Trade winds stir Miami storm - Miami, Florida's Cuban residents clash over continuation of U.S. economic boycott against Cuba - Cover Story

Insight on the News, June 7, 1993 by Shawn Miller

Summary: A toughened U.S. embargo on Cuba has inflamed animosity between hard-line anti-Castroites and those who seek relief for the Cuban people. As Cubans resort to eating roadside plants, exiles are fighting it out on Miami streets and in lobbyists' offices in Washington. Among the questions: Is business being hurt more than Castro?

Madre mia!" shouts Jorge, banging his fist on the seat in front of him, as a brown-jerseyed player blows what should have been an easy carom shot. "That Benny, he always kills me," laments the middle-aged Cuban-American as he rips up his betting tickit, all hopes of the lucrative late quiniela double having disappeared into thick, cigar-smoke-filled air. "It's all fixed, anyway," he moans, throwing up his hands in a "What, me worry?" gesture, the universal sign of surrender for regulars at the Miami Jai-Alai Fronton.

But Jorge's attention is fixed on something more pressing, anyway: "If you were Fidel Castro, sitting right here in front of me, I would kill you with my bare hands and eat your heart," he says, without a hint of a smile. "But I look at that, and I can't help but think of them and what the United States could do for them."

"That" is the cover of that morning's Miami Herald, emblazoned with the headline "Malnourished Cubans flock to hospitals." "Them" is the two older brothers Jorge and his family were forced to leave behind when they fled Havana for Miami in 1961, two years after Castro's New Year's Revolution. According to the Herald, eye disease and paralytic beriberi -- both caused by severe malnutrition -- are sweeping the island, and Cuban officials have counseled the people to supplement their meager government food rations by eating plants.

For Jorge, who has only intermittent contact with his siblings, the image of this forced vegetarianism has been with him throughout the day. "Can you imagine your own brother eating leaves on the side of the road, like a cow or a donkey?" he asks.

But even his imagination can't bring Jorge to call for his adopted country to completely lift the embargo it placed on his homeland more than 30 years ago. Yet he does question what he calls the "severity" of the plan: "There must be a way to help the Cuban people without helping Fidel."

The question of just what that way might be has set off conflicts from the streets of Little Havana in Miami to the halls of Congress. With the demise of the Soviet Union and its $4 billion-a-year palimony check to the Castro government, the impact of the United States' unilateral embargo of Cuba has been transformed. No longer a largely symbolic anticommunist snub, the embargo, which restricts most economic transactions between the two countries while allowing limited communication, is the focal point of debate about the island's immediate economic future.

Any hope that the end of the Cold War would produce a thaw in relations between the United States and Cuba was dashed with the passage of the Cuban Democracy Act in late autumn. Signed by President Bush and endorsed by candidate Bill Clinton, the act gave the granddaddy of all U.S. embargoes a new set of teeth by prohibiting foreign subsidiaries of U.S. companies from trading with Cuba. Stateside, opinions on the act vary -- it has been called everything from "a key to peaceful transition in Cuba" to "an economic declaration of war" -- but the new regulations have been denounced worldwide as an infringement on international trade law.

In Miami's exile community, the controversy has spawned increasingly vocal opposition to the United States' policy toward Cuba -- unheard of among a populace that is overwhelmingly and sometimes violently against any dialogue with the Castro regime. The opposition organizations, some openly socialist, are being joined in their crusade by their ideological opposites. Eager to get in on the capitalist action that Castro has recently offered to foreign companies, U.S. businesses have been complaining that Washington is denying them access to the potentially lucrative Cuban market.

Proponents of the embargo say the United States has a moral duty to deny any aid to the Cuban government. "We have to make sure Castro knows that the United States will never do anything for him as long as he continues his repression of the Cuban people," says Francisco Hernandez, president of the powerful, anti-Castro Cuban American National Foundation.

Others question whether the embargo helps Castro more than it hurts him and, as Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Andres Oppenheimer says, whether it represents "a Miami policy instead of a Cuba policy."

Ramon Cernuda, one of the leaders of the movement in Miami to liberalize the sanctions, calls the Cuban Democracy Act "the biggest mistake the United States has made with regard to Cuba since supporting the Bay of Pigs," the botched 1961 invasion attempt.

Few, if any, in the crowd that clogged the intersection of Southwest Calle Ocho and 13th Avenue, in the heart of Little Havana, on April 17 would agree with Cernuda's assessment. They had gathered to pay tribute to los martires de las brigadas de asalto, the martyrs of the Bay of Pigs, on the 32nd anniversary of the incident.