MIAMI
(By David Reiff, NYTimes) July 13,
2008 —
On the
surface, political life in Cuban
Miami seems unchanged. Little Havana
is still partly a Disney version of
a displaced Cuba and partly a
genuine community hub, where
families who have long since left
for suburbia still come for
nostalgic weekend lunches. At the
Versailles Restaurant, the community
newspapers preaching no compromise
with Castro are all that are on
offer. For almost four decades, the
Versailles has been an obligatory
stop for Washington politicians
courting the Cuban-American
community, visits that, as
photographs in the restaurant
attest, have often involved putting
on a white guayabera, the
four-pocket dress shirt that often
replaces a coat and tie in the
Caribbean. This familiar theater of
intransigence — a staple of South
Florida life at least since the Bay
of Pigs invasion in 1961, when C.I.A.-backed
Cuban exiles tried to overthrow the
new Communist regime — is
ubiquitous. Some Cuban-Americans
point hopefully to a softening in
the Spanish-language, Cuba-focused
radio outlets that now dominate the
South Florida market. But for an
outsider, what is striking is the
degree to which the hard-line stance
endures, since it might have been
supposed that 50 years of failure to
influence events on the island might
have led to the conclusion that the
hard-line position needed to be
reconsidered. Most officeholders in
Florida and, for that matter, most
national politicians continue to at
least pay lip service to the dream
of a post-Communist Cuba, even
though, early this year, Fidel
Castro succeeded in seamlessly
handing over power to his brother
Raúl — testimony, if any was needed,
to the stability of the regime.
Yet if
Cuban Miami does indeed continue to
dream, it is also beginning,
quietly, tentatively and painfully,
to adjust. Backstage, something very
new is happening. Call it the Miami
Spring, or Cuban-American glasnost.
This community that has clung for
decades to its certainties — about
the island itself, about the role
the exile community would play after
the Castro brothers passed from the
scene, about where Cuban-Americans
should situate themselves in terms
of U.S. domestic politics — is in
ferment. This matters not only in
terms of the destiny of the
Cuban-American community itself but
also in terms of the 2008 elections
since, despite claims made on
background by some of Barack Obama’s
advisers, Florida is likely to play
a pivotal role in determining
whether Obama or John McCain becomes
president, and the Cuban-American
vote is likely to play its usual
outsize role in deciding which
candidate prevails in the state.
In the
past, both Democratic and Republican
contenders tried to conform to the
hard-line expectations they
perceived as the overwhelming
consensus within the Cuban-American
community. But Obama has recently
strayed from orthodoxy by
criticizing aspects of the American
embargo on Cuba and asserting that
he is prepared to open talks with
the regime. This might seem like a
golden opportunity for McCain to
solidify his hold on the
Cuban-American vote, but Obama’s
views appear to be resonating in
Cuban Miami more than anyone could
have predicted. Two Democratic
Congressional candidates in the
Miami area — Joe Garcia and Raul
Martinez — were added last month to
the Democratic Congressional
Campaign Committee’s list of
potential “red to blue” conversions,
bringing to 37 the number of seats
nationally that the Democrats hope
to flip away from the Republicans.
For the first time, the hard-line
consensus is being challenged. There
is real debate in Cuban Miami these
days about the embargo, above all
about the series of further
restrictions that were imposed by
the Bush administration in 2003 and
2004. These limited travel for
so-called people-to-people
educational exchanges, abolished the
category of “fully hosted” travel
(under which travel to and from Cuba
was underwritten by non-U.S.
citizens and which Washington long
suspected of being a scheme for
money-laundering), reduced family
visits to once every three years and
limited the sending of money from
Cubans or Cuban-Americans living in
the United States to the sender’s
immediate family — parents,
siblings, children — rather than, as
before, to his or her extended
family. A decade ago, support for
such restrictions and any other
confrontational policy was a
certainty in Cuban South Florida. So
was its domestic corollary:
dependable support for Republicans
both locally and nationally. Today,
and quite suddenly, that unwavering
support for Republicans is no longer
a given.
Even sudden change has roots, and
this is true in South Florida.
Eduardo Padrón, the president of
Miami Dade College and himself a
Democrat, told me recently: “This
community was always a great deal
more politically diverse than it was
given credit for. And Cubans have
always been more socially liberal
than their voting patterns might
suggest.” The architect Raúl
Rodríguez — whom I accompanied on a
number of family visits to the
island in the early 1990s and who
has been involved in civic affairs
in South Florida for many years —
put it more sharply: “This community
has always been caricatured.”
The
community is also more fluid than
you might assume. Despite Republican
dominance ever since President John
F. Kennedy was seen as having
betrayed the cause following the Bay
of Pigs disaster, Cuban-American
Democrats have been able to gain
office from time to time. César Odio
was Miami’s (appointed) city
manager; Alex Penelas was mayor of
Miami-Dade County during the Elián
González controversy, in which, over
fierce (and bipartisan) protests in
Miami, the Clinton administration
returned to Cuba a child whose
father remained on the island and
whose mother tried to take him with
her to Florida in a makeshift raft
but drowned on the voyage. But while
Odio and Penelas were impeccably
liberal on domestic issues, their
attitudes toward the Castro regime
were every bit as confrontational as
those of their Republican rivals.
Penelas took a leading role
supporting those trying to keep
Elián in Miami, while Odio was a key
political adviser to Jorge Mas
Canosa. Mas Canosa’s political
action committee, the Cuban American
National Foundation (CANF), had a
reach in Washington in the 1980s and
1990s almost on a par with those of
the American Association of Retired
Persons or the American Israel
Public Affairs Committee.
Until Mas Canosa’s death in 1997,
“the Foundation,” as it is almost
universally referred to in Miami,
could legitimately be described as the power in the exile
community, and Mas Canosa — it was
always difficult to separate the man
from the institution — was the
person to whom both Republican and
Democratic administrations turned
for the seal of approval on all
matters related to Cuba policy. But
there is little question that while
he supported some Democrats and
could work with them on local
problems, on the national level, Mas
Canosa, like his constituency, was
strongly Republican. The speaker of
the Florida House of
Representatives, Marco Rubio, is a
Republican, as are all three of
greater Miami’s Congressional
representatives — Ileana
Ros-Lehtinen, Lincoln Diaz-Balart
and his brother, Mario Diaz-Balart —
and one of Florida’s two senators,
Mel Martinez. And only the most
optimistic Democratic political
operative would go so far as to
claim that Cuban South Florida is
likely to eschew John McCain for
Barack Obama, any more than it opted
for John Kerry or Al Gore over
George W. Bush. Senator McCain
almost certainly represented the
majority view in Cuban Miami when he
insisted, in a speech there in May,
that to soften the travel
restrictions or the limits on
remittances “would send the worst
possible signal to Cuba’s dictators
— there is no need to undertake
fundamental reforms; they can simply
wait for a unilateral change in U.S.
policy.”
But
the fact that the Illinois senator
would decide to take the bull by the
horns and come out flatly for a less
absolutist interpretation of
Washington’s embargo in a speech
before a Cuban-American audience in
Miami — and be received warmly at
the foundation by Jorge Mas Canosa’s
son — is an emblem of the fact that
the Cuban-American vote is in play
even on what in exile politics is
called el tema: the theme of
the exile and of Cuba’s future. As
Obama put it at the luncheon for him
at the foundation: “I know what an
easy thing it is to do for American
politicians. Every four years, they
come down to Miami, they talk tough,
they go back to Washington and
nothing changes in Cuba.” In a
direct appeal to Cuban-American
voters opposed to the restrictions
on travel and remittances, the
senator said it was “time to let
Cuban-American money make their
families less dependent upon the
Castro regime.”
Whether Obama really expected to
make inroads into the Cuban-American
vote with the speech is
questionable. When Hillary Clinton
was still in the race, she was far
more circumspect, even if, off the
record, her aides expressed views
not that dissimilar from those of
the liberal Cuban-Americans whom
Obama was echoing. But that the
presumptive Democratic nominee would
think the speech worth making at
all, in a community where he is the
subject of a great deal of mistrust
and hostility and in a state where
he is not polling well against
Senator McCain, exemplifies the
change that is taking place in the
Cuban-American community.
The
most significant emblems of this new
dispensation in Miami, however, are
closer to home. It had long been a
commonplace of South Florida
politics that greater Miami’s three
Congressional representatives,
Ros-Lehtinen and the Diaz-Balart
brothers — who are descended from a
prominent pre-Castro political
family — could basically keep their
seats for life, as previous South
Florida congressmen like Claude
Pepper and Dante Fascell did. But
while Ros-Lehtinen is generally
regarded as a shoo-in for
re-election, the Diaz-Balart
brothers are facing the first
serious challenges of their careers.
Instead of facing off against the
comparative unknowns who have been
the sacrificial lambs of the
Democratic Party in the past in and
around Miami, they are facing two
extremely well-known (and
surprisingly well-financed)
Cuban-American Democrats: Raul
Martinez, the controversial former
mayor of the working-class (and
overwhelmingly Cuban-American) city
of Hialeah, just northwest of Miami,
and a proven vote-getter for many
years; and Joe Garcia, from his
youth a protégé and then a trusted
colleague of Jorge Mas Canosa’s and,
after the older man’s death, his
successor as head of the Cuban
American National Foundation.
It is
a stunning change. As recently as
2004, the Diaz-Balart brothers each
won re-election easily. And while in
the Democratic tsunami of 2006 their
Democratic challengers did somewhat
better than expected, no one really
thought that genuinely credible
opponents like Martinez and Garcia
might decide to take on the brothers
in 2008. Some people in Cuban Miami
say privately that overconfidence
led both congressmen to neglect
bread-and-butter issues in their
districts and not devote enough
resources to constituent services.
They point out that the third
Cuban-American member of the House
delegation, Congresswoman Ileana
Ros-Lehtinen, has constituent
services second to none and is far
more flexible on social questions
than the Diaz-Balarts. (Her district
now includes the heavily gay Florida
Keys, and she has garnered
considerable support there as well.)
This, they say, rather than her
views about Cuba, is what makes her
own re-election such a virtual
certainty.
The
problem for the Diaz-Balart brothers
is that this time they are facing
competitors whose Cuban bona fides
are beyond challenge, and who are
more in tune with the social
liberalism of much of the
Cuban-American community. As Joe
Garcia put it to me over coffee at
the Versailles Restaurant in Little
Havana, “Mario is not going to
out-Cuban me, that’s one thing you —
and he — can count on.” (Mario
Diaz-Balart declined to be
interviewed for an article in what
his press spokesman described as the
“left-wing New York Times,”
asserting that it could not be
objective; Lincoln Diaz-Balart
simply did not respond to interview
requests.) For his part, Raul
Martinez points to intimidation of
dissident voices in the past. “There
is a fear in this community,” he
said as we sat together in the
living room of his home in Hialeah,
“that if you speak out, then bad
things will happen. I think that, in
particular, businesspeople have been
afraid of being denounced on talk
radio or not getting contracts
because they are too
‘controversial.’ ” This has now
changed, he said, and the change is
real, though he added, laughing,
“It’s just that no one wanted to be
the first person to call for it.”
Raul Martinez says he believes that
Lincoln Diaz-Balart and his
supporters will focus on the Cuba
issue to the virtual exclusion of
all others. “They have no other
issues to discuss,” he said. “They
have to attack me as objectively
pro-Castro.” Referring to the Miami
gossip that Lincoln Diaz-Balart
retains political ambitions in Cuba
after the fall of the regime,
Martinez added: “I don’t want to be
president of Cuba. When change comes
to the island, I want to be a
resource person.”
Martinez was scathing about Lincoln
Diaz-Balart’s record on constituent
service. It seemed clear that as far
as he was concerned, the priority
should always have been what you
could bring back to your district.
“Claude Pepper,” he said, “who held
this seat for decades, brought back
federal money for affordable
housing. Lincoln was in Congress
when I was mayor of Hialeah. He
never brought any bacon home. What I
got, I got from other congressmen.
What has Lincoln done? As we say in
Cuba, he has one song, and he’s
sticking to it. I want to do what
Pepper did, what Dante Fascell did.”
But to achieve this, Martinez
conceded, meant challenging the way
political dialogue has been
structured in the Cuban-American
community for decades. He said he
sensed it was happening. “Where
people used to worry about being
called Communists,” he told me, “and
that was something that ended the
conversation in Miami, now times
have changed. What people say to me
is not, ‘How can you dare take these
positions,’ but, ‘What took you so
long?’ ”
This does not mean that
Cuban-American voters have become so
assimilated into the American
mainstream that they will vote
pocketbook issues to the exclusion
of Cuba-centered ones like the terms
of the embargo or the role of the
exile community. Both the painful
wounds of exile and concern about
the future of the island, rekindled
now that Raúl Castro has settled
into power, are never far from the
surface in Cuban Miami, even among
young people whose politics
vis-à-vis Cuba are far less
hard-line and confrontational than
those of their parents and
grandparents. “Everyone in Miami has
been waiting to say that the exile
is over,” Raúl Rodríguez told me.
“But as Yogi Berra said, ‘It ain’t
over ’til it’s over.’ ”
Just as the struggle between the
exiles and the Castro regime was
always a civil war in the most basic
sense, pitting family member against
family member, so the political
schism in Miami is a family and
often a generational affair. One of
Joe Garcia’s young staff members, an
Obama supporter, Giancarlo Sopo,
exemplifies this. His biography is
typical of leading families within
the exile community. And if Sopo
cannot be called representative, he
is nonetheless one of a great many
of the children and grandchildren of
hard-line anti-Castro exiles to have
come to believe that not only do
things have to change in Cuba, but
they have to change in Miami as
well.
Over lunch in Miami Beach, Sopo was
at pains to point out both what
unites and what divides the
generations. “My father was a Bay of
Pigs veteran,” he told me. “He was
in one of the first infiltration
teams to go into Cuba before the
landing. Later, he was Jorge Mas’s
right-hand man at the foundation, a
Ronald Reagan supporter to his
core.” Sopo’s face hardened and his
voice grew quieter: “My father died
in 1999. He died frustrated because
his dreams of returning to Cuba
never came true. But I don’t believe
my father died so that my generation
could make the same mistakes. There
has to be another way.”
For
some in the older generation of
Cuban exiles, Sopo’s “other way” is
inevitable with the passage of time.
As another former foundation
stalwart, César Odio, observed
grimly, “The exile will be over by
death, with my generation dying
out.” For Odio, young people like
Sopo and Odio’s own younger son, who
is also working for Obama, are
typical of what in Miami is often
referred to as the fourth generation
(though Odio’s wife, Marian Prio,
the daughter of a former president
of Cuba, has been a strong backer of
the Illinois senator from early in
the campaign). “If things haven’t
changed yet,” he told me, “they will
soon enough. Not only are the
historical exiles going away, but
increasingly the community is either
made up of people who consider
themselves to be Americans first or,
among the recent arrivals, people
who grew up in Castro’s Cuba for
whom the embargo as currently
enforced simply makes no human
sense. They, not the intransigents,
are the majority now.”
Odio is certainly not alone in
emphasizing the effect on South
Florida politics of Cubans who have
arrived since the early 1980s.
Attitudes have been mutating for
many years, particularly among
people who have arrived from the
island over the past decade and
among the generation of young,
native-born Cuban-Americans in
college or now entering the work
force, for whom Cuba is less a cause
than a curiosity and, potentially at
least, a business opportunity.
Both Joe Garcia and Raul Martinez
are betting on these recent arrivals
to help undermine the hard-liners.
For many of the newcomers, Cuba is a
place, not a cause; and to the
extent they have a cause, it is the
relatives they left behind not all
that long ago and want to see
regularly and help without
restriction. Martinez flatly
dismissed the idea that the ban on
remittances was effective anyway.
“If you go to a local barber,” he
told me by way of illustration, “and
people are reassured that you’re not
from the F.B.I., they are likely to
ask you how, not whether, they can
send money to their relatives in
Cuba. Everybody down here is doing
it!”
Such rhetoric is part of Martinez’s
argument for why voters should
choose him over Lincoln Diaz-Balart.
But when he talks about voters
asking him indignantly, “The
government’s going to tell me I
can’t go see my family more than
once every three years or send them
money?” — or insists that
anti-Castro intransigence has become
“a business” for a Cuban-American
establishment unwilling “to lose its
franchise” — he is identifying a
hunger for change that he maintains
is widespread within the community.
Martinez’s fellow insurgent
candidate, Joe Garcia, is convinced
that the times have changed already.
He does not repudiate the
anti-Castro activism of Mas Canosa.
Indeed, in conversation he speaks
proudly both of Mas Canosa and of
his own connection to him. But he
claims that his own message of
change is getting a hearing even
among older, more hard-line voters.
“Many of them,” he told me, “know
just as well as I do that new times
demand new solutions. I can speak
with authority about the ways we
tried in the past. I played a role
in shaping them, after all. But I
think if Jorge Mas were alive today,
he would see that the world has
changed and that we Cuban exiles,
and Cuban-Americans, we have to
change, too.”
When I told César Odio what Garcia
had said, he smiled, though whether
more out of amusement or bitterness
was hard to say. “Look,” he told me
flatly, “we tried intransigence, and
it got us nothing in terms of
actually affecting what took place
on the island for all those years.
It will be half a century next year
since Castro seized power! Do you
realize that? And when Castro turned
over power to his brother, what
effect did we in the exile have? The
answer, unfortunately, is none
whatsoever.” After a pause, he
added, “And even if someone could
promise us that we would be more
effective at some point in the
future, he has to face the fact that
the commitments of people of my
generation — people born in Cuba —
are not the same as those of our
children and grandchildren.” Anyone
who spends much time with young
Cuban-Americans in South Florida can
vouch for the accuracy of this. As
Odio put it, “The fourth generation
of Cuban-Americans, born here of
people born here, are not exiles;
they’re Americans. Cuba is important
to them, but it’s not everything to
them, the way it is still to this
day to many people in my
generation.”
Whether this means a change in the
monopoly on power that hard-line
Cuban-Americans have maintained
pretty much since they began to gain
serious political power in the 1970s
is another question. On the two key
questions — whether pocketbook
concerns will trump exile politics
in the 2008 election cycle, and
whether there is now enough
opposition to the ban on remittances
and the limitations on travel — the
jury is still out, and will be until
the fall elections decide the
matter. After all, Democrats have
won in Miami-Dade County (that is,
greater Miami) before. John Kerry
carried the city in 2004. But no one
suggests that he did so with
Cuban-American votes or that his
victory represented any great shift
in the community’s attitudes. Even
if the Democratic victories are as
widespread in November as the
consensus among political
consultants and pundits suggests,
the electoral math may still not add
up for Cuban-American Democrats.
Modesto Maidique, president of
Florida International University,
argues that John McCain will be a
powerful candidate both in Cuban
South Florida and in the state
generally, and he is almost
certainly correct. And the
Democratic consultants and campaign
workers I spoke with struck me as
taking their wishes for reality when
they suggested that McCain won’t
have coattails. As the influential
State Representative David Rivera,
admittedly himself an interested
party on the Republican side of the
political divide, put it to me: “I
concede that if you poll people who
have come here from Cuba over the
past decade, they feel differently
than the 1959 or even the Mariel
generation. But I think the people
who say they represent a fundamental
shift are deluding themselves.”
Yet
even Rivera conceded that the
hard-line voting bloc is aging. His
conviction that the 2008 cycle would
comfortably return Mario and Lincoln
Diaz-Balart to Congress and help put
Florida’s electoral votes in John
McCain’s column was, in part at
least, based on his belief that
“it’s older people who vote.” As he
told me, “We call them supervoters,
and they are overwhelmingly
hard-line anti-Castro and
pro-democracy.” Of the Mariel
generation — between that of the
revolutionary-era exiles and the
most recent generations, and named
for the harbor from which as many as
125,000 people left Cuba for the
U.S. in 1980 — Rivera said it was
predominantly, if not
monolithically, “anti-Castro,
pro-democracy, anti-Communist.”
Regarding the 300,000 or more people
who have come from Cuba to the
United States in the past 10 years,
Rivera presented a subtle picture.
“Anecdotally,” he told me, “it’s not
that the post-1994 generation is
pro-Castro, but instead that they
think politics ruined their lives in
Cuba, and so they are deeply
apolitical. Whatever my Democratic
friends may be telling themselves,
whatever Raul [Martinez] and Joe
[Garcia] may be hoping, they’re not
ready to be energized politically.”
There is little doubt that
antipolitics is the strongest form
of politics among these recent
arrivals. Unlike earlier generations
of exiles, most are not mourning the
non-Communist Cuba that was and
might have been. For them, Communism
is a fact of life from childhood,
not something alien — however much
most may detest the regime and be
glad to have made their way to the
U.S. And while most would probably
say they value the freedoms of the
United States, there is little doubt
that many, if not most, left for
economic and family reasons.
How
this translates into American
politics is another question. When I
asked Rivera if he thought that, in
the long run, this generation would
not alter the political terms of
reference in the Cuban-American
community, his answer was curiously
ambiguous and seemed more like a
statement of faith than the
conclusion of a hardheaded, savvy
modern American politician. “By the
time you have critical mass,” he
said musingly, “with an ability to
make a difference, we may all be
back in Cuba.”
Marco Rubio, speaker of the Florida
Legislature and Rivera’s colleague,
friend and political ally — both men
supported Mike Huckabee in the
Republican primaries, then endorsed
John McCain and are working hard for
him throughout South Florida — was
at pains to emphasize his sympathy
for anyone who wanted to send money
to their relatives on the island.
Like Rivera, Rubio readily conceded
that people who have arrived in
Miami from Cuba in the past 5 to 10
years did harbor different
attitudes. “It would be disingenuous
of me to pretend otherwise,” he told
me. But Rubio thoughtfully defended
the 2004 restrictions on both
practical and ethical grounds. “Let
me give you some context,” he told
me, “the kind of context I don’t
hear when I listen to Joe or Raul —
and incidentally, Raul has been a
career politician for 30 years, and
Joe has been politically active for
years, so I don’t really see how
they can call themselves new faces
on the South Florida scene.” Having
made his point, Rubio returned to
the context of the embargo: “First
of all, in 2004, we had realized
that unrestricted remittances had
become a cash cow for the Castro
regime. As for the travel
limitations, I would never criticize
anyone for visiting family members.
But that wasn’t the problem. What
you had was a situation where people
would come to Miami from Cuba, stay
for a year and a day and then go
back. And what this was doing was
threatening the sustainability of
the Cuban Adjustment Act itself, the
U.S. law that gives Cubans who come
to this country a special status as
political exiles rather than
immigrants.
“What makes Cubans different from
Haitians who come here or anyone
else,” Rubio went on, “if they go
back and forth, that is to say, if
they’re not exiles at all? In that
case, why should Cubans be any
different? The whole structure would
have unraveled had something not
been done.”
Rubio was saying that neither
Washington nor the Cuban-exile
community could accept a
historical-political exile morphing
into a contemporary economic
migration. It was an argument that I
was surprised not to have heard more
often from supporters of the Diaz-Balarts
and other politicians on the
Republican side: that the embargo
was necessary to preserve the status
of Cubans in America as political
exiles. At the least, the recent
intensification of the debate within
the Cuban-American community has
caused people like Rubio to defend
positions that initially seem more
like role reversal than political
orthodoxy. Thus, supporters of a
loosening of the embargo spoke about
the emancipatory effects of tourism
and big business while a
conservative like Rubio justified
the embargo at least in part
because, as he put it, “otherwise
American businesses will just go to
Cuba and prefer to do business with
the government. Corporations are not
interested in democracy; they’re
interested in making money, in
capitalism. Look at China. There
businesses don’t have to abide by
environmental standards, union
rights, human rights generally.” It
is a peculiar world when the
conservative hard-liners fear the
results of a free market and the
left-leaning reformers want to give
capitalism a chance.
Whether Joe Garcia and Raul Martinez
win their bet, or instead, the Diaz-Balarts
manage to win in what will almost
certainly be a very bad cycle for
Congressional Republicans, the
change in Cuban Miami is palpable.
Even the rhetoric of Washington
politicians campaigning in South
Florida seems to have grown more
nuanced, as if these politicians and
their staffs know that even David
Rivera’s hard-line “supervoters” are
no longer as likely to be appeased
by symbolism as they often were in
the past. After Senator Obama’s
speech produced little outcry — with
only a few diehards accusing him and
the foundation, which hosted him, of
being Communists or the dupes of
Communists — Raúl Rodríguez said to
me that what he and many people he
knew were most grateful for was
that, so far, neither John McCain
nor Barack Obama “put on a guayabera
or shouted, ‘Viva Cuba libre.’
It may have taken 50 years, but that
at least is no longer acceptable.”