CUBANET ... CUBANEWS

April 23, 2001



Conflict Over a Cuban Hero

Los Angeles Times. By Erin Texeira, Times Staff Writer. Saturday, April 21, 2001.

Adolfo Nodal retired three months ago, but these days he's still working. There's one project the former director of the Los Angeles Cultural Affairs Department can't give up.

Nodal and other prominent Cuban Americans want to redesign and expand an aging monument in Echo Park honoring Cuban poet and revolutionary Jose Marti. But fierce, months-long opposition from some neighborhood residents has stalled the project, forcing several design changes and sparking bitterness between the groups.

The heated debate has centered on how best to use the northeast corner of Echo Park--either as home to a new, bigger monument or as mostly open, grassy space.

Beneath the debate runs a vein of ethnic tension: Some Cuban American activists believe the opposition to their project has been uncommonly virulent because the monument honors a prominent Latino, and improving the space would likely draw more Latinos into an area increasingly dominated by Spanish-speaking immigrants, they said.

Echo Park community leaders, who also include at least a handful of Latinos, scoff at such accusations, saying their diverse, mixed-income neighborhood is starved for parkland and has little need for more concrete.

This afternoon, city officials will host another community meeting to decide the issue. It is expected to be the last in a string of gatherings that began in fall 1999.

"I've worked on many things," Nodal said, "but this is special."

A local Cuban American arts and culture group, Patronato Jose Marti, first erected a small monument to its namesake at the corner of Glendale Boulevard and Echo Park Avenue in 1976.

At the time, the neighborhood was bursting with Cuban emigres who had fled Fidel Castro's revolution. They opened local businesses and started clubs, and pooled money to erect the concrete platform and bronze bust of Marti, a 19th century cultural hero to many Latinos. Since then, many Cuban American families have left Echo Park for such suburban areas as Burbank, Downey and Torrance.

The original Marti bust is cracked and routinely marred by graffiti, and the biggest Cuban presence in the neighborhood comes each May during a Cuban festival. Still, several long-standing Cuban-owned businesses remain, and many insist the neighborhood holds tremendous symbolic importance for the community.

"What other neighborhood should we do this in?" asked Norma Montero, president of Patronato Jose Marti. "This monument is already there. We want to improve on it."

Susan Borden, secretary of the Echo Park Improvement Assn. and an opponent of the monument, said the neighborhood today is "as much the heart of the Cuban community as, I would say, the Breed Street shul [the famed, now-shuttered Orthodox synagogue in predominantly Latino Boyle Heights] is the heart of the Jewish community. . . . You're talking about a ghost here, not an existing community."

The city's Department of Recreation and Parks considers the 29-acre site "a community park," which means its fate will largely be determined by current residents, said department Director Ellen Oppenheim.

Ethnic tension cropped up during the first meetings between monument planners and residents in late 1999, according to Cuban Americans involved in the process.

"Early on in the process . . . their complaint was, why not [honor] an American character or personage," said Pablo Ruiz, an architect who, with Miami-based Cuban architect Nicholas Quintana, is designing the project at a cost of about $200,000--all through private funding.

"In my personal view," Ruiz said, "these people feel threatened that the demographics are changing in that community." The Echo Park-Silver Lake area is half Latino, according to the 2000 census, with equal numbers of whites and Asian-Pacific Islanders making up most of the rest of the population.

Margarita Fernandez, an Echo Park resident who surveyed about 200 park-users last year and found that most opposed the project, said it was unfair to imply ethnic prejudice. "The community in Echo Park is people of different backgrounds. That's what makes us richer."

Said Isa-Kae Meksin, a community activist who is fighting the monument: "At each of the meetings, there's always some prejudiced, ignorant person who stands up and says, 'Go back to Cuba' or 'What about Elian?' But 99% of this is about protecting park land."

The original plan for the monument plotted a 9,000-square-foot space, including a curving wall that rose to 12 feet in some places and framed a paved plaza with benches. It encountered "strong resistance in the community because it was too massive and had too much 'hardscape,' " Oppenheim said.

In October, planners presented a plan that would eliminate a current paved walkway and relocate the Marti bust to a 2,500-square-foot plaza framed by two adjoining walls. The space sits at the base of a small hill in the park.

The design, planners said, would simply shift paved park area from the walkway, opening up some of the park's flattest terrain for ballgames and the like.

Residents still balked, and officials in the Cultural Affairs Department, at a public forum in November, ordered designers to modify the plan further until it had more community support.

Echo Park activists said they contacted the Los Angeles Police Department regarding safety concerns in connection with walls in an urban park. They also discovered that a UCLA graduate student had surveyed park-users and documented threatened wildlife in the park's lake. They have researched the city's ethics code, arguing that a public figure such as Nodal has no right to take public land for a project that, by his own admission, holds personal importance.

Nodal acknowledges that some Cuban Americans are becoming discouraged by the persistent opposition. Fund-raising has all but stopped until a design is approved.

If no compromise is reached, Nodal said, Cuban Americans may use the money already raised to renovate the current Marti bust, or relocate the whole thing elsewhere.

"This is my last project," Nodal said, weariness in his voice. "This is really it."

Copyright 2001 Los Angeles Times

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