The Exile Decision: Visits to Cuba Mean Painful Choice

When I left Cuba

I left my life

I left my love

When I left Cuba

I buried my heart.

(Translated from Spanish, “When I left Cuba” by Luis Aguile, 1966, one of the most popular Cuban exile songs)

In two days, Paloma Morales Rodriguez will inhale Cuba’s intoxicating sea breeze and embrace her favorite first cousin at Havana’s Jose Marti International Airport, her 30-year fantasy come true.

Cuba. Finally Cuba.

After decades of longing, of rising each morning to the same lonesome thought--Will I ever see my homeland again?--Rodriguez will return to her Cuba on Saturday. To visit her aunts, uncles and cousins, to drink guarapo juice, and to hunt for tinajones, the huge clay pots that made her hometown of Camaguey famous.

President Clinton has made it easier for Cuban Americans such as Rodriguez to travel to Cuba. But the decision to actually do so, to step on Cuban soil and spend dollars in a country where its citizens have no freedom, remains a painful one for most Cuban Americans. Sometimes it makes Rodriguez cry.

Rodriguez vividly remembers the freedom flight she boarded in 1970 with her parents and siblings: how all of its passengers wept silently until one, and then all, roared, “Viva Cuba Libre!” toward the horizon. She was a 15-year-old beauty queen and ballet student then, the youngest daughter of an army captain who defended his country against communism and then abandoned it to save his children.

The father Rodriguez adored has died, and, on paper, she is a U.S. citizen. But Cuba’s light still shines inside Rodriguez and all around her. The island’s essence dwells in the tall palm trees she planted in her luscious backyard in Walnut, in her breakfast cafe con leche and in the rhythmic sway of her shoulders and hips.

“I always wanted to go back,” Rodriguez said. “Every day, it’s Cuba, Cuba, Cuba. I drive my husband and poor kids crazy with Cuba. I may be far from Cuba, but Cuba is never far from me.

“I never expected to go back with Castro still there. But if I can bring a little bit of happiness to my family there, I will do it. It’s been too many years.”

It’s been 39 years since the United States clamped an embargo on the Communist-ruled island, ending flights by American carriers. On Saturday, when Rodriguez, her sister and nephew board the first flight between Los Angeles and Havana since 1962, the journey will be historic politically as well as personally. Cuba has been under Communist rule since Fidel Castro overthrew the government in January 1959. The embargo was intended to end the multimillion-dollar contribution that American tourism had been making each year to Cuba’s economy.

The largest island in the West Indies, Cuba is home to more than 11 million people and has been struggling financially since the early 1990s.

In 1998, Clinton relaxed U.S. sanctions by allowing flights from Miami, then New York City and now Los Angeles for a select group: Cuban Americans, journalists, students and businesspeople. But for years thousands of Cuban Americans have been traveling to Cuba illegally through third countries, such as Mexico and Jamaica.

“There seems to be an exhaustion with the embargo,” said Damian Fernandez, who was born in Cuba and now is chairman of the international relations department at Florida International University in Miami. “But this is not a free-for-all. It’s a very cautious policy.”

After a yearlong evaluation of its financial records, proposed itineraries and vendors, Cuba Travel Services of Inglewood was licensed by the U.S. Office of Foreign Assets Control to organize a weekly charter.

The travel company will sell the trips and lease the airplanes from TACA International Airlines of El Salvador. The round-trip fare is $649, a price some potential passengers say is too high as it is $86 more than a flight from Tijuana.

“The convenience and the fact that this is an American company makes this a competitive price,” said Cuba Travel Services President George Tejadilla said. “People can leave right from LAX. We’re offering something that people couldn’t do before.” He also said he cannot guarantee that fares will not increase in the summer, the peak travel season.

Los Angeles International Airport was selected as the third trip site because it serves the third largest Cuban American community in the nation, a State Department official said. The department estimates 80,000 Cuban Americans live in the Los Angeles area and an additional 40,000 in outlying areas.

New Ties Via Sports

Clinton’s policy of increased “people-to-people contact” also promotes cultural, athletic and educational exchanges between the estranged countries. The Baltimore Orioles, for example, played an exhibition series with the Cuban national team in Havana last year.

On board Saturday’s flight will be 28 water polo players from Mount San Antonio College in Walnut, the first U.S. team to compete in the Marcelo Salado International Water Polo Tournament in Havana. Although some Cuban Americans criticize American athletes who compete in Cuba, coach Marc Ruh says his players “would be crazy” not to participate in the tournament.

“I’ve never believed in mixing politics with sports,” Ruh said. “I spent a lot of time in Communist countries myself when I was growing up, and I don’t think these kids really understand what freedom is. I think this is going to open their eyes to a lot of things.” (Rodriguez’s nephew, 18-year-old Fred Sicard, is on the team.)

At the heart of the softened travel policy, however, is reuniting families separated by Castro’s revolution.

Gabina Cruz and her daughter, Carmen McGonigal, are taking advantage of the first flight to visit Cruz’s mother, whom they have not seen since 1970. Politics would never stop them from doing so, McGonigal said.

“This is going to be an emotional and exciting experience,” said McGonigal, 40, of Frazier Park. “For my mother, especially, because she hasn’t seen her mother in 30 years. I think everybody should have the freedom to visit their family. This world is just too ornery.”

But visiting Cuba creates tension in many exiled families. While her father was alive, Rodriguez would not have dared to set foot in Cuba. Emilio Morales had served three years in prison after Castro took over, lost his property to the revolution and refused to contribute financially in any way to Castro’s regime.

“We respected my father when he was alive, but Castro isn’t going anywhere and my mother has six brothers and sisters in Cuba,” said Maria del Carmen Sicard, Rodriguez’s sister, who has gone to Cuba twice in two years. “But you know what? It’s very hard. Every time I’m on the plane, I’m thinking of my dad. The Cuban tragedy is very hard on families.”

Nothing has crystallized the pain of Cuban exile more clearly than 6-year-old Elian Gonzalez, who survived two days at sea after a refugee boat capsized and his mother drowned. After Elian was rescued off the Florida coast in November, his paternal relatives in Miami maintained that he should not be sent back to Cuba, even though Elian’s father asked for his return.

Although Rodriguez’s sister and mother had visited Cuba, it was not until she received a letter from her eldest aunt in Las Tunas, Cuba, that she decided politics should not break an elderly woman’s heart.

“I would not have given my father that sorrow of seeing me go,” said Rodriguez, fighting back tears. “I understand why they’re against it, the people who refuse to go back under any circumstances. We all lost everything to that man. I know our name is going to be mud after this, but how could I deny my aunt what could be her last wish?”

Ruth Aparicio, Rodriguez and Sicard’s eldest sister, cannot reconcile her sisters’ sentimental journey with the knowledge that they will be contributing economically to the government that ruined their lives in one military swoop. She sends medicines and money to her relatives and prefers to invite them to visit her in California, a lengthy process that requires authorization by the Cuban government.

“I’m not angry, but I feel a lot of sadness in my heart,” Aparicio said. “Cubans are forgetting why they left Cuba. All of a sudden, Cubans are becoming nostalgic and romantic. My exile has not ended, and it will not end while Castro is there and there is no democracy.”

Communities of Exiles

The first Cuban exiles arrived in Los Angeles in the 1960s and settled in Echo Park, where a bust of Jose Marti, Cuba’s famous freedom fighter, signals their presence. As the community gained economic strength, Cubans dispersed to Glendale, Huntington Park, Downey and South Gate, forming several political and social clubs. Today, Cuban Americans live all over the Southland, which does not have a uniting hub like Miami’s Little Havana or New Jersey’s Union City.

The community’s impact, however, is most evident in business and the arts, said Al Nodal, the Cuban-born general manager of Los Angeles County’s Cultural Affairs Department. The Cuban entrepreneurial spirit is showcased in dozens of restaurants, bakeries, travel agencies and supermarkets in the metro area. Two newspapers--20 de Mayo and La Voz Libre--and Contacto, a magazine, offer a platform for issues important to exiles.

Cuban Americans also hold prestigious academic posts--for example, Santa Monica College President Piedad Robertson is a Cuba native--and important cultural positions in the music industry and Hollywood. A group of exiles formed the Cuban-American Cultural Institute in 1996 to preserve the island’s contribution to the arts and to pay homage to Cuban American artists, said the group’s executive director, Herminia Balboa.

“The exile community was really focused on fighting Fidel and dealing with the political side of our existence,” Nodal said. “But we’ve sparked something now. The cultural life of our community and the communication of what we’re about can also be through the arts. It doesn’t all have to be political.”

Ileana Gonzalez Monserratt, who left Havana in 1969 and now lives in Los Angeles, uses her creativity to channel her despair and to foster understanding of Cuban history. Her two books, “La Habana 1995,” published in 1991 by Ediciones Universal in Miami, and “Holocastro,” published in 1999 by Betania in Madrid, explore the history of Cuba and the psychological and political motives of Cuban exiles.

“I am more integrated into the American life because it’s too painful and too demanding to deal with the Cuban reality every day,” she said. “I wish I could go there and embrace my relatives and visit the cemetery. But in the back of my mind, anything that will help Castro directly or indirectly is too much of a burden for me.”

A Bay of Pigs veteran and one of the first 100 Cubans to arrive in Los Angeles, Abel Perez founded the newspaper 20 de Mayo in 1969 “because there were no American papers telling the truth about Cuba.

“I don’t think that anyone should kiss the boot of the tyrant who kicked you out of your own country,” Perez said. “People are giving in to their sadness and melancholy. But I’m 76. I don’t have that melancholy anymore.”

Such nostalgia permeates both sides of a sea that separates exiles from the country and people they love. Carmen Sedano Morales, one of Rodriguez’s maternal aunts, waited for her parents to die before attempting to leave Cuba. Then time ran out.

“The Cuban government teaches you that this country is bad, but I always knew in my heart Americans are good people,” said Morales, 78, who has been visiting her California relatives for two months. “We’ve all been going crazy these past 30 years without seeing each other. Those of us who lived the good life in Cuba, who lived during that beautiful time before Fidel came along, know what a horrible country it’s become. If he opened the borders, Cuba would empty out.”