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Washington Post
From Cuban refugee to cabinet appointee
By Anne Hull. Washington Post Staff Writer. Tuesday,
December 26, 2000; Page A27
Mel Martinez fits into the mythological playbook from which George W. Bush
extracts his themes: a self-made man who relied on his own sweat and
determination, navigated by religious faith.
Up from the oil fields, the cotton fields, and in the case of Martinez, the
immigrant orphanage.
As President-elect Bush's pick for the 12th secretary of Housing and Urban
Development, Martinez, 54, will become the first Cuban American Cabinet member
in U.S. history. He has served for the last two years as the elected chairman of
Orange County, Fla.
"I feel a great sense of responsibility to do the job well and make
sure I keep the door open for others," Martinez said Friday, weary from
celebration and from the daunting binders with which the transition team loaded
him down.
The charismatic Martinez appears on the national stage after a relatively
short hitch in public life. He is a key ally of the Bush brothers. He co-chaired
Florida's GOP presidential effort and was also one of the state's 25 Republican
electors.
His own story is heroic. At 15, Martinez fled Cuba during the airlift of
children known as Operation Pedro Pan, landing in 1962 at the Cuban
refugee-processing center on Matacumbe Key. Alone, he began his American life in
a foster home in Orlando, which at that time was nothing more than a scrubland
of citrus groves and golf course blueprints. Martinez would eventually govern
the multibillion-dollar sprawl of tourism and high-tech start-ups.
"Here's a guy who couldn't speak a word of English when he got here,"
said longtime friend Kenneth L. Connor, president of the Family Research
Council, a conservative family values group. "When his daddy and mama and
sister arrived four years later, Mel handed his daddy keys to a car and a job
he'd gotten him at T.G. Lee Dairy."
After graduating from Florida State University College of Law in 1973,
Martinez joined an Orlando firm and practiced personal injury law in relative
obscurity. In 1984, he was appointed chairman of the Orlando Housing Authority
by the mayor, his former law partner. He held the post for two years, and later
served as president of the Orlando Utilities Commission.
Martinez's first political race came in 1994 when he ran for lieutenant
governor in the Republican primary. Easily crushed, the experience wasn't all
bad: Martinez started his friendship with the primary victor, Jeb Bush.
Martinez became the most influential Cuban American Republican above the
South Florida fault line in 1998 when he was elected Orange County chairman, a
mayoral-like leader of 13 municipalities providing urban services to 820,000
people, with a $2.2 billion budget and 6,000 employees. As chairman, he
advocated home ownership programs for low-income families and kept a campaign
promise of lowering property taxes. He dismissed a fire chief who failed to
racially diversify the personnel of the Orlando Fire Department.
Gov. Jeb Bush tapped his friend to head the state's 23-member Growth
Management Study Commission. Although critics said Bush loaded the commission
with too many builders and developers, Martinez surprised skeptics by declaring
a moratorium on new residential projects in already-crowded school districts.
Still, Martinez takes a big leap when he assumes the $30 billion HUD, which
faces a critical shortage of low-income properties and mid-income rentals.
According to a recent HUD report, 5.4 million families pay more than 50 percent
of their gross income for rent.
During the presidential campaign, neither Bush nor Vice President Gore
emphasized housing. Bush's "Renewing the Dream" plan called for $1.7
billion in tax credits to build 100,000 homes by 2006. But in Texas, the
governor's own Department of Housing and Community Affairs was embroiled in
scandal, and housing experts said the number of poor, elderly and disabled
Texans living in unaffordable or dilapidated housing was at a record high.
Martinez's Horatio Alger story gives many hope that he will have a heart for
those whose housing needs he shepherds.
"He has a tremendous life story," says Howard Glaser, senior vice
president for government affairs at Mortgage Bankers Association of America. "That
bodes well for the sensitivity issues faced by HUD."
Martinez and his wife, Kitty, who have three children, have opened their own
home to Cuban and Vietnamese refugees.
With Martinez, Cuban Americans are hoping for new influence in the White
House. Martinez has been a steady voice on Cuban issues, calling for a U.S.
naval blockade of Cuba. During the Elian Gonzalez saga, he urged the Senate
Judiciary Committee not to return the 6-year-old boy to his father in Cuba, and
took the opportunity to rail against Fidel Castro.
The day after Bush tapped his HUD pick, Cuba's official Communist Party
daily called Martinez a "worm" and said the position was a prize given
to Cuban Americans.
"This has to be unsettling for Cubans in general, not just the regime,"
said Joe Garcia, a longtime Martinez friend and executive director of the
Cuban-American National Foundation in Miami. "For Cubans to think this boy
came as an orphan, and through the democratic process, became a part of the U.S.
Cabinet, it's just an outstanding concept."
The same day the newspaper Granma was insulting Martinez, a message of a
different kind reached his Orlando doorstep. Banker Cesar Calvet dropped off a
bottle of Dom Perignon for his old friend and fellow exile. The card spoke for
many. "Congratulations!" wrote Calvet. "From Matacumbe to the
U.S. Cabinet. We're all proud of you!"
Cuban restoration project pins new hopes on Old Havana
By Scott Wilson. Washington Post Foreign Service. Monday,
December 25, 2000; Page A30
HAVANA--"In each neighborhood, revolution," reads the sign on a
sooty Communist Party building in Old Havana. Just next door, there are signs of
a different sort of revolution sweeping through the graceful stone buildings and
broad plazas.
Workers are salvaging Havana's romantic old quarter from the ravages wrought
by centuries on the Atlantic seafront, meticulously restoring block by block
what was not destroyed by pirates or the privations of the U.S. trade embargo.
"There is so much work," said Roberto Perez, a former veterinarian
who has taken a more lucrative job on an Old Havana construction crew, "so
much, that I expect to be working here for at least another eight years.
A New World outpost of wooden huts and fortune hunters almost 500 years ago,
Old Havana is now a cornerstone of Cuba's financial future. The restoration is
motivated both by a desire to preserve the area's history and the more modern
considerations of luring tourists and their foreign currency to the Communist
island.
The number of tourists visiting Cuba is increasing by 12 percent a year,
according to government estimates that forecast 2 million visitors in 2000.
Eight in 10 of them pass along Old Havana's narrow streets where Cubans lean
over wrought-iron railings and sway to music from corner cafes.
The neighborhood runs along Havana's famed sea-splashed avenue, the Malecon,
before running up the narrow deep-blue channel that opens onto Havana harbor.
Freighters dock where Spanish galleons and invading English frigates once did.
Streets too small for most trucks open onto wide plazas, carved up by triangles
of gardens or marked by a central fountain.
With its antique American cars, shrines to Ernest Hemingway and ubiquitous
revolutionary symbols, Cuba at times seems close to becoming a tourist theme
park. But the history here is real, especially in Old Havana, which UNESCO named
a World Heritage site in 1982. And so is the money emerging seven years after
President Fidel Castro, Foreign Minister Felipe Perez Roque and Vice President
Carlos Lage, in the depths of Cuba's post-Soviet financial crisis, decided to
jump start Old Havana's revival with a $1 million investment.
The restoration project has been in full swing for two years, financed now
by annual revenues of about $40 million generated by the government-owned
refurbished hotels, galleries and restaurants. At the helm is Eusebio Leal, the
city historian who has virtually unchecked power to carry out the work in a
country of blanketing bureaucracy. He lectures around the world, reportedly
breaks building codes with impunity and reports only to Perez Roque and Castro.
More than 150 projects, most in partnership with foreign investors, are in the
works under his bustling authority.
"It is the reason for my life," said Leal, 56, while conducting a
recent tour of the old city.
At Plaza Vieja, old and new sit side by side. On one corner is a
meticulously restored apartment building with iron-filigree balconies and high
ceilings now set aside for foreign residents. Across the plaza, laundry hangs
from balconies and old men gather daily to play dominoes under the exposed
wooden eaves.
"And of course running it all is Eusebio Leal," said Ricardo
Becerra, a university teacher from the eastern city of Camaguey who is in town
for a conference.
"He's moving mountains," added Mike Phillips, an English teacher
at Havana University.
That the city historian is as well known as a baseball star is testament to
Leal's devotion to his task. He frequently accompanies Castro on foreign trips,
delivering seminars to historic preservationists. What his utilitarian wardrobe
lacks in panache he makes up for in the poetry he uses to describe his work.
"Something small for such a great man," Leal said to describe
Hemingway's tiny iron bed in Old Havana's restored Ambos Mundos Hotel. Hemingway
called the hotel "a good place to work."
Like urban gentrification from Baltimore to Berlin, salvaging Old Havana has
a price. More than 35,000 people live within a half-mile radius of Plaza Vieja.
Hundreds of them have been moved to distant neighborhoods as a result of the
renovation, and many will not return. Only select families, picked by the length
of time they have lived in the neighborhood, received temporary housing in
American suburban-style miniature villages that sit cheek-by-jowl with the
renovation work.
Miguel Angel, a photocopy assistant in a government ministry, has lived 39
of his 43 years in a small second-story apartment on Plaza Vieja. More than two
years ago, he was moved out of the apartment during renovation and put up in a
complex of two-story metal-sided buildings a block away. Twenty other families
are there, too, rotating in and out as the work progresses.
"I thank God for the opportunity to live here and that I will be able
to return," said Angel, recalling several longtime neighbors who were moved
further away.
Angel's move was supposed to last only a year. He was recently told he would
be in by next summer, and he looks forward to leaving the stuffy temporary
apartment he says is "fine but not forever."
"Really, though, I think this is a very positive thing," he said
of the renovation. "Before Old Havana was a place only for Cubans. Now it
is a place for everyone."
CUBA: Silent Nights
By Scott Wilson, Washington Post Foreign Service. Sunday,
December 24, 2000; Page E05
You have to look hard for Christmas in Cuba. It is an indoor holiday here,
advertised only with sparse strands of tinsel in the select storefronts seen by
tourists, celebrated family by family over steaming pork and cold beer in
starkly lit dining rooms across Havana.
The laziness of its arrival is disorienting to someone raised on the
inevitable five-week shopping sprint between Thanksgiving and Christmas. No
flashing lights spelling "Merry Christmas" wrap around Morro Castle,
the fortress guarding the entrance to Havana harbor. No street-corner Santa
Claus on the sea-sprayed Malecon or plastic snowmen and sleighs in Vedado.
Growing up, I spent most Christmases with my family in Mexico. So I am used
to coconut palms instead of snowy pines in December. But when night falls here
and a city of chronic power shortages goes dark, I miss the twinkle of lights
that brighten other countries in the region I cover. In Venezuela and Colombia,
for instance, the American consumerist trappings of Christmas appeared in
mid-November.
But little money and a lack of a Christmas tradition here have removed
gift-giving and other public festivities from the holiday. Along Boulevard de
Obispo, Old Havana's answer to Fifth Avenue, the dollars-only stores are full of
people -- speaking German, French and English. Tourists also get towering
Christmas trees in their hotel lobbies, unseen in most other public places
around the city.
In this small way, the holiday helps Cuba's communist government earn the
hard currency it needs now that much of its foreign credit is shot. Cubans,
though, seem confused about how to celebrate a holiday their government only
recently permitted and still does not entirely embrace.
"This little tree, a roast pork and three cases of beer," says
Manuel Hidalgo, who sells oil paintings of Che Guevara, Havana street scenes and
naked American models from a shop on Boulevard de Obispo. His tree is a foot
high, and his Christmas plans sound much like those of a dozen other Habaneros,
who tend to view New Year's as the bigger event. For one, New Year's has a "revolutionary"
element -- the day in 1959 when Fidel Castro's rebel vanguard marched into
Havana -- that gives freer rein to celebration.
As a show of goodwill before Pope John Paul II's January 1998 visit, Castro
gave Cubans the day off for Christmas for the first time in nearly three
decades. He had originally canceled the holiday, hoping that an extra day of
work would help bring in a record sugar harvest (it didn't help enough). He
never brought it back. Christmas became clandestine in a country where almost
half the population of 11 million people is Catholic, though only a fraction
feel comfortable practicing their religion publicly.
Today, signs of Christmas pop up in odd places. In the 300-year-old Iglesia
Santo Cristo del Buen Viaje, a church near Havana harbor, the Spartan altar
blinks pagan with a lighted Christmas tree complete with gold star. It will be
there until after the Misa del Gallo, or Mass of the Rooster, for which devout
Cubans gather after Christmas dinner in symbolic vigil for the birth.
The church, so named because it was the first place visitors arriving from
the treacherous Caribbean Sea stopped at to thank God for their "good trip,"
was silent on a recent Sunday. Only a few old women whose beliefs predate an "atheist"
revolution shuffled in to pray. Toward the back, under a dark wood ceiling,
sprawls a nativity scene.
"Five or six years ago and you wouldn't have seen any of this,"
said Manuel Rodriguez, a 47-year-old night watchman and parishioner. "But
very little is permitted outside the church, only inside."
Talking to Rodriguez and others, I began to see the church here leading up
to one of its holiest days as subversive, much as it was to the Roman Empire
after Christ's birth. Cuba's government has occasionally felt threatened by the
church's influence, and still must approve any public display of Christmas cheer
like a parade (hence, there aren't any).
But there is an upside to Christmas. Rodriguez pointed across the plaza,
filled with kids playing hopscotch and kickball, to a shop selling trees,
nativity scenes and tinsel. "The state owns that store, so it is a source
of investment for them, too."
There are flashes of home. In Harris Brothers, a dollar store on the edge of
Old Havana, the cafe and uniformed elevator operators resemble a small-scale
Bloomingdale's. Tourists and Cubans lucky enough to have jobs that pay in
dollars crowd counters selling tennis shoes, liquor and cigars.
But mostly it feels much farther removed from the United States than 90
miles, not least because of the steady soundtrack of six-string guitars,
stand-up basses, horns and shouted singing that wafts around the old town. No "Holly
Jolly Christmas" mall music.
There are no signs on department store walls wishing "Feliz Navidad,"
only "Feliz Ano 2001." One ad features a cartoon guerrilla shooting a
shark wearing a top hat made of the American flag. "Hey, friend,"
calls out a street vendor in broken English to an obviously non-Cuban
correspondent. "Want to buy a brassiere?"
"For Christmas," says another shopkeeper, displaying in his back
bedroom a cabinet full of contraband cigars spirited out of the factory. "But
don't say a word."
I am here, far from my extended family in California and my wife and two
daughters in Caracas, as Christmas nears. Each day my daughter opens another
door of the Advent calendar her grandmother gave her. I am not there to see it,
and what I am watching here as families arrange a night of intimate celebration
makes me want to return to mine as soon as possible.
Out of necessity, Cubans have made Christmas quiet and, perhaps to a
visitor, a little lonely. Across the Florida Straits, calm these past few days,
lives the other half of many families here. Another Christmas coming, separated
by miles of sea.
Scott Wilson is The Post's bureau chief in Caracas, covering northern South
America, the Caribbean and Central America.
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