By Laurie Goering . Laurie Goering is a Tribune staff writer . Chicago Tribune, April 9, 2000
MIAMI -- If anyone is to blame for Miami's much-detested new national image as a breakaway "banana republic" of the United States, it is Alex Penelas, the young Cuban-American mayor of Dade County.
Penelas, you'll remember, was the one who warned federal authorities recently that "if their continued provocation . . . leads to civil unrest and violence" in Miami over Elian Gonzalez, he wouldn't be to blame. It was a clear incitement, for all his backpeddling afterward.
Since then, the nation has waited breathlessly for Miami to explode, fulfilling everyone's ugliest expectations.
The truth is, it almost certainly won't.
What has quietly self-destructed instead is the reputation of Miami's huge Cuban-American community, a largely moderate group dragged by its hardline leaders into a battle that now appears lost.
In their single-minded effort to best Fidel Castro, Miami's most vocal Cuban-Americans have ended up shooting themselves in the foot, estranging many Americans and perhaps eroding their remarkable power in Washington.
Cuban-American leaders were "so eager to pick any possible fight with Castro that [they] picked one that pits our community against parental rights, family values, international and U.S. law, public opinion, the attorney general, the Cuban Catholic bishops, most of the island's population,
leading dissidents and common sense," wrote Max Castro, a Cuban-American sociologist at the University of Miami, in a recent column.
That has resulted, he said, in "a script in which the Miami exiles play the role of the frenzied mob and Castro gets to be the hero."
Sometime soon, probably next week, 6-year-old Elian Gonzalez will leave the home of the Miami relatives who have cared for him since his mother drowned at sea last November.
Protesters in the street outside will pray and weep. Some may form human chains in front of the house. The airwaves of Miami's powerful Cuban radio stations will crackle with diatribes.
Already, though, the crowds are thinning outside Elian's relatives' home, and flag waving is being replaced with quiet prayers. A palpable sense of failure has settled over the scene.
"I think people have recognized they've lost this fight," said Damien Fernandez, an international relations expert at Florida International University.
"We're mellow people, We're not monsters," added Raymond Duran, 52, one of the protesters, who insists things won't turn ugly when Elian goes. "We follow the law. God bless America."
That, though, is not the image Americans have gotten of Miami's Cuban-American community over the last few months.
The community, after all, is hardly known for its moderation. When Los Van Van, a hot Cuban salsa band, showed up last October for a concert, nearly a thousand angry demonstrators turned out to protest, some lobbing rocks and bottles.
The city has lost the chance to host conventions and national awards programs to policies banning virtually any deal that might result in dollars flowing to Cuba. The rules mirror U.S. sanctions against the island, policies the same Miami Cuba-Americans helped create and now help maintain.
Cuban-Americans, in fact, have been among the most politically successful immigrant groups of the last century. After fleeing the island following Castro's 1959 revolution, many rapidly rebuilt business empires in Florida.
Their political campaign contributions and their willingness to vote as a bloc handed them control of U.S. foreign policy toward the island.
That, however, is slowly changing, to the frustration of many in Miami. America's long-icy relations with Castro's dictatorship are warming, and growing numbers of Americans support ending 40 years of economic sanctions against Cuba.
Most Americans see the change as a natural result of the failures of 40 years of Cuban isolation. Many Cuban-American exiles see it as an incomprehensible about-face in the battle against communism and as pandering to a dictator they hate with a personal vehemence.
What's worse, Cuban-Americans see the change happening in their own children.
"I've always worked to tell them how lucky they are to be here," said Raul Angulo, of his kids and grandkids. Angulo's parents sent him alone to Miami shortly after Castro's revolution, on one of the Pedro Pan flights by the U.S. government which brought 14,000 Cuban children out of
Castro's communist regime.
For two years Angulo lived in a foster home, waiting for his parents to follow him. His mother eventually came, but his father died in Cuba. "Comprehending Cuba," Angulo explained, for those who haven't lived through its painful ordeals, "is sort of like comprehending winter
weather in Chicago if you're from Miami. You have to live through 20 degrees below zero to understand it."
Miami's Cuban-American exiles have been losing clout since the death in 1997 of Jorge Mas Canosa, the community's charismatic leader who gave it much of its clout in Washington--and who has proved impossible to replace.
Leaders have since thrashed around for a unifying issue--and then Elian floated into their arms.
The boy quickly became a near-mythological symbol for the community. His survival at sea, many said, was a miracle. Dolphins had pushed his inner tube toward land and saved him from sharks. His mother had drowned for his freedom. Images of the Virgin Mary began appearing on his bedroom mirror.
Elian, some said, was fated to bring down Castro. How could the miracle child be sent back?
The rest of Miami, however, was none too impressed with the Cuban-American miracle boy, especially after his supporters blocked traffic in the city to protest a U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service order to send him home.
Soon afterward, a poll showed that while 90 percent of Hispanics wanted Elian to stay in Miami, nearly 80 percent of blacks and 70 percent of whites wanted him sent back to Cuba.
Miami's numerous Haitian immigrants grumbled about the community's eagerness to protect Elian while dozens of Haitian children were sent back to their politically dangerous homeland. African-Americans berated the city's heavily Cuban-American leadership for playing favorites. Delayed commuters
complained that Cuban-American protesters, in standing up for their rights, were trampling on those of others.
The child, they and the rest of the country argued, belonged with his father, by all accounts a loving and attentive parent. U.S. law backed them up.
Cuban-American leaders, everyone said, were putting themselves above the law by trying to keep Elian here.
Political analysts, however, charge that that view is a bit historically short-sighted.
In Chicago, former Mayor Harold Washington in the 1980s wrote an executive order telling his city departments not to collaborate with the INS because he considered it a repressive, bungling agency, noted Maria de los Angeles Torres, a DePaul University political scientist.
"And look at the civil rights movement," said Ninoska Perez, a spokeswoman for Miami's Cuban American National Foundation. "Those people stopped traffic, angered people. But they were doing what was right, and if it hadn't been for them, nothing would have changed.
"I was taught from early on that when you feel you are doing something you feel is right you don't care what others think," she said.
That, perhaps, is the key misunderstanding between Cuban-Americans and their neighbors in the Elian story. While most Americans see Elian at the center of the controversy, the Cuban-Americans chanting outside the boy's home have their sights set on Castro.
"We are not just crazy, passionate people," said Amelia Garcia, a protester outside the home. "We are trying to save 11 million people who live under that crazy old man."
With the Berlin Wall now long down and once solidly anti-communist Americans now focused on other issues, however, Cuban-Americans have become orphan idealogues and their anti-communist rhetoric sounds odd and extreme to the rest of the country--even if it may be right.
Worse, most of the protesters realize they've been outmaneuvered by the enemy. "Fidel's in a win-win situation," said Jorge Pujol, 45. "He wins if the kid comes back, or even if he doesn't."
Miami analysts say the Elian battle almost certainly will end up a public-relations disaster for Miami Cuban-Americans, who could lose clout in Washington. There's also potential for a hard-line backlash in a community that has quietly grown more moderate over the years.
If, by some unlikely chance, Elian is allowed to remain in Miami or his father defects, the community's most extreme elements will be seen as the winners "and the lesson from that is quite negative, that he who screams loudest wins," Fernandez said.
But if the community's leaders lose their battle, "there will be a sense of frustration and mistrust of institutions, common motifs in the Cuban political culture," he said. "It's pretty bad either way."
Cuban-American leaders, finally seeing the potential for damage, have insisted in recent days that their followers avoid violence at all costs, even if Elian is taken away.
"Violence is not an option," Rep. Lincoln Diaz-Balart (R-Fla.), a wayward nephew of Fidel Castro, insisted at a recent town meeting. "We cannot resort to violence. We have to do everything within the law."
Demonstrators seem to have taken the admonitions to heart. Talk of Miami becoming another Waco has died away.
Miami leaders still worry that one fanatic with a gun or a handful of people bent on blood could bring a violent ending to Elian's long story.
"Anytime you have a crowd, there's always a possibility [for ugliness]," Perez said. "It could get out of control. There are extreme voices in our community, as in any community."
But the huge majority of Cuban-Americans in Miami say that is not what they want. They have other plans.
"No, I won't join any human chain," said Al Giraud, 28, the son of Cuban exiles. "That's not something I want to do. If they pick Elian up, that's something we can take care of in the next elections." |