Cubans of ORANGE COUNTY : 5,000 of Them Live Here but They Are Hard to Spot, Having Quietly Assimilated

Victor Cueto of Santa Ana took to the streets when he heard that the Cuban national water polo team was coming to Southern California.

He rounded up two dozen Cuban friends and staged a protest demonstration at Newport Harbor High School, one of the contest sites. He called newspapers to arrange for coverage of his demonstration at the exhibition games. And he and his friends distributed to the surprised young athletes anti-Communist T-shirts that had “Cuba, Volveremos” (“We’re Coming Back”) printed on them.

Cueto, 31, was born in Washington state and his only view of Cuban soil was when his parents took him for a visit when he was 3 months old.

He was too young to have understood that he was seeing pre-revolutionary Cuban life for the last time. It would be his parents’ memories and passions that fostered his anti-Castro fervor.

The Cueto home is rife with near-daily discussions about news of Cuba. So when Victor Cueto heard about the visit by the Cuban water polo team earlier this month, he put into action what began as talk at home among his family.

His mother explained, with understatement, “He was brought up that way.”

Cueto wanted to shake up the complacency of Americans who accept President Fidel Castro and Communist Cuba as an irrevocable fact of life.

“We were cheering for the team,” Cueto said. “But we were also trying to raise the awareness of Americans. They should know that there’s sentiment here (in the United States) that’s very anti-Fidel.”

Conversation turned to an exchange of insults, with the team players calling Cueto and his friends gusanos (“worms”), the common name for emigre Cubans.

He was surprised the team players, who were 18 to 30 years old, were offended by his protests. “I guess they’re too young to remember any other Cuba,” Cueto said.

“It turned out to be quite a show,” he said, explaining that he didn’t interrupt the play, but he did make his presence known.

The estimated 5,000 Cubans who live in Orange County are hard to spot. While the Cubans in Miami have prominent power, the Cubans here have quietly assimilated. In Santa Ana, with its large Mexican population, a grocery store owned by Cubans is called La Mexicana, instead of something like Little Havana. There is no cultural center here and the Cuban Assn. of Orange County--the Circulo Cubano--lapsed into inactivity three years ago.

In their homes, however, they will say that Nestor Almendros’ film “Improper Conduct,” with its testimony by Cubans imprisoned for unconventional behavior, is closer to the truth in its depiction of Cuba today than the series of PBS programs hosted by Harry Belafonte praising the great improvements under Castro.

And if discussion turns to Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s latest book, these Cubans won’t be talking about the plot but rather about the author’s friendship with Castro.

Most of the more than one million Cubans in the United States live on the East Coast, in Miami and the greater New York area. Of the Cubans in California, the greatest concentration (44,000, according to the latest census figures) is in Los Angeles County.

In Orange County, Cuban families cluster in Santa Ana, Garden Grove, Westminster and Anaheim. Some frequent the Felix Continental Cafe in Orange for a home-style meal and look forward to the annual New Year’s Eve dance put on by Club de los Amigos, an informal Latino group centered in Santa Ana.

Cuban-born Isabel Alvarez, associate director of the World Affairs Council in San Diego, said few will branch out as far south as Orange County or San Diego. “Others stay (in Los Angeles) where there is a larger number of Cubans,” Alvarez said. “But the most venturesome (Cubans) risk being outside their culture, their food.

“They have more courage,” she said, “more atrevimiento. “

Cubans typically adapt well; they like to get involved and are socially active, Alvarez said. They want to excel, educationally and economically. “There may not be many of them, but they like to make their mark.”

In the traditional Cuban family, children will marry and settle close to home. The extended family, including grandparents, aunts and uncles, will assemble at the parents’ home on weekends for conversation and the Sunday midday meal. At Christmas, relatives come to the parents’ home for traditional noche buena celebrations of roast pork, black beans and rice, platanos maduros, malanga or yucca and flan.

Paintings displayed on the walls of the De la Cruz home in Santa Ana recall Cuban landscapes: the beach at Varadero; a typical bohio with walls made of tabla de palma; the town of Camarioca, and the Valle de Yumuri. All were rendered from memory or photographs by Aurelio de la Cruz, who is now retired.

The bumper sticker on the family car, “Reagan ‘84,” tells you the De la Cruz family’s politics are anti-Communist and Republican. They feel at home in Orange County, where the majority of registered voters are Republican.

In 1961, Aurelio de la Cruz, then a professor at the Polytechnic Institute in Matanzas, and his wife, Siomara, sent their two sons to live with a former student in Oklahoma. Aurelio and Siomara arrived in the state two years later, “without even a dime to call my sons,” Aurelio de la Cruz said.

The family came to Orange County in 1965, and lived across from Rancho Santiago College. An inability to speak the language didn’t prove a hindrance for Siomara de la Cruz. It was her smile that got her a job as a preschool teacher at Temple Beth Sholom in Orange County. Those who hired her later told her, “We couldn’t understand a word you said (at the interview). But we liked your smile.” She’s been there for the last 25 years.

She worked as a preschool teacher by day and as a clerk at Zody’s department store at night. Aurelio de la Cruz worked at various power plants as a manual laborer who could read blueprints.

After their sons completed college, Aurelio started his own business, Cruz Electric Motors, which he operated for 13 years until his retirement in 1986.

Sons Aurelio and Oscar de la Cruz, now in their 40s, refused to date Cuban girls, who always arrived with a chaperon--an aunt or grandmother. They married American girls.

Those who had the good fortune to leave Cuba before 1959 came to the United States with money and education. But the majority of political refugees--most of them university-educated professionals--arrived immediately after the 1959 revolution and the 1961 Bay of Pigs incident. When air travel was canceled in 1962, refugees filtered through infrequent windows of travel or through the American base at Guantanamo.

In 1962, the United States imposed a trade and tourist embargo against Cuba.

The most recent flow of immigrants came in 1981 in the “Freedom Flotilla” from the port at Mariel. These people--poor and speaking little English--were citizens disaffected with the Communist regime. They had been labeled “bad communists” by revolutionary citizens’ committees, or had been imprisoned for homosexuality or criminal acts.

Of about 8,000 Marielitos who settled in Southern California, most live in Los Angeles County. Some of those who did pass through Orange County made their presence felt in the county’s mental health clinics: Fidel Castro had emptied his psychiatric wards and shipped the patients off to America. Other Marielitos became workers in Orange County’s construction industry.

The next wave of immigrants may be the 3,000 Cubans now stalled in Panama who are hoping to be claimed by North American relatives. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen (R-Fla.), a 38-year-old Cuban native, is now lobbying Congress for help.

Immediately after the Bay of Pigs, Castro detained nearly 100,000 people on suspicion of counter-revolutionary sentiment. He demanded that judges change the Cuban Constitution to accommodate executions of traitors--by definition, those who had worked under the previous regime. Failure to publicly announce commitment to the new regime demanded resignation from jobs, loss of food coupons or imprisonment.

Ramon Calderon, owner of Felix Continental Cafe in the city of Orange, remembers the five years he spent working in an agricultural labor camp to earn his family’s departure from Cuba.

He had continued his work as a bookkeeper after the Communist regime took over his office. He even worked for Che Guevara, who never asked whether he was a Communist; Guevara just wanted to know whether he was a good worker. As soon as Guevara left for Bolivia, his new bosses demanded affirmation that Calderon was Communist. He resigned, therefore losing all his rights.

Calderon lived in a military encampment about 500 miles from his home. He worked without pay and was denied communication or visitation with his family. About twice a week a Communist official would ask if Calderon missed his family. Hadn’t he converted to communism yet? And didn’t he feel he’d like to try it out under the new regime?

His wife, Lilia, worked at the Banco Nacional for two years. When she resigned in 1961, she kept the family going by selling her wedding gifts on the black market: bedclothes were exchanged for soap and other barters.

Calderon was able to fly with his wife and three children to Florida in November, 1969, on the freedom flights. They spent 20 days at the Casa de Libertad in Miami before they moved to Torrance, at the invitation of the Comite de Refugiados, a group of volunteers who assisted in relocating Cuban refugees around the country.

“It was a very sad situation” when the family first arrived in the United States, Calderon said. His first job was sorting dirty laundry. After working as a cook for five years, he opened Felix Continental Cafe with his cousin Tomas in 1979.

When he first arrived, he didn’t speak English. “When you’re the head of the family, you have to be able to speak for all,” he said.

Even harder was the fact that his wife already spoke English, having learned it at the Havana Business Academy. He studied English at El Camino College.

Learning another language is necessary, Calderon said, but losing your cultural heritage is unforgivable.

Recently an American-born daughter of a Cuban couple asked for a translation of a menu item that read platanos maduros. These fried, ripe plantains are a staple of Cuban cuisine. Calderon was shocked that the daughter made no pretense to speak Spanish.

Ramon and Lilia Calderon’s daughter, Lilita, married an American, then divorced him and later married a Cuban man. “I have a better understanding with a Cuban,” she said.

Preserving the cultural heritage was the reason parents sent their children from Cuba to live with relatives in the United States.

From Christmas, 1960, until after the Cuban Missile Crisis in October, 1962, more than 14,000 children were sent alone to the United States through Operation Pedro (Peter) Pan, a program created by Miami’s Catholic Welfare Bureau and a team of Cubans.

Two Pedro Pan children were Francisco Felipe Firmat, an Orange County Superior Court judge, and Arturo Luis Nieto, a lawyer who has lived in Santa Ana since 1974.

Firmat’s parents put the 11-year-old alone on a plane bound for Florida in July, 1961. They hoped he would join his two sisters, who had left the month before, and that the parents would soon follow. He stayed in Kendall, Fla., for a month, and in August flew to Denver, where he stayed at a boys’ orphanage a few blocks away from his sisters.

It was a close call for Firmat’s father (also named Francisco Firmat), who had been a judge under the previous regime led by Gen. Fulgencio Batista. Castro demanded that the judges give him the right to execute those whom he called “Batista’s men,” themselves included.

Capital punishment was prohibited in Cuba, and two-thirds of the judges ruled Castro’s demand unconstitutional. The following day, the father was told to go home; his services would no longer be required.

Firmat’s parents fled Cuba in November, 1961. The reunited family lived in Denver until 1966, when it moved to Southern California--first to Alhambra, then to Orange County in 1973. They knew no other Cubans in Denver, Firmat said, and when they arrived in Southern California, the Firmat children were immersed in the Anglo community.

“The saddest thing about the Pedro Pan program,” Judge Firmat said, “was when the parents were unable to arrive in time to bring up their children as Cubans.”

So it happened to Santa Ana attorney Arturo Nieto. He was 14 when he arrived in the United States in 1961, one day before his passport expired. He was housed at Camp Matacumbe at Homestead, Fla., and then was sent to Sparks, Nev., to live in a makeshift orphanage run by the Brothers of the Holy Rosary. Little wooden stalls had been built in a gymnasium.

By the time Nieto’s parents arrived eight years later, their boy was married to an American woman and had a family of his own.

He worked for the Sparkletts water firm for 10 years, then returned to college when he was 29, graduated from law school and passed the bar exam. Most of his clients are Latino.

“I know what it was like not to speak English,” he said. “You are as lost as you can be.”

Some children in the Pedro Pan programs “suffer culture shock at first,” Nieto said. “They (went) through a phase of wanting to be totally American. But I grew out of that and took some stances, and I know I’m definitely Latino. Now I cling to that knowledge with a lot of fervor.”