Group Targets Castro’s Domino

Cuban Spanish ricochets in the private dining room, fast and hard and soft at the same time:

“He is a modern Nero,” Javier Quintero says.

“He realizes that he is surrounded,” says Maria Quintero, his wife. “If we dance to his tune, that’s no good,” growls Reynaldo Rodriguez, a white-haired warrior with chiseled features. “He expects us to want war. They say we want an invasion, we want to fight. . . . No, that’s not the way. What we must tell him is this: We want elections, we want a plebiscite, we want to be allowed in, organize, express ourselves, create parties of opposition. Democracy! He already has the invasion within.”

The monthly meeting of the National Assn. of Cuban Lawyers in Exile, California chapter, is a gathering of voluble veterans of a Thirty Years War. The war has gained urgency over the past year as the walls of Eastern Europe dissolve with the speed of images flickering across the 6 o’clock news.

Energized, the Cuban lawyers discuss ways of bringing about what they see as the inevitable fall of the next domino: Fidel Castro’s Cuba.

Imagine the scene multiplied in Cuban-American communities nationwide, conversations laced with coffee and smoke and hope.

They talk about the aging dictator--shaggy, wide-eyed, blustering, defying all comers during televised harangues. But he is running out of friends. There have been rumblings, rumors, cries of “Down with Fidel” in public places. He looks more than ever like an endangered species, a dinosaur-tyrant.

The 25 men and women in the restaurant are in their 50s and 60s, well-dressed, their dignity forged from the ashes of a frozen tropical past. Most of them live comfortably rebuilt lives in the San Fernando Valley.

But all of them remain citizens of El Exilio , The Exile, that Cuban-American space preserved by nostalgia and passion.

Vindication has been a long time coming, according to Mario Tapanes, who wears square glasses and gestures pugilistically as he talks.

“Twenty years telling the truth and no one listened,” he says. “I have no confidence in the American media. The media romanticized Castro.”

Rodriguez agrees. “They made him into Jesus Christ, the Robin Hood of America. . . . Finally he has lost stature internationally. . . . For the first time in the 31 years that he has been in power, I see him truly worried.”

Rodriguez is the president of an international federation of former Cuban political prisoners. He spent six years as a political prisoner, two years in a squalid compound on the Isle of Pines that he said was rigged with dynamite to prevent escape or invasion.

Luis Aguirre, association president, calls the meeting to order. Among the items of past business is a telegram of congratulations sent to Nicaragua’s new president, Violeta Barrios de Chamorro.

Rodriguez announces that his prisoners’ federation will honor six Cuban-American officers in the U.S. military for writing an open letter urging the Cuban army to refrain from violence against their people if there is an insurrection.

The discussion touches on TV Marti, the latest U.S. government offensive against Castro, a television version of Radio Free Europe.

Despite efforts by the Cuban government to block the signal, the word from Miami is that the programs are reaching viewers in Cuba, Tapanes says. He takes vigorous exception to complaints that the programming includes too many “light” shows.

“What they are saying here in the press is that it costs $30 million for nothing, for silly programs. That is not true. When the people there see what life is like here, how a man who works in a factory lives--he has his own car, his computer, the VCR, he goes to McDonald’s, he comes and he goes--that will have even more impact than the news. These programs carry a message, a powerful message.”

Then Tapanes says he would like to introduce a concept he has encountered in dealings with corporate America. He savors the syllables: “Brain-storming-session.”

The first time Tapanes took part in a brainstorming session--people free-associating and thinking out loud, every opinion given equal value--he was amused.

“I thought, ‘That’s what we Cubans do whenever we get together.’ ”

Suggestion adopted. A note pad fills with ideas for shaping post-Castro Cuba: Agrarian reform. Urban reform. Labor reform.

Silver-haired Felix de Quesada adds a suggestion: “Political tolerance in Cuba.”

“Now there’s a good specific suggestion,” Tapanes says. “What will happen to the Fidelista or Communist Party in Cuba. Will it be legal?”

“First we shoot them and then we legalize them,” Quesada says, deadpan.

Widespread laughter, aimed as much at their own ideological intensity as at the joke’s exaggeration.

Afterward, Aguirre and Ernesto Torres are asked how many people in the room would go back if the dream of Fidel’s fall materializes. The men smile wryly, they nod, they talk of children and grandchildren and Americanization.

“Probably more would stay than move back,” Aguirre says.

“But think about this,” Torres says. “I might be a guy who goes on vacation to Las Vegas, to Baja California. Why do that if I can go back to my own country, get a little place of my own? . . . Miami is 50 minutes from Cuba. The cultural movement and interchange would be incredible.”

Gatherings such as this serve a cathartic purpose, says Benito Borges. There is an expression for it, he says, his tough open face growing reflective: Sudar el odio.

“Sweat out the hate,” he says. “We have to sweat out the hate, as if it were a fever. So we can go back without hate.”