CUBANET ... CUBANEWS

April 28, 2000



The Voice of Dispassion for U.S. Cubans

By Sylvia Moreno and Lonnae O'Neal Parker. Washington Post Staff Writers. Friday, April 28, 2000; Page C01

It's the morning after Elian's Miami relatives left Washington, and in the tiny Georgetown suite of the Cuban American National Foundation, business is back to some semblance of normal for Jose Cardenas.

The telephone rings nonstop. A pager buzzes. A cell phone beeps. The fax spews out the latest anti-Clinton and anti-Reno propaganda, and the computer announces e-mail after incoming e-mail. Someone is asking the CANF--the leading anti-Castro group--to endorse a poster depicting a weeping Statue of Liberty ("Give me your tired, your poor . . . EXCEPT ELIAN GONZALEZ"). A congressman's office calls. The deadline for a television taping is looming.

All in a day's work during these recent months of controversy over Elian Gonzalez.

But for Cardenas, head of the Miami-based group's Washington office, handling the visit of Elian's cousin Marisleysis was a different story.

This is Washington, home of dispassionate politics, where buttoned-down lobbyists like Cardenas schmooze and plan strategy. Where staid congressmen make measured, sonorous pronouncements, and partisan matters are often worked out behind closed doors.

The U.S. Gonzalezes--Marisleysis, her father, Lazaro, and uncle Delfin--brought the raw emotion of Little Havana to the nation's capital, and put Cardenas, a man known for his low-profile style--in the eye of the family hurricane.

They are people who for months have condemned the Clinton administration and, in the hours after federal agents seized Elian from their home, sobbed and screamed and threatened for all the world to see on live television.

"What are they going to do here?" Cardenas recalled wondering when he learned at midday Saturday that the Gonzalezes were flying to Washington.

They wanted to visit Elian, they said, arriving just hours after the boy had been reunited with his father, Juan Miguel Gonzalez, at Andrews Air Force Base.

The assignment fell upon Cardenas and his deputy, Emilio Vazquez--who make up the CANF's Washington staff--to help support the Gonzalezes in their quest.

"The reality is that Washington is a conservative town and basically it doesn't really comprehend people that--" and here Cardenas pauses, then squeezes his eyes shut as he rubs his temples with his fingers and casts about for a politic description of Marisleysis and her kin "--doesn't comprehend people that justifiably wear their emotions on their sleeves."

"This was going to be totally on the fly," he predicted. And he was right.

There was the tearful Capitol Hill news conference. The accusations that the photographs of Elian hugging his father were fake. Lazaro Gonzalez's insinuations that the boy had already been taken back to Cuba by Communist agents. The four futile trips to Andrews. The impromptu calls to a sparsely populated Capitol, since Congress is still in recess.

Through it all, Cardenas flinched from the sidelines.

"If you want to see the boy, let's do this in a serious way. I don't think you make ultimatums at a press conference," he says now. "Let's step back and open up a channel of communication and see how we can make that happen.

"But I'm not the one who's going to tell them to calm down. This family has been very, very hurt by what happened," he says. "Their house was trashed, and they've been vilified by the Clinton administration. . . . I felt a lot of empathy for them."

It's an empathy that he learned as a child. He may sound as anti-Castro and anti-Communist as the Gonzalez family, but the secret, as Cardenas likes to say, is he is Colombian American.

Now 40, married and the father of four, he was raised in the area around Baileys Crossroads, where his parents, immigrants from Medellin, settled in 1958, when his father came to serve his residency in surgery at Georgetown University Hospital. By 1960, Cuban exiles fleeing the Castro regime started moving in, establishing a strong Latino presence in the area and at the local Catholic church, St. Anthony's. These were the families that Cardenas's parents socialized with, and their children were his classmates.

"I'd always heard the political horror stories about fleeing Cuba," he says. "People burying the family silver in the back yard so Communists wouldn't take it.

"They came with nothing, and they were able to reestablish themselves. I just have tremendous admiration and respect for this community. That's why I will go to the mat again and again to defend them."

He was also grateful to have grown up among Latinos.

"We were just one more family with another Spanish surname," he says.

Cardenas graduated from Catholic University with an international-relations degree and earned a master's in government from Georgetown.

The CANF was founded in 1981 by Cuban American businessmen led by Jorge Mas Canosa, and opened its Washington office that year. In 1986, Cardenas saw a job notice at Georgetown's placement office, applied and was hired. There were a lot of "unhyphenated Americans" on staff at the time, he says. He's been there ever since.

Cardenas had grown up politically conservative and joined the CANF during the national debate over U.S. policy toward Central America.

"I wanted to get into the fight, and I didn't buy into the campaigns against Ronald Reagan's policies toward Central America, policies that have now been vindicated by history," he said. "I wanted to get into the fight, and I wanted to get in on the right side."

In the protracted fight against Castro's Cuba, the Elian episode has been one of the hardest for CANF, Cardenas says.

"It's been very difficult to touch a broader American public because most Americans have not had to deal with the issues of those who know tyranny and its destructive impact on people's lives," he says.

Those who have worked with Cardenas, or squared off against him, say he brings a valuable voice to the debate.

"He feels strongly about the issues, and the two of us have disagreed on many occasions, but always respectfully," says Wayne Smith, a senior fellow at the Center for International Policy who favors opening a dialogue with Cuba.

"He does understand what democratic debate is all about: that there are various sides to an issue [and] that the various sides should be debated."

Cardenas's is an on-message, no-nonsense comportment that has aided his reputation as a thoughtful, dedicated advocate. And it has helped counter hotheaded Latin stereotypes, says Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen (R-Fla.), a Cuban American whose district includes Little Havana. She has worked with Cardenas for nearly a dozen years.

He's got the "right combination of practical know-how, coupled with strong convictions of wanting a free Cuba," Ros-Lehtinen says. "He's not just a wild-eyed idealist, but has a practical sense of how to move legislation--how to work the process."

Cardenas's office is filled with art and books from pre-Castro Cuba. Just above his desk is a large mounted poster of a Chinese student facing down the tanks at Tiananmen Square. For him, he says, it is a symbol of one man's unflinching stand for democracy--and of his own resolve.

"You do not have to be Cuban American to have a profound love of freedom and an outward aversion to tyranny."

© 2000 The Washington Post Company

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