L.A.’s Cuban Americans Join the Elian Outcry

The government raid that reunited 6-year-old Elian Gonzalez and his father has ignited an activist spirit in Los Angeles County’s small and dispersed Cuban American community.

Hundreds of Cuban Americans scattered across the region took part in demonstrations to publicly express their distaste for Cuban dictator Fidel Castro--and the U.S. government’s position that the boy should go home.

“It’s the first time Cubans feel so offended that they say they regret being American citizens,” said Aurelio de la Vega, a retired Cal State Northridge music composition professor who left Cuba in 1959.

Cubans demonstrated Saturday at the Federal Office Building in Westwood--as they did three times before--to coincide with a large protest in Miami.

The 74-year-old De la Vega attended a protest there April 22, and said Cuban Americans appeared uncharacteristically angry at the way the U.S. removed Elian and reunited him with his father, Juan Miguel Gonzalez.

Edie Smith, 44, who lives in Studio City, said she put a sign on her car bearing the message: “I’m embarrassed to be an American.”

“Elian should be with his dad, but it should have been handled differently,” said Smith, a child-care supervisor at a North Hollywood nonprofit community organization who left Cuba with her parents in 1970.

Manuel Pozo, 44, a former political prisoner in Cuba, started a weeklong hunger strike Wednesday in Echo Park to express his anger and disappointment. And Thursday, several exile groups met in Diamond Bar to draft a manifesto criticizing U.S. action.

Many Cuban Americans said they feel maligned by their portrayal in the media as reactionary, protesting mobs, and they complain that there are few references to the fear and oppression they say the Cuban government inflicts upon its citizens.

“We’re part of the Cuban people on the island. We don’t belong to the bourgeoisie,” said Ruth Aparicio, 61, of Diamond Bar, a member of the Cuban American Teachers Assn., who has helped organize anti-Castro groups. “We want to show Cuban exiles’ real face. We are here fleeing communist repression.”

Elian has been the focus of a highly political and emotional custody struggle since he was rescued from the sea off Florida on Thanksgiving Day. The boat carrying him from Cuba had sunk and his mother and 10 others drowned in their attempt to reach the United States.

The boy’s great-uncle and his family took Elian into their Miami home after his rescue by two men who were fishing and maintain that he should not be forced to grow up in Cuba. On May 11, an appellate court is scheduled to consider the family’s bid to win a political asylum hearing for the boy.

Elian, his father, stepmother and infant half-brother are staying at an estate east of Washington, D.C., while the legal process continues.

In Southern California, Victoria Rives, who co-owns Las Palmas restaurant in North Hollywood with her husband, Gaston Rives, said she wished there had been a call for West Coast Cuban Americans to join the hundreds of Miami businesses that closed last Tuesday in protest.

There were no reports that the approximately 5,000 Cuban-owned businesses in Greater Los Angeles were closed that day, activists said.

“There’s a lot of apathy here. If you don’t give a customer service, he’ll say, ‘I don’t care [about Elian],’ ” said Victoria Rives, 59.

The local Cuban American community has been estimated at 50,000 to 70,000 people--small compared with Miami’s 800,000. The largest concentrations are in Glendale, Burbank, Sun Valley, Culver City, Inglewood, Huntington Park and Downey. Living more than 3,000 miles from Cuba and Florida, they are far removed from the activity in Little Havana. The Southland also lacks high-powered Cuban radio stations, which have helped mobilize Cubans in Miami.

Yet many local Cuban Americans say they care about what happens to Elian because they identify with his plight.

“Knowing what Fidel Castro’s Cuba is like, I think every human being should grow up with freedom,” said Raquel Maria Santin, 71, who patronized Las Palmas last week. “[Elian’s] mom died to bring him here. It would be horrible to send him back to Cuba. He would become a banner for communism.”

Santin said she was imprisoned twice on political charges in Cuba--by the Fulgencio Batista dictatorship that preceded Castro and by the present regime--before she left in 1970. She said the courts should decide whether Elian can stay in the United States.

“I don’t deny a father’s right to be with his son, but I’m against the way things have been handled,” she said. “Clinton is playing Castro’s game.”

Hunger striker Pozo, who is a financial consultant, said he spent eight years in Cuban prisons on conspiracy and rebellion charges before he left the island in 1992. He is camping beside a bust of Cuban Independence hero Jose Marti in Echo Park during his weeklong fast.

Olga Fernandez, a radiation physicist at UCLA who left Cuba in 1971, said her concern for the boy moved her to create the Committee for the Freedom of Elian, which organized the Westwood protests. She contacted more than 600 people to participate, she said.

“We come from a different reality and are very sensitive to personal freedom,” said Fernandez, 53, of Mar Vista. “This should have been a family custody issue and for reasons I don’t understand well, it hasn’t been treated that way.”

Jesus Hernandez Cuellar, Cuban-born publisher and editor of the Spanish-language magazine “Contacto,” said many Cubans in the U.S. believe the Elian saga involves more than reunifying a father and son.

“It’s inexplicable why the U.S. Justice Department acted the way it did when there’s an ongoing legal process,” said the 48-year-old Burbank resident.

Hernandez said he suspects Castro may have threatened to suspend U.S.-Cuba immigration accords and to unleash a massive refugee boat lift unless Elian is returned to Cuba.

He and other Cuban Americans also believe the Cuban government agreed to accept Cuban inmates who rebelled and took hostages in a Louisiana jail last December in exchange for the return of Elian, he said.