A Day of Rage for Exile Community

Irene Alonso’s husband, Ruben, kept the television on all night--just in case. Then, at 5:15 Saturday morning, he shook her awake with horror in his eyes and venom in his veins.

“Look! Look what they’re doing to that poor little boy!” Alonso shouted as he dragged his wife to the set in their Little Havana home as federal agents launched Operation Reunion live on global TV.

“It was just so horrible,” Irene recalled later as she waited to bail out Ruben at the Miami-Dade County Jail, where most of those gathered believed that police had overreacted and provoked many confrontations. “How could this happen in the United States? It was like being back in Cuba again.”

Less than two hours after those images were broadcast, the Alonsos were in the streets with their 19-year-old daughter at the start of a marathon day of venting--a day of fury, confusion, betrayal and then sad resignation. It ended with more than 260 people behind bars and gaping wounds in a Cuban American exile community that has built so much of this city.

And as community leaders railed against “a betrayal of all the values and principles that [America] represents,” Irene Alonso spent most of her time trying to get a husband who fled communism in Cuba out of jail in America.

Appealing for calm among his 800,000 Cuban American constituents Saturday evening, Miami-Dade County Mayor Alex Penelas expressed his own “anger and frustrations at the federal government’s actions” during the raid that “snatched” 6-year-old Cuban castaway Elian Gonzalez from his great-uncle’s Little Havana home.

Echoing so many whose pained reaction paralyzed about 10 city blocks all day, the Miami city mayor, Joe Carollo, added: “I can’t find the words to express the indignation, the shame I felt this morning toward our federal government.”

Most of those gathered in the streets chose to express their feelings through signs and slogans, although some used bottles and stones, occasionally pelting columns of helmeted and gas-masked riot police in a disorganized ballet for control of the streets.

But behind it all was a shared sense of righteous passion.

Said Miami Police Chief Bill O’Brien: “It’s not a large group of people--probably not more than 1,000--when you’re talking about a community of 2 million. But they’re being very disruptive.”

A Jeep festooned with Cuban flags and graffiti declaring “Clinton Disgraced His Family; Now He Disgraced Ours” attempted to break through police lines. A shirtless, elderly man silently held a sign reading “Ashamed to be an American.” Scores wore T-shirts calling the U.S. president a Communist.

Some even burned the American flag.

Amid such imagery, which underscored the conflicting emotions shared by hundreds of thousands of Cuban families divided by two nations and systems that have been sparring since Cuban President Fidel Castro’s revolution 41 years ago, many in the streets felt ripped in half by their ancestry and their nationality.

“What they did to that boy is anti-American. It’s anti-democratic,” shouted Jaime Velasco, a 64-year-old waiter who came to the U.S. a year after Castro’s revolution. “Of course, today I’m ashamed of America. Because I love this country.”

Brian Otero said he would die for America, even as he condemned its president and attorney general.

“I pledged allegiance to this flag in this great country,” said Otero, a 21-year-old unemployed carpenter who was born after his parents migrated from Cuba. “But how does one nation under God come in like a thief in the night on the eve of Easter to take away a little boy?”

Jorge Mas wasn’t merely hurt. The head of the powerful and well-endowed Cuban American National Foundation lobbying group said in a statement: “Shame on you Bill Clinton. Shame on you Janet Reno.” He called the Little Havana raid “a barbaric act that will always be remembered.”

The more strident Democracy Movement, which has led many street protests in the past, dubbed Operation Reunion “Gestapo tactics”--a metaphor Mayor Carollo anticipated earlier Saturday when he gave his version of the raid: “They came in with machine guns. They came in gassing people. This is America. This is not Cuba. This is not Hitler’s old Germany.”

Later, appearing alongside Penelas and local religious leaders in a televised appeal for peaceful protest, Carollo was in tears.

“No matter how much we hurt inside,” he said, “we cannot think with our hearts. We have to think with our heads. . . . That is the best way we can help Elian Gonzalez, help Miami and put less shame on America today.”

At the Miami-Dade County Jail, amid a throng of weeping and worried family members seeking word of arrested relatives and friends, Irene Alonso was dealing with several levels of pain.

As a mother wailed in the background--”I brought my son to America to be free, and now he’s here in jail”--Alonso reflected on what drove her, her husband and daughter and so many others into the streets Saturday.

“It was just so cruel. You don’t do that to a little child,” she said of the raid. “If they had gone in an orderly fashion, none of this would have happened.”

After a day of few injuries and no major property damage, she also stressed the nonviolent instincts of a community that, after all, owns most of the property in Little Havana and much of metropolitan Miami.

“The Cuban community is not violent,” she said, stressing that she believed the demonstrations would not continue beyond Saturday night. “They got a little violent today, but we know this isn’t the way.”

Still, as nightfall approached, riot police moved into the neighborhood surrounding Elian’s former home on Northwest 2nd Street in an attempt to clear out before dark the media city that has drawn crowds throughout the five-month Elian saga. Now that Elian and his great-uncle Lazaro Gonzalez and family were gone, police at the scene explained, it was time the media circus closed down as well.

“We will not tolerate violence,” Penelas declared after hours during which some of the most violent behavior was exhibited by Miami riot police, who carried M-16 assault rifles and fired pepper spray as they shoved, jabbed and handcuffed nearly 200 people that included several journalists--among them Los Angeles Times photographer Carolyn Cole.