CUBA NEWS
The Miami Herald

Evangelical church thrives

A minister who came to Cuba 50 years ago celebrates the anniversary of the church he started. Today its members number more than 1,000.

By John Rice, Associated Press. Posted on Sun, Nov. 23, 2003

CAMP CANAAN, Cuba - Paul Northrup raised his hands and shouted ''Alelujah!'' A congregation of more than 1,000 Cubans echoed back.

The small church that Northrup planted in central Cuba 50 years ago has grown and thrived since he left in 1959, becoming a small part of a broad movement that Cuban evangelicals have built across their socialist nation.

''They told us when we left, the work would fail,'' Northrup said. "There were seven churches then. Now there are 53.''

Northrup, now 71, and his family came down from Southern California to join with Cuban church members for a 50th anniversary celebration this month at a borrowed Methodist center called Camp Canaan, about 170 miles east of Havana.

''It makes me happy. It's kind of like our kids and grandkids,'' Northrup said.

Northrup came to Cuba with his wife, Vera, in 1953 as an independent preacher, carrying only ''our clothes and an accordion.'' In Sancti Spiritus, he found a radio station that sold him time for $6 a minute, and he began to preach.

HUMBLE ORIGINS

Soon he managed to establish a small church called Buenas Nuevas -- "Good News.''

A milkman who regularly passed by grew curious and decided to enter one day.

''I didn't know that by entering, my life was going to change,'' said Eliseo Leon, who is now president of Buenas Nuevas.

As Northrup built the church, Fidel Castro was building a revolution against the dictatorship of Fulgencio Batista.

Northrup recalled seeing rebels that Batista's men had hung from streetlights. Another day, "Batista sent his planes in at night. One had a searchlight and the other planes would strafe where they thought the rebels were.

''Not that it would have done any good against a .50-caliber [gun], but we took all the mattresses we had, piled them on a bed'' and hid underneath, he said.

After toppling Batista, Castro's revolution veered toward socialism. Relations with the United States soured, and the atmosphere grew uncomfortable for many Americans.

Northrup said he left because his presence could make some think of Buenas Nuevas as a U.S. church: "We felt we'd hurt them more by staying.''

He later founded Gospel Relief Missions, based in Mission Viejo, Calif.

Hundreds of other pastors, both foreign and Cuban, also left the country.

RELIGIOUS STRUGGLE

For the next 25 years, all religions struggled under an explicitly atheist government that discouraged all sorts of religious faith. Believers were barred from important jobs and were viewed with hostility by officials who oversaw just about all aspects of life.

''They were trying to make ends meet. There were some places they lost membership,'' said Marcos Antonio Ramos, a Miami-based Baptist preacher and historian of Cuban Protestantism.

But the wall was starting to crack by 1984, when Castro attended a Protestant service with the Rev. Jesse Jackson. The collapse of the Soviet bloc later led the government to abandon official atheism and to openly, if warily, accept religious faith.

The arrival of Pope John Paul II in Cuba in 1997 drew attention to the island's Catholics, but many analysts estimate that attendance at Protestant churches has long exceeded that at Catholic services.

Northrup's decision to register his new church with the government in 1954 turned out to be fortunate: After the revolution, no new churches were recognized, and unofficial churches, often operating out of houses, ran the risk of being shut down.

It is still hard to get permission to build new churches, and Buenas Nuevas has about 200 home-based worship centers. They are among thousands of such home churches that other Protestants have sown across Cuba.

Cuban exiles reunite to help dedicate historic county park

A new county park will open in West Kendall on the site where thousands of young Cuban boys lived after coming to America in the early 1960s.

By Jennifer Mooney. jmooney@herald.com. Posted on Sun, Nov. 23, 2003.

When 13-year-old Fernando Collado left Cuba without his parents, he thought he'd be all alone.

But during his three-month stay at Camp Matecumbe as part of the Operation Pedro Pan exodus, Collado developed friendships that have lasted for more than 40 years.

Collado and a few dozen other middle-aged Cuban men whose parents sent them to America in the early 1960s to escape Castro's communist regime reunited Saturday at a dedication ceremony honoring the West Kendall camp as a Cuban exile landmark and Miami-Dade's newest park.

More than 4,000 young boys who fled Cuba, including U.S. Secretary of Housing and Urban Development Mel Martínez, Director of the Bureau of Citizenship and Immigration Eduardo Aguirre and Latin music icon Willy Chirino, spent time at the camp waiting to be reunited with their parents.

''This is where life in America began for me,'' said Martínez, who recalled spending his first night in America sleeping in the camp's dining hall. "It's really important that it's going to be remembered as a part of history.''

Starting next summer, the 22-acre park -- combined with an adjacent 77-acre preserve of pinelands already owned by the county -- will be open to the public for picnics, nature walks, camping and bird watching, officials said. The county bought the $2.4 million park -- the site of the Archdiocese of Miami's Boystown in West Kendall -- through grants, impact fees and donations from Pedro Pan alumni.

'MY ELLIS ISLAND'

Former Pedro Panners, some of whom traveled from out of town to attend the event, are thrilled that a part of their history is being preserved.

''This is like my Ellis Island,'' said Ricardo Gonzalez, 54, who remembers the ''extremely long'' car ride from the airport to the camp in 1962.

Gonzalez, like many other Cuban boys whose first stop in the United States was Camp Matecumbe, says he'll never forget what life there was like.

''At first it felt like summer camp,'' recalled West Palm Beach resident Ruben Cortina, "but then it was shock.''

County officials, including Mayor Alex Penelas, Manager George Burgess and a few commissioners, spoke of the camp's significance to the Cuban community.

''No other site, with the exception of the Freedom Tower, so captures the soul of the Cuban exile community,'' Miami-Dade Parks Director Vivian Donnell Rodriguez told a group of about 100 people sitting inside the camp's gymnasium, which will serve as the new park's activity center and historic exhibition area.

REMINISCING

After the ceremony, grown men laughed as they remembered their teenage years together, playing baseball in a grassy area near the gymnasium, swimming, sleeping in bunk beds or tents and growing closer to their newfound ''brothers'' as each day passed.

Though Collado was separated from his parents for four years after arriving from Cuba in 1962, the relationships he forged at the camp made his transition easier.

Said Collado: "The only thing we had was this group of guys relying on each other. We were our own family.''

Playwright feels the joy and tears at end of a long artistic journey

By Christine Dolen, cdolen@herald.com. Posted on Mon, Nov. 24, 2003 in The Miami Herald.

NEW YORK -- More than 1,300 miles separate Matanzas, Cuba, from the heart of New York City. But just over a week ago, a long journey that playwright Nilo Cruz began when he left his Cuban hometown as a frightened 9-year-old ended just off Times Square when his play Anna in the Tropics opened, at last, on Broadway.

From a boy whose parents brought him to Miami on a Freedom Flight from Cuba in 1970 to a man who became the first Hispanic-American to win the Pulitzer Prize for drama in 2003, Cruz has evolved from a struggling exile to an exalted artist, even though some New York critics found his poetic play about Cuban-American cigarmakers in Florida's Ybor City in 1929 less than transporting.

Even so, the weekend of Nov. 15-16 was one of the happiest in the 43-year-old playwright's life.

Part of it, of course, was the thrill of his first Broadway opening, of seeing a play written for the tiny 104-seat New Theatre in Coral Gables open in the 1,068-seat Royale, an ornate Broadway theater with murals of Spanish lovers on its second-floor ceiling. Too, there was the excitement of looking around the opening night audience and seeing fellow Pulitzer winners Edward Albee and Neil Simon, stars like Brian Stokes Mitchell and Philip Seymour Hoffman and Alfred Molina in the red velvet seats.

But what made the opening weekend sweetest for Cruz, who lives alone in an East Side apartment in New York, was that he got to experience it surrounded by family.

His former wife, artist Dorothy García, brought their 15-year-old daughter Chloe from Pasadena, Calif., where the Westridge High School freshman studies piano and is an aspiring jazz singer. Clara Martha Cruz, a Spanish teacher at Hialeah Gardens Elementary and one of Cruz's two older sisters, came up from her home in Westchester with her husband, Ramón Bezanilla, and daughter Krystel Ramos, a 17-year-old senior at Miami's St. Brendan Catholic High School. Missing were his father, also named Nilo Cruz, who passed away in 1999, and his mother Tina, who is recovering from knee surgery.

''It was really good that I could also have private moments with my family and share this experience in a more intimate way. They don't ask for anything. They allow you who you are. You can just hug them and kiss them,'' Cruz says.

"The media ask you to intellectualize emotion. I was certainly elated, but they still want you to articulate it. By the time I got to the opening night party [at The Supper Club], the last thing I wanted to do was talk about it. I was feeling so much, I was just trying to take it all in and experience it.''

That's what Cruz's extended family did. They squeezed in some family reunion time (they had breakfast at the Times Square Howard Johnson's), some quick tourist stops (the World Trade Center site and Madame Tussaud's Wax Museum) and, of course, the in-the-spotlight glamour of a major Broadway opening night.

''We walked to the theater from my cousin's hotel, and there were all these photographers. It was crazy!'' says Ramos, who stayed up 'til 3 a.m. the night she arrived, catching up with her uncle, whom she sometimes calls ''Papi'' by mistake.

'I thought, 'Wow, this is probably how Jennifer Lopez feels'. . . And the night before, we got to meet Jimmy Smits, who was so great, so elegant in the play in his white suit. Then we got to stand on the stage and look out at all those empty red seats.''

Ramos' mother, Clara Martha Cruz, was like the brother she still calls ''Nilito'' in feeling waves of overwhelming emotion.

''Anna is very meaningful for us. She's like a new sister, a new part of the family,'' says Cruz, who spent the day after her return from New York taking the poster of her brother's play from classroom to classroom at Hialeah Gardens, reminding the students that her Pulitzer Prize-winning brother was also a product of Miami-Dade's public school system.

"When we arrived at the theater and I saw all people outside, I was shaking. Then I saw my brother looking very elegant, and my daughter and niece had gardenias in their hair [like the character of Marela in the play].

"Our father's birthday would have been Nov. 15, and the gardenia was his favorite flower. And the name of the cigar factory in the play is Flor del Cielo, flower of the sky. So I thought of God, of our father, of our grandmother who loved theater and taught us to love it.''

Chloe García-Cruz, who still has braces on her teeth and whose glowing face reflects a blending of her parents' Cuban, Mexican and Japanese heritage, had seen an earlier production of Anna in the Tropics at South Coast Rep in Costa Mesa, Calif. She found the Broadway production faster-paced, more clear. And she marveled at the effect that her father's words had on the opening night crowd.

''I saw people crying,'' she says. "It's an amazing story -- beautiful but very tragic. You have to finish the story for yourself. I loved it so much . . . I'm really happy for my father. I've seen four of his plays so far, and I don't think you can compare any of them. It's like comparing two beautiful things.''

Cruz's ex-wife Dorothy, an artist, sat with him and their daughter at the opening, her hair also sporting a gardenia from Cruz.

She says of Anna, "You just felt the whole time. The feelings of the play live in Nilo . . . He's in touch with his feminine side. I don't think that very many men experience the broken-heartedness that Nilo does.''

On Nov. 16, though, Cruz was anything but broken-hearted. After the actors took their curtain call, basking in the warmth of applause and cheers, Smits left the stage, then brought out Cruz and director Emily Mann. The first-nighters lept to their feet, cheering, shouting ''Bravo!'' and ''Nilo!'' Emotions played across the smiling, tear-streaked face of the trim playwright, clad head-to-toe in black Prada, a gardenia on his lapel. It was, he says, something that ". . . went so fast but lasted so long. It was thrills, humility, grace, generosity, all those emotions washing over me. And being so grateful.''

But the sweetest moment of all happened as he exited the stage, to find Dorothy and Chloe waiting in the wings.

''I hugged the two of them,'' he says. "I was in the middle. It was lovely.''

Christine Dolen is The Herald's theater critic.

Revival as touching as funny

By Christine Dolen, cdolen@herald.com. Posted on Mon, Nov. 24, 2003.

When last we met Carmen Peláez, she was intoxicating South Florida theater audiences with the potent poignancy of her funny, moving solo show Rum & Coke.

That was six years ago, and Area Stage, the Lincoln Road theater where Peláez first introduced us to a half-dozen unforgettable Cuban and Cuban-American women, is no longer there.

But happily, Peláez is back, this time in the intimate Encore Room at the Coconut Grove Playhouse.

The actress-playwright has been tinkering with her show, adding music from Albita, Emilio Estefan Jr. and Graciela, greatly altering the design concept from the old Havana mansion that was handsomely realistic, set at Area to projected paintings and photographs on a nearly barren Encore Room stage.

CALLING UPON FAMILY

Peláez, a South Florida gal whose great-aunt was the Cuban painter Amelia Peláez, at times achieves added emotional weight with photographs of another elderly aunt, Ninita, and the gorgeous Havana home that she lovingly maintained despite the hardships of living in Fidel Castro's Cuba. But the bare-bones simplicity of the ''design,'' coupled with the way the audience in the reconfigured Encore Room now sits on chairs and stools (the tables have vanished, the better to squeeze in more customers), suggest purposeful cost-cutting that doesn't serve the art.

That said, Peláez' real ''sets'' are created in the imaginative collaboration between the actress and her audiences.

Her words, vocal changes and simple physical alterations are all she really needs. With them, she takes us into the worlds of women who will forever be connected to Cuba, no matter where they live.

There's Camilla, a curvaceous young Cuban-American woman who exudes supermodel confidence despite her far more ample proportions. Juana, who encounters a stranger's cruelty at a dance. Camilla's abuela, both funny and poignant as she does her shift at a hunger strike. Illuminada, a cigar-puffing santera who does manicures (she pronounces it ''man-ee-kyew-ray'') when she's not making predictions or sacrificing chickens. Nikita, a teenager who walks the Malecón as a prostitute to feed her family. And Nena, a former Tropicana singer who now doles out precisely measured lengths of American toilet paper in the club's ladies' room.

DEEPER TOUCHES

What makes Rum & Coke so powerful is Peláez' ability to suggest longing and loss, though more often she makes you laugh. When Nena tells Camilla the story of how her lover left her, bobbing away to Miami on a raft, she says quietly, "You want to know somebody? Watch how they walk away from you.''

The play will, of course, resonate most deeply with Cuban-Americans, both in terms of culturally specific laughs and the pull of shared history. But Peláez is such a warmly engaging storyteller, so wry and boisterous and moving, that anyone who loves good theater should enjoy this newest round of Rum & Coke.

Christine Dolen is The Herald's theater critic.

IF YOU GO

WHAT: Rum & Coke by Carmen Peláez.
WHERE: Encore Room at the Coconut Grove Playhouse, 3500 Main Hwy., Coconut Grove.
WHEN: 8:30 p.m. Tuesday-Saturday, 2:15 p.m. Wednesday and Saturday-Sunday (no performances Thanksgiving, Christmas Eve or Christmas Day; two evening performances on Friday-Saturday near the end of the run in January; some performance times vary, so check with box office), through Jan. 25.
HOW MUCH: $25 and $30 (group and subscriber discounts available).
TICKETS AND INFO: 305-442-4000 or www.cgplayhouse.org.

PRINTER FRIENDLY