By April Witt. Washington Post Staff Writer. Sunday, April 16, 2000; Page A01
MIAMI, April 15 –– Marcia Fernandez's parents packed a tiny suitcase with three changes of clothes and put her on a plane out of Cuba alone at age 9, so determined were they for her to escape Fidel Castro's communist revolution that they were willing to risk never again seeing their
only child.
Standing at the barricades here with other Cuban Americans this week, Fernandez, now a physical therapist, was frustrated to exhaustion trying to explain to Miamians who have not lived her exile why 6-year-old Elian Gonzalez must not go home.
"I feel very impotent," she lamented even as this city's powerful Cuban American community continued to help Elian's relatives thwart the federal government's effort to reunite the boy with his father. "It's like I am talking to walls. Why doesn't anyone want to understand what we
are saying?"
Some anti-Castro protesters vow political retribution against Miamians who do not support their cause, and community leaders say the custody battle is widening divides in a community long marked by racial and ethnic fragmentation and fractiousness.
"People will pay for this," said Ramon Suarez-Del Campo, a Cuban American businessman, writer and activist who joined the wall of demonstrators outside the modest home of Elian's Little Havana relatives. "When black politicians come to Cuban politicians asking for favors or some
help in the future, they are going to say, 'Where were you for Elian?' "
A majority of Americans favor reuniting Elian with his father, who says he wants to take his son home to Cuba. In Miami-Dade County, polarization on the issue is stark. Ninety-two percent of blacks and 76 percent of non-Hispanic whites say the boy should be returned to Cuba, while 83 percent of
Cuban Americans say he should remain here and 55 percent of other Hispanics agree with them, according to a recent poll by the Miami Herald.
"There is a 10-mile fissure in this community and it's getting wider," said civic activist Dan Ricker, a businessman who went to Little Havana this week to observe the demonstrations.
Florida International University Prof. Antonio Jorge, who served many years on Miami community relations boards trying to foster racial and ethnic cooperation, said the Elian saga shows how thoroughly those efforts have failed.
"The Elian case is direct evidence that we don't understand each other," said Jorge, who is Cuban American. "It will affect the quality of life in this community for years to come."
"However this turns out now, the end product will be more polarization," he said. "If the child goes back to Cuba, Cuban Americans will resent it and they will resent other groups for not helping. If the child stays, other groups will say that the Cubans in their infinite
arrogance have succeeded in manipulating the system through undue political influence.
"I'm afraid what will happen next is people will try to get their pound of flesh."
Bishop Victor Curry, president of the NAACP in Miami-Dade County and one of the most influential black leaders in South Florida, said today that African Americans and Haitian immigrants already are so excluded from power in Cuban-dominated Miami that there is little that the Cuban Americans can
do to punish them for disagreeing over Elian.
"If we look at the history of Cubans being in power, they have not done anything for black people," Curry said. "So if that's their threat, it's idle. We have not advanced under Cuban leadership in Miami. We have had more problems with Cubans in power than we did under whites."
"The reason we are not supporting them on Elian is we believe they are wrong," said Curry, a Baptist minister and popular radio commentator. "The boy needs to be with his father. I am a father. I can imagine how I'd react if someone took one of my children and said they wouldn't
give him back to me because they don't like Bill Clinton.
"That baby is being held hostage."
The Rev. Thomas Wenski, an auxiliary bishop of the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Miami, said divisions are now so pronounced they remind him of an anthropological term--systemic misunderstanding--that he came upon recently in a briefing book on Jewish-Palestinian relations in the Middle East. "It
means that your framework is so different from my framework that it cannot be corrected by providing more information," Wenski said.
However Elian's sad journey ends, "there is going to be a lot of need for reconciliation here among people," the bishop said. "My hope is that a lot of polarization is emotional. And emotions eventually will subside."
For now, the voices of Cuban Americans at the barricades are alternately bitter, sad, angry or dismayed. Demonstrators cannot fathom why the nation and the city that welcomed them--gave them freedom to flourish in an exile that seems gilded to poor, less influential groups in Miami--now want to
snatch away the little boy who symbolizes all their hurts and hopes.
"This is not a battle only to keep a child," said Remedios Diaz Oliver, president of All American Containers Inc. in Miami. "It's a battle for all Cubans in Miami to let Americans know what is happening in Cuba. We are asking the world to look at our tragedy."
Curry said many non-Cubans in Miami are weary of exile tales of suffering and are eager for the administration to end the impasse. "I think a whole lot of people are just sick of them," Curry said. "I'm upset with the president and attorney general for not doing what they are
supposed to do. If these were African Americans or Haitians telling the attorney general, 'No, you are going to have to come by force,' it would be a bloodbath around there."
Ana Maria Lamar, an elegantly attired housewife, prays every day that God will give her the wisdom to explain to people who have not lived in Cuba under a communist regime what kind of life Elian would live there. She likened repression in Cuba to slavery or the Holocaust and cannot understand
why African Americans and Jews are not joining her protest.
"The number one issue here is the question of freedom," Lamar said Friday as she kept vigil through a torrential rain outside the house of Elian's great-uncle, Lazaro Gonzalez, where Elian staying. "Even if our Jewish neighbors are not here, I'm sure the souls of children murdered
in the Holocaust are with us. They are all around us now."
For Fernandez, the physical therapist, there is no doubt Elian must remain in the United States no matter what her non-Cuban coworkers or neighbors think. To ask whether it is better for a child to be with his father than to live in a democratic country would be to question the wrenching
decision her parents made long ago to send her away from Cuba alone. Unthinkable.
And so she struggles to explain. "We've tried and tried for years to explain what we're all about, and still people right here in our own community can't grasp it," said Fernandez, who eventually was reunited with her parents in the United States. As she spoke, a throng of
demonstrators behind her chanted rhythmically.
"Viva Cuba Libre!" they chanted. Long live free Cuba. "Viva Cuba Libre!"
© 2000 The Washington Post Company |