Hope, Doubt in Little Havana

It was Cuban Independence Day in Little Havana on Monday, and rum-laced Cuba libres were on the house at the Versailles restaurant. Jose Lago, who fled the island in the 1960s, had just listened to President Bush on the radio. And he had tears in his eyes.

“He is the only president who will liberate Cuba,” the 61-year-old businessman said. “He is my president.”

One hundred years to the day after the Caribbean island became an independent nation, Bush delivered a hard-line speech on Cuban-American relations. He linked any lifting of the 40-year-old U.S. trade embargo to Fidel Castro’s willingness to free political prisoners, allow opposition parties and organize independently monitored elections.

“A relic from another era,” Bush said, “has turned a beautiful island into a prison.”

The president then flew from Washington to celebrate the holiday with leaders of Miami’s 700,000-member Cuban American community--one of the Republican Party’s most reliable constituencies. It is also a key voting bloc for the state GOP in the November elections, in which the president’s brother, Jeb, is seeking reelection as governor, and for Bush’s own reelection chances in 2004.

Bush’s tough talk, however, clearly did not sit well with everyone in Little Havana, despite how they may feel about Castro and his communist dictatorship.

Marlene Garcia, who has been in America for 22 years, complained about the current government restrictions on travel and money transfers to Cuba. Her brother Julio, 45, who had remained on the island, died of a heart attack Sunday. Garcia said she would like to be able to attend the funeral without breaking U.S. law. Likewise, Garcia said, her niece in Cuba depends on the cash payments Garcia regularly wires her. “If you don’t have dollars in Cuba, you can’t live.”

Some See Ordinary

Cubans as Victims

To mark the century of independence from Spain, Cristy Ruiz Brown put the red, white and blue flags of the island into the hands of her son, 3-year-old Dante, and daughter Vanessa, 11 months, and came to Calle Ocho, Little Havana’s Main Street. The New Jersey-born daughter of Cuban exiles, Brown, 28, said she believed that Bush’s approach was too harsh--and that the long-standing ban on U.S.-Cuban trade hurts ordinary Cubans and not the island’s rulers.

She also sounded dubious that Bush’s strategy of offering renewed economic ties in exchange for democratic reforms would work. “They’re not going to make those changes,” Brown said. “If they didn’t do it in 40 years, I don’t think they’re going to do it the next day.”

But Manny Palmeiro, a Cuban American who is the spokesman for the bus and rail system of Miami-Dade County, said Bush’s new proposals have backed Castro against a wall. “If, like [Castro] says in almost all of his speeches, all the problems of the country are due to the embargo, this is his chance to solve them,” Palmeiro said. “With what [Bush] has said this morning, we may see a new light.”

(To fete the Monday holiday, Palmeiro and other members of the Hispanic Transit Society and the National Assn. of Hispanic Public Administrators ordered an 8-foot-long lemon sponge layer cake with custard filling that was shaped like the island of Cuba.)

A week ago, former President Carter traveled to Havana and urged Cubans to embrace democracy. He simultaneously called on the United States to scrap its unilateral trade ban. In contrast, Bush insisted Monday that the Castro leadership transform the political system first, saying open commerce between the nations would be possible only “when Cuba has a new government that is fully democratic.”

So as to not place all his bets on the 74-year-old Castro, Bush promised aid to private organizations that assist Cubans, as well as scholarships at U.S. colleges and universities for Cubans who are trying to build civil institutions outside the communist system.

The president’s approach--offering Castro a deal while also trying to foment change in the country--was music to the ears of the most influential exile organization in Miami, the Cuban American National Foundation. The group’s leaders believe that revived trade would cement Castro’s grip on power.

“Today, President Bush shut the door to those who want to throw a lifeline to a dictatorship or have a humanitarian capitulation,” executive director Joe Garcia said in an interview.

He also saluted Bush’s echoing of demands by Cuban human rights activists for a national referendum that would ask voters whether they favor civil liberties--including freedom of speech--and amnesty for political prisoners. The European Union also voiced support Monday for the petition, known as the Varela Project.

Doubters Among

Dissidents in Havana

But leading Cuban dissidents in Havana said Monday that Bush’s policies could hurt their efforts to force a democratic opening.

“Changes have to be made, but changes have to be made on both sides,” Vladimiro Roca, who was released from prison this month two months short of his five-year sentence, told Associated Press.

“Dialogue, negotiation and reconciliation” will do more than U.S. hard-line policies, Roca said. There was no immediate response from the Cuban government.

Jose Padron, a 38-year-old Miami psychologist, expressed doubts that even the deftest political maneuvering by the White House could dislodge the wily and experienced Castro, who seized power with his band of revolutionaries in 1959 and retained it through ruthless repression and a secret police force trained by the Soviet KGB.

Only an armed uprising of the same sort Castro organized against Fulgencio Batista, the former president-turned-dictator he ousted, will produce real results, Padron said.

“The Cuban people can fight for freedom, but we need help--like we had before with President Kennedy,” he said. In 1961, the CIA backed a failed invasion of Cuba by armed exiles at the Bay of Pigs.

Over the last few months, Uva de Aragon, assistant director of the Cuban Research Institute at Florida International University in Miami, has been reading about how Cuba won its independence and what ensued.

Following the defeat of Spain in the Spanish-American War, the United States occupied the island. At midday on May 20, 1902, an American general formally transferred power to Cuba’s first president, Tomas Estrada Palma. For years afterward, under an amendment that Washington insisted be added to Cuba’s constitution, the United States intervened in the island’s affairs when it deemed its own national interests at risk.

“In a way,” De Aragon said, “it’s sad that 100 years after the independence of Cuba that Cubans both on the island and here are still so attentive to what presidents of the United States say Cuba should be and do.”