After Hurricane Elián
Miami is a city asunder, divided by race, but the Cuban exiles' stranglehold
on local and national power has unmistakably eased.
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By Max J. Castro
June 28, 2000 | Now it is over. Elián González returned to Cuba Wednesday
after the U.S. Supreme Court declined to hear the appeal presented by the
boy's Miami relatives.
In the wake of "Hurricane Elián," Miami is a city asunder. The divisions,
evident on the surface in the silent duel of flags waving from cars and homes
-- here Cuban, there American, yonder both -- are deep, complex,
contradictory and often intimate.
Flags are not the only symbol of the struggle. At the height of local
tension, after the Immigration and Naturalization Service removed the boy
from his Miami relatives' home in an April pre-dawn raid, critics of Miami's
Cuban-American leadership threw bunches of bananas at City Hall.
Since that incident, the banana has become the symbol of opposition to the
status quo, and "banana republic" is the favorite epithet used by those who
are fed up with the hard-line exiles' clout in local government.
Is the Elián saga a turning point for the city, marking the beginning of the
end of the exiles' control of Miami politics? And does it also herald a
softening of the U.S. hard-line policy toward Cuba, a policy exiles have done
so much to maintain? It seems no accident that this same week, Congress will
approve measures to allow U.S. agricultural sales to Cuba for the first time
in 38 years. It's the first significant break in the embargo and signals a
major departure from the trend toward confrontation that characterized
U.S.-Cuba relations five years ago.
It will be some time before we know the lasting impact of the Elián saga on
Miami and the United States, but even now several things are clear. The Elián
struggle has dramatically worsened ethnic tension in this multicultural city.
The conflict pitted Cubans against Anglos, but also blacks against Cubans.
African-American feeling grew so bitter that some blacks were willing to
march with whites waving Confederate flags in the hastily organized
"pro-American" demonstrations that drew several thousand protestors in the
wake of the federal enforcement action to remove Elián from the Little Havana
home.
Black attitudes, in turn, have hardened many Cuban-Americans' feelings toward
African-Americans, never very positive in the first place. Many Cubans see
black involvement in the rallies -- some of which had a xenophobic tinge --
as meaning African-Americans have such rancor and envy toward Cubans they are
willing even to consort with racists just to spite Miami's newly-dominant
ethnic group.
Virtually every racial and ethnic group in Miami is upset about the Elián
drama, but many Cubans are feeling humiliated and besieged, and not just
because of the repeated court defeats. The federal operation to retrieve
Elián took place the very day the government in Cuba celebrated the 39th
anniversary of the Bay of Pigs victory over exile invaders. For
Cuban-Americans, the Bay of Pigs was a defining event, marking the end of
hopes for an early return to the homeland, and giving rise to Cuban American
allegiance to the GOP in the wake of President Kennedy's perceived
"betrayal."
When, 39 years later to the day, a Democratic administration seized Elián,
the exile community exploded. Hundreds flew the Cuban flag, while others flew
the American flag upside down and a few hotheads even burned the Stars and
Stripes. And then the long pent-up anger of many non-Cubans, black and white,
boiled over, prompting pro-American demonstrations and fueling ethnic strife.
Many Cubans see the local black and white backlash as anti-Cuban racism and
xenophobia. That element was not entirely absent, but it was more than that.
Liberal whites and blacks who would not dream of supporting English Only laws
or other anti-immigrant initiatives were outraged by the exile community's
hysteria. So they brought out the American flag and the bananas.
The "banana republic" label is laden with anti-Latin American connotations.
It also doesn't fit. Family members of Jorge Mas Santos, head of the Cuban
American Foundation (CANF) -- which bankrolled the fight to keep Elián in
Miami -- own controlling interests in telecommunications companies worth
billions of dollars and listed on the New York Stock Exchange. CANF leaders
are sophisticated about the workings of American capitalism and politics.
That sophistication and clout, not bananas, is the secret of their success in
plugging into the American political system and turning it to their own
devices.
Miami's Cuban-American community is more like Taiwan circa 1960 than the
stereotypical banana republic. It's a community of people displaced by a
Marxist revolution. Here, economic success and professional expertise mixes
with a fierce, anachronistic-sounding anti-Communism and authoritarian
tendencies.
Ultimately, the Elián case may signal a turning point in U.S.-Cuban
relations. The decision to allow agricultural sales is a huge step toward
change. U.S.-Cuba relations worsened four years ago, with the downing of the
"Brothers to the Rescue" airplanes in 1996, and the resulting approval of the
Helms-Burton Act. In the ensuing years, business and farm lobbies began to
actively work against economic sanctions, and U.S. public opinion seemed to
turn away from support for diplomatic isolation and the embargo.
But as late as 1999, the hard-line lobby and the three Cuban-American members
of Congress and their allies were able to turn back an effort to exempt food
and medicine from the embargo. Have these forces been fatally wounded by
their actions in the Elián fiasco? The action by the U.S. Congress to ease
the embargo is an important indicator that may be the case.
One reason is that in the Elián saga, the iron triangle defined by the United
States, Fidel Castro, and the exiles took on a new configuration. This time
the governments of the United States and Cuba converged on a common position,
leaving the exile community alone to fight a two-front battle. Even their
Republican allies backed off when it became clear that there was no public
support for citizenship for Elián González or for hearings into the INS raid.
But is the new geometry lasting? Or can Cuban American conservatives make
normalization as drawn out and excruciatingly difficult an affair as they
made the resolution of the Elián saga?
In the Elián case, the hard-liners overreached so badly and looked so bad in
the eyes of the U.S. public they gave their adversaries -- the U.S. farm
lobby, Cuban American moderates and other embargo opponents -- the enhanced
political clout needed to finally make a breakthrough. Even Sen. Jesse Helms,
fierce anti-Castro stalwart, friend to Cuban Americans and sponsor of the
Helms-Burton law toughening the embargo, voted to ease sanctions against the
wishes of the Cuban-American lobby.
The story is different in Miami, where no changing of the guard can be
expected, although there is a change in their tune. Some of the very people
who helped fire tensions at the height of the controversy, including
Miami-Dade mayor Alex Penelas, have been talking the language of dialogue and
reconciliation ever since.
Yet the fruits of such efforts have been meager. For instance, top civic
leaders met in the days following the INS raid to discuss scenarios in the
event of Elián's return to Cuba. But they were not able even to agree that
all communities would accept a final court ruling, and allow the boy to leave
without protest. But a split in the Cuban-American leadership has become
increasingly evident since the Elián affair. Some leaders -- most notably
business executive Carlos Saladrigas and Pedro Freyre, head of the advocacy
organization Facts About Cuban Exiles -- are pushing a new, more moderate
approach for the Cuban American community. They advocate focusing more on the
post-Fidel future, and urge local leaders to draw a boundary between Miami
governance and anti-Castro politics.
Calls for change have been rejected, however, by conservative Cuban American
icons like the nonagenarian retired banker Luis Botifoll and by CANF.
Instead, CANF has gone on the offensive, lambasting critics and launching a
campaign of ads in the U.S. media exposing the government of Fidel Castro for
human rights violations, and claiming that the Elián affair was not a defeat.
In reality, hard-line forces have been dealt three tough blows in quick
succession. First, the Supreme Court struck down the state of Massachusetts'
sanctions against the government of Myanmar, invalidating Miami-Dade County's
own ultra hard-line Cuba policy. Next the Miami relatives lost their last
chance to keep Elián in the U.S. when their appeal to the Supreme Court was
rejected. Finally, Congress agreed to ease the embargo, striking a blow
against the hard liners' favorite policy, which they have fought tooth and
nail to maintain and expand.
No community has been as touched by the Cuba debate as Miami. The Elián
affair, like a seismic cataclysm, exposed deep social and cultural fault
lines and brought to the surface long-suppressed resentments that, on many
sides, seem to burn only hotter with time. Often, it is personal. In the wake
of Elián, friendships were lost, affairs were ended and feuds flared: that
is, wherever people did not opt for the more frequent recourse to a tense
silence or to careful avoidance.
That toll was brought home to me with special force the day Elián was
reunited with his father. On that night, I had a late dinner with my best
friend and his girlfriend, both Cuban-Americans. I had just appeared on
"Larry King Live," debating CANF chairman Jorge Mas Santos, and my friends
had watched.
Inevitably, our conversation centered on Elián and the events of that
morning. Although both my friends thought father and son should be reunited
-- a decidedly minority view among Cuban-Americans -- it soon became clear
they felt very differently about the case. Based on instinct and scuttlebutt,
the woman, who comes from a family of 1960s exiles with an upper-middle-class
background in Cuba, took a dim view of Elián's father, who she saw as a macho
lowlife. But her boyfriend, my best friend -- the child of dirt-poor Cuban
immigrants who arrived in New York City in the 1940s -- took personal
offense, and countered with his own disparaging view of the Miami relatives.
An argument ensued, turned bitter and ended in silence. The next day, my
friend told me that his girlfriend had ended the relationship.
It's a tale that could be recounted by a depressing number of people in Miami
these sad and searing seven months. Yet let's not write the city or the
Cuban-Americans off just yet. My friends finally reasoned it out and decided
to get back together. As Elián went home, there were no riots in the city,
and the mood among militants was mostly quiet and resigned.
Maybe someday soon Miami will catch up with Taiwan, and Cuban-Americans will
join the Koreans, North and South, who lately seem eager to settle their
differences peacefully. I just hope I live to see and revel in that day.
- - - - - - - - - - - -
About the writer
Max J. Castro, Ph.D., a sociologist, is currently senior research associate
in the Dante B. Fascell North-South Center at the University of Miami and a
regular op/ed columnist for the Miami Herald.
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