Cubans Have Transformed Miami Into an Island of Opportunity : Immigrants: The exiles and their children dominate the economy, government and culture. The new order worries some black leaders.

Tony de Varona, a former member of the Cuban senate, remembers the signs in the store windows when he first came to Miami years ago:

“No children. No dogs. And no Hispanics.”

As late as 1980, as a backlash to the Mariel boatlift that brought additional thousands of exiles from Cuba, bumper stickers appeared around town saying: “Will the last American out of Miami please take the flag.”

But times have changed, says De Varona, now 82. Living in Miami today, he says, “is more or less like living in Cuba.”

The signs today announce such things as farmacia (drugstore) or ferreteria (hardware store). Cuban restaurants flourish, along with simple window-counter operations serving up small medianoche (literally, midnight) sandwiches and tiny paper cups of strong Cuban-style coffee.

There are two full-time Spanish television channels and several with some Spanish programming, as well as 11 full-time Spanish radio stations. The Miami Herald has a Spanish paper. Also published in Miami are the nationally circulated Diario Las Americas and many weeklies.

The mayor of Miami is Cuban.

Fidel Castro’s 1959 revolution and his embrace of communism triggered a flood of refugees to southern Florida and started a transformation of Miami as sweeping as the one in Cuba.

More than 1 million Cubans, equal to 10% of the island’s population, now live in the United States, compared to 125,000 in the nation in 1960. Two-thirds are in Miami and its suburbs.

Cubans are the largest group in the area, accounting for more than half of Miami’s residents.

Many have gone from riches to rags to riches again.

But Cuban-born economist Antonio Jorge says the economic success of the Cuban exiles is sometimes exaggerated. The truth is that the median Cuban family income is $26,858, compared to the national median of $32,191, according to U.S. Census Bureau estimates.

However, the Cuban figure is well ahead of other immigrant groups in the United States, such as $21,025 for Mexicans and $18,932 for Puerto Ricans. They own an estimated 15,000 businesses, from 500 groceries to more than two dozen banks.

De Varona notes the Cuban political clout.

“We have one in Congress. We have three state senators. Eight representatives. Six mayors. And commissioners--whew!” he said, waving his hand.

Today the Cuban assimilation--or ascendancy--is virtually complete. The Southern resort town has become a bustling, multiethnic city in which white non-Latinos, or Anglos, constitute the smallest group, one-third of the population of Dade County. The city has become the unofficial “capital of Latin America.”

Events in Cuba are still watched closely, but after 31 years, few Cubans talk anymore of going back.

The city, meanwhile, appears to be heading into a new era.

“This place is becoming an international mecca,” said Mayor Xavier Suarez.

But the Cubans once shunned in Miami are now accused of making other groups feel unwanted.

In the section known as Little Haiti, the Rev. Gerard Jean-Juste, a leader of the growing Haitian community, predicts trouble ahead.

“Probably, we are going to have more uprisings here,” he said. “Many Anglos will move out. Those African-Americans left in town will be ignored. The result then will be street pressure.”

“We are at a very critical crossroads in the development of Miami,” said H.T. Smith, 43, an attorney born and raised in the predominantly black Overtown neighborhood which was torn by race riots four times in the 1980s.

Smith has been leading a black boycott of Dade County hotels that has seen 10 black organizations cancel conventions, losing an estimated $4.5 million to $13.5 million in business.

The boycott followed the June 28 visit by Nelson Mandela, the symbol of the anti-apartheid struggle in South Africa whose visit has become the hallmark of the tensions that cloud Miami’s future.

Given a hero’s welcome at every other U.S. stop following his 27 years in South African prisons, Mandela was snubbed by Miami-area officials and protested by placard-carrying Cubans who assailed his ties to Castro.

“For black Miami, this community will never be the same again after Mandela,” Smith said.

Blacks felt anguished and embarrassed, he said.

Less than a week after Mandela left, police in riot gear quelled violent demonstrations by Haitians outside a Cuban-owned shop whose owner allegedly abused a Haitian customer.

A black lawyers’ association Smith speaks for demanded that political leaders apologize for the Mandela snub and make commitments to the role of blacks in the community.

Smith and other blacks pledged to step up the economic boycott after the Dade County School Board on Oct. 24 picked Cuban-born Octavio Visiedo, 39, as the new superintendent, bypassing 31-year school veteran Tee S. Greer, who is black.

Robert L. Steinback, a Miami Herald columnist who is black, thinks Miami’s future is on the line.

“Miami will in fact evolve into a hopelessly fractured city if the black community is not given clear reassurance that it is a welcome and vital part of the economic, political and social environment in south Florida,” Steinback wrote recently.

Suarez says the Mandela visits and the boycott have been “confused and aggravated by inaccurate media reports.”

Some blacks have felt displaced by the influx of Cubans and the subsequent influxes of more than 100,000 Nicaraguans and tens of thousands of other Latinos they say eagerly took menial jobs for lower pay and worse conditions than American-born blacks would accept.

There has been a bonding in recent years between American blacks and the estimated 100,000 Haitians. Predominantly white Latinos fleeing anti-U.S. regimes have been welcomed with open arms while thousands of the predominantly black Haitians fleeing repression and poverty are turned back by U.S. Coast Guard patrols at sea or detained in an immigration camp on the edge of the Everglades.

Jorge, the economist, says “a big push” is needed to attend to black needs ranging from jobs to street conditions. He has been urging such an effort for years but believes the time may now be right because Cubans are no longer engrossed with “making it” in the new country and now may be developing a sense of community about Miami.

Smith agrees.

“What you’re seeing is the kind of friction that is necessary to mold together three communities who really have not had much time or interest in working together,” Smith said. “Let’s face it, it’s going to be the Cubans’ town. They have a tremendous stake in seeing that Miami becomes a bright and shining example.”

Roger Biamby, a Haitian political scientist, also is hopeful.

“Ten years from now, I see Miami being used as a model for other cities where groups must learn to interact,” Biamby said.

Blacks who don’t like the transformation of Miami usually don’t have the ability to pick up and move, as have many Anglos, say black leaders. In 1980, Anglos accounted for 47% of Dade’s population, down now to about 32%. Blacks have swelled in numbers from 282,000, or 17% of Dade’s 1980 population, to 415,000, or nearly 22%, today.

They complain that their voting strength is diluted by the city and county use of at-large voting, instead of single-member districts, but blacks have become an important factor in city races.

Puerto Rican-born Maurice Ferre, Miami’s mayor for 12 years, rode heavy black support past Cuban challengers until 1985 when blacks turned on him after he fired a black city manager. Suarez was elected that year as Miami’s first Cuban-born mayor.

In 1980, a Dade County referendum was passed mandating that no county funds could be spent on any language other than English.

“The problem is that a lot of people aren’t comfortable with change. They’d like tomorrow to be like yesterday,” said Democratic Sen. Bob Graham, a native who remembers from post-Depression boyhood a Miami where the largest neighborhoods were “Little Georgia” and “Little Alabama.”

In 1989, political novice Gerald Richman, an attorney, scored a stunning upset over Cuban-born Rosario Kennedy in the Democratic primary for a special election to replace the late Rep. Claude Pepper.

Richman campaigned on the theme that the 18th Congressional District was “an American seat.” That was interpreted by some as an anti-Cuban code, and Latino voters, predominantly Republican in Miami, turned out to elect a Cuban-born Republican, Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, in the general election. The district, which in 1962 was drawn to order for Pepper because of its heavy Northeastern retiree population, is now more than half Cuban.

Ros-Lehtinen steered away from ethnic themes in her campaign and has stressed that she represents all her constituents. She and other Cuban-American politicians lobby for a tough U.S. policy against Castro, which they often describe as similar to the lobbying for Israel by Jewish politicians.

At 38, she is in the generation of those born in Cuba but raised for the most part in the United States. Others include pop music star Gloria Estefan, actor Steven Bauer, Oakland A’s slugger Jose Canseco, Miami Mayor Suarez, Florida Democratic Party chairman Simon Ferro and Marty Urra, head of the south Florida AFL-CIO.

The young Cuban-Americans sometimes call themselves “yucas.” That stands for Young Upscale Cuban-Americans and is a takeoff on the potato-like yucca that is a staple of Cuban diets.

They often move in and out of mainstream American life and personal lives that emphasize their native culture. They usually describe themselves as patriotic toward both Cuba and the United States.

State Sen. Lincoln Diaz-Balart, 36, spends much of his day speaking English in the Legislature or his Coconut Grove law firm, but tries to speak only Spanish at home to his children, ages 5 and 7.

Many afternoons find him slipping away at lunchtime to meet one or more of his three brothers--they include a banker, a state representative and the weekend anchor on a leading English-language television station--at La Hacienda restaurant for the day’s special, always with fried bananas and black beans over rice.

“I never actually separated being a Cuban-American from being American,” Diaz-Balart said. “I was always proud of my roots, proud of Cuba. And I was always proud of the United States, the land of freedom and hope.”

Diaz-Balart’s first name evinces the affinity Cubans long have had for the United States, which intervened in the Cuba’s war for independence that exiles smilingly note is called “the Spanish-American War” in U.S. history.

He is eager to help rebuild a Cuba he says has been devastated by his uncle. Castro was married to Diaz-Balart’s aunt and Castro’s son, Fidelito, is a first cousin.

Diaz-Balart says very few Cubans would move back to Cuba permanently after three decades here. However, many will be involved in a post-Castro Cuba.

“There’s going to be a lot of duality,” Suarez said, with Cuba only 90 miles from Florida’s southern tip. “There will be people with homes in both places, investments in both places . . . trade, tourism. A lot of people are going to feel very comfortable here but also want to spend part of the time there.”

Castro has vowed to maintain his system in Cuba, but excitement over his potential downfall is as high here as perhaps anytime since before the failed U.S.-backed Bay of Pigs invasion in 1961.

Around Miami there is a new sign: “Christmas in Cuba.”