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Cuba exchange program has
come under suspicion
By Noah Bierman, Knight
Ridder Newspapers. Posted on Thu, Feb. 09,
2006 in Myrtle
Beach Sun News, SC.
MIAMI - Elizabeth Cerejido collapsed in
a surge of painful memories four years ago
while walking up the broad steps of Cuba's
notorious 18th-century prison, La Cabana.
As she toured the fortress, she began looking
for the jail cells.
''What are you talking about?'' Cerejido
says a young Cuban resident asked her. "This
had never been a prison.''
Cerejido knew that it had been, long before
it became a tourist attraction with costumed
singers, a cannonball salute and a striking
view of the city and the Bay of Havana.
Cerejido had been there in the late 1970s,
as a little girl, walking the same steps
as she visited her father, a prisoner, she
said.
The return trip to Cuba in 2002 helped
Cerejido establish her cultural identity,
and the visit to La Cabana was one of those
rare moments that crystallized a lifetime's
worth of complex emotions about personal
history.
Such trips, suspended by the U.S. government
when it tightened travel in 2004, have recently
become the focus of wider community controversy.
The exchange program that brought her to
Cuba, Puentes Cubanos ("Cuban Bridges''),
is cited in FBI documents as a possible
recruiting ground for accused spy Carlos
Alvarez, who served as its discussion moderator.
Alvarez, a Florida International University
professor, was charged this month with acting
as an unauthorized foreign agent, accused
of providing information about Miami's exile
community to the Cuban government. He has
not been charged with providing government
secrets. FBI documents claim he used Puentes
Cubanos to look for recruits, but never
provided any names to the Cuban government.
Supporters of Puentes Cubanos are feeling
besieged. Many contacted by The Miami Herald
do not want to speak publicly, for fear
of tarnishing the program's image while
Alvarez is in the news.
Cerejido traveled with four other Cuban-American
professionals to Cuba in October 2002. Her
trip was among five that Alvarez took with
Puentes Cubanos.
Cerejido, 36, agreed to an interview because
she wants to show that the programs are
about more than Alvarez, though she says
she would feel personally betrayed if he
is found guilty of spying.
''It does not change for me the legitimacy
of the program,'' she said. "These
two things should not be mixed up.''
Cerejido was born in Cuba in 1969 and came
to Miami with her mother before her first
birthday. Her father was supposed to join
them later, but he was delayed and then
jailed in 1975, she said. Cerejido said
he was a political prisoner, but the specifics
were never made clear to Cerejido. Researchers
and former prisoners could not confirm or
elaborate on the circumstances of Jose Cerejido's
imprisonment, but said the story sounds
plausible.
''My entire childhood was trying to get
my father here,'' Elizabeth Cerejido said.
At age 9, Cerejido visited her father in
La Cabana, an old fortress used as a prison.
''My first impression of him is my father
being brought out by guards,'' she said,
"... in a jail uniform, a very thin,
tall man with very sad eyes.''
Cerejido would grow up with that image,
in a working-class home in Little Havana.
Even when her father arrived in Miami, as
part of the Mariel boatlift, he did not
recover from the trauma. Cerejido became
one of those young Cuban Americans who translated
for her parents and knew her families' memories
of old streets and songs as "almost
this virtual Cuba.''
She attended Coral Gables High School and
got a job at Books & Books in Coral
Gables that introduced her to an alternate
version of Miami. She became a photographer
and is now the curator at Florida International
University's Frost Museum, though the job
is not how she met Alvarez. Nor is her job
connected with her travels to Cuba, she
said.
Cerejido wanted to find her own Cuba connection.
She returned to the island in 2000 with
her then-husband and her mother, who had
early signs of Alzheimer's disease. Cerejido
spent most of her time with her extended
family. She never connected with other young
artists or experienced the country as she
expected she would. Cuba was bizarre to
her, a collection of faded awnings with
the slogans of a failed revolution.
She came back to Miami, and during the
Elian Gonzalez saga felt silenced, frustrated
and unrepresented. Her father, who would
not return to Cuba, died in 2001. She sought
like-minded young professionals who believed
in dialogue and reconciliation. That brought
her to Puentes Cubanos and the trip.
Founder Silvia Wilhelm, 59, shared many
of Cerejido's views, though she was from
an older generation.
Wilhelm came to Miami as a girl in 1961,
during Operation Pedro Pan, a Catholic Church
initiative that brought 14,000 child refugees
without their parents following the 1959
revolution.
Wilhelm had been pro-embargo, but changed
her view in the 1990s after communism fell
in Europe and Cuba remained unchanged. In
1999, she organized a series of five small
trips, uniting about a half-dozen young
professionals from each country for a week
of cultural exchanges. She also organized
a sixth exchange in Miami, with Cubans who
gained permission to leave the island, three
years ago.
Wilhelm said the generation of young professionals
on both sides of the Florida Straits have
inherited a dilemma and need to understand
each other to prevent animosity when Cuba
opens up.
Such exchange programs would raise few
eyebrows in other parts of the country,
but Wilhelm's was a rarity in Miami. She
said it was the only Miami-based program
that promoted direct dialogue between young
Cuban American professionals and Cubans
of the same age and interests who stayed
on the island.
Miami's most vocal exile groups say exchange
programs of any kind undermine America's
opposition to Fidel Castro's dictatorship
because they chisel away at the embargo,
benefiting the government-run economy. Puentes
Cubanos collaborates with the University
of Havana, which gives it an automatic association
with Cuba's communist government.
Cerejido said Wilhelm told the group before
they left for Cuba in October 2002 that
participants were not there to change each
other's minds. It was, rather, an opportunity
for open-minded discussion.
Much of the week was spent in a classroom
at the University of Havana. Alvarez, a
trained facilitator, and a Cuban counterpart
would moderate discussions about Cuban identity.
But some of the best exchanges occurred
outside the classroom, over a shot of rum,
she said.
''Our dual identity, our being Cuban-hyphen-American
brought a lot more baggage to the table
than the other side because they had only
lived in Cuba,'' she said.
On the first day, following the trip to
La Cabana, Cerejido told her Cuban counterparts
about her father's imprisonment and the
reason for her collapse on the steps. They
gasped, she said, never having heard such
a story.
Living on an island where virtually everyone
has relatives who had moved to the United
States, she said many of her Cuban counterparts
felt a disconnect, but the Cuban professionals
she met were bound by a sense of tight social
fabric, appreciating that they occupied
a unique place in history. Yet they were
critical of their government's shortcomings
and aware of what they lacked, she said.
On one occasion, Cerejido gave a presentation
to a larger group of students from the University
of Havana. She and a friend showed video
footage of a trip they had taken to Washington,
D.C. with a group called Yo Si Voy (''I
Do Go'') to lobby politicians to loosen
travel restrictions to Cuba. "(The
students') mouths dropped,'' she said.
Cerejido said they were surprised, some
speechless, at the level of freedom and
passion the Americans had. It strengthened
her conviction that reconciliation can work.
At the end of the week, she and her counterparts
had another one of those moments where they
broke down - a sudden realization that they
were all Cubans divided by something that
was beyond them.
''That sort of little bubble we were in
was soon going to pop because we were going
to be leaving and going our own separate
ways,'' she said. "Everything is so
arbitrary and beyond our control.''
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