Now In Miami, Astonishment Over Action and Disagreement Over Cuba News
MIAMI — From the raucous cafecito counter at Versailles Restaurant, the city’s Cuban touchstone, to the noisy streets in and beyond Little Havana, Miami’s Cuban exiles and immigrants expressed astonishment over the seismic news that the United States was liberalizing relations with Cuba.
But, in a city with more Cubans than anywhere but Cuba, agreement over the momentous announcement ended there.
For some — the aging generation of Cuban-American traditionalists who take a hard line on Cuba policy — astonishment quickly turned to acrimony. Denouncing the move as wrongheaded and disastrous, they viewed President Obama’s decision to establish closer travel, diplomatic and export ties to Cuba as capitulation to a dictatorship.
In return, they said, Mr. Obama received no guarantees from Cuba’s president, Raúl Castro, and no commitment to human rights.
“There have been too many deaths, too much blood and too much terror, and there is no reason to throw them a life preserver,” said Alex Rodriguez, 63, who stood outside Versailles, describing himself as a man who wears “two hats” — American and Cuban. “The Cuban people, from the human rights perspective, still won’t have the freedom to vote, the freedom of expression, the freedom of assembly, the freedom to determine their own economic future. What do they get: maybe a little bit better of an economic situation.”
People watched President Obama speaking on a television at the El Rey de Las Fritas restaurant in the Little Havana neighborhood in Miami on Wednesday.
Yet, in the same mix at Versailles and further afield in the storefronts lining Little Havana, a different wave of people applauded the decision, calling it past due. They make up a less vocal, less politically active but nevertheless large part of the city’s makeup — recently arrived Cubans who continue to stream in from the island and younger Cuban-Americans who are less emotionally entangled in the relationship between Cuba and Miami.
For them, the announcement is recognition that in five decades of Cold War, anti-Castro sanctions have failed to achieve their goal: Bring down the Castro brothers and usher democracy into Cuba.
“I think it’s time to leave all that behind,” Yadira Sebasco, 36, who was born in Camagüey, Cuba’s third-largest city, and moved to Miami 11 years ago, said as she sat in her office at a travel agency that helps book trips to the island. “You have to live in the present.”
Even some of the “historicos,” as the older generation is called, have softened their views, recognizing the lack of democratic progress in Cuba. Laureano Vilches, 71, stewed for decades over the fact that his family’s business, a refrigerated warehouse in Havana, was seized by the communist government. But today, he has set aside his outrage.
“As far as I’m concerned, this can only be good for the Cubans who are still there, and they’ll live a better life economically,” said Mr. Vilches, who went 40 years without setting foot in Cuba but now visits every couple of months. “I don’t stay angry anymore.”
On a practical level, Mr. Obama’s executive action is expected to make it easier for Americans and Cuban-Americans to travel and send more money to people in Cuba and for businesses to export more approved goods to the island. Americans will no longer have to load up on dollars for their trips — the only option for most Americans visiting the island. Soon, they will be able to use their credit cards and bring home more Cuban products.
This loosening of restrictions will be a boon to some businesses in Miami, particularly those who ferry people and goods to Cuba.
Others reminded that Cuba has had strong ties with many European and Latin American countries, yet no democracy has resulted.“I think you will see an exploding travel industry emerging overnight and you will see investment now that is, in essence, sanctioned,” said Fernand Amandi, a managing partner of Bendixen & Amandi International, which tracks the changes in Cuban-Americans in Miami through its polling. “It has the potential to be a watershed moment.”
“Where are the changes?” Mr. Rodriguez asked.
But, in Miami, Mr. Obama’s decision touched on something more profound than just esoteric foreign policy. Cuba is personal here. It is about sisters who long to share a plate of picadillo across the dinner table, but cannot. It is about the son who left his father long ago across the Florida Straits. And it is about the grandmothers and grandfathers who arrived two generations ago and have embraced the United States but cannot bear to simply bury their sorrow and anger just because it is now considered old-fashioned.
Their sadness is not easily shaken off. It is rooted in their thoughts of lost homes, the deaths of friends and relatives, the island’s tropical transcendence and the identities they were forced to abandon so many years ago.
“No matter how good you feel in this country, it’s never going to feel like being in your own land,” said Ramon Bermudez, 86, as he leaned on his cane in Domino Park, where older Cubans gather daily to exchange barbs and slap dominoes on tables.
Others, many of them recent arrivals, want to try a new approach. Apolitical, eager to steer clear of the stridency that the Cuba debate generates here, they say their aim is simple: to help their families on the island.
Enrique Diaz, center, who is a Cuban, played dominoes with a group of friends at Domino Park in Miami’s Little Havana neighborhood on Wednesday.
Hearing the news after she arrived at her job as a manicurist, Yudis Perez said it had been five years since she last saw her parents in Cuba, a long and painful separation. Perhaps now, she said, it will be easier and cheaper to reunite.
“It should have happened long ago,” said Ms. Perez, who left Matanzas for Miami 10 years ago. “If this succeeds, it will be good for Cubans here and good for Cubans there.”
While all Cuban-Americans here applauded the release of Alan Gross, who had spent five years in a Cuban prison, many had harsh words for Mr. Obama’s decision to release three Cuban spies. The spies were members of the Cuban Five who had infiltrated Brothers to the Rescue, a group of pilots who would scan the sea for Cuban immigrants. One of the three spies had been serving a life sentence for murder conspiracy in the 1996 downing of one of the planes, which killed four Cuban-Americans.
Standing in the throng at Versailles, Miami’s mayor, Tomás Regalado, said the announcement would do little to steer the island toward democracy. Mr. Obama, he said, is giving the benefit of the doubt to a terrorist state.
“This is not a political opening to Cuba,” Mr. Regalado said. “This is a public relations movement.”
Susan Kaufman Purcell, the director of the Center for Hemispheric Policy at the University of Miami, said that both optimism and skepticism were warranted in Wednesday’s announcement.
“This is a dictatorship,” she said, adding that Mr. Castro’s economic reforms have “always looked more promising than they actually were.”
Sitting on a bench in the shade at Domino Park, Jorge Alonso, 86, took the long view in a narrative that has already seemed interminable for many here. “Everything that has a beginning must have an end,” Mr. Alonso said. “On the day you least expect it, Cuba is going to be free.”
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