Cuban Group’s New Tack Elicits Cries of Betrayal

When the 8-year-old son of Jorge Mas Santos heard his father described in a recent radio broadcast, there was one term he didn’t understand. So he asked his father.

“The word,” recalls Mas Santos with a thin smile, “was ‘dictator.’ ”

With Mas Santos at its eye, a hurricane is raging in Miami’s Cuban American community over the correct strategy and tactics for opposing Cuban strongman Fidel Castro and returning democracy to the island.

In the last year, Mas Santos, 38, a Miami Beach-born businessman who chairs the powerful Cuban American National Foundation, has quietly steered the influential political lobbying group on a new, more pragmatic tack and away from the virulent right-wing policies that had become synonymous with Cuban American politics.

At the same time, the chairman and his allies in the foundation leadership are trying to apply the bitter lessons learned from the Elian Gonzalez affair last year. Not only did Cuban American activists fail to prevent the return of the 6-year-old boy to Cuba with his father, a humiliating political Waterloo for the exiles, but they also came off looking like hysterical fanatics to many other Americans.

Hence Mas Santos’ support for hosting the Latin Grammy awards in Miami and other changes in policy that tend to mute what might have seemed to non-Cubans like unreasonable extremism, said Dario Moreno, professor of political science at Florida International University.

“They want to reach out to mainstream America. And they can’t if they look silly or intolerant,” said Moreno, a Cuban American raised in Los Angeles.

For some Cuban Americans inside and outside the group, the new direction is a patent betrayal of the traditional hard line and legacy of Mas Santos’ late father, Jorge Mas Canosa, who founded the organization.

“How can you give your hand to your enemy? It’s stupid,” objected Pedro Diaz, a former journalist who was confined in Cuban prisons and psychiatric asylums for four years and now lives in Miami.

There is a generational aspect to the clash, some analysts maintain. Like Castro himself, many historic leaders of the exile opposition to communist rule are now old. Many of the directors who quit were in their 70s, said the foundation’s media relations coordinator, Mariela Ferretti. Several had been close friends of Mas Santos’ father, including Dr. Alberto Hernandez, his personal physician.

Mas Santos denied that a changing of the guard is now afoot but added soon afterward: “A younger generation sometimes tends to think of different strategy, different tactics--thinking outside the box.”

With Castro turning 75 on Monday, and his health questionable, such issues have assumed a fresh sense of urgency.

The foundation, which once shunned all contact with Cuban officialdom, is now discreetly talking to figures in the communist island’s armed forces and police, especially since Castro suffered a fainting spell in June, Mas Santos disclosed in an interview.

The organization, the most politically potent in the Cuban American community, has also come out in favor of allowing humanitarian shipments of food and medical aid to the island, academic exchanges with Cuban institutions of higher learning and U.S. government assistance to small entrepreneurs and political dissidents.

“We will engage anybody, other than those who have the blood of Cuban people on their hands, in dialogue,” Mas Santos said.

In recent weeks, 20 of the foundation’s 150 directors have resigned, including spokeswoman Ninoska Perez Castellon and her husband, Roberto Martin Perez, a former Cuban political prisoner. The departing directors accused Mas Santos of a dictatorial brand of leadership at odds with the group’s very reason for existence: the promotion of a free Cuba.

“Notwithstanding our efforts, the organization has taken an undemocratic path antithetical to these very principles,” the resigning directors said in a joint statement. “We will not continue to engage in futile battles that do not advance the cause of a free Cuba. The battle has been too long. There is only one enemy--the dictatorship that enslaves Cuba.”

Policies Defended

Perez Castellon, who hosts a popular afternoon talk show on a Spanish-language radio station in Miami, accused Mas Santos of hijacking the foundation to impose radically new policies but not having the guts to admit it.

The chairman retorts that the collegial nature of the group’s decision-making, plus the ideals that brought an estimated 800,000 Cubans to the United States after Castro took power in 1959, make it impossible for him or anyone else to impose his will.

“We believe in democracy. We believe in freedom,” Mas Santos said. “We believe in a free flow of ideas and debate. And that’s why we’re here as exiles.”

The spark that ignited the controversy was the chairman’s very public backing for the successful effort at bringing this year’s Latin Grammy music award show from Los Angeles to Miami. The prospect of Cuban musicians winning awards, and perhaps paying homage to Castro, was too much for diehard exiles to contemplate.

Castro Still the Target

“Our struggle isn’t against the Buena Vista Social Club [a noted Cuban musical ensemble],” countered Mas Santos. “It’s against Fidel Castro and the regime.”

The Cuban American National Foundation was created 20 years ago as an admitted carbon copy of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, widely viewed as one of the most potent political lobbies in Washington.

The original chairman, Mas Canosa, was a charismatic, strong-willed and larger-than-life figure who sometimes talked of becoming president of a free Cuba.

Before, the main Cuban American political organizations had been shadowy groups like Alpha 66 and Omega 7, which trained in the swamps of Florida for military action against Castro.

“It’s really the foundation that got Cubans out of the Everglades and into Washington lobbying,” Moreno said.

In 1997, Mas Canosa succumbed to cancer, and the following year his son, a highly successful businessman, took over. Old guard exile leaders who thought they could call the shots found they were mistaken. Mas Santos imported his own coterie of advisors, and some longtime figures in the anti-Castro struggle reportedly felt excluded.

“I am not in my father’s shadow. I have my own shadow,” said Mas Santos.

In business, he has arguably achieved more than his father. Mas Canosa started a telephone cable-laying company. Under the son, the firm has grown to a $1.4-billion telecommunications enterprise, MasTec Inc., ranked as the largest Latino-owned business in the United States.

For Mas Santos and other more pragmatic foundation leaders, the outcome of last year’s Elian Gonzalez affair had the same galvanizing effect that the U.S. sale of AWACS planes to Saudi Arabia had on the Jewish community 20 years ago.

“We have to realize that, in the American context, if we can’t explain ourselves, we’re doomed,” said Joe Garcia, the foundation’s executive director. The group, he said, began to “streamline” its message. That has not been to everybody’s liking.

“What this means is that the ideologues in Miami feel left out,” said Lisandro Perez, director of the Cuban Research Institute at Florida International University. “They feel they need to keep up the fight against Castro, even in Miami.”

Grumbling Over Politics

Though the foundation has always been avowedly bipartisan in its political donations, some in predominantly Republican Little Havana believe it has become too cozy with the Democrats, who are sometimes perceived as soft on Castro.

A meeting here in June between foundation leaders and Sen. Joseph I. Lieberman (D-Conn.), the former vice presidential candidate, caused some grumbling. Garcia felt compelled during a local television public affairs show to deny a widespread rumor that he had once hugged Janet Reno, the former Democratic attorney general who was instrumental in returning Elian to Cuba.

In February, the foundation opened higher-profile offices in Washington, with a former career U.S. diplomat, Dennis Hays, in charge. In Miami, it plans to move later from its third-floor offices in Little Havana to the Freedom Tower, the historic downtown building where nearly half a million refugees from Cuba were once processed into this country.

The organization, in the words of Mas Santos, is also trying to “professionalize” itself. A key step in that direction was to hire the politically savvy and outspoken Garcia, 38, as executive director last year.

Garcia, a second-generation Cuban American, was the highest-ranking Latino in the state government when he served as chairman of the Florida Public Service Commission in 1999 and 2000.

Castro’s public unsteadiness in June added to the pressures to rethink strategy. “I think people realized that the Castro endgame is beginning,” said Moreno. “Whoever controls the foundation is going to have a lot of influence on what U.S. policy is towards Cuban transition.”

According to Mas Santos, his organization has a “game plan,” reviewed regularly, on what to do in the event of Castro’s death or disability, or to deal with other scenarios, including the assumption of power by Fidel’s brother, Raul, head of Cuba’s armed forces.

The proper role of the foundation, Mas Santos said, is that of a “think tank in waiting” to move to Havana one day and help transform post-Castro Cuba into “the diamond of this hemisphere.” He would like to go too, he says.

As for people calling him a dictator, Mas Santos said, “We’re fighting against everything a dictatorship implies.”