Published Wednesday, July 19, 2000, in the Miami Herald .
Elian shown reading Castro's message, but Cuban president remains scarce
HAVANA -- (AP) -- With Fidel Castro in the wings, Elian Gonzalez was shown on state television Tuesday night reading the book that the Cuban president gave him to commemorate the boy's successful completion of first grade.
As the camera panned over the dedication that the Cuban leader wrote to Elian in the "The Golden Age,'' a children's book by Cuban independence hero Jose Marti, Castro's voice could be heard in the background reading it aloud.
"For when you are in the fourth or fifth grade and can enjoy one of the most tender works of Marti,'' Castro read off-camera. It was signed, "Affectionately, Fidel Castro.''
But Castro himself was never shown during the 45-minute program on Elian's life in Cuba since his return on June 28.
Opponents of Elian's return to Cuba had predicted that Castro would parade the boy around like a poster boy for the revolutionary government.
That hasn't occurred. But there have been television images of Elian laughing and swimming in a pool, Elian singing Cuba's national anthem, Elian writing his cursive letters on a blackboard and in a composition book, Elian dancing with maracas, Elian placing yellow gladiolas at a bronze statue
of Marti.
Cuba state media on Saturday revealed very few details when they reported last week's meeting between the 73-year-old head of state and the 6-year-old boy. It was the first reported reunion of the pair since Elian's repatriation.
Castro had promised that Cuba would avoid a media circus upon Elian's return to Cuba. He was even conspicuously absent at the boy's airport homecoming.
Since then, Elian has been kept away from the media in a house in west Havana, where the child, his family and a group of classmates and teachers have been living.
State television reported Friday night that Elian had received his first-grade diploma after a special effort by teachers to help him recover the time lost during his tumultuous stay in the United States.
Although the government initially said that Elian and his family would take a week's holiday after the boy completed his studies, uniformed police Tuesday continued to block all traffic around the house -- an indication that they may still be there.
The government initially said that after the weeklong vacation, the Gonzalez family was to return to their home in Cardenas, a small port city two-hours east of Havana.
Elian survived a boat sinking that killed his mother and 10 others.
After the child was rescued on Nov. 25, he became the subject of an international custody dispute between his father in Cuba and their relatives in the United States, who fought unsuccessfully all the way to the Supreme Court to block his repatriation.
A new voice for Cuban cause
After Mas Canosa's death and Elián, leader wants to strengthen foundation
By Carol Rosenberg. crosenberg@herald.com
He's never set foot inside Cuba. His English is better than his Spanish.
And he unapologetically defends one of his best-known public service legacies: 10-digit telephone dialing.
Meet Joe Garcia, 36, formerly Florida's chief utilities regulator who quit Tallahassee to take day-to-day charge of the Cuban American National Foundation.
Garcia is a Miami Beach native on a mission: to show that the foundation, which for two decades has wielded influence in Washington, has been diminished neither by the death three years ago of its founder, Jorge Mas Canosa, nor the return to Cuba of its most potent recent symbol, Elián
González.
"We're getting ready for the endgame,'' he says, describing expansion plans -- from moving his headquarters to downtown Miami from Little Havana to cranking up efforts in the Washington, D.C., office.
Named executive director in late May, Garcia is front-man in the high-stakes campaign to isolate, if not topple, Fidel Castro. His strategy: to engage in the kind of Cuban-American politics that makes sure, in his words, "we do not get victimized'' by post-Cold War trends -- U.S. policy on
China, Palestinian-Israeli peacemaking, constructive engagement.
And, after more than a month in charge, he is emerging as symbolic of a young, new generation of activists committed to the Cuban cause.
Hiring him was "a very, very smart move. He's young. He's a very likeable fellow. He speaks English without an accent,'' says Lula Rodriguez, deputy assistant Secretary of State and one of the highest-ranking Cuban Americans in the Clinton administration.
POLITICAL SAVVY
Most important, he developed his political savvy on this side of the Florida Straits. He sat six years on the Public Service Commission -- sent to Tallahassee by Gov. Lawton Chiles, later elevated to chairman by Jeb Bush -- field experience that has left him with a taste for suspenders,
baby-blue seersucker suits with white buck shoes and, most of all, shmoozing.
"He's as comfortable within the Cuban-American community as he is outside,'' said Rodriguez, "and with his years outside South Florida, he has learned how the business of government and policy is conducted elsewhere.''
TOUGH AS NAILS
But make no mistake. Ideologically, he is as uncompromising as the most bitter Bay of Pigs veteran.
An example:
The son of exile parents who wed here, he rules out posing as a tourist to visit Cuba because it is morally reprehensible "while Cubans are enslaved.''
Born Jose Antonio Garcia on Oct. 12, 1963, at Mount Sinai Hospital, he has a thoroughly Cuban-American pedigree:
Educated at the Belen Jesuit Preparatory School, he received his undergraduate and law degrees at the University of Miami, where as student council president he forged a friendship with Juan Carlos "J.C.'' Mas, who would introduce him to his famous father, the foundation's founder.
PARKED CARS
It was 1987, he said, and he and J.C. parked guests' cars at the Mas family's Pinecrest home at a dinner for movers and shakers who had gone on a mission to Israel sponsored by the Greater Miami Jewish Federation. He later joined the elder Mas at dinner.
Two years later, Mas chose him to run the foundation's Exodus Relief Fund, a multimillion-dollar, U.S.-government supported program that resettled in Miami more than 10,000 Cubans from Europe, the former Soviet Union and Latin America.
ELECTED OFFICE
Five years later, foundation funds helped bankroll Garcia's only bid at elected office: a failed run for the District 11 Metro Commission seat in which he outspent fellow first-time candidate Miguel Diaz de la Portilla.
"Joe's a very smart guy; hardworking, competent and a fine gentleman,'' said Diaz de la Portilla, a Republican running for Miami-Dade County mayor, who, like Garcia, attended Belen, graduating a year earlier.
Garcia acknowledges, politics has long been his passion, ever since he lost his first election, as eighth-grade student council representative.
In a series of interviews, he answered three ways -- yes, no, maybe -- when asked whether the foundation job would be a good launching pad for the future political career he still clearly covets.
A MIXTURE
Leo Núñez, executive assistant principal at Belen Jesuit, recalled Garcia recently as "a very interesting mixture, at 17 or 18, of seriousness and charm.''
He says he recognized even then that Garcia "was probably going to end up in politics or PR work. . . . The guy was a sharp student, and mature for his age clearly, so when he started to move in political circles in Miami, I wasn't surprised.''
Some people here were surprised, though, by his decision to give up the $117,020-a-year seat on the Public Service Commission.
PUBLIC SECTOR
The grandson of a bus driver and a veterinarian, Garcia had oversight of a $17 billion industry, a $25 million budget and 400 employees. It was a public sector job smack in the center of lobbyist-littered Tallahassee, so he recites the numbers easily.
But a bid to pry similar CANF figures from Garcia causes head-scratching and obfuscation.
Is he taking a pay cut? "Indirectly, no,'' he says, explaining that he plans to do utilities consulting on the side. Besides, he no longer commutes between a Tallahassee apartment and his wife, lawyer Eileen Ugalde, and their 2-year-old daughter in Miami Beach.
DONATIONS
How many people answer to him? About 25, including the folks who run La Voz de la Fundación, which produces radio programs, and clerks who track $5 and $20 monthly "membership'' donations.
How big is his budget? "In the millions,'' he replies.
On one thing he is clear on, however:
His boss is "Jorge, the Son,'' as he says in Spanish, a reference to foundation chairman Jorge Mas Santos, who inherited not only the foundation's chairmanship, but is now in charge of MasTec, his father's $1.1 billion telecommunications business.
As Garcia tells it, the son is as much up to the job as his father, who he says has been mythologized as the master operator and Mr. Fixit.
Garcia should know. Besides heading the foundation's Exodus resettlement program, Garcia also designed Mas' 1992 "I don't believe The Miami Herald'' billboard and bumper sticker campaign.
RESPONSIBILITIES
Garcia's move to running the foundation day-to-day, a responsibility formerly handled by CANF's president, Jose "Pepe'' Hernandez, was, conspicuously, the first major change after the foundation's failed effort in April to negotiate a meeting between Elián González's feuding
great-uncles and his father at the Vatican Embassy in Washington, D.C.
But Garcia doesn't see the Elián episode as a failure.
"Today, there are more people who know there is a dictatorship on a small island in the Caribbean,'' he said. "If people are talking about your issue, if they are discussing your issue, you're not forgotten. To see Elián as a failure is to not step back and see where we are.''
Elián is a touchy topic. Even some foundation admirers wonder, mostly privately, whether Castro would have fought so fiercely for the child had the foundation not pasted Elián's face on anti-Castro posters at a Nov. 30 World Trade Organization meeting in Seattle.
Garcia indulges in none of it. Elián "was the indicative example of what happens to a child in Cuba,'' he said, adding that he would use the child's picture on a poster all over again.
"I'm in the middle of a war here,'' he added.
Whether stronger or weaker today, longtime supporters of the foundation say they are relieved at its renewed interest in Washington. With the end of the Cold War and then the death of Mas Canosa, the lobby had lowered its Washington profile.
THE POLITICS
Now, the foundation is returning to the old-style Washington-based politics that the elder Mas patterned after AIPAC, the powerful American Israel Political Action Committee when he created the group in the aftermath of the Mariel Boatlift.
It's a comparison that Garcia encourages. In fact, Garcia frequently uses analogies that evoke Jewish history, notably the Holocaust.
He casually characterized a U.S.-licensed Miami-Cuba charter airline operator as "Mengele,'' for the Nazi-era concentration camp doctor nicknamed The Angel of Death for deciding which Jews would go to the gas chambers.
He sometimes explains that Cuban Americans are like the Jews after their exile to ancient Mesopotamia, cosmopolitan and enriched by diaspora influences. Most American-born Jews did not move to Israel after independence in 1948. So it can be a comforting talking point for Cuban-Americans, like
Garcia, who straddle two cultures -- but have no dream of resettling in a post-Castro Cuba.
THE LANDSCAPE
"I'm an American. I'm Cuban. Yeah, I'm an exile,'' he said. "I wanna visit Cuba. I wanna visit relatives there. But I love Miami. Miami is the greatest city in the world.''
Because, in the end, his perch and his politics are both of Miami, where, as Garcia sees it, a call-in radio show that skewers U.S. policy, an advertising campaign against a Washington senator and a family feud over a 6-year-old child are all part of the local landscape.
"Cuba is part of local politics and we shouldn't be scared or embarrassed because of it,'' he said. "People make a mistake if they take away touchstones that unite us.''
Changes Ahead At Foundation.
The appointment of Joe Garcia as executive director is only one of the changes now under way at the Cuban American National Foundation. Some others:
Expanded Washington presence. Former State Department Cuba Desk chief Dennis Hays has been named a vice president and chief of the Washington, D.C., office, and the staff there is expected to increase to eight from three.
Downtown profile. By May 20, 2001, the foundation plans to move its office from 1312 SW 27th Ave. to the Freedom Tower, the 1925 vintage, 17-story downtown building that foundation founder Jorge Mas Canosa bought in 1997 for $4.2 million. The tower will also house an art gallery, museum, public
meeting space and cultural center, all oriented to Cuba, Garcia says.
Grass-roots campaign. Foundation executives plan more activities for the "thousands'' of members who are $1, $5 and $20 a month donors in an effort to counteract any perception that the foundation, where directors and trustees pay $2,500 to $5,000 for their titles, is a millionaires club.
More media savvy. Sharp-tongued Ninoska Perez Castellón, whose radio programs ring up Cubans on the island to assault them as Castro collaborators, has served largely as foundation spokeswoman. Now, Garcia says attorney Kirk Reagan Menendez, 37, who left Greenberg Traurig recently to
become deputy executive director, will increasingly act as official spokesman. Also planned: media training with outside consultants -- for nonfoundation Cuban activists on how to speak to a non-Cuban audience.
Copyright 2000 Miami Herald |