By Christopher Marquis. The New York Times. June 30, 2000
WASHINGTON, June 29 -- After dominating the United States policy debate over Cuba for nearly two decades, Cuban-American advocates of a hard-line stance toward Havana find themselves on the defensive, increasingly estranged from other Americans, supporters and critics say.
As a result, the Cuban American National Foundation, the pre-eminent exile lobby, is reorganizing its leadership to include younger faces and today appointed a non-Cuban former State Department expert on Cuba to head its Washington office.
The Miami-based group is also singling out the districts of Congressional adversaries for television advertisements and pledging to spend "whatever it takes" to protect the unyielding American policy it helped to create.
With the return home this week of Elián González, the 6-year-old Cuban refugee, and an agreement in Congress to lift the ban on sales of food and medicine to Cuba, exiles are adjusting to a political landscape that increasingly favors accommodation with President Fidel Castro.
The travails of the foundation, widely viewed as one of the most effective ethnic lobbies in the United States, are emblematic of exiles' lost political ground. The lobby's leaders this week portrayed their prosperous constituency as an underdog, in a moral struggle against Goliath: American
farmers and corporations bent on doing business with Castro.
"We really have no choice but to respond in a very aggressive way," said Jose Cardenas, the foundation's Washington director.
Joe Garcia, the foundation's new executive director, complained that the Cuban lobby had been bruised by "very good players" in the public relations arena: Attorney General Janet Reno, President Clinton and Mr. Castro himself.
For some Cuba-watchers, such shifts are a stark reversal from the foundation's heyday under the iron-fisted stewardship of Jorge Mas Canosa, a multimillionaire businessman who breezed through the halls of Washington with the aura and the entourage of a head of state.
Under Mr. Mas Canosa, the well-financed lobby mustered a stable of loyal Congressional allies, drafted Cuba legislation, established anti-Castro radio and television stations with federal money and kept United States-Cuban relations in a deep freeze.
But since Mr. Mas Canosa's death in 1997, the exiles have yet to put forth a national figure who commands respect and fear in Washington. Without such leadership, the foundation has invited challengers.
"That's all it was: It was Jorge Mas, his personal relationships and fund-raising," said a Congressional aide who works with the lobby.
"That got things done.
Now that he's died, his son really hasn't taken up the cause."
Under the direction of Mr. Mas Canosa's son, who is also named Jorge, the foundation ran into a public relations fiasco with the Elián González case. To an extent, it was self-inflicted. Within hours of the boy's rescue from Florida waters last Thanksgiving, the lobby was the first
to convert Elián, literally, into a poster child, distributing thousands of leaflets of him at the World Trade Organization meeting in Seattle beneath the headline: "Another child victim of Fidel Castro."
Castro quickly responded, portraying Elián as a kidnap victim, being kept from a devoted father by an exile band of extremists. Americans who had paid little attention to the Cuba policy debate tended to support the father's claim over exile relatives in Miami, who insisted that the boy
be granted political asylum.
"They showed what they were really all about," Representative Jim McDermott, Democrat of Washington, said of the Cuban-American hard-liners. "They were ready to sacrifice one of their own kids, and they didn't really care about separating him from his father."
Exile hard-liners acknowledge missteps in handling the case. But they deny their actions had any impact in what came next: a drive by American business -- led by the Farm Bureau and the United States Chamber of Commerce -- to open Cuba for business after 38 years of embargo.
"I think that if there was any negativity surrounding the Elián González situation, it was pretty much self-contained," Mr. Cardenas said. "I think that basically people saw it as the equivalent of the O. J. situation. They just wanted it to be over, and out of their
living rooms."
But Max Castro, a sociologist at the University of Miami's North-South Center, disagrees.
During the seven-month struggle over Elián, Mr. Castro said, people who had paid little attention to America's policy toward Cuba began to ask questions about the hard-line approach.
"Americans have basically said it's a policy that hasn't worked, and it's inconsistent with the rest of our foreign policy," Mr. Castro said.
Pressed by lawmakers representing wheat and rice growers, Congressional Republicans agreed this week to lift the ban on sales of food to Cuba, a move that has already been approved by the Senate.
Foundation officials portrayed the deal as merely symbolic, noting that allies had barred federal or private credits for such sales.
The lobby moved quickly to regain its footing.
In a news conference today, the foundation announced that Dennis Hays, a former American ambassador in Suriname, would take over its Washington office.
Mr. Hays, who is not Cuban-American, endeared himself to many exiles in 1995, when he resigned as the State Department's top officer for Cuba to protest a deal to allow the forced repatriation of Cuban refugees.
The foundation has also sought to renovate its image in Miami, where it has long been led by exiles from Mr. Mas Canosa's generation.
In his new post, the American-born Mr. Garcia, 35, promises to update the foundation's image, including "more sophisticated" media efforts to educate the American people about Cuba.
"You certainly are going to see a reinvigorated foundation," said Mr. Garcia. He eschews the familiar "bearded tyrant" references to President Castro, calling him instead "this old goofball."
As a start, the foundation plans to run television advertisements that highlight Mr. Castro's abuses. Beginning this weekend, the foundation plans to air advertisements denouncing the haven provided by Cuba to scores of fugitives from American justice.
The advertisements are to broadcast first in Washington, D.C., Mr. Cardenas said, and later in the districts of selected lawmakers who favor easing sanctions.
Mr. McDermott, the Washington Democrat, said foundation officials risked further isolating themselves with such tactics. "Threatening people is not going to help them," he said.
After Boy's Return, Castro Tries to Keep Momentum
By David Gonzalez. June 30, 2000
The Associated Press
Luis Zarrager, a native of Cuba, made his daily visit Thursday to the Miami home where Elian Gonzalez had lived, and where protesters had gathered for months.
HAVANA, June 29 -- "At Last in the Fatherland!" declared the front-page headline in the official newspaper, Granma, above pictures of Elián González stepping off the plane and being swept up in a relative's arms, an emotional end to the seven-month custody battle that
captivated Cuba.
Despite the triumphal headline, the newspaper quickly reminded readers that the child's return was just the beginning of renewed efforts by Cuban officials who want to see an end to an American trade embargo. They contend that the embargo and other American policies weaken their economy and
encourage people, like Elián's mother, to risk their lives at sea while seeking political asylum.
For those reasons, the government plans to continue the public rallies and televised discussions that provided a political play-by-play during the Elián custody battle.
Foreign officials based here see the continuing campaign as an attempt to tap into the Cuban public's overwhelming support for Elián's return in the hope of rekindling a revolutionary ardor that had cooled in recent years.
They said the battle over Elián was the perfect opportunity for President Fidel Castro to restore his appeal.
"He got himself front and center before the country on a daily basis," said one foreign official. "He re-established himself in his image as the sole leader in Cuba who still has the oomph and fire to carry on the revolution. He got an issue he could mobilize the youth, who are
his audience and a group that he had not had effective outreach to before."
It is not clear whether Mr. Castro will be able to sustain his appeal. Some people said they had tired of the government-sponsored rallies for Elián and the televised talks about the ills of American society. Many said they simply wanted the boy home with his family.
"Politics is politics," said María González, who was shopping at a Havana market. "Human feelings should not be mixed up with that."
Yet today's newspapers were filled not only with praise for Elián and his father, Juan Miguel González, but also for the youths who attended the countless public rallies organized by the government. While insisting the government would not trot out the child as a symbol, the
official newspaper made clear Elián's importance to a battle that it said must continue "immediately and without a truce."
"Ahead of us is the challenge that no new Eliáns continue to appear," one article said.
Already, the huge billboards with Elián's face have been replaced by others that call for the United States to end its Cuban Adjustment Act, which grants political asylum to Cubans who reach American soil. But while the custody battle strongly affected many Cubans, the policy issues now
being tackled may not have the same resonance.
"Elián's story was so visual, with this child and his father," said one foreign official. "Can you keep that up with the Cuban Adjustment Act without any such visuals? It will be difficult."
In the short term, diplomats said, the Cuban government has scored some points through its campaign for Elián's return. They pointed to the easing of restrictions on American food sales passed this week by the United States Congress. They said that decision was a result of a growing
sentiment against the embargo in the United States among people who favored Elián's return and who were turned off by the hardball tactics of Elián's Miami relatives and their supporters who sought to keep him.
"They noticed it was not just about a regime, but there were real people living in Cuba," one diplomat said. "A lot of people in the United States questioned the embargo, and Elián helped with that sentiment."
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