T he recent visit of Pope John Paul II to Cuba gave the world an unusual glimpse of the last officially communist nation in the West. The implausible location of that country, just a short hop from American shores, was highlighted by the thousands of American pilgrims on the island for the occasion. The two old men who warmly greeted each other on the tarmac of José Martí International Airport could not be more different, but they also know each other. The pope knows communism intimately from his Polish and Eastern European days; Fidel knows the Church intimately from being brought up Catholic by Jesuit priests. They dueled with great finesse during those five days, trading subtle barbs at each other's ideology. Only on one point did they firmly coincidethe immorality of the United States's economic encirclement of Cuba and the need to bring it to an end. It was this common point that actually opened the doors of the island to the pope, creating a political turning point after almost four decades of iron dictatorship.
Only a few weeks earlier, the most prominent Cuban exile leader, Jorge Mas Canosa, had died of cancer in Miami. His death also marked a political turning point. It is but a slight exaggeration to say that under Mas's influence, Miami began to acquire the features of a Latin American dictatorship, opposite in ideology but similar in ruthless effectiveness to the communist regime that it opposed. The American trade embargo that the pope and Castro jointly denounced in Havana would probably have been lifted long ago had it not been for Mas and his powerful supporters. Although the pope overtly decried Washington's intransigence, his message was really aimed at Miami, where the roots of that intransigence lie.
While explicitly addressing the confrontation between two countries, the pope tacitly sought to reconcile the Cuban war across the Strait of Florida. For decades, charismatic leaders at both ends of the strait have used all available means to stay in power and crush their opponents. In Miami no less than in Cuba, the rule of law takes second place to the leaders' conviction in the rightness of their cause and their own historical role. Mas, like Castro, was a faithful practitioner of the old Latin American motto: For my friends, everything; for my enemies, the law.
It would be inaccurate, however, to portray Mas and his supporters as a criminal gang. He and the members of the organization that he created, the Cuban American National Foundation (CANF), are politically sophisticated extremists with a tight grip on the Cuban-American electorate. They direct Cuban Americans to vote overwhelmingly for hand-picked candidates, who purvey hard-line anti-Castro policies in Tallahassee and Washington. Farther afield, CANF's money has helped elect presidents and has heavily influenced the outcome of political struggles in Latin America and Africa, always on the conservative side. And, most importantly, the foundation has succeeded in imposing its views on the Clinton administration, literally dictating its policy toward Cuba.
For newcomers to Caribbean politics, the puzzling question is how an organization of first-generation immigrants, not a majority even in Miami, gained so much power. How did it restrict freedom of expression in Miami by dictating local ordinances that forbid public appearances by Cuban artists and sports teams? How did it bring the federal government to finance radio and television stations dedicated to beaming anti-Castro propaganda to the island? How did it persuade Congress to pass the Cuban Liberty and Democratic Solidarity Act of 1996 (the Helms-Burton Act), which directs the U.S. government to impose sanctions on foreign companies that trade with Cuba, thereby eliciting immediate opposition from Canada, Mexico, France, and other major U.S. allies?
In answer to these questions, outside observers have commonly focused on Cuban exile leaders' disregard for fair play and ruthlessness in pursuing their goals. In 1992, the Miami Herald ran an editorial opposing the bill sponsored by New Jersey Congressman (now Senator) Bob Torricelli, a liberal Democrat, which aimed at tightening the existing embargo against Cuba. The Herald's opposition to this bill infuriated CANF, which had donated money to Torricelli. Mas went to Miami's Spanish radio stations to denounce the newspaper as an enemy of Cuban exiles, likening it to Granma, Cuba's official daily, in its suppression of dissenting opinions. This was followed by a public intimidation campaign in which 60 Miami public buses were decked with ads in English and Spanish reading "I DON'T BELIEVE THE MIAMI HERALD." Destruction of dozens of the newspaper's selling stands and death threats to its personnel followed. Although the Herald's editors gallantly resisted this offensive, the paper trod much more carefully thereafter when addressing CANF's initiatives.
In the same spirit, Mas and his supporters never hesitated to brand their congressional opponents and South Florida critics as stooges of Fidel Castro and friends of communism. Their influence over a powerful media apparatus made these charges stick, at least in South Florida.
ROOTS OF CUBAN-AMERICAN POWER
This Caribbean McCarthyism was not an instant success, however. Nor were its eventual achievements due solely to ruthlessness. The roots of the Miami political story go back to the fateful years of the early 1960s when the United States and the Soviet Union squared off over Cuba's revolution. The political turmoil following Castro's rise to power expelled much of the Cuban upper and middle classes, which fled, for the most part, to South Florida. This population had three defining traits. It was skillful at business, bringing with it professional and managerial experience and, sometimes, considerable capital. It was savvy about American ways because Cuba's longtime dependence on the United States taught local elites how the country to the north actually worked; many of them had gone to the United States to get their professional degrees, and others had extensive business ties with American companies. Finally, dispossession and expulsion turned the exiles into implacable enemies of socialism and, in particular, Cuban communism.
At first, the displaced Cubans counted on the support of the United States to return them to their home country. Americans had intervened innumerable times in Latin America, often for lesser reasons. A communist regime 90 miles from U.S. shores seemed unlikely to last. With this in mind, many early émigrés thought of their stay in South Florida as a temporary exile. They had not reckoned, however, with the political currents of the Cold War, in which Cuba played an increasingly central part.
Cold War tensions produced three American decisions that struck anticommunist Caribbeans as successive betrayals. First, an invasion brigade of Cuban exiles was abandoned in the Bay of Pigs in 1961. Second, a pact was signed with the Soviet Union, which took Soviet missiles out of Cuba in 1962 and committed the United States to rein in any further military attacks by exile forces against Castro. Third, the exiles' last-gasp attempt to organize an invasion force outside the United States came to an ignominious end in 1964 when American authorities alerted their British counterparts, who promptly located and captured the expedition in a Bahamian key. All three events took place during Democratic administrations, first Kennedy's and then Johnson's, at a time when the exile leadership dealing with Washington was dominated by moderate pre-Castro politicians.
T he reaction to these disappointments was a decisive shift toward right-wing radicalism. Nothing but the most intransigent anticommunist stance would be acceptable afterward. There was not a single redeeming feature in Castro's government; everything that harmed it and its allies was just and proper. The West in general and the United States government in particular were too soft on communism and were full of fellow travelers who had to be identified and denounced. The half million Cubans living in South Florida by the end of the 1960s coalesced around these positions with remarkable fervor. Still, their political influence was initially small. The exiles could not vote, and many were still poor, having neglected their affairs in the expectation of a prompt return to their island.
In the 1970s the exiles struggled to overcome their double defeat: first by Castro in Cuba, then by two successive Democratic administrations in the United States. As they became eligible to vote, the Cubans lined up solidly behind the Republican Party, long a minor political force in South Florida, which in turn came to dominate local and state elections. Former professionals and business owners now put their skills to use, climbing the corporate ladder or refounding their old Havana firms in Miami. Cuban-American executives reached senior positions in such companies as Dow Chemical, Coca-Cola, Citibank, and NationsBank. Others established a wide array of new firms. A Cuban-American economy surged in Miami.
With increasing economic and political power, Cuban-American leaders now turned to their paramount project, the overthrow of Fidel Castro. The 1980s marked the mise-en-scène of CANF, led from the start by Mas, and the mass entry of Cubans into American electoral politics. As a result, two Cuban-American members of Congress from South Florida and one from New Jersey (where a second large Cuban-American concentration exists) were elected and lost no time in forcefully articulating the exiles' views in Congress. Moreover, Cuban-American money funded a powerful anti-Castro lobby. Barred from plotting a direct assault by the U.S.-Soviet agreement reached at the time of the missile crisis, Cuban-American leaders aimed to shape American policy to isolate and harass Castro's regime.
To this end, the exiles enlisted a number of senators and congressmen from both sides of the aisle. Congressman Torricelli was persuaded by CANF largesse to sponsor the bill tightening the U.S. embargo against Cuba. The resulting Cuban Democracy Act of 1992 prevented subsidiaries of American companies from trading with Cuba and barred ships that had transported goods to or from the island from touching American ports for six months. When this did not prove sufficient to bring about Castro's downfall, two conservative Republicans, Jesse Helms and Dan Burton, were brought aboard to ratchet up the embargo. The Helms-Burton legislation, signed into law in mid-1996, was dubbed the "Adios, Fidel" Act. By discouraging non-U.S. companies from doing business with the island, it sought to provoke an economic collapse that would produce a popular uprising. Despite the many diplomatic difficulties that it has created with America's allies in Europe and Latin America, the act has so far failed to meet its goal.
The extraordinary influence wielded by CANF and the rest of the Cuban-American lobby in Washington does not rest solely on money and block voting. CANF also draws political strength from a pair of ideological factors. The exiles gained from the fit between their single-minded determination and the broader goals of United States foreign policy during the Cold War. Cuban Americans may be extremists, but they were our fanatics insofar as their animus against Castro coincided with the American goal of unseating communism everywhere. The continuing power of this affinity was evident after the downing of two Miami planes by Cuban MIGs in February 1996. Although the planes belonged to an exile organization and were piloted by exile Cubans, the public perceived the planes as American, and the attack as anti-American aggression by Castro. That perception greatly aided passage of the Helms-Burton Act, which the Clinton administration had resisted up to that point. Once the drift of public opinion became clear, Clinton responded by endorsing the legislation.
Moreover, Miami's Cubans benefited from a diffuse sense in official Washington that they had been left in the lurch too many times and that previous disappointment bolstered their current claims for redress. The Cuban exiles' perennial efforts to make life more difficult for Castro received a sympathetic hearing in many government and congressional quarters. Their strong anticommunism and bitter history got them a foot in the door. Money and votes did the rest.
POWER AND PARADOX
Mas and his followers walked the corridors of power comfortably, winning victories that sometimes conflicted with sound political sense. The American-funded, anti-Castro TV is jammed by the Cuban government and is utterly ineffective except as a symbol of anticommunist commitment. The Helms-Burton law has stirred considerable international resentment, including a challenge in the World Court. But these excesses have also triggered a backlash against the Cuban lobby that, in combination with Mas's death, may considerably weaken CANF. As the Economist recently put it, "[T]he day of [American] presidents whispering and bowing when the [CANF] calls will be over."
Objections to CANF's excesses have come from three quarters: the American public, Cuba, and the exile community itself. The spectacle of a small nation being incrementally strangled by a powerful neighbor has triggered a grassroots mobilization of American churches and humanitarian groups to repeal the embargo and bring aid to the island. These groups have carried tons of food, medicines, and other supplies to Cuba, often in direct violation of the embargo. The same groups are working with moderates in Congress, both Republican and Democrat, to rescind Helms-Burton and restore normal relations with Cuba.
Back on the island, the figure of Mas and the success of Helms-Burton have been a godsend to communist hard-liners. Deprived of generous Soviet support in the early 1990s, and facing the reality of global communist collapse and growing discontent among their own people, Cuban leaders were handed a trump card by their Miami adversaries: nationalism. Unlike the former Eastern European satellite countries where anticommunism and (anti-Soviet) nationalism went together, in Cuba a strong and long-standing sentiment against subordination to American power helps keep the communist regime in place. Castro and his collaborators never tire of raising the specter of the "Miami Mafia" returning to power in Cuba, or of laying blame for Cuba's suffering at CANF's doorstep.
Hence, the simplistic goal guiding the embargo and its successive refinements, which is to create enough internal discontent to provoke a popular uprising, has been ably turned on its head by the Cuban leadership. Perennial scarcity has become an instrument of legitimation, and evidence of American hostility and of Cuba's indomitable resolve to resist.
This turn of events has not been lost on the Cuban exile community. A growing number of Cuban Americans are questioning the wisdom of present policies. It is increasingly inescapable that the embargo has backfired. Eighteen months after the "Adios, Fidel" Act, the law's inadvertent bolstering of hard-liners inside Cuba has only reduced whatever space might have existed for dissent. As Castro's regime persists, right-wing predictions of his imminent political demise sound increasingly ludicrous. Perhaps for this reason, the actual behavior of ordinary Cuban Americans is increasingly at odds with their leaders' proclamations.
Calls for the island's complete isolation by CANF and Cuban Americans in Congress are undermined by their presumed supporters who send an unending stream of remittances and supplies to their relatives back home. The latest reliable estimates put Cuban-American remittances at close to $1 billion per year, far exceeding the sum total of private contributions by charitable organizations to Cuba worldwide. The Cuban economy has grown increasingly reliant on the help of its expatriate community to sustain both popular living standards and the country's foreign exchange reserves.
THE END OF THE MIAMI MAFIA?
The Castro regime is thus in the peculiar, but not uncomfortable, position of being supported by its own enemies. Politically, it gains by the nationalist legitimacy that the embargo provides. Economically, it is bolstered by the remittances that undermine that same embargo.
At the same time, rifts are growing among Cuban Americans tired of marching one day in Miami to urge strengthened sanctions against Castro and lining up the next day to send money and goods to friends and family on the island. The pope's ringing denunciation of the trade embargo against Cuba has heartened Cuban Americans already working against CANF's policies. In Miami, large groups of Cuban Americans, including many who traveled to the island for the papal visit, are meeting publicly to consider ways to break the economic blockade. Seeking to stem the tide, CANF has come up with a proposal to send limited food aid to Cuba under the "Food for Peace" program (Public Law 480). The foundation has recruited the ever-dependable Senator Helms to propose this initiative to Congress, with the promise that the food would be distributed only by private charities. Predictably, the Cuban government rejected the initiative, indicating its interest in "trade, not alms." More revealingly, the proposal was also rejected by all three Cuban-American members of Congress, who see in it a dangerous softening of their traditional hard line.
This rift between CANF and its usual spokespeople comes at a time when another congressional initiative to lift the embargo on trade of food and medicines with Cuba is gathering considerable momentum. Sponsored by Senator Christopher Dodd of Connecticut and Mexican-American Congressman Esteban Torres, it has gained the support of some 90 cosponsors, powerful unions, and the newly created U.S.-Cuba Chamber of Commerce. Perhaps more importantly, it is being actively promoted by emerging Miami-based Cuban-American organizations, such as the Cuban Committee for Democracy (CCD) and Cambio Cubano (Cuban Change). These groups are forcefully conveying to Congress that moderates in the exile community are ready to end the vengeful rigidity of past policies.
If successful, these efforts will open a new chapter in U.S.-Cuban relations. In pursuit of hard-line policies, the United States has come to loggerheads with Canada, Mexico, France, and other important allies without advancing one inch toward democratizing Cuba. The universal consensus, which Miami's extreme right has so far held at bay, is that American goals will be better served by open exchange that will deprive the Cuban regime of the nationalism card and bolster Cuban reformers in search of a peaceful transition to democracy.
