Exile and the Life Expectancy of Rage

Rafi’s Cuban Cafe sits two cities away from the strip mall in Westminster that’s been besieged by Vietnamese protesters. It may as well be a world away, it’s so peaceful and friendly here in Old Town Tustin.

Yet the turmoil and fervor of the anti-communist demonstration has hit home with owner Rafael “Rafi” Sanchez. The 42-year-old Cuban American has been following the news intently, engrossed by the daily drama of the stubborn shopkeeper taunting his neighbors by flaunting symbols of the revolution that uprooted them.

To Rafi, this is not just an exotic story about passions in Little Saigon. Nor is it just an intellectual exercise about free-speech rights to display a portrait of Ho Chi Minh, the late Communist leader, in defiance of community sensibilities.

No, Rafi watches the news and thinks of how his own mother has suffered. He thinks of all she lost after Fidel Castro’s rise to power in 1959--her whole lifestyle and heritage. He recalls how she had to flee with her two young children, Rafi and an older sister, and leave their father behind.

Rafi turned 6 during his first year in exile. He didn’t see his dad again until he was 12, and they were strangers then.

The Communist regime that forced Rafi’s family from their home was later so allied with Communist North Vietnam that many Cubans on the island even named their children “Hanoi.”

“Those [protesters] are the people who suffered the same way we did,” Rafi said, gesturing toward the kitchen where his mother, Elia, 74, was working. “They left everything behind.”

From a distance, the standoff in Westminster looked a little foreign. The images on the nightly news of angry Southeast Asians, some with their heads wrapped in bandannas, sparked a vague flashback to the Vietnam War, which many of us watched unfold on our television sets.

Armchair observers may worry that recent immigrants have brought their strife to these shores.

I can hear the grumbling: Why do these people come here and continue fighting over a war long ago settled? Why don’t they learn to live under our laws, standards and way of life?

The truth is that the battle of Little Saigon is an all-American phenomenon. We are all children--or orphans--of revolution. And that includes our Founding Fathers, who inherited and transplanted their religious and ethnic conflicts from the fractured British Isles.

The roots of American colonial conflict--and later the war between North and South--can be traced to antagonisms created more than 100 years earlier in the English Civil War, political commentator Kevin Phillips says in his new book, “The Cousins’ Wars.”

“Revolutionary New England seethed with 17th century memories, suspicions and analogies,” he writes, comparing the new nation to the modern-day Balkans. “Far from beginning in the New World, much of this polarization can be traced back to the Old.”

The confrontation in Westminster made me think of political conflict in my own family history. My parents were born in the wake of the Mexican Revolution of 1910, the century’s first great social upheaval, predating Russia’s Bolshevik uprising by seven years.

All across Orange County you can still find elderly Mexicans who escaped the turmoil at home by immigrating to the United States during the 1920s and 1930s. These are the original settlers of budding barrios from El Toro to El Modena.

My parents didn’t come here until the 1950s, and my father came equipped with a medical degree. But even then, a full half-century after Emiliano Zapata declared that the land belonged to those who work it, the topic of revolution was touchy at home.

You could not mention the name of Lazaro Cardenas--a revolutionary who became the nation’s leader in 1934--in front of my mother. Many Mexicans, including some of my dad’s kin, consider Cardenas one of the country’s great presidents, comparable to FDR. To my mom, Cardenas and Roosevelt were both communists.

In the 1930s, Cardenas, father of the current mayor of Mexico City, nationalized U.S. and British oil interests. He also carried out the revolutionary promise of land reform.

In my hometown of Torreon, that meant the loss of my grandparents’ land holdings. Forever after, my mother blamed the Cardenas regime for her family’s misfortunes.

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My dad was not as fixated on those events. But he was a fervent anti-communist during his days as a medical student in Guadalajara, a time of political thuggery on campus. In the States, he became an early admirer of Barry Goldwater and Ronald Reagan.

Imagine their consternation when I came home from Berkeley with long hair, sandals and a copy of Che Guevara’s Bolivian diary! I’m still here only because a parent’s love is unconditional.

And because time heals.

Anger ebbs, hard-liners pass away, new roots take hold. Passions also have cooled among Cuban Americans in the 40 years since Castro took power.

Don’t think Rafi, the restaurateur, has gone soft on Fidel. He says he’d like to see him strung up naked in a town square like Mussolini. And don’t dare go to his place wearing a Che T-shirt, not if you’re hungry and value your life.

But unlike his more inflexible fellow exiles, Rafi favors normalizing relations with Cuba as a way of encouraging democracy. And if you listen to the music playing at his cafe, you’ll hear hip new sounds by Cuban bands that are boycotted by extremists in Miami.

Cubans in California are much more mellow, he says. The political rage of the past--the kind that made his father’s veins pop out on his neck--gets more and more diluted as new generations become more Americanized.

Rafi sees it happening with his own grown daughters; the politics of Cuba mean nothing to them. The very same neutrality is taking hold among the children of some Vietnamese families in Westminster, though moderate voices have been temporarily drowned out by noisy extremes.

“It has to change,” Rafi says. “Nobody can keep that going all the time, that hatred. It gets to the point where you have to let it go.”

Agustin Gurza’s column appears Tuesday and Saturday. Readers can reach Gurza at (714) 966-7712 or agustin.gurza@latimes.com.