban Americans increasingly favor a post-Cold War policy that tries to foment democracy by freeing up travel to the island and defrosting diplomatic relations with its leaders.

"Why are we pursuing a policy with Cuba that has not worked anywhere in the world?" said Carlos A. Saladrigas, a prominent Miami businessman. He co-founded an organization called the Cuba Study Group that's trying to convince Washington that a "silent majority" of Cuban Americans favor a more moderate path.

Florida International University, which has been polling Cuban American attitudes here since 1991, found last year that nearly two-thirds want a dialogue with the Cuban government, compared with 40% when the poll started 16 years ago. More than 55% supported unrestricted travel to Cuba.

Though most Cuban Americans still back the U.S. economic embargo of Cuba, support is steadily shrinking. The university survey found that 57.5% wanted to continue the embargo, the lowest number since the poll began.

The changing views are playing out in congressional contests in South Florida, where two Cuban American Democrats are challenging the Republican Diaz-Balart brothers, scions of a powerful and strongly anti-Castro exile family, who have helped craft U.S. Cuba policy for years.

The changes were also apparent in last week's Democratic presidential debate, where Sen. Barack Obama said he would meet Castro's successor as president, his brother Raul, "without preconditions." His pledge, which was quickly criticized by GOP front-runner Sen. John McCain, raised eyebrows in Miami, where it would have been political suicide a decade ago.

The reason for the shift is simple, experts say: These are not the Miami Cubans of yesteryear.

The political exiles who left Cuba after Castro's revolution triumphed in 1959 -- bringing with them a boundless hatred for the dictator that was stoked by painful memories of confiscated homes and slain relatives -- are dying off. They now make up less than 10% of South Florida's 800,000 residents of Cuban descent.

About 125,000 Cuban refugees sailed to Florida in 1980 after an economically strapped Cuban government opened its borders, triggering the Mariel boatlift. An additional 250,000 have come with legal visas since 1994, when another rafters' crisis spurred Washington and Havana to sign an orderly-migration accord.

Newer arrivals largely left Cuba for economic rather than political reasons, and still have friends and family there. Most deeply resent a 2004 tightening of sanctions that limits their Cuba visits to once every three years without exception.

Yera said he grew up as a peasant in central Cuba -- his family had no electricity, and cooked meals with firewood -- before moving to the city of Santa Clara. At a hotel there he came to know foreign tourists who changed his outlook forever.

"From childhood I was raised to think the U.S. was the enemy," he said. "But I began to see there was another world out there, and after that they could not hold me back."

Yera divorced the German woman and is now married to an artist named Daymis, a recent Cuban immigrant like him.

He recently sold his first business, a gas station, and used the profits to buy his wife a small art gallery, as well as to purchase his restaurant, Ay Mama Ines, which is named for a mythical Afro-Cuban free spirit with an ever-present stogie and coffee.

But his parents, Carlys and Rafael, are stuck in Cuba along with his sister, Yuditza, and that haunts him.