A City Under Emotional Distress

Even before up to 100,000 Cuban exiles take to the streets today in yet another protest against the federal seizure of Elian Gonzalez a week ago, this city is seething, and its leadership is in turmoil.

The city manager has been fired, the police chief quit Friday and dozens of residents have complained they were roughed up by police in last weekend’s demonstrations. “Emotions are raw. The situation is tense. The patience of the community is being worn thin on all sides,” said attorney John DeLeon, president of the Miami chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union. “Tomorrow is going to be a very telling day.”

The man at the center of the upheaval is the city’s mayor, Joe Carollo, an outspoken backer of the Miami relatives’ efforts to prevent Elian from being returned to Cuba. Carollo has complained bitterly that local police officials did not give him warning that armed federal agents were coming to take Elian from his great-uncle’s Little Havana home.

Barred by the city charter from firing the police chief, Carollo ordered City Manager Donald Warshaw to fire William O’Brien. Warshaw refused. So Carollo fired Warshaw.

O’Brien, 56, a 25-year police veteran, announced his resignation Friday. “I refuse to be the chief of police in a city that has someone as divisive and destructive as Joe Carollo as mayor,” said O’Brien at a news conference as about 60 police officers, including some Cuban Americans, cheered in support. Crying, some of the officers later embraced the chief, who himself was in tears.

DeLeon said the ACLU has received about 100 calls from people who said they were roughed up by police, who made more than 300 arrests to quell demonstrations last weekend by Cuban Americans. Police used tear gas and pepper spray to break up crowds that blocked traffic and set tires ablaze at several intersections.

Today’s demonstration, called by a coalition of exile groups, is planned as a peaceful, flag-waving march down 20 blocks of 8th Street in the heart of Little Havana.

But DeLeon and others warn that many people who had invested heavily in Elian as a symbol of their decades-long opposition to Cuban leader Fidel Castro are “feeling powerless, humiliated.”

“The city is going through an upheaval right now,” said DeLeon.

Chaos at City Hall is distracting but not unusual in Miami, the largest city among 28 municipalities that make up Miami-Dade County. Nor is Carollo, 44, any stranger to controversy. Long known for his temper and combative nature, he is a former police officer and city commissioner who regained the mayor’s office after a nasty 1997 election tainted by vote fraud.

Carollo Takes Center Stage

In the days before the Saturday raid, Carollo was a fixture in front of the television cameras that were trained on the Little Havana house where Elian lived, appealing for calm yet insisting that Miami police would not be a part of any federal plan to grab the boy.

Miami-Dade County Mayor Alex Penelas, the executive of the unincorporated parts of the county, made similar statements but has scaled back public comments on the issue in recent days.

Miami police did not join federal agents in entering the home of Lazaro Gonzalez, Elian’s great-uncle, during the raid. But to ease the federal agents’ passage through police barricades, an assistant chief did ride in the front seat of the van in which the boy was rushed off.

In firing Warshaw on Thursday, Carollo told an overflow crowd of supporters at City Hall that the action had nothing to do with the raid. But few believed that.

“Clearly it is [about the raid],” said Damian J. Fernandez, a Cuba expert at Florida International University. “There are deep-seated divisions in Miami politics at various levels, and the crisis surrounding Elian has exacerbated those divisions.” In the past generation, Miami has been riven by riots, ethnic tensions, political corruption and sharp debate over immigration.

Under his contract, Warshaw, 57, himself a former Miami police chief and a friend of O’Brien’s, will stay on the job for 10 more days. He said he would name O’Brien’s successor and proposed a list of three male candidates, all high-ranking Latinos on the city force.

Carollo said he would have no confidence in any chief Warshaw named. And right now, he has the backing of the majority of the city’s five-member commission.

O’Brien said he would stay in uniform through the weekend protests.

Police Chief Defends Officers

O’Brien defended his officers against charges they used excessive force against protesters. “I know there is incredible anger and frustration in the exile community,” said O’Brien. “And I want to tell you, if you’re looking for a focal point for that frustration, here it is. I gave the orders.”

Warshaw also expressed bitterness toward Carollo, who named him city manager two years ago but now says he fired him because he had grown “power hungry.”

“This is a man who wanted to be Don King, the King of Miami without being elected,” said Carollo.

Gov. Jeb Bush, entering the fray, met with Carollo on Thursday and said he encouraged him to consider an investigation into the alleged police abuse rather than move to sack the city manager. “I asked the mayor to be reflective rather than reactive,” Bush said.

For his part, Warshaw urged the community to refrain from violence. “I hope and pray that you won’t let these cameras portray us around the world as chaotic people, because we’re not,” he said.

Fernandez theorized that much of Miami is suffering from what he called “post-traumatic stress disorder” as the result of the Gonzalez case, which he added “has been mismanaged to the point where the whole community has suffered.”

“Elian was politicized, turned into a cosmic battle against the evils of communism,” said Fernandez, who is Cuban American. “Now we are a community that needs to reflect, clean up our image and rethink who we are. This has been a fiasco we should learn from.”