Disbelief, Outrage Abound in Miami’s Little Havana

It is a great betrayal, a cynical sellout, says Pedro Gonzalez, a television repairman by profession and a self-described patriot of his native Cuba by belief, history and fate.

“The United States is dancing the rumba with Fidel Castro, but President Clinton will learn this is a dangerous step,” said Gonzalez, gathered with other like-minded Cuban exiles along Calle Ocho , central artery of Little Havana, the Cuban American urban heartland. “Miami feels wounded and betrayed.”

It is a familiar refrain these days along 8th Street, a place where even the fast-food joints serve invigorating shots of Cuban cafecito and nearby avenues are named in honor of Teddy Roosevelt and Ronald Reagan. There is disbelief, outrage, a feeling that something has gone badly amiss--and a foreboding that it might get even worse. The daily images of Cubans held behind barbed wire at the U.S. naval base at Guantanamo Bay have triggered a kind of collective trauma.

It is not just that Cubans are being denied sanctuary in Florida because of a Clinton Administration policy shift that reversed three decades of favorable treatment. There is also widespread suspicion about the ongoing negotiations between U.S. and Cuban representatives.

Washington insists the talks are limited to immigration matters and will not address Cuba’s demands for a lifting of the U.S. trade embargo, but that assurance is viewed warily on Calle Ocho . More and more voices are calling for “dialogue” between the two governments, rejecting the generation-long preeminence of the Miami hard-liners in U.S.-Cuban affairs.

“Dialogue?” asked Jose Esteves, a white-haired, pony-tailed businessman who is clearly aghast at the thought. “There is no dialogue with him .”

Just the mention of dialogue with Fidel Castro is enough to trigger a torrent of vitriol in machine-gun Caribbean Spanish. “Dialogue” has become an epithet, a code word for yet another clever Castroist subterfuge. Those Cuban Americans who seek talks-- dialogueros (roughly, “dialogue-seekers”), as they are called disparagingly--are denounced as traitors, dupes of the tyrant.

“Dialogue is treason!” asserts Alodia Gomez de la Torre, a 62-year-old wheelchair-bound grandmother who stopped by 8th Street the other day to show her support for la causa . “I will go back to Cuba myself and fight before I accept dialogue! They can push me in in my wheelchair.”

In these tense days, the litmus test for loyalty leaves little wiggle room.

Early Sunday, someone tossed a pair of Molotov cocktails at the Little Havana offices of Replica , a Spanish-language magazine that has called for dialogue. There were no injuries, but the attack, the first such incident in four years, came as exile leaders warned that broader talks with Castro could lead to unrest.

Of course, incendiary bluster, and condemnation of any move even vaguely conciliatory toward the Cuban leader, has long been a fundamental characteristic of exile politics. The current sense of betrayal, however, is something new and pervasive.

Nowhere does the disappointment seem more intense than along 8th Street, a 1950s-style strip of coffee bars, restaurants and stores. Most shoppers long ago moved to air-conditioned malls, but Calle Ocho remains a sounding board and gathering spot for anti-Castro militants. It was here last month where 25,000 mourners marched in the funeral procession of Rafael Gamez, one of the balseros , or rafters, who was lost during the recent exodus.

When Administration strategists express fear of a Cuban American backlash, they are alluding to the 8th Street crowd and its white-collar political godfathers, notably the virulently anti-Castro Cuban American Foundation and its leader, Jorge Mas Canosa.

Critics call the hard-line core a small, anachronistic group of reactionaries whose extreme views predominate because of lopsided influence and bullying intolerance of dissent. Nonetheless, the White House has taken pains to reassure Miami’s Cuban Americans publicly that wide-ranging negotiations with Havana are not on the horizon.

In return, community leaders have tacitly accepted the painful detention of Cubans at Guantanamo--a policy that, from the Administration’s standpoint, is necessary during a period of national backlash against immigration.

On 8th Street, though, locking up fleeing Cubans on a military base simply won’t do.

Here, directly in front of the stone monument and eternal flame commemorating the “martyrs” of the ill-fated Bay of Pigs invasion, a half dozen men have set up metal cots beneath a makeshift plastic tent and are engaging in a very public hunger strike. They demand a naval blockade of Cuba, a U.N. embargo of the island and legislation allowing armed Cuban Americans to launch an invasion of Cuba to overthrow Castro’s government. Men in fatigues stop by to express support, testament to the strong paramilitary undercurrent.

The hunger strikers’ camp, flanked by U.S. and Cuban flags, has become a rallying point, a kind of civic shrine. Motorists on 8th Street honk their horns in solidarity. The megaphones tend to come out in the early evening, after the sweltering heat has subsided and the afternoon downpours have passed, leaving behind a faint tropical aroma.

A wooden rowboat and rubber inner tube are on prominent display. The plight of the balseros has galvanized this community. The rafts and their occupants have become heroic symbols of resistance and the will for liberty. One Cuban American columnist wrote of keeping a pair of oars in her bedroom, reminding herself daily of the rafters’ plight.

Elsewhere, experts say the detention of rafters only puts Cubans on the same legal footing as undocumented refugees fleeing poverty and repression in other countries, notably Haitians. Along Calle Ocho and in scores of other Cuban American enclaves, however, there is anguish and anger.

“How can the United States welcome us with open arms one day and then turn their backs the next day?” asked an incredulous Dahlia Lemus, an animated 65-year-old who came from Cuba five years ago, leaving behind four grown children. “This is a betrayal. And I’m sure there will be other betrayals.”

Jesus Manuel Rojas Pineda is one of the lucky ones. He and five other balseros arrived on the Florida coast in late July, and now he has joined the hunger strikers.

“I had nothing to eat in Cuba, and now I have nothing to eat here,” joked the rail-thin Rojas, who was a fisherman in Cuba.

Rojas is a valued recruit in a crusade generally led by men of mostly European ancestry who haven’t been back to the island in more than 30 years. Later waves of immigrants tend to include more mixed-race and black Cubans, reflecting the island’s population diversity. But, as the case of Rojas and other rafters indicate, newcomers aren’t necessarily any more inclined toward dialogue.

Outside the Little Havana Chess Club, a lively venue where the cigar smoke swirls around the skilled aficionados of the royal game, Luis Alvarez paused to chat about the generational chasm among exiles and their offspring.

At 39, Alvarez is part of a younger generation of Cuban Americans, those who were born in Cuba but left as children and have spent most of their life in the United States, speaking English as well as Spanish. Among his emblematic boyhood memories: a husky cop arresting his anti-Castro father at a sandwich counter in Matanzas, Cuba.

“What frustrates me is that the terrible experiences of the older generation have created a kind of inertia,” said Alvarez, a salesman. “Everything is frozen. They’re living on hate and nostalgia.”

The struggle against Castro, he noted, often comes down to personal experiences, a matter of family and honor.

Down the street, a mural of the island’s famous Varadero Beach embodies the much-idealized place left behind; elegant Don Juans in dinner jackets dance with voluptuous women, attentive waiters bear cool drinks to strand-side tables, bathers frolic as a calm surf caresses the palm-shrouded shore. This is the Cuba of a thousand memories, the kind of frozen image that many cherish and that others would like to shatter, enabling time to move forward and maybe even allowing some old wounds to heal.

But the spirit of conciliation is seldom voiced along 8th Street, where vengeance is the more prevalent impulse when politics comes up, as it always seems to. What would happen if Clinton were to lift the U.S. embargo on Cuba? “Miami would burn,” declared an unequivocal Pedro Gonzalez, leader of the hunger strike, who said he was a political prisoner for 21 years in Cuba.

A few miles down 8th Street, a marble angel watches over the graves of lost balseros , who were as likely motivated by the desire to feed and clothe their families as by a grand political passion. Nearby, a white banner with red and black letters stands against the wall of a cemetery building, ready to be hoisted anew at the next burial-turned-political statement along Calle Ocho . It is addressed to Castro.

“Our Dead Today,” the banner advises. “Yours Tomorrow.”

On Calle Ocho , it seems, there is consensus on this, that the dying will not end soon.